ENGLISH VERSION Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900 PART 12

Francisco Pacheco
Christ on the Cross (1614)

Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga
The Trattato in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Spanish Perspective and Art Theory

in

Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900
Edited and introduced by Claire Farago

[On Leonardo see in this blog also :

Leonardo da Vinci, On the Motion and Measurement of Water, Nine Books Ordered by Brother Luigi Maria Arconati. Published using the Barberini Archetypal Code, Edited by Enrico Carusi and Antonio Favaro. With an introductory essay by Francesco P. Di Teodoro

Claire Farago, Janis Bell, Carlo Vecce, The Fabrication of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura, with a scholarly edition of the editio princeps (1651) and an annotated English translation, With a foreword by Martin Kemp and additional contributions by Juliana Barone, Matthew Landrus, Maria Rascaglia, Anna Sconza, Mario Valentino Guffanti. Two volumes. Leiden, Boston, Brill, 2018. Part One, Two, Three, Four and Five.

Carlo Vecce, The Lost Library - Leonardo's Books, Rome, Salerno editrice, 2017

Leonardo da Vinci, The Book of Painting, Codex Vaticanus Urbinas lat. 1270 in the Vatican Apostolic Library, Edited by Carlo Pedretti, Critical transcription by Carlo Vecce, 2 Volumes, Firenze, Giunti, 1995

Giovanni Mazzaferro, Vasari and the 'Homeric Question': conflicting interpretations of the Lives in the light of the biography of Leonardo da Vinci.

Giuseppe Bossi, About Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Facsimile reprint of the 1810 Milan edition, Skira editore, 2009

Re-Reading Leonardo, The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900, Edited by Claire Farago, Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeenth, Eighteenth.

Giovanni Ambrogio Mazenta, Some memoirs of the facts of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan and of his books, Republished and illustrated by D. Luigi Gramatica, prefect of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, La Vita Felice, Milano, 2008]

[1] An examination of the influence of the Treatise of Leonardo in the Spanish world can only start from a matter of fact: the first translation into Spanish was very late. Conducted on the first printed edition of 1651, but probably also on subsequent versions, it dates back to 1784, as a work of Diego Antonio Rejón de Silva. There is no doubt that the Spanish translation forms integral part of a larger project of education reform at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, a project that is attributable to the will of Anton Raphael Mengs, who was Rejón’s dear friend. “From its foundation in 1744 until Mengs put forward his reforms in 1766, the Academy had functioned as a workshop for artisans and painters. The teaching of science had no place in this scheme. That is why Mengs suggested the introduction of theoretical subjects such as modeling, color, copying of prints, chiaroscuro and composition” (p. 337). And there is no doubt that Rejón’s translation entered fully into the ranks of those texts that were most studied since then. In other words, the academic institutionalization of Leonardo’s Treatise was a much later phenomenon in Spain than for example what happened in France. 

[2] Until then, the influence of the writings of Leonardo had been relatively limited and confined to a small circle of scholars and theorists. The author, for example, indicates that the traces of the teachings of Leonardo in Spanish treaties on perspective - also in unpublished ones - are very scarce, and anyway likely the result of an intermediated and indirect knowledge of the same. Among the theoretical treatises of the Spanish Seventeenth century the Arte de la Pintura (Art of painting) by Francisco Pacheco deserves instead specific consideration, because without doubt this is the text that presents the widest range of references to Leonardo. There are in fact 27 quotations from Leonardo; Pacheco uses obviously a source in which the chapters (which he calls Documentos) are numbered (the first one to be mentioned is the document no. 70). It is very likely that this must have been an apograph manuscript (of Florentine origin). This means that Pacheco did not have availability of autograph manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci (still, we know that many of Leonardo's manuscripts were in Spain for a few years, along with Pompeo Leoni, and is known to all the discovery of the manuscripts 8936 and 8937 in the National Library in Madrid). Most critics, however, believe that there are no ties with Pacheco’s Documentos). Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, author of the most recent critical edition of the Art of Painting, believes he has recognised 13 of the 27 citations, performing an accurate comparison with the anthology of writings by Leonardo proposed by Richter; Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga considers, however, more productive to operate a search directly on the first printed edition of 1651, thus identifying there the location of 25 of the 27 excerpts. The chronology of the editions might seem making such a comparison as far-fetched: the first printed edition of the Treatise is of 1651, the Arte de la Pintura is published posthumously in 1649, but in reality we know that the work was completed in 1638 and that much of it was written around 1615 to 1620. However, we also know that the apogragh manuscripts produced in Florence around 1580 (see Claire Farago , Who Abridged Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting ?) were in fact already very similar to the first printed edition of 1651 , and the assumption is that just one of these apographs (unknown to us) was Pacheco’s source. On the content of Leonardo quotes made by Pacheco and on their use within the Arte de la Pintura see Charlene Villaseñor Black, Pacheco, Velázquez and the Legacy of Leonardo in Spain. 

[3] Leonardo is widely quoted by Palomino, and there is nothing strange, because the Museo pictórico, y escala óptica (Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale) was published in the second decade of the 1700s, the author being able to rely on both Pacheco and on the first printed edition of 1651. Some more problems to solve are created by a couple of quotes from da Vinci by Carducho in his Dialogues de la pintura (Dialogues on painting). For his personal history Carducho could be considered as the link between Spain and the environment in which the Florentines apograph manuscripts of Leonardo circulated. In fact it seems that it was the case. In one case Carducho claims to have seen in the house of a Spanish nobleman two books drawn and written by Leonardo: These are probably the two manuscripts in the National Library in Madrid. In another case Carducho cites the statement of Leonardo, which is found in Chapter 23 of the first printed edition, according to which the practice of the artist must be built on a solid theoretical basis. Today, however, we know that Francisco Pacheco had published a short writing around 1619 (see Francisco Calvo Serraller, Teoría de la Pintura del Siglo de Oro - Theory of Painting of the Golden Age, p. 181) in which precisely the same passage Leonardo is reminded, so that, within the Arte de la Pintura Pacheco does not fail to remember that Carducho’s quote had actually been subtracted from what he had written earlier. It would seem, therefore, that Carducho did not know Leonardo via apograph manuscripts and that he did not have either any opportunity to examine the two autographs of the National Library in Madrid.