We suspect that Mrs Merrifield has fallen into a common error, propagated by historians such as Robertson, with regard to this ignorance of letters. It was not only "usual for persons who could not write to make the sign of the cross, in confirmation of a charter," but for those who could. If a little more had been accurately ascertained of the feelings and manners of the periods in question, it would have been seen that the signature of the cross, instead of the name, was more according to the dignity of the signing person and the sanctity of the act—in fact, a better security for the full performance of the contract. We are not quite sure that "pro ignoratione literarum" implies so much as an inability to write a name; for, writing being then not the kind of clerkship which it now is, but in documents of moment, especially an artistic affair, it may not be very wonderful if "persons of the highest rank" were unable to compete with the practised hands, and were unwilling to show, and to the deterioration of the outward beauty of the documents, their inferiority in caligraphy. But, after all, the "innumerable proofs," between the eight and twelfth centuries, amount only to four.
That of Tassilo duke of Bavaria, by its wording, may express the ornamental character, "Quod manu propriâ, ut potui, characteres chirographe inchoando depinxi coram judicibus atque optimatibus meis." If, however, this Duke of Bavaria was so poor a scribe, he was at least the founder of a convent that made full amends for his deficiency—one of whose nuns, Diemudis, was the most indefatigable transcriber of any age. An amazing list of her caligraphic handicraft is extant, almost incredible, if we did not know the patient zeal of those days of fervent piety. Those who are desirous to obtain better information than is commonly received on the subject of the learning, as well as the piety of the middle ages, will be amply repaid by consulting Mr Maitland's "Dark Ages," in which the historians are refuted to their shame, and the charge of ignorance is most fairly retorted. In his very interesting volume, this list of Diemudis may be seen. The works copied are indeed religious works, which some of our historians may have looked upon with a prejudice, and as proofs of the darkness of the times. Mr Maitland's book will undeceive any who are of that opinion, containing, as it does, so many proofs, in original letters and discourses, of erudition, perfect acquaintance with the sacred Scriptures, of eloquence and intellectual acuteness. Whatever books these "ignorant" monks and ecclesiastics possessed, there is one invention of a time included by most censurers of the "dark ages" in that invidious term, the absence of which would have deprived this "enlightened" age of half the books it possesses, of half the knowledge of the "reading public," and of we know not how many other inventions to which it may have been the unacknowledged parent: we are grateful enough to acknowledge that, without it, we should not be now writing these remarks, and should certainly lose many readers—the invention of spectacles. There are notices of them in A. D. 1299. It is said on a monument in the church of Sta. Maria Maggiore, at Florence, that Salvino degli Armati, who died in 1317, invented them. "Indeed P. Marahese attributes the invention of spectacles to Padre Alesandro," (a Dominican and miniature painter;) "but the memorial of him in the Chronicle of St Katherine, at Pisa, proves that he had seen spectacles made before he made them himself; and that, with a cheerful and willing heart, he communicated all he knew."
"The proof," says Mrs Merrifield, that Europe is indebted to religious communities for the preservation of the arts during the dark ages, rests on the fact that the most ancient examples of Christian art consist of the remains of mural pictures in churches, of illuminations in sacred books, and of vessels for the use of the church and the altar, and on the absence of all similar decorations on buildings and utensils devoted to secular uses during the same period—to which may be added, that many of the early treatises on painting were the work of ecclesiastics, as well as the paintings themselves. A similar remark may be made with regard to architecture, many of the earliest professors of which were monks." We believe Mrs Merrifield here is short of the fact; and that, where the monks were not the builders, they were in almost all instances the designers. Their architecture, indeed, and all that pertained to it, was a Christian book to teach; their designs contained Christian lessons, which the knowledge of ecclesiastics could alone supply. "Painting was essentially a religious occupation; the early professors of the art believed that they had an especial mission to make known the works and miracles of God to the common people who were unacquainted with letters:—'Agli uomini grossi che non sanno lettere.' Actuated by this sentiment, it is not surprising that so many of the Italian painters should have been members of monastic establishments. It has been observed that the different religious orders selected some particular branch of the art, which they practised with great success in the convents of their respective orders. Thus the Gesuati and Umiliati attached themselves to painting on glass and architecture, the Olivetani to tarsia work, the Benedictines and Camaldolites to painting generally; and the monks of Monte Casino to miniature painting; while the Dominicans appear to have practised all the various branches of the fine arts, (with the exception of mosaic,) and to have produced artists who excelled in each." Their devotion to the arts was, indeed, a religious devotion; their treatises commence with most earnest prayers, and solemn dedication of themselves and their works to the Holy Trinity; and not unfrequently with a long exordium, introducing the creation and fall of man, as we see in the prefaces of Theophilus and Cennino Cennini.
