ENGLISH VERSION Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900 PART 5

Michael Cole
On the Movement of Figures in Some Early Apographs of the Abridged Trattato

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

Stefano Della Bella

[1] Judging with contemporary eyes, and if we think about the archetype code by Melzi , we certainly believe – as Cole argues - that the great merit of the Book on Painting by Leonardo, compared to Leon Battista Alberti's De Pictura, was to provide the reader with "the first ever illustrated handbook dedicated to the whole art of painting " (p. 107). However, if we try to change perspective, and to refer to the Treatise stepping into the shoes of many writers and artists who consulted the apograph manuscript versions, are we really sure that it was really so? First, we must take into account a number of manuscripts that almost totally omitted images; then we cannot ignore the fact that “all the copies that retained the figures... shifted the majority of them from the positions they had occupied in the Codex Urbinas, at the centre of blocks of text, to the margins” (idem). Because of this, one of the strengths of the editorial project by Leonardo and Melzi disappeared (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?); at the same time, a problem of interpretation of the relationship between text and image arose. It is indeed obvious that moving images from a central location, surrounded by their respective text, to a marginal one (perhaps between more chapters) makes the direct correspondence between the two elements less immediately perceived. And especially among the copyists of apograph manuscripts of a second or third generation, the confusion that beset them on some occasions in having to decide to which chapters of the Treaty (especially if particularly cryptic) to report the images, must have been felt strongly. Of course, all this led to mistakes and omissions that today we are quite easy to assess, as we have the Urbino Code; but even here, if it is certainly correct to speak of mistakes and of greater or less distance compared to the original in philological terms, it is equally correct in terms of art history?

[2] There are however a few examples that force us to reflect on this. One is the manuscript written in 1617 by the sculptor Giovanfrancesco Susini (Codex Magliabechianus XVII), a pupil of Giambologna. Susini shifts images to the top of each sheet of the manuscript, and includes extracts, sometimes very short, from Leonardo Treaty to explanation of the drawn images. When he is faced with pieces of text not accompanied by illustrations, he omits them without too much trouble. "The notebook [editor's note: by Susini] ... is among other things a document of the ways in which it was possible to read Leonardo’s Trattato in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. While literati might approach the work as a “discourse” into or onto which visual “demonstrations” could be fit, Susini instead saw it in the first place as a collection of figures – perhaps even figural inventions – each of which was explained by an accompanying text” (p. 110). Even more: Susini shows special attention to the images that are more suited to his style and the one of his teacher Giambologna. “The “figure that bears weight” was virtually a topos in Giambologna’s oeuvre, and variations on this theme turned precisely on the rotations of the body in various ways around an axis, often so as to dramatize what Leonardo called “equiparantia”” (p. 121). In the same way, in his apograph manuscript of 1630 (Codex Riccardianus 2275 Riccardiana Library, Florence), Stefano della Bella produces images on the motion of the human body that are considered not only of particular beauty, but also among the most adherent to the dictates of Leonardo, while in other pages (e.g. on perspective) the quality of the illustrations becomes poor and inattentive to what is stated by da Vinci. “Della Bella was not stupid, but he clearly put his mind to some things more than others, and his unequal attention was guided by his own practice as a painter, draftsman, and printmaker” (p. 120). In short, it is clear that “early artists did not just regard the Trattato as a primer on how to paint. As often as not, they read and copied it because it helped explain or justify something they were already doing. The early history of the treatise, consequently, may be most interesting for what it shows us about the seemingly peripheral interests of the individuals involved” (p. 121). 

[3] As a curiosity, it should be noted that the Treatise on Painting has always been published either on the basis of the first printed edition (princeps) of 1651 or the Urbino Code by Melzi. There would be one exception (see p. No. 56. n.22), i.e. the printed edition conducted in 1792 by Francesco Fontani on the manuscript by Stefano della Bella (Trattato della pittura di Lionardo da Vinci ridotto alla sua vera lezione sopra una copia a penna di mano di Stefano della Bella con le figure disegnate dal medesimo, corredato delle memorie per la vita dell’autore e del copiatore - Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci reduced to its true lesson from a hand-written copy of Stefano della Bella with figures drawn from the same, accompanied by memories on the life of the author and the copier).