Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

Ricordi di belli colori
Initially it seemed reasonable to assume that the Rome manuscript was writter.
Sy Mariani as a draft version of the landscape section. The manuscript
wa, then reworked and expanded for the larger treatise of which, presumably,
both the Leiden and Yale manuscripts are copies. However, there are some
remarkable features that made us continue the search fo r the origin of the
Rome manuscript, leading to interesting results.
The manuscript's text covers most of the chapters on specific landscape elements
that are present in the Leiden and Yale manuscripts, but lacks the
chapters on composition and underdrawing. There are also considerable differences
in the order and composition of the chapters and in the language,
as well as some repetitions and crossing out of text. First, a comparison with
other Italian treatises on painting technique from the sixteenth and early
seventeenth century shows that no specific attention is given to landscape
painting, especially not in such great detail as we see in the Rome manuscript.
Landscape painting of that period was simply a Flemish specialty. It reached
its peak after Pieter Breughel the Elder introduced the new spatial concept
of several planes leading to a distant vista in which the religious theme became
a detail instead of the main, foreground scene. The landscapes produced by
the many Flemish artists working in Italy were enormously popular, and
landscape print series circulated widely (18). The Rome treatise seems to
reflect a Flemish sense of detail concerning landscape elements, an idea supported
by the presence of Flemish painter Michiel Gast's name in a chapter
on how to paint villages in the background. Gast's methods are found to be
exemplary. We know little about Michiel Gast today except that he came to
Rome as a pupil of Lorenzo of Rotterdam and was known for his paintings
of ruins (19). The citation of Gast's methods and the detailed attention to
landscape elements suggests a strong Flemish influence on the author of Ricordi
di belli colori.
Another remarkable feature of the Rome manuscript are the chapters on
flowers and plants. Although the plants described are quite common in Italy,
the names used are often botanical ones, probably most familiar to a person
with a special botanical interest. In these chapters some personal remarks are
present. For example, the writer says, "I have made a yellow flower in my
book with herbs, the biggest one without landscapes" and "to represent well
the fruit of the Jusaina or otherwise nocella as that is how it is called in the
village of Rocca Contrada." It is striking that all such personal remarks made
by the author are omitted in the landscape section in the Leiden and Yale
manuscripts, while personal remarks are retained in the sections of those
manuscripts containing recipes for pigments and dyestuffs .
A reading of the manuscript suggests that the writer lived in Rocca Contrada,
painted landscapes, came from a Flemish background (or was strongly influenced
by Flemish landscape painting), had botanical interests, and probably
illustrated a herbarium. Knowing this, should we still consider Valerio Mariani
da Pesaro as the writer of the Rome manuscript or should we look elsewhere?
It was in fact the citation of Michie! Gast's name which helped us to answer
this question.
Gherardo Cibo
One of the very few known works by Gast can be found in the collection
of Gherardo Cibo, an Italian nobleman-artist-botanist (1512-1600). Cibo
lived for most of his life in the small village of Rocca Contrada, now called
Arcevio, in the Marche, the region of the Duchy of Urbino. Cibo started an
ecclesiastic career in Rome but he did not pursue it, settling in 1539 in Rocca
Contrada where he occupied himself with artistic and botanical activities.
Although in obscurity until the 1980s, research has revealed that Cibo was
responsible fo r many landscape drawings in major collections that had been
anonymous or wrongly attributed, often to Flemish artists (Fig. 2). A 1989
Hermens 51