Whilst the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries saw the erection of magnificent cathedrals, (our own York, Salisbury, and Westminster were built in the thirteenth,) the manners of the people were yet rude: one plate served for man and wife; there were no wooden-handled knives; a house did not contain more than two drinking-cups. There were neither wax nor tallow candles; clothes were of leather, unlined. Had the middle and lower classes, in our day, no better dwellings than were the houses belonging to those conditions so late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we dare not to conjecture how much worse would be their moral condition. "In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the houses of the English, of the middle and lower classes, consisted in general of a ground-floor only, divided into two apartments—namely a hall, into which the principal door opened, and which was their room for cooking, eating, and receiving visitors; and a chamber adjoining the hall, and opening out of it, which was the private apartment of the females of the family, and the bed-room at night. The greater part of the houses in London were built after this plan." The more wealthy classes were not very much better lodged; the principal difference, being an upper floor, the access to which was by a flight of steps outside. As arts advanced, manners refined: the Crusades had their domestic as well as warlike effects; they induced a taste for dress, and general luxury; and the Saracens were ready examples for imitation. It was then, and when commercial enterprise enriched a few cities, the arts of the monks began to be appreciated; but they did not readily assume a secular character—painting and other decorations were in design either religious, or historical with a religious reference or moral. It is curious that clocks were not found in convents after they had been among the articles of domestic furniture in castles and palaces. Perhaps, this may be an instance of a devotional spirit of the monks, who may have thought it an impiety to relax the discipline of reckoning time by the repetition of Ave Marias, Paternosters and Misereres. They were, however, generally adopted about the latter half of the fifteenth century.
To those who are at all advanced in life, and who must themselves remember a very different state of society from the present, and the introduction of our present luxuries and comforts into houses, and alteration of habits and manners, it must seem but a step backwards into comparative barbarism. A very few centuries take us back to paper windows; and even they were removable as furniture, not attached to the house. We have ourselves heard an old person say, that he remembered the time when there were only two carriages kept in a city, the second in importance in England—who now in that city would task himself to count the number? Nor was our own country singular in the deficiencies of the luxuries of life. The changes were general and simultaneous; and this is extraordinary, that the revival of arts and literature was not confined to one country or one place, but arose as it were from one general impulse, and simultaneously, among people under varieties of climate, circumstances, and manners.
It is time we should say something of the book which has led us to make this somewhat long introduction. It consists of two volumes, containing original treatises, dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, on the arts of painting in oil, miniature, mosaic, and on glass; of gilding, dyeing, the preparation of colours and of artificial gems, by Mrs Merrifield, whose valuable translation of Cennino Cennini has been reviewed in the pages of Maga. Mrs Merrifield is likewise the authoress of an excellent little volume on fresco painting, very opportunely published. The present work is the result of a commission from the Government to proceed to Italy, to collect MSS., and every possible information respecting the processes and methods of oil-painting adopted by the Italians. As the Original Treatises discovered, and now published, contain much other matter besides that which relates to painting in oil, the work is more comprehensive than the first purpose of the commission would have made it. The introduction, which occupies nearly two-thirds of the first volume, is a very able performance; in it is a comprehensive view of the history of the fine arts. The conclusions drawn from the documents, the result in detail of her search and labours, are so clearly laid before the reader, with ample proofs of each particular fact and inference, as greatly to facilitate the reader in his inquiry into the documents themselves. He will find that Mrs Merrifield, by her arrangement of the parts, and bringing them to bear upon her purpose, has saved him that trouble which the nature of the work would otherwise have necessitated. Besides that her introduction contains a separate and complete treatise on each branch of art, the preliminary observations, heading each document, render its contents most tangible. At the end of the second volume is an index, which in a work of this kind it is most desirable to possess—the want of which in Mr Eastlake's excellent Materials for a History of Oil-painting we have often had occasion to regret; and we do hope that, in his forthcoming work on the Italian practice, he will make amends for this defect by an index which will embrace the contents of the "Materials." We have ourselves spent much time, that might have been saved by an index, in turning over the pages for passages to which we wished to refer, for that work is one strictly of reference, although interesting in the first reading.
The documents consist of the following MSS.—the manuscripts of Jehan Le Begue, of St Audemar, of Eraclius, of Alcherius, in the first volume. In the second—the Bolognese, Marciana, Paduan, Volpato, and Brussels manuscripts; extracts from all original manuscript by Sig. Gio. O'Kelly Edwards; extracts from a dissertation read by Sig. Pietro Edwards, in the academy of fine arts at Venice, on the propriety of restoring the public pictures.
As these several MSS. open to us new sources of information, most important in establishing certain facts, from whence the art of painting among us may enter upon great and important changes, it may not be altogether unprofitable to give some short account of them in their order.
The manuscript of Jehan Le Begue, "a licentiate in the law, and notary of the masters of the mint in Paris," was composed by him in the year 1431, in his sixty-third year. It is, however, professedly a compilation from works of Jehan Alcherius, or Alcerius, of whom little is known, nor is it certain that he was a painter. His work probably preceded Le Begue's about twenty years. Alcherius himself was a collector of recipes, from various sources, during thirty years, and twenty years afterwards his MSS. came into the hands of Le Begue.
The manuscript of Petrus de St Audemar, according to Mr Eastlake, may be of the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century. He is supposed to have been a native of France, (Pierre de St Omer.) Some of the recipes are found in the "Clavicula," attributed to the twelfth century; but this is no argument against the date, for it was at all times the practice to make selections from former "secreti."