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| The Treatise on Painting Naples edition 1733 |
Thomas Willette
The First Italian Publication of the Treatise on Painting: Book Culture, the History of Art, and the Naples Edition of 1733
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 :
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.
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
[1] An essay in which history of publishing and history of art are (happily) strongly related among them. The first Italian edition of the Treatise on Painting by Leonardo (not the first edition in Italian language, which was that of Du Fresne in Paris in 1651) came to light in Naples in 1733 (see important clarifications later in these notes). The first decades of the 1700s are particularly fervent for Neapolitan publishers, for at least a couple of reasons: first local aristocracy and erudition pushed to fully include the town in the core group of locations for scholarly publications, in particular with reference to the treatises on art; second in Naples the control of censorship on books to be published was relatively mild and the town of Naples became the second most important town (after Venice) for clandestine publications. This is the framework where act figures such as Francesco Ricciardi (or Ricciardo), Niccolò Parrino and the Rispoli brothers. Francesco Ricciardi was exactly the publisher of the Treaty in 1733. This is not a sporadic episode. Ricciardi had already published in 1728 the second edition of "Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni" (The Lives of modern painters, sculptors and architects) by Bellori (the front page of the latter book, according to a fairly common use, referred to Rome as place of printing, but in fact it was really Naples). Nicola Rispoli, a colleague of Ricciardi, (and with him involved in the publication of the Treaty), financed the Neapolitan edition of the Vite (Lives) by Baglione (1733) and the second of two Neapolitan editions of the Abbecedario pittorico by Pellegrino Orlandi. And always in Ricciardi’s printing plants, even with years of delay, the certainly most ambitious (and most impudent) project of Neapolitan art history, or the Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani (The Lives of Neapolitan painters, sculptors and architects) by Bernardo de’ Dominici saw the light. Among the clandestine publications Willette includes the first printed edition of the Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, on which - to tell the truth - the debate is open (Willette promised a publication on it).
[2] The edition of 1733 answered the need of the overall book market: the first edition of 1651 had become essentially impossible to find and the few remaining copies had a fully inaccessible price; the case of manuscript copies of the first printed edition was not uncommon, as it cost less to hand-copy the original than to purchase another printed copy (cf. p. 147, in particular on Ms. Lauri manuscript). The new edition was not simply a unchanged reprint, and there are some changes in the paratext (some dedications are cancelled, and a new one is introduced to Bishop Ercole d' Aragon, which inevitably seeks to emphasize the "Neapolitan " nature of the entrepreneurial enfeavour), but the most important variant is undoubtedly the one implying the insertion, in the final pages, of the Osservazioni di Nicolò Pussino sopra la pittura, already published by Bellori in his Lives. The Treaty thus becomes a sort of anthology, in which the texts of three masters as Leon Battista Alberti (with De Pictura), Leonardo and Poussin are recorded. "In the context of the Naples Treatise, Poussin... appears as the intellectual heir of Leonardo, as the painter who attempted to bring Leonardo’s precepts up to date for the current age, with regard to movement, expression and composition, as well as imitation, invention, chiaroscuro and color, just as Leonardo had reaffirmed and developed the earlier precepts of Alberti” (p. 153).
[3] The title page of 1733 contains, in addition to the indication of the printer of the Parisian first edition of 1651 (Jacques Langlois), the message that this version was produced "in-house printing of Francis Ricciardo at the expense of Niccola and Vincenzo Rispoli", which appear, therefore, the true funders of the initiative. In the same frontpage appears the coat of arms of Nicola Rispoli. This information, provided by Willette on real time, is far from trivial to clarify the history of entrepreneurial initiative. First of all, in fact, it was discussed whether or not the one of 1733 is the first edition of the Treaty published in Italy. They are in fact two copies dated 1723 of the Treaty (one at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice and the other in Los Angeles) and was therefore long believed that on that date the work was printed for the first time in Italy (as Mario Valentino Guffanti noted, albeit with due caution, in Bibliography of Printed Editions of Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting). Let me be clear: the two volumes of 1723 were always printed in Naples by Francesco Ricciardo. There are, in the title, no references to Nicola e Vincenzo Rispoli. The lay-out also changed, which now depicts an eagle; and above, the book only showed the Treatise on Painting by Leonardo, without the works of Alberti and Poussin. Willette recalls that the issue of the relationship between the edition of 1723 and that of 1733 was resolved by Victoria Steele (Victoria Steele, The First Italian Printing of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, 1723 or 1733?, in Notiziario Vinciano 1980) “who ascertained in a careful comparative study that the books are in fact two issues of the very same edition. The main texts in both cases were printed from the same type setting and show the same inking irregularities, typographical errors and misalignments of letters” (p. 156). In short, we can now say with a certain peace of mind that a separate edition dated 1723 has never existed and that it is indeed a historic false, put in place, perhaps by the same Ricciardi or possibly others, for reasons of commercial speculation. Moreover, the title page of 1733, which we have already described, is not the only type known to us. Willette indicates at least two variants, with different emblems and words. In short, the work appeared in 1733 in a version that could be called "common", then there were different versions that find their raison d'être either in speculative interests or other types of requirements (such as those to ingratiate themself the favours of one or the other personality).
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