ENGLISH VERSION Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900 PART 10

André Félibien

Pauline Maguire Robison
Leonardo’s Theory of Aerial Perspective in the Writings of André Félibien and the Paintings of Nicolas Poussin

in

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

[1] The first printed edition of the Treatise of Leonardo (1651) was not, as well known, a particular example of clarity; one of the most difficult issues to reconstruct is the so-called "aerial perspective". In this sense, it is useful to draw attention on the one hand to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin and the other to the theoretical work of André Félibien, that demonstrate an understanding of the subject assuming - at least in the case of Poussin – a direct knowledge of the writings of Leonardo further than what was published in 1651. It may be useful, with reference to Poussin, to start from the analysis of the manuscripts H 228 and H 227, now preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. As is known, Ms. H 228 is the one that contains the original drawings by Poussin to the print edition planned by Cassiano dal Pozzo. A copy of the same manuscript, now preserved in St. Petersburg, was donated by Cassiano to Chantelou and served for the preparation of the first printed edition of 1651. Ms. H 227, however, contains heterogeneous material drawn (via Arconati) directly from Leonardo's autographs at the request of Cassiano himself (by the way, it is to be remembered that the final part of the manuscript contains the Memoirs of Giovanni Ambrogio Mazenta on the vicissitudes of the Vincian writings). In the anthology reported in Ms H 227 stands out “by far the largest body of notes being concerned with issues of perspective and optics that are of interest to us here” (p. 268). Cassiano’s intentions were to publish the material as an appendix to the first printed edition, which was instead based on the apograph manuscripts. In fact, none of this was published. It is not (to us) entirely clear whether the cause was that, quite simply, Chantelou did not receive any copy. To the contrary, it would seem that in fact this was the case, given that in the essay it is assumed that the non- publication of the first printed version of 1651 was due to the overly "scientific" precepts of da Vinci . Anyway, what is relevant at this point is that Nicolas Poussin had direct access to both the MS H 228 and Ms H 227, and that evidently he studied carefully even the latter. A physical proof of this fact is that "inscribed on the front page of Ms H 227 is a reminder to Poussin to return the manuscript with attached diagrams when finished with it” (p. 269). The study of aerial perspective by Poussin, therefore, goes beyond the material published in 1651 and is testified in a number of works executed by the master in those years. 

[2] André Félibien dealt with the aerial perspective in the fifth of his Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes (Conversations on the lives and works of the greatest old and modern masters), published in 1679. Robison shows how Félibien in these pages reduced the more than 100 chapters concerning aerial perspective and its related aspects (color and acuity perspective, light and shadow and reflected light) dispersed throughout the Trattato into what was then and arguably remains the clearest and most concise statement of the theory. By the time the fifth Entretien appeared in 1679, Leonardo’s Trattato had been available in print for almost 30 years, and owing in large part to the influence of Poussin’s paintings, the aerial perspective had become an established aspect of French academic art theory” (p. 268). 

[3] “It was, in fact, on the basis of this aspect of painting that Charles Perrault, secretary to the King’s powerful Surintendent des Bâtiments Jean-Baptiste Colbert, declared in 1685 before the Académie française (without mention, however, of either Poussin or Leonardo), that painting under Louis XIV had surpassed everything that had gone before in antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, including Raphael” (ibid.). See also Charles Perrault, Parallelo fra gli antichi e i moderni (Parallel between the ancients and the moderns) in La disputa sei-settecentesca sugli antichi e sui moderni (Dispute in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries on the ancients and the moderns).