For half a millennium Leonardo has been a huge presence in the world of art, and latterly in science. Inevitably we tend to project the Leonardo we know today into past eras. Even nonspecialists now have a sense of Leonardo as the universal genius, and may be able to summon up some suggestive imagesâranging from the Mona Lisa to mysterious pages of multitudinous designs and illegible writing. He is (to speak in clichés) renowned as the founder of the High Renaissance style, as the painter of a few world-famous paintings, as a fertile inventor of sculptural and architectural designs, as a theorist of wide ambition, as a visionary scientist across a remarkable range of disciplines, and as a prophetic engineer. However, until the late nineteenth century, âourâ Leonardo was not known. Many of the paintings attributed to him in inventories of major collections were at best Leonardesque. Of the great body of drawings, a few had been engraved and published, beginning with Wenceslaus Hollar in the mid-seventeenth century, but the great majority were known only to an elite band of collectors. His thousands of pages bound into volumes were even less known, other than by reputation, which was colored by Giorgio Vasariâs rather jaundiced view of Leonardoâs dispersal of his talents when he should have been painting masterpieces.
Leonardoâs projected book on the theory and practice of painting was at
least as elusive as the other parts of his written legacy. What remained were
sets of notes and individual passages that were at one stage intended for
inclusion, sometimes with accompanying illustrations or diagrams. Although some
notes were clustered, as in
The manuscript in Rome that is catalogued as the Codex Urbinas Vaticanus Latinus 1270 is rightly credited to Melzi. Dating from some twenty years or more after Leonardoâs death, and written in a gratifyingly readable script, it carries the title âLibro di pitturaâ (the âBook on Painting,â not the âTrattatoâ or âTreatiseâ). It looks as if it is not far from being ready for the publishers, though some important decisions remained. The devoted Melzi had worked his way through the miscellaneous papers in his possession, using editorial marks to designate selected and transcribed passages. At the end of the Libro, he listed over twenty manuscript sources, which he identified by numbers or signs. Only about one fifth of the texts selected by Melzi are available to us today.
We now think of the Vatican manuscript as âLeonardoâs Treatise on Painting,â but it entered the public domain only when it was finally and fully published in 1817. For 250 years Melziâs compilation was known through abridged transcriptions, beginning with manuscripts made in the second half of the sixteenth century. Even in the era of the printed book, manuscripts played an important role in transmitting knowledge. Conspicuously omitted from these abridged versions were the first thirty folios of the Codex Urbinas, which contained some of Leonardoâs grandest statements of principle, mainly deployed in the service of the paragone, his elaborate and often forced comparison of the arts of painting, sculpture, poetry, and music. It was in its truncated form that the Trattato eventually appeared in print in simultaneous Italian and French editions in 1651. The editio princeps, or rather the editiones principes, were the result of an extended process through which various efforts were made to reconstruct the original, uncorrupted texts of Leonardoâs notes. This process was begun in Rome by the redoubtable Cassiano dal Pozzo, the Italian collector, antiquarian, and patron of Nicolas Poussin. Cassiano required that a number of unclear passages should be checked against Leonardoâs actual manuscripts in Milan.
This raises the question of whether the publication was an antiquarian exercise, aiming to shed retrospective light on one of the historical giants of art, or whether Leonardoâs formulations were to be read as vital contributions to absolute theory. The answer is that antiquarian ambitions were powerful in the desire to identify and clarify the texts, and that these ur-texts were seen as promulgating enduring values.
The printed editions of the Trattato provided widespread access to Leonardoâs thought via successive editions and translations across Europe, until priority was progressively ceded to the Codex Urbinas during the course of the nineteenth century. It is the longstanding Trattato to which the current edition is dedicated. It places us in a good position to ask what was actually known of Leonardoâs writings and illustrations, and, just as importantly, how they were read and viewed. We can ask about what was selected, and also what was left out and why. As becomes clear in what follows, the editing of Leonardoâs ideas took place in contexts in which the function of art was hugely contested, particularly in the wake of the Reformation and the Catholic response. This unstable context may explain why Melziâs efforts did not result in a printed book during his lifetime.
The issue of what was actually known of Leonardoâs ideas embraces crucial details of textual corruption, such as the mistaking of moto (motion) for modo (manner), and the comic substitution of Imperatore (Emperor) for lâoperatore (operator). It also involves the overall image conveyed by the abridged text. We tend now to read it with a breadth of knowledge of Leonardo and his writings that was not available in the mid-seventeenth century. The overall tenor of what was included in the Trattato is for us rather thin on great statements of the âscience of art,â and oddly lacking analyses of linear perspective. Anatomy is only schematically present. Many of the selected passages are characterized by a close focus on the appearances of things when we look at nature âin the field.â There is a great deal on the perception and representation of light and color. We encounter the subject of light in landscape as early as page 6 in the Italian edition.
There is also a major focus on the motions of the human figure, a subject that was central to decorum and expression in the kinds of narrative paintings prized by the French Academy. Looking again at the Italian and French editions of 1651 on the University of Virginia website (http://www.treatiseonpainting.org), I am struck by how deeply they are permeated by a French academic tone. This is most obvious in the engravings of the human figure after the designs that Poussin created for Cassiano, which are full of allâantica grace and gravity. But it also pervades the sections on landscape, light, and color. Although Poussin was far from flattering about Leonardoâs so-called Trattato, no doubt irritated by its lack of logical coherence, if we set the 1651 texts beside Poussinâs The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert, painted in 1637â1639, the match is very close (see fig.F1). We are invited to read the narrative as a series of varied figures reacting to the central event of the miracle according to their diverse roles, ages, genders, and temperaments. The landscape setting is orchestrated to support the narrative on the basis of Poussinâs brilliantly observed drawings of light and shade in nature.
Leonardoâs treatise as published is refracted though this kind of lens. Reading the abridged text in the light of modern research, we can detect the underlying framework of medieval optical science, with its emphasis on the probity of geometry and the physical behavior of light as a dynamic medium. These foundations, brought out clearly in this edition, would have been apparent to learned figures like Cassiano, but not to the great majority of readers, who were seeking prescriptions through which they could make or view depictions of nature.
Given that the truncated text was very much of its time in the mid-sixteenth century, and that the printed editions are very much of theirs a century later, we might ask whether Leonardo would have been pleased. In that he was much concerned with enduring fame, he would have been delighted to find that his reputation was living on with such vigor. It is more doubtful whether he would have welcomed the abridged text as an adequate representation of his ideas on art over the centuries. But that is what happened. It was this abridged Leonardo with its French visual tone that provided such a potent force in the European academies. The present edition is a great step forward in understanding the nature of this force.