Claire Farago (ed.), Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900 PART 1

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

Ashgate Publishing, 2009
Isbn 978-0-7546-6532-8

[1] Text of the flap:

“For nearly three centuries Leonardo da Vinci’s work was known primarily through the abridged version of his Treatise on Painting, first published in Paris in 1651 and soon translated into all the major European languages. Here for the first time is a study that examines the historical reception of this vastly influential text. This collection charts the varied interpretations of Leonardo’s ideas in French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Greek, and Polish speaking environments where the Trattato was an important resource for the academic instruction of artists, one of the key sources drawn upon by art theorists, and widely read by a diverse network of artists, architects, biographers, natural philosophers, translators, astronomers, publishers, engineers, theologians, aristocrats, lawyers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and collectors. The cross-cultural approach employed here demonstrates that Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting is an ideal case study through which to chart the institutionalization of art in Europe and beyond for 400 years.

The volume includes original essays by scholars studying a wide variety of national and institutional settings. The coherence of the volume is established by the shared subject matter and interpretative aim: to understand how Leonardo’s ideas were used. With its focus on the active reception of an important text overlooked in studies of the artist’s solitary genius, the collection takes Leonardo studies to a new level of historical inquiry.

Leonardo da Vinci’s most significant contribution to Western art was his interpretation of painting as a science grounded in geometry and direct observation of nature. One of the most important questions to emerge from this study is, what enabled the same text to produce so many different styles of painting?

Claire Farago is Professor of Early Modern Art, Theory, and Criticism at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.”

Leonardo da Vinci, Self-Portrait (1513 ca), Turin, Royal Library
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[2] The idea behind this work is quite simple: starting from the second half of the Nineteenth century, scholars on Leonardo have tried to reconstruct his theoretical work in the field of painting, on the one hand drawing - in the form of anthology - from surviving original manuscripts, on the other hand striving to provide the most complete and philologically correct version possible of the Codex Urbinate Latino 1270, preserved in the Vatican Library, or the so-called Book on painting (or the Treatise on painting) that Francesco Melzi, Leonardo's pupil, probably compiled around 1545, following the directions given to him by da Vinci in his old age, and gathering the material from eighteen different manuscripts . It is hardly necessary to recall that the traces of Melzi’s original were lost soon. We are now able to reconstruct its passage to Urbino in 1631 and the one to the Vatican Library in 1657. But the original manuscript was rediscovered only in 1797 by Guglielmo Manzi, who published the first printed version in 1817. As mentioned before, only at the end of the Nineteenth century (the version edited by Heinrich Ludwig, 1882) the importance of the Codex Urbinate Latino 1270 was really understood, and all subsequent versions of the Treaty were conducted on it, up to the excellent critical edition edited by Carlo Pedretti in 1995. This critical edition may, in some way, be considered as "final", whatever the final assessment of the code compiled by Melzi may be; Pedretti gives the manuscript archetype the same value of an autograph of Leonardo; recently this claim has been questioned by at least part of critics, and in particular by the curator of this publication, i.e. Claire Farago, in How Leonardo da Vinci’s Editors Organized His Treatise on Painting and How Leonardo Would Have Done It Differently in the Treatise on Perspective: published and Unpublished. And yet one thing is objectively undeniable: that, with some exceptions all still to be confirmed (perhaps Federico Barocci, for example), along three centuries all those who approached the Treatise on Painting did not draw from the lost original manuscript by Melzi, but from other sources: we are talking about a whole series of shortened manuscripts, conducted on Melzi’s archetype, which circulated for example in Florence and Rome between the second half of 1500 and the first half of 1600 (we do not know what were the circumstances for transcriptions). Of course we are referring to the first printed edition of the Treaty, which was published in Italian in 1651 in Paris by Raphael Trichet du Fresne, followed in the same year by the French edition (always in Paris) by Roland Fréart de Chambray, both conducted on apocryphal manuscripts, compared with Leonardo's original ones available at that time; not to forget all subsequent editions of the Treatise, which were published in all Western Europe since 1651 until about 1850; and not to mention, finally, that Leonardo's ideas were handed down for even more indirect ways, such as the oral tradition and their implementation in other treaties signed by other authors. To sum up, the purpose of this book is to understand how Leonardo was perceived over three centuries, before Melfi’s autograph returned back to very centre of the scene; and the most interesting thing that is clear from this reading it that was interpreted in very different ways from each other, depending on the historical moment of national realities, but also of the individual sensitivity of the interpreters. One element , however , must be considered as a unifying factor, meaning that almost everywhere, albeit at different times and in different forms between them, the Treatise on Painting was a distinctive element of the stage where painting sorted out from an embryonic state of "a mechanical art" to become institutionalized as a topic to be taught in academia. We will see in single contributions in what way this materialised.

Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, 1485, Krakow, Czartoryski Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[3] “Another study... will also complement the present volume: a modern critical edition of the abridged Trattato della Pittura/Traitté de la Peinture published in twin editions in Paris in 1651, is in preparation by Juliana Barone, Janis Bell, Claire Farago, Martin Kemp, Matthew Landrus, Pauline Maguire Robison, Anna Sconza, and Carlo Vecce” (quoted from the curator’s introduction, p. XXV- XXVI) . The critical edition, to date, has not yet been published. 

Leonardo da Vinci, La Belle Ferronnière, 1490-1495 ca, Paris, Louvre Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[4] Volume of great interest, with some broadly excusable discontinuities and two imperfections: first, the index does not include the annotations at the end of each essay; and second, the notes would have deserved further proof-reading and editing, if nothing else from someone who knew Italian (always check , therefore, the accuracy of the quotes). Some slips, then, are as conspicuous as trivial. The curator noted that the idea for this book was born as a result of an international conference held at the Warburg Institute in London on 13 and 14 September 2001. At that conference, which opened just two days after the Twin Towers attack on September 11, many speakers could not physically attend, due to the interruption of air travel. At p. 175 Catherine M. Soussloff opened her contribution dedicating it "to all the people killed in the tragic events of September 9, 2001." Nobody noticed the typo.

Leonardo, Mona lisa, 1503-1506, Paris, Louvre Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[5] In the following table I provide a list of the essays in the volume; most of them are rewieved; you can see the comments by clicking on the links:

• Claire Farago. Introduction: the Historical Reception of Leonardo da Vinci’s Abridged Treatise on Painting. 

Section One: The Italian Reception

• 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?; 
• Robert Williams. Leonardo and the Florentine Academy; 
• Claire Farago. Who Abridged Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting?; 
• Michael Cole. On the Movement of Figures in Some Early Apographs of the Abridged Trattato; 
• Janis C. Bell. Zaccolini and the Trattato della Pittura of Leonardo da Vinci; 
• Thomas Willette. The First Italian Publication of the Treatise on Painting: Book Culture, the History of Art, and the Naples Edition of 1733. 

Section Two: The French Reception 

• Catherine M. Soussloff. The Vita of Leonardo da Vinci in the Du Fresne Edition of 1651; 
• Juliana Barone. Poussin as Engineer of the Human Figure: the Illustrations for Leonardo’s Trattato; 
• Martin Kemp. “A Chaos of Intelligence”: Leonardo’s Traité and the Perspective Wars at the Académie Royale; 
• J.V. Field. Perspective and the Paris Academy; 
• Pauline Maguire Robison. Leonardo’s Theory of Aerial Perspective in the Writings of André Félibien and the Paintings of Nicolas Poussin; 
• Thomas Kirchner. Between Academicism and its Critics: Leonardo da Vinci’s Traité de la peinture and Eighteenth-Century French Art Theory. 

Section Three: The Spanish Reception 

• Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga. The Trattato in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Spanish Perspective and Art Theory; 
• Charlene Villaseñor Black. Pacheco, Velazquez and the Legacy of Leonardo in Spain

Section Four: The Dutch, German, and Flemish Reception 

• Michèle-Caroline Heck. The Reception of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della Pittura, or Traitté de la Peinture, in Seventeenth-Century Northern Europe; 
• Thijs Weststeijn. “This Art Embraces All Visible Things in its Domain”: Samuel van Hoogstraten and the Trattato della Pittura; 
• Juliana Barone. Rubens and Leonardo on Motion: Figures, Inscriptions, and Texts. 

Section Five: The English Reception 

• Richard Woodfield. The 1721 English Treatise of Painting: a Masonic Moment in the Culture of Newtonianism ; 
• Geoff Quilley. The Trattato della Pittura and Leonardo’s Reputation in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics. 

Section Six: The Greek and Slavic Reception 

• Chrysa Damianaki. The Translation and Critical Fortuna of Leonardo’s Trattato in Greece and the Balkans: the Manuscript Translations of Panagiotis Doxaras ; 
• Marcin Fabiański. The Fortuna of Leonardo’s Trattato della Pittura in Nineteenth-Century Poland . 

Mario Valentino Guffanti. Bibliography of Printed Editions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting

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