Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION
Leonardo da Vinci
Libro di Pittura [The Book of Painting]
Codice Urbinate lat. 1270 nella Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
Edited by Carlo Pedretti
Critical transcription by Carlo Vecce
2 volumi, Firenze, Giunti, 1995
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| Leonardo, The Vitruvian Man Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia Source: Luc Viatour (http://www.lucnix.be/main.php) via Wikimedia Commons |
[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.
[1] "This edition reproduces exactly the text of the ‘luxury book’ published with the facsimile of the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas lat. 1270, in a limited edition of 998 numbered copies (Florence, 1995). The size of the text has been enlarged by ten percent, compared to the ‘luxury book’, but the illustrations on the graph are maintained in the same size as the original code "(p. 10).
[2] Text of the strip:
"Among the writings of Leonardo da Vinci, only those on painting escaped the singular destiny of being ignored in the following centuries, thanks to a compilation, entitled Trattato della pittura [Treatise on Painting], published for the first time in Paris in 1651. The European culture of the modern age knew only the texts by da Vinci in the Treatise, which in turn was the shortened version of the original Book of Painting, completed by the pupil of Leonardo, Francesco Melzi, in the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Latino 1270. Melzi had probably followed a project of Leonardo himself, transcribing texts into thematic sections that not only addressed the practice of painting, but also included broader issues of scientific and epistemological importance: the comparison between the arts and the disciplines; the definition of painting as scientia [science] and its primacy over other forms of knowledge; the analysis of the mathematical foundations of the real; the study of optics, of perspective, of light and shades. The code is not an autograph by Leonardo, but largely displays texts from now lost manuscripts. Moreover, the loyalty shown by Melzi in the transcription preserves all the characters of the language of Leonardo, committed to creating a new form of expression: an exact, precise, and immediate one. The Book of Painting, ultimately, is not so much a collection of precepts for the painter, but rather an extraordinary document of the penetrating analysis - performed by Leonardo da Vinci - of the complex combination of the scientific art issues. The publication of this work in the “Biblioteca della Scienza Italiana” [Library of Italian Science] is therefore fully justified."
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| Leonardo, Study of human proportions. Royal Library, Windsor Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[3] The Domenicale (Sunday Supplement) of the Italian Daily “Il Sole 24 Ore” has devoted considerable space to the Book of Painting, when the “luxury book” was published (the one in this collection - I repeat - is the version with a more feasible price, around EUR 45, instead of EUR 900). On 11th June 1995, the Sunday Supplement has included a presentation by Marco Carminati, excerpts from the introduction by Carlo Pedretti and some pages of Leonardo’s Treatise. Below, we are displaying the writings by Carminati and Pedretti (reproduced from the Multimedia Library of Sole 24 Ore - Cd Rom Sunday 1983-2003). We will skip the passage from Leonardo, indicating that it refers to pages 151 and 152 of the first volume of the work.
SUNDAY – Scripta manent
Facsimile edition of the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Lat. 1270, containing the full text of the famous Treatise on Painting
Leonardo's precepts, uncut
The manuscript was compiled by Francesco Melzi, faithfully following the instructions of the Master
by Marco Carminati
From the seventeenth century to date, the "Treatise on Painting" of Leonardo da Vinci has been repeatedly published in various editions. The first dates back to 1651, was edited in Paris by Raphael Trichet Du Fresne and was illustrated by none else but Poussin. The last one is only a few months old, and was printed in a really inexpensive edition for the types of Tea Publishers in Milan.
The common denominator of all these issues - among which we must remember at least the "historical" ones of Manzi (1817), Ludwig (1882) and Borzelli (1914) - is the fact of displaying only partially the text of Leonardo. Yet, the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Lat. 1270, drafted personally by Francesco Melzi, the favorite pupil of Leonardo, on precise notes and directions of the teacher, has always kept the authentic trace of the treatment by Vinci. To date, however, for several reasons, no one had ever tried to achieve the full publication and critical edition of Melzi’s manuscript. Giunti Publishers of Florence did it now, printing the facsimile of the Vatican codex, accompanied by a second volume containing the introduction, the transcript, the tables and the critical devices prepared by Carlo Pedretti, internationally renowned scholar on Leonardo, professor of history art at the University of California, Los Angeles, and by his collaborator Carlo Vecce, a young philologist by Napoli, since years engaged in the study of the writings of Leonardo.
