CHAPTER XXXIII
TREATISES ON THE ARTS BEFORE THE INTRODUCTION OF ARABIC ALCHEMY
Latin treatises on the arts and colors—Progress of the arts even during the early middle ages—Scantiness of the sources—Character of Arabic alchemy—Different character of our Latin treatises—Compositiones ad tingenda—Mappe Clavicula—Some of its recipes—Question of symbolic nomenclature—Magical procedure with goats: in Mappe Clavicula—Similar passages in Heraclius—And Theophilus—A magic figure—Use of an incantation in tenth century alchemy—Experimental character of the work of Theophilus—How to make Spanish gold—The question of symbolic terminology again—Alchemy in the eleventh century—St. Dunstan and alchemy and magic—Introduction of Arabic alchemy in the twelfth century.
“ ... campum latissimum diversarum artium perscrutari....”
—Theophilus, Schedula, I, Praefatio.
Latin treatises on the arts and colors.
We come to the consideration of several treatises dealing with colors and the arts and dating from about the eighth to the twelfth centuries and probably in part of earlier origin. These are the Compositiones ad tingenda in a manuscript of the eighth or ninth century, the Mappe clavicula found in part in a tenth century manuscript and more fully in one of the twelfth century, the poem of Heraclius on The colors and arts of the Romans, and the remarkable treatise of Theophilus On diverse arts in three books.[3022] The oldest known manuscripts of Theophilus are of the twelfth century and he has been dated at the beginning of that century or end of the eleventh, and Heraclius, from whom he takes a number of his chapters, still earlier. But it scarcely seems that some of Theophilus’ descriptions of ecclesiastical art would have been written before the twelfth century. Mrs. Merrifield regarded only the first two metrical books of The colors and arts of the Romans as the work of Heraclius, and the third book in prose as a later addition of the twelfth or thirteenth century and probably written by a Frenchman, whereas she believed that Heraclius wrote in southern Italy under Byzantine influence.[3023] His poem sounds to me like an attempt to imitate Lucretius, while one also is inclined to associate it with the perhaps nearly contemporary poems in which the so-called Macer and Marbod recounted in verse form some of the properties of herbs and stones which they had learned from ancient writers.
Progress of the arts even during the early middle ages.
Berthelot regarded these treatises on the arts as proof that the knowledge of industrial and alchemical processes continued unbroken even in western Europe from Egypt to the middle ages, although he held that the theories of transmutation and the like reached the west only in the twelfth century through the Arabs.[3024] Moreover, there is progress in the technical processes just as there was progress in Romanesque and Gothic art. New items and recipes appear in the lists. Even in the declining Roman Empire and earliest middle age we have evidence of new discoveries. The artificial fabrication of cinnabar becomes known at some time after Dioscorides and Pliny and before the eighth century.[3025] The hydrostatic balance is described not only in the Mappe clavicula but in the Carmen de ponderibus of Priscian or of Q. Remnius Fannius Palaemo of the fourth or fifth century A. D.[3026] Heraclius speaks more than once in his poem with admiration of the works of art of the Roman “kings” and people, and asks, “Who now is capable of investigating these arts, is able to reveal to us what those potent artificers of immense intellect discovered for themselves?”[3027] However, his aim is to resurrect these arts; he assures the reader that he writes nothing which he has not first proved himself;[3028] and he tells in particular how he discovered by close scrutiny of a piece of Roman glass that there was gold-leaf placed between two layers of glass, a work which he successfully imitated.[3029] On the other hand, lead glazing, according to Alexandre Brongniart, director of the Sèvres manufactory, is not found in European pottery before the twelfth century, when it was applied in Pesaro about 1100 and is found on pottery in a tomb at Jumièges of about 1120.[3030]
Scantiness of the sources.
During the early medieval centuries the Byzantine Empire, Syria and Egypt after they were conquered by the Arabs, the busy streets of Bagdad and Cordova, and Persia undoubtedly produced a far more flourishing activity in the fine arts and the industrial arts than was the case in backward western Christian Europe. Yet the surviving evidence for such activity is disappointing, and seems limited to some notices and allusions in Arabian and Jewish travelers and historians, and to the dust-heaps of ruined cities like Fostat, Rai, and Rakka. As the finest early specimens of Byzantine mosaics are preserved in Italy at Ravenna, so our Latin treatises concerning the arts are perhaps the best extant for the early medieval period up to the twelfth century.