ENGLISH VERSION Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900 PART 8

Nicolas Poussin

Juliana Barone
Poussin as Engineer of the Human Figure: the Illustrations for Leonardo’s Trattato

in

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

[1] “This paper is based on a chapter of my doctoral thesis, J. Barone, Leonardo on Motion: Seventeenth-Century Views (Ph.D. thesis, Oxford University, 2002)”” (p. 220 n. 1).

[2] The study of the illustrations prepared by Nicolas Poussin for the first printed version of the Treaty, planned by Cassiano dal Pozzo, is of particular importance because “it was the figures he designed that established the way in which Leonardo’s Trattato was known visually until the early nineteenth century” (p. 198). From a careful comparison of the drawings made by Poussin in ms H 228 inf. (now preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan) and those of the earlier apocryphal manuscripts (and of the Code of Urbino, which Poussin did not know) Barone tries and understand the extent to which Poussin presents the reader with "his Leonardo". Not only that; the author also traces the method of work of the French artist and his figurative sources. The test results show first of all the dependence of Poussin from a number of models of ancient statuary; secondly, the adoption of a single system of representation of human proportions, based essentially on those of the Antinous Belvedere. Poussin, therefore, works on repetitive patterns based on the ancient, cleverly varying poses, the size, the facial features. “It is... plausible that the process involved several stages and intermediate drawings, which, in their turn, might have been used on more than one occasion, as part of the construction of other figures as well” (p. 206). Unfortunately, we do not have a record of these "intermediate" drawings that would confirm the method of work of the French artist, which is also a logical outcome (“such drawings were likely to have deteriorated from constant re-use; and even if in a reasonable condition, they were unlikely to have been kept or collected” – see p. 214), but the evidence resulting from the comparison of the electronic images is also very convincing. 

[3] The images of the Treaty that we know today thanks to the Code of Urbino and those in the aprograph manuscripts (see Michael Cole. On the Movement of Figures in Some Early Apographs of the Abridged Trattato), however, show that the reference to the "Antique" was totally absent in Leonardo's project (as well as in Melzi). “Poussin’s overall transformation of the Trattato figures from abstract schemata into recognizable characters shows great independence from the Trattato text and deliberately modifies the visual message of Leonardo’s chapters, not least of those on motion” (p. 219). In this regard see also Martin Kemp and Juliana Barone, What Might Leonardo’s Own Trattato have Looked Like? And What did it Actually Look Like up to the Time of the Editio Princeps? The authoress continues like this: “His [note of the editor Poussin’s] preference for statuesque and stabilized poses, even for the chapters on violent motion, undermines one of the principal ways in which Leonardo graphically represents human motion. In Leonardo’s conception, the necessary condition for motion to occur is disruption of balance, which, in visual terms, he convincingly represents by strong rotations or lateral displacements of the limbs from a still pose” (p. 219). The drawings of Poussin, however, show “inherent breaks in a sequence achieved through a succession of poses devoid of internal impetus. Rather than transitions, Poussin’s emphasis remains on decorous, frozen poses that work primarily at a rhetorical level” (p. 220).