Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845

The most important recipes of Cennino Cennini may be those which relate to fresco-painting; and as that is now likely to be nationally revived, this publication is well-timed. So much has been said and written of late upon this subject, that we think it best simply to refer to the text and notes. To those who mean to practise fresco, they may be important. Besides the value of the recipes of Cennino, there are incidentally some curious things not unworthy of notice. All persons must have been surprised in pictures of grave subjects, and we might especially mention those of Paul Veronese, that dogs are introduced as attendants on feasts, and we find them gnawing bones on very fine floors. But we find in Cennino Cennini that it was the practice to throw their bones under the table. Cennino recommends them to be gathered and selected for black pigments. We have heard it said that Murillo was partial to the pigments made from beef bones taken after dinner.

There is a practice, or we should say happily there was, in the days of these old painters, which did not tend very much to raise the profession. "Sometimes, in the course of your practice," says Cennino, "you will be obliged to paint flesh, especially faces of men and women." He recommends the painting them with egg tempera, with oil, and with oil and liquid varnish, "which is the most powerful of temperas." He proceeds to tell how the paint is to be removed. Chapter 162 is entirely devoted to the ladies, and offers a caution now happily unnecessary, but it is so quaintly given, that we quote it:—

"It sometimes happens that young ladies, especially those of Florence, endeavour to heighten their beauty by the application of colours and medicated waters to the skin. But as women who fear God do not make use of these things, and as I do not wish to render myself obnoxious to them, or to incur the displeasure of God and our Lady, I shall say no more on this subject. But I advise you, that if you desire to preserve your complexion for a long period, to wash yourself with water from the fountains, rivers, or wells; and I warn you, that if you use cosmetics, your face will soon become withered, your teeth black, and you will become old before the natural course of time, and be the ugliest object possible. This is quite sufficient to say on this subject."

A modern painter with whom we are acquainted, declares that he has very often been called upon to paint "under the eyes" of certain "young men about town"—we presume of the Titmouse grade—that they might appear the more decently before the public and their employers.

If poor Cennino had entertained no other fears but the displeasure of the fair sex, he would have passed a happier old age. We know not that he condescended to paint faces, however, in his most abject condition. There was ever from the beginning a complaint of the little favour bestowed upon artists in general. Was the art considered a slavish practice? Grecia Capta taught it to the Romans, with whom, notwithstanding the force of some few high names, as of Fabius Pictor, it was at no time in very high repute.

The indefatigable Gaye says of the fluctuations incidental to the profession of arts—"While, on one hand, painters, sculptors, and military engineers flourish as ambassadors, magistrates, and correspondents with princes, others live overwhelmed with debt, and pleading for subsistence." A tax return of Jacopo de Domenico, painter, gives this sad account of himself—"Ever since 1400, have I gone on struggling, and eating the bread of others, until 1421; after which I returned to Florence, where I found myself plundered, and in debt, and totally destitute." The reader will be surprised at his remedy, and the modern Poor-law Commissioners, those "Indociles pauperiem pati," will deny the test of destitution, and feel a separating impulse; for he continues—"I took a wife, and went to Pisa, where I mended the roads about the gates, and staid four years." The tax returns afford curious documents. We have that of Massaccio:—"Declaration of the means of Tommaso di Giovanni, called Massaccio, and of his brother Giovanni, to the officers of the fisc, detailing their miserable means, inability, and liability—We live in the house of Andrea Macigni, for which we pay ten florins a-year." "The son of this Andrea bound himself apprentice in the studio of Nendi Bicci for two years, in 1458, aged seventeen, to have fifteen florins and a pair of shoes yearly."8

It was the custom of writers, in the time of Cennino, to neglect the precept of Horace. They did not rush "in medias res"—Cennino in particular. He not only begins with the beginning of every particular thing, or invention, or practice; but thinks it necessary to commence his work on the arts with a much earlier fact than the production of Leda's egg—even with the creation of the world—and immediately deduces the art of painting from the fall of Adam, who was from that event compelled to labor; hence invention—hence the art. His book is, however, written in a pious spirit; nor have we now-a-days any right, in good taste, to ridicule his mixing up with his reverence for the Creator, and the Virgin Mary, and all saints in general, and St Eustachius, and St Francis, St John the Baptist, St Anthony of Padua, "the reverence of Giotto of Taddeo, and of Agnolo the master of Cennino;" nor do we in the least doubt, nay, admire his happy zeal, when he says that he begins his book "for the utility, and good, and advantage of those who would attain perfection in the arts." We said that this is a beautiful volume; the few plates and illustrations are not the least of its charms: they are drawn on stone by the translator. We hail the republication of every old work on the arts; and although as yet we have not been so fortunate as to discover the vehicle of Titian or Correggio, we do not despair. In a former paper, if we mistake not, we mentioned a treatise of Rubens—"De Lumine et Colore"—said to have been, somewhat more than half a century ago, in the possession of a canon of Antwerp, a descendant of Rubens: surely it may be worth enquiring after. It is said to be in Latin, which, not being a living and moveable language, is the best form from which we could have a translation upon any subject relating to the arts.

