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The Montpellier manuscript summarises the 'received wisdom' circulating in the workshops of the fourteenth century, upon which the forefathers of the Flemish primitives might have drawn. Understanding this 'state of the art' of pre-Eyckian painting allows us better to evaluate the impact of oil and isolate the impact of materials versus that of the exceptional artistic vision of individual Flemish primitives. The famous treatise 'On various arts' by Theophilus has, until now, been the principal textual source used in studies of mediaeval painting technique in general, and the pre-Eyckian use of oil paint in particular. But painting was clearly only a minor concern of Theophilus, occupying less than a fifth of his text, with paint recipes per se occupying only five per cent. More comprehensive by far is the almost-unknown Liber diversarum arcium (Montpellier, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Médicin, Manuscript H 277, folios 81v-100v). Written in Latin, the MS dates from c.1400, but the text is apparently earlier, c.1350. It is as long as Theophilus' text, but in contrast it is almost entirely concerned with painting. It contains one of the fullest and earliest (perhaps the earliest) set of written instructions and recipes for artistic use of oil paint to have survived. Of the 469 recipes half are unique to this manuscript. In particular it contains a great number of prescriptions for systematic modelling of flesh and drapery, including in oil. |
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It is not merely a collection of recipes, but is an organised treatise:
Book I Fundamentals : drawing, materials, aqueous media
Mark Clarke is preparing a publication of the Montpellier MS, containing an edition, English translation, commentary on the recipes, and explanatory material on the text and its relationships with other mediaeval artists' recipe manuscripts |
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Mark Clarke is assistant coordinator of the ICOM-CC working group on Art Technological Source Research: http://www.clericus.org/atsr/index.htm |