ENGLISH VERSION Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900 PART 9

Charles Le Brun

Martin Kemp
“A Chaos of Intelligence”: Leonardo’s Traité and the Perspective Wars at the Académie Royale

in

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

[1] "This essay is reprinted with the publisher's permission from “Il se rendit en Italie”. Etudes offertes à Andrè Chastel (He went to Italy – Essays in honour of Andrè Chastel) (Rome: Electa and Paris: Flammarion, 1987).

[2] The essay describes analytically the initial reactions to the first printed edition of 1651 within the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. A chronological aspect has to be immediately evidenced: the Académie was founded in 1648 and the Treaty saw the light in 1651, thus when there was still a debate within the institution over what and how to teach students. The particular virulence of the controversies that Kemp describes has to be understood from this point of view: “we should remember that the early academicians were doing nothing less than establishing the intellectual and organizational base on which their profession could acquire strength in the culture and society of their age” (p. 250). Controversies, mind you, which did not focus on the much discussed supremacy color/design, which is particularly dear to Italians from Vasari onwards, but on the weight to be given to perspective (and what kind of perspective) in the teaching of painting. 

[3] At the centre of the dialectical conflict are, on the one hand the majority of the members of the Academy, gathered around and represented by its President, Charles Le Brun, and on the other hand the famous engraver, as well as expert of perspective, Abraham Bosse. Precisely because of his reputation as an expert in this subject (he had published in 1647 Maniére universelle de M. Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective - Universal method by Mr. Desargues to implement perspective) Bosse was called to teach it at the Academy in May of 1648, also thanks to the special protection granted to him by the influential Laurent de La Hire. By virtue of the work provided by Bosse, the Academy then decided to integrate him into its ranks in 1651 as an honorary member. Bosse was a pupil of the great mathematician Gerard Desargues, who in 1636 had developed a theory of perspective whose base “was his metrical martière (or methode) universelle in which scales of petit feet are used to plot on the picture plane the precise locations and relative dimensions of any given object... The disadvantages for artists [note of the editor: of Desargues’s method] are that it makes considerable demands on its operator’s patience, is dependent on a series of detailed measurements in plan and elevation, and is rather abstract in its procedures in that the use of different scales within the same construction tends to separate it from the more tangible notion of the visual pyramid with which artists generally felt more at home” (pp. 241-242). For these reasons, friction between Bosse and the rest of the Academy had to exist already since him joining in 1648. Bosse was a staunch defender of the "universal method" of Desargues and believed that this method should be at the very basis of the realization of every work of art. The conflict erupted in a crashing way with the publication of the Treaty of Leonardo in 1651 and, beyond technical aspects, which were important as well, soon assumed political overtones: the image of Leonardo that they wanted to give was that of the Italian genius that transferred in France the basics of artistic knowledge and thus enabled the birth of the transalpine painting school. Behind the material executors of the first printed edition (in two versions, Italian and French), that is behind the various Du Fresne, Poussin, Errard and Fréart de Chambray, there were the French crown and Colbert. To speak about Leonardo, in short, meant to quote a ‘monstre sacré’, and the writings of an absolute superstar are studied carefully, and not disputed. When the Treatise was published, Le Brun asked Bosse to base the teaching of perspective on the text of Leonardo. Bosse, in response, “disparaged the treatise, casting doubts on its authenticity and ridiculing its disorderliness, repetitions, contradictions, commonplaces, and obscurities” (p. 242). From his point of view, Bosse had a point. The lack of organization of the first printed version, for obvious reasons, was so much evident that John Francis Rigaud, in its English edition of 1802, spoke explicitly of "chaos of intelligence" (p. 244). Moreover, the passages devoted to linear perspective in the Treaty were very few and amongst the most obscure. Moreover, Bosse had to live with chapters of the Treaty in which Leonardo highlighted the limitations and contradictions of linear perspective, preferring the so-called "aerial perspective ": “The science of art for Leonardo was more vitally concerned with beguiling observations of light, atmosphere and color in nature than the constructional techniques of geometrical perspective” (pp. 247). In short, if the common call to Leonardo and Desargues was that the basis of the work of art was "natural science", it was quite evident that two very different ways of understanding the science collided the one against the other (for an approach with particular clarity about this - a view not only focused on the history of art, but also on the history of science - see JV Field, Perspective and the Paris Academy). The conflict between Le Brun and the Academy on the one hand and Bosse on the other soon degenerated, charging of personal disagreements. In 1655, the Academy decided that the writings of Bosse could not be published under the name of the institution any more, to make it clear that the thoughts of the engraver concerned only him. A year later the protector of Bosse, Laurent de La Hire, died and his position within the Academy was further weakened. The Academy itself then guaranteed its sponsorship to another treatise on perspective, signed by the Jacques le Bicheur, which was published in 1660. In response Bosse replied that this publication dishonoured the whole Academy and the nation itself. In May 1661 Bosse was expelled from the Academy and opened what Kemp calls a "schismatic art school" for young artists in St Denis. A King's injunction, signed by Colbert, had to be issued, threatening Bosse’s imprisonment in the event that the school had not been immediately closed. But the story did not end here. In 1665 Bosse published the Traité des pratiques geometrales et perspectives (Treaty on geometric practices and perspectives) and fired with heavy artillery against Le Brun’s front: in fact he published a letter that had been addressed by Nicolas Poussin (a personality who was certainly undisputed for the academic front) in which the latter bluntly wrote that “all that is good in that book [note of the editor: Leonardo’s Treatise] one could write in large characters on one single sheet of paper, and those who believe that I approve of all that is in it do not know me” (p. 242). A dramatic turn of events, such that somebody questioned for long time the authenticity of the letter (Poussin had just died and was not able to confirm). Today, in fact, the authenticity of the letter of the French painter is indeed confirmed by all critics, so that the letter appears in the official collections of Poussin's letters published in French and Italian. The reasons that moved Poussin to express himself in that manner were however probably quite different. Poussin had illustrated the Treaty at the request of Cassiano dal Pozzo and definitely did not like Errard’s interventions on his own images. More generally, “he no doubt felt growing irritation at the increasing tendency of the “Poussinistes” in France to claim to be speaking for him on all matters” (p. 243). The controversy between the Academy and of course Bosse went on for years. What is most important here is to emphasise just that the most bitter clashes concerned the relationship between linear perspective and aerial perspective. It should also be said that “many [note of the editor: others] aspects of Leonardo’s message as conveyed by the Traitté were readily absorbed into the developing academic ideals, particularly his concerns with the communicative motions of the human figure... and the principles of decorum in narrative compositions” (p. 240).