ÆSTHETICS OF DRESS

No. IV

Minor Matters

It is not to be supposed that a man is to be styled "dressed" when he has only got a proper coat on his back; something more than this is necessary ere he can claim a place in the beau monde, or can decently figure in a bal paré. There is no one, indeed, but your mere Hottentot, who considers himself the pink of fashion solely from the fact of throwing something, more or less becoming, over his shoulders; though, by the way, we once heard of a negro chief who, in a state of unclad majesty, clapped a gold-laced cocked-hat on his head, and then strutted about with an air of intense satisfaction at the result of his habilimentary effort. He was not a well-dressed man this chief, any more than our friend the Frenchman in the diligence; but we will tell you this æsthetic story, gentle reader.

It was our destiny once—as it has been, too, of many a son of perfidious Albion—to be journeying across the monotonous plains of Upper Burgundy, en route for the gay capital. 'Twas a summer morn, and the breezy call of the incense-breathing lady, as Gray the poet calls her, came delightfully upon our heated forehead, as we pushed down the four-paned rattling window of that clumsy typefication of slowness, misnamed a diligence, to escape from the stifling atmosphere of the rotonde. Our fellow-travellers consisted of a couple of greasy, black-haired, sallow-faced curés, two farmers' wives with a puking child each, our own portly self, and the sixth passenger. Now, this sixth individual, who was in reality the eighth Christian immured in this quasi Black-hole, was one of those nondescript Parisian existences, to define whom is almost impossible to those who have never witnessed the animal. He might have been a commis-voyageur, or a clerk in the passport-office, or the keeper of a small café, or an épicier, but he did not look stupid enough for the last. Be this as it may, he was short rather than tall, lean rather than fat,—in a shabby brown surtout—smoked and took snuff—had been in Dauphiné—thought the Germans a set of European Chinese—considered a national guard as the model of a good soldier—kept spitting out of the window from time to time—stretched his legs most inconveniently against ours—tied his head up at dark in a dirty bird's-eye blue cotton mouchoir-de-poche, and snored throughout the night. He told us that he had not washed or shaved himself since leaving Lyons, two days before; and in the morning, just as we were opening the window, Monsieur yawned, stretched, rubbed his eyes, spat and spoke—"Sacré nom de cochon! Conducteur! conducteur! vous m'avez donc oublié! il fallait me faire descendre là bas!—là bas! là! là! nom de Dieu!"—"Plait-il?" said the conducteur as he came round to the door, taking his pipe out of his mouth, "qu'est ce que vous voulez, M'sieur?"—"Je vous avais dit qu'il fallait me faire descendre chez M. Dubois, et maintenant nous voilà à–où sommes-nous, par exemple?" "Imbécile! il y a encore trois bonnes lieues à la Pissotte!" and the angry conducteur, who had been roused from his sleep, and climbed over and round the lumbering vehicle to the back-door, now climbed round and over again to the banquette. The sixth passenger squeezed himself back into the corner, and resumed:—"M. Dubois ne m'attend pas: d'ailleurs je ne le connais pas: c'est égal; je me nicherai chez lui pour une huitaine de jours: j'y ferai de bonnes affaires." All this was of course as unintelligible to the other passengers as it would have been uninteresting if we had cared to listen to him:—"Puisqu'il peut y avoir des dames," he went on, "il faut faire ma toilette." So saying, he took off his pocket-handkerchief from his head, and wiped his face well with it, yawned a good deal, and spat incontinently; opened his coat, spread back and jerked down the lapels; shoved his fingers comb-fashion and comb-colour through his matted hair till it stood up a là Bugaboo; and then looked round for admiration. "Ah! je l'avais oublié!" he exclaimed. Upon this he pulled out a large shabby green pocket-book from his coat; took off a greasy black stock, displaying a collarless shirt and neck, upon the tinge of which it would be needless to descant, and then extracting from the pocket-book two curvilinear pieces of dirty white paper, which had been folded more than once, and had an ink spot or two on their surface, applied them to his chin, holding their corners in his mouth, buckled on his stock again over them, adjusted these pseudo collars by aid of his watch-back, grinned a mile of approbation, and exclaimed, "Me voilà propre!"

