Um tratado medieval de pintura

Acabou de ser publicado o seguinte livro:

Mark Clarke, Mediaeval Painters' Materials and Techniques. The Montpellier Liber diversarum arcium, London, Archetype Publications, 2011.

Da apresentação:

The anonymous Montpellier Liber diversarum arcium (‘Book of Various Arts’) contains the most complete set of instructions in the craft of medieval painting to have survived to the present day. Its comprehensive summary of the state of the art of painting in the workshops of the fourteenth century will be of great interest to art historians, conservators and historians of artists’ technology.

This long-overlooked manuscript provides a complete practical painting course: drawing, water-based tempera, oil and fresco. It includes painting on manuscripts, panels, sculptures and walls, but also painting on glass and ceramics. Instructions are given for the preparation of materials such as pigments and media, and also for their application and modelling, as well as for gilding and other useful techniques.

The range of knowledge displayed is remarkable with nearly six hundred recipes, two-thirds of which are unique to this manuscript. Furthermore it demonstrates that when the van Eycks and their contemporaries transformed painting in the fifteenth century, they did so using materials and techniques of oil painting that already existed.

This volume contains the first ever published translation of the Liber diversarum arcium together with an extensive technical and historical commentary.

Índice:

• Introduction
• The content of the Liber diversarum arcium: a systematic course in painting
• Discovery and reception of the Liber diversarum arcium
• The importance of the Liber diversarum arcium for technical art history
• Table of contents of the Liber diversarum arcium
• The organisation of this book
• The formation of the Liber diversarum arcium
• The Liber diversarum arcium in relation to other art-technological texts
• The composing of the Liber diversarum arcium
• The writing of Montpellier MS H 277
• The Liber diversarum arcium and the state of the art of painting c.1200–1400
• The general principles of mediaeval painting technology and technique
• Beyond Theophilus: the Liber diversarum arcium and pre-Eyckian oil painting
• Conclusions: peculiarities and purpose
• MS H 277 and the Liber diversarum arcium: manuscript and text
• Why the Liber diversarum arcium was composed
• The value of the Liber diversarum arcium
• Reliability and usefulness: texts as practical tools
• Conclusions
• Translation
• Aims and principles of the Translation
• English–Latin glossary
• Translation
• Commentary and discussion
• The Liber diversarum arcium and the craft of fourteenth-century painting
• Latin–English glossary
• Edition: Latin text
• Aims and principles of the Edition
• An editing theory for mediaeval recipe texts
• Abbreviations
• Manuscripts
• Hands
• Dictionaries
• Latin text
• Appendices
• Codicology and context within MS H 277
• Edition of Compendium artis picturae f. 26v
• Text of De coloribus et mixtionibus
• Zagan’s reworkings of Theophilus II.23
• Subsequent history of MS H 277
• Guillaume Libri
• Concordance of Theophilus chapter numbers in different editions
• Other mediaeval technical recipe manuscripts in Montpellier
• Modern references to the Liber diversarum arcium
• Bibliography
• Manuscripts cited
• Printed works