ENGLISH VERSION Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900 PART 17

Marcin Fabiański 

The Fortuna of Leonardo’s Trattato della Pittura in Nineteenth-Century Poland

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] The reception of the Treatise on Painting by Leonardo in Poland is a case study that can only provoke curiosity, on the one hand, and interest on the other, due to the extremely difficult circumstances that however did not prevent the publication of a first Polish translation (1876) by Wojciech Gerson. We have here not (only) to deal with the problem of a class (the artists) who claims generousness and nobility of their profession, but first of all with a country that throughout 1700 and 1800 knows several invasions and dismemberment by Austria, Prussia and Russia, merely disposing (only in happier times) of a weak administrative autonomy. Therefore, we do not see the establishment of academies in major universities in Poland, simply because those in power have no interest in promoting an education policy in Poland, and indeed often take measures completely in the opposite direction, such as the prohibition of the use of the mother tongue in the university textbooks. 

[2] In this context, it is important to look at people, not institutions. The big names, for the purposes of transposing Leonardo’s Treaty in the Polish culture are actually three: Wojciech Korneli Stattler (1800-1875) who lived for some years in Italy and studied the Treatise probably at the Accademia di San Luca, supporting then its dissemination in the area of Krakow; Maria z Sadowskich Straszewska (1855-1918), an outstanding figure of Polish scholar (probably she too lived some years in Italy), who in 1885 wrote a book on Leonardo and his theoretical work; and finally Wojciech Gerson, the author of the first printed edition in Poland in 1876. Mind you, Gerson (1831-1901) did not issue a sumptuous publication. Gerson taught in Warsaw in a Class for Training in Drawing and Sketching (what was left from a previous College of Fine Arts before a crackdown by the Russians), and published the work while not being able to officially use Polish when teaching (classes had to be given in Russian). In the preface to the Polish edition (which is a brief issue, small in size, published at the author's expense and at any rate with the stamp of the Russian censorship), Gerson tells how he got to the idea of the publication. His story is, in fact, the one of autodidact, who, having heard as a youngster about Leonardo and got passionate about it, learned Italian by himself, and was finally able to obtain a copy of the Paris first printed edition of in 1651 (a copy in Italian, in fact). He prepared the language translation, compared it with the first German edition (1724), which he had been able to obtain with the greatest difficulty, and was finally able to give it to the press in 1876. While this was a "subversive" edition in some respects, it is nevertheless likely that Gerson was able to impart teachings to his students based on the precepts of Leonardo. The fact remains that, without a shadow of a doubt, the implementation of the Treaty in the course of the nineteenth century it remains a fact of very limited scope, more than anything else left to the good will of the individuals.