It is not enough to be propre in one article of dress only: you must preserve a certain æsthetical tournure, or else set yourself down among the frampy multitude for ever. This must be our apology, dear reader, for thus detaining your attention, and for setting before you "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," which may tend, if properly applied, to the inappreciable beautification of your own valuable person. Descend we therefore from the head and trunk of man—a curious bathos—to his understandings and unmentionables; you know what we mean. And herein, as in duty bound, draw we a distinction. "We know how to call all the drawers by name," (if we may so take a liberty with friend William's prose;) and let us therefore premise that we shall notice the unmentionable trews, femoralia, or periscelemata—as the Greeks would probably have called them, only they wore them not, but like Highland laddies preferred their own hides—of the virile portion of the community only. As for those tantalizing appendages of the better portion of her Majesty's subjects, we leave them in their proper concealment. We could easily write a volume or two to show that the custom came on Ormus, or Ind, or Araby the Blest; but criticism would not be tolerated, and besides—

——"Levius fit patientiaQuidquid corrigere est nefas.""On s accoutume à tout!"

Go, therefore, æsthetic reader, to Trajan's column at Rome, and amid the barbaric costumes which adorn it, you will find the prototype of the modern trouser. Or you need not travel so much out of your way. In the Townley Gallery there is the figure of Mithras with a fashionable pantaloon on his legs; and in the Louvre there are two or three disconsolate-looking barbaric captives, with their trousers flapping about their shins, and tied round their ankles: these are the originals of our modern what-d'ye-call'ems. As for the good old buckskins of our venerated grandsires and governors, they arose in Roman times. Field-marshal Julius Cæsar wore something very near of kin to them under his military kilt, in that pretty little skirmish wherein he first had the honour of exchanging stones and darts with our British ancestors; and from those days down to the present time has this garment maintained its ground, and proved its utility, with undying pertinacity. Now, we do not approve of the barbaric trews: that tying of them round the ankles, though it kept out the cold, was decidedly a Sawney practice: it militated against the curves of the leg, and destroyed all firmness and dignity of gait. Far better was the fashion of the middle ages, when the trouser became a real pantaloon—a pantalon collant, as modern artists call it, and when the full symmetry of the limb was displayed to the utmost advantage. This was, no doubt, the acme of perfection that the garment in question was capable of; and it is to be lamented that the mode has not kept its position in society more universally. For all purposes of ceremonial or ornamental dress, this form should still be rigidly adhered to. Utility and ornament here go hand in hand, or rather inside each other. No disguisement of natural form is attempted; and a man's appearance is judged of at its true value. The tight pantaloon is at once simple, useful, and beautiful. So far for its form. But there is an immense difficulty in the choice of its substance. If too elastic, the knee will soon make for itself one of those provoking pudding-bags that have tended, more than any thing else, to bring the fashion into disfavour. If too rigid and too frail, you know the catastrophe! We still remember the case of a fat friend of ours at a fancy-ball! British manufacturing ingenuity should bestir itself to invent a stuff fit for satisfactorily solving this vestimental problem of the greatest strain; and the pantaloon might then once more resume its paramount sway. To revert to the old buckskin: it is a perfectly respectable, useful, and satisfactory affair for the purposes to which it is now applied, and worn with a stout top-boot, and thrown over the side of a gallant horse, has no superior in the world. It is also a very good thing to put on if you are going to a new tailor's in town, especially if you can write Harkaway Hall as your address. The man will set you down for a real country-squire, and will give you tick for the next twenty years. But if you want to avoid having your pocket picked, don't wear buckskins as you go along Piccadilly; buckskins and tops, on foot, are so truly Arcadian in their appearance, that the swell mob cannot resist the temptation, and you are pretty sure to be victimized. As for the unmeaning black things worn with white silk stockings on court-days, and gloried in by all the beaux of the eighteenth century, they ought to be sent to the right-about as neither useful nor becoming. It may be all very well for Spanish matadors and Castilian dancers to wear them; but they were originally intended to have boots beneath them—so Charles I. wore them until he borrowed a foolish fashion from France—and from the very cut and nature of them, they should be worn so still, or abandoned altogether. We quarrel with them, not on the score of form so much as on that of inutility and undue contrast of colour. If the thing be dark, and the stocking light, an effect of cleanliness is attained; but the magpie appearance immediately prevails. The case is the same as that of a white waistcoat and a black coat; too glaring, trop prononcé. If they are both of the same colour, then the tight and continuous pantaloon is far more reasonable and becoming, and, for use, any thing else is better—experto crede. The only exception in its favour that we can make, is for the sportsman and the farmer; for him who joins on a stout legging or a gaiter, whether of cloth or leather; or, if you wish to do a bit of Jerry Hawthorn to some friend's Tom or Logic, here is your garment de rigueur;—put on your leggings, your green coats, and your white hat, and you are complete; but unless you wish to be mistaken for your friend's butler, or a waiter from your club, do not venture on the black culotte.

The trouser, then—the modern trouser—what are we to say of this? Why, that it is the most useful, the most comfortable, the most economical, and one of the least ugly garments ever invented by man. We almost remember the day, dear reader, when as yet trousers were among the great unborn; it was only the Duke, and those dashing fellows at his heels, who imported the idea, we believe from Germany originally, though they used it in the Peninsula. After the battle of Waterloo, no man of any spirit at all ever wore any thing else for common use. It existed, certainly, among our honest tars long previously to this epoch; but the fashion did not come from them; the rage originated with the Peninsular troops, and was confirmed by the examples of the brilliant staffs that accompanied the Allied sovereigns to this country in 1814. It is true that the trouser did not assume its definite and rational form, such as it now has, all at once; it went through a round of vagaries indicative of a most diseased state of public taste. At one time it was all à la Cosaque, and you might have made a greatcoat out of a pair; at another, it was half up the leg, and more than two feet in circumference; by degrees it got strapped down and cut away into a sensible kind of shape; and now it has attained the juste milieu, making a happy compromise between the tight symmetry of the pantaloon, and the flaunting of the sailor's ducks. An immense step in the improvement of this garment has been made by the introduction of all that beautiful variety of plaids, and checked patterns, which are so commonly used; those in wool for winter wear are truly delightful; while for summer use, the trouser recommends itself to our untiring favour by the multiplicity of soft light substances which are every where employed. The trouser is to the pantaloon as the foraging cap is to the hat—good for all kinds of use, and likely to remain so for an indefinite period; good for all ranks and for all ages. One canon, however, should be laid down as to the cut:—no pockets should be tolerated on any account whatever: they make a man look like a Yankee. 'Tis the most slovenly custom on earth to keep your hands in your pockets—you deserve to have them sewed in if you indulge in it. And therefore, to avoid this disagreeable penalty, have your pockets sewed up.

The next step downwards in the scale of dress brings us to the basis, foundation, and understanding of mankind—we mean boots and shoes; and here, being approvers of both "men and women's concise recti," as old Joe used to say, we must give a word of advice to both sexes; and ye who groan under the torments of corns, ("bunions" is a nasty word, we always think of onions when we hear it,) attend to our dictum. If any thing imperatively demands that utility should be consulted before ornament in its construction, it is the covering of the foot; whoever goes hunting in a dancing-pump is a fool, and whoever dances in a shooting-shoe is a clodhopper. There can be no doubt that the human mind speedily adopted normal rules of design when first the idea of protecting the foot was started in the world—and, on the whole, less absurdity has been evidenced in the pedal integuments than in most other matters of dress. The old tragic buskin, and the comic sock, the military sandal, caliga, and boot, all did their duty excellently in ancient times: we have not a word of reproach for them—and their successors in the middle ages acquitted themselves of their duties in a tolerably satisfactory manner, though not without some curious flights of fancy. Thus the cross gartering of the Saxon buskin, boots, or gaiter, or whatever else it might have been, looks to us truly absurd and uncomfortable, judging from the caricatured figures of ancient MSS.; but the peaked and tied-up points of the 14th century, when the toe was fastened to the knee, strikes us as the ne plus ultra of human folly. How Richard II.'s courtiers must have gone slopping and spirting about in the mud that befouled their streets as well as ours! What queer figures they must have cut on horseback in a rainy day, with the water running off from the pendulous tips of their shoes! Nevertheless, there was something good in the arrangement of the upper part of the shoe or half-boot of those times, and even of earlier days, as any one who reads the Art-Union, or who knows the history of British costume, can tell. It formed an appropriate termination to the tightly-dressed limb; and when not too much pointed, prolonged the natural shape of the foot into a gracefully-curving support. Shoes, in the present sense of the term, were not then worn: every thing was limited to the elastic half-boots: but for the huntsman or the horseman, not armed for the tented field, a sort of brown leather boot coming up to the knee was in common use. This had no falling tops, and was far removed from the ridiculous Spanish boot of after days. It was a plain and useful servant to the cavalier, and became him much better than the ponderous jack-boot of later times. It is to the Spaniards that we are indebted, if "indebted" be a suitable term, for the wide-topped falling boot of the sixteenth century; that inconvenient, no-service thing—good for the stage-players, fancy-ball men, and fellows like old Hudibras, who crammed a portable larder and wardrobe into its unfathomable recesses; but for the rough-riding horseman or the active hunter, a nuisance beyond all description. Boots such as these may look admirably well in pictures; for when delineated by a Vandyke, any thing would become graceful; but for actual practice, they would serve only to catch the rain, and to gall the legs of the wearer. Their descendant, the top-boot, has reformed itself wonderfully, and nearly all the inconvenience has been got rid of. Still, the brown colour of the top, which is no longer the inside of the boot turned down, as it was once, is an anomaly, and the boot itself ought to be merged in the plain single-coloured boot which is now much used on the Continent, though in England patronized only by the Meltonians. For positive use, the boot ought to come up fully to, or above, the knee, in order to stand the wear and pressure of the saddle; but for ornament, it may well be allowed to rise only partially up the leg, and to be, in short, the beautiful Hessian or Hungarian boot—far the most graceful covering ever put on the leg of a modern European. That such a truly elegant boot, so gentlemanlike, so dressy, and yet so thoroughly serviceable, should ever have gone out of fashion, is to us a melancholy, though not a needed, proof of the sheer caprice by which men's fancies are commonly swayed. We suspect, however, that if any cause more ostensible than mere accident can be alleged for this change, it is to be traced to some knock-knee'd or spindle-shanked fellow, who was ashamed to show his mis-shapen legs, and therefore concealed them in loose trousers. These boots, it is true, were not so well calculated for campaigning as the smaller ones which still bear the great man's name; and this may have had something to do with their disuse; nevertheless the change is to be lamented æsthetically, for the perfect union of utility and ornament was never so well exemplified as in the Hessian boot.

With all due respect to the dancing world, or to the world of dancing-masters, we beg leave to anathematize the light shoe or pump; it is an ugly, inconvenient, unsuitable thing, fit for a man with a white waistcoat, gold chain, knee-breeches, &c., but not for a gentleman. The true æsthetical article is either the elastic half-boot of the middle ages; fitting on to the pantaloon, or else the thin Wellington boot of the present day under the trousers. We do not care to see your ribbed and open-worked silk stockings; such display is not for the sterner sex; even in his highest moments of ornament, a man should always bear about him a trace of the useful. To illustrate what we mean—a man is not born to be a dancing-master, nor a tavern-waiter; a gentleman, more especially, is intended, from the moment he can run alone, to be ready for feats of gallantry and hardihood. He should dress accordingly; and, as a fundamental rule, the reason for which lies deeper than most people think, a gentleman should always be so attired as that, if occasion demands, he should be able to mount a horse on the instant and ride for his life. Now, your modern exquisite in pumps, or your old beau of the last century in high red-heeled shoes, could do nothing of the kind without much previous preparation; and we take it to be a sign of their degenerating manhood. Nine-tenths of the men who take pleasure in shoes and pumps, are but tailors on horseback; and the old fox-hunter, or the old dragoon, (good types both in their way of what a man should be,) love their boots next to their bottle. A slipper and a dressing-gown are excellent companions, agree well together, and never give their master a moment's uneasiness; hence their value; similarly, a stout high-low and a good leathern legging, buttoned well over the ankle beneath, and the knee above, will carry a man through heather or gorse, on foot or on horseback, and will prove "marvellous good wear;" they ought to be, as indeed they commonly are, dear friends to "whoever loves his country."