Compiled personally by Francesco Melzi, the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Lat. 1270 was considered by Kenneth Clark as "the most important document of the entire history of art." Melzi copied there the texts and drawings taken directly from the precious originals by the master which have gone, in most cases, irretrievably lost. Then, he affixed to the book the title which probably Leonardo himself had suggested: therefore, not "Treatise on Painting", as universally believed, but "Book of painting". Basically, Melzi performed a first-hand selection of the writings by Leonardo, dividing the material into eight main categories (corresponding to the eight parts of the book).
The first part is devoted to a comparison on the arts, the famous "Paragone” [Comparison], in which, with a passionate rhetoric, the disciple of Leonardo claims the rank of science for painting, placing it before poetry, music and sculpture as the highest expression of the human intellect. In the second part, the workshop practice is discussed, including recipes, handwork and technical aspects of the profession; instead, the third section is focused on the human figure, its structure and the problems of movement, expression and lighting. A fourth part discusses drapery; a fifth one, very extensive, follows immediately, dedicated to one of the most passionate problems for Leonardo: shadows and sfumato [note of the translator: literally ‘toned down’]. In the sixth, seventh and eighth sections, finally, are dealt the problems of the representation of nature, plants, clouds, and the depiction of the horizons.
With the publication of this cornerstone of world art literature, Giunti Publishers is slowly reaching the culmination of a titanic initiative started years ago, namely the full facsimile publication of all the manuscripts of Leonardo: only the Codex Arundel is now missing, due out next year. Thanks to the courtesy of the publisher and the editor, we are proposing to our reader an excerpt of the introduction by Carlo Pedretti to the "Book of Painting" and a passage by Leonardo himself, extracted from the "Comparison" between the arts. The "Book of Painting" - composed of two volumes enclosed in a box, with the facsimile volume reaching 672 pages and that with the transcript of the analytical apparatuses 554 pages - was published in 998 numbered copies and costs 1,800,000 lire [note of the translator: around EUR 900].
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| Leonardo. Profile of a man and study of two riders Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia Source: Wikimedia Commons |
From the Introduction by Carlo Pedretti
For the first time, the famous Treatise on Painting by Leonardo appears with the title wanted by Leonardo himself, Book of Painting. And for the first time the archetype code of the compilation, conducted on the original manuscripts, preserved in the Vatican Library (Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Lat. 1270), is now reproduced in facsimile, with a critical edition of the text, as a document which is now treated as equally important as an autograph by Leonardo, i.e. with the same problems of chronological, historical and biographical order. "To the Treatise in particular must refer all those wishing to collect the materials defining the ethical values that Leonardo assigned to the artist, and that above all he proposed to himself. This may happen only by considering,– as typically art historians always do – the entire set of precepts contained in a forest of comments and recommendations, but investigating and evaluating only those laying in front of the that forest and still soaring above it." So writes Claudio Scarpati in his recent and vibrant edition of the "Comparison", which is the preface of the book, as a corollary to the lapidary conclusion by Benedetto Croce: "The precepts of Leonardo are an autobiography" [note of the editor: see Benedetto Croce, Leonardo filosofo (Leonardo as a Philosopher), in Saggio sullo Hegel seguito da altri scritti di Storia della filosofia (Essay on Hegel followed by other writings of the History of Philosophy)
We know that Leonardo moved from Florence to Milan at the age of thirty years, in 1482, after an internship of at least seven years with Verrocchio. Exactly in Milan, the capital governed by the Sforza family, Leonardo began the systematic compilation of observations on painting in general and the problems of optics, perspective, anatomy and physiognomy in particular, towards the end of the eighties. He did it according to the programmatic line that is defined in Della Pittura (On Painting) by Alberti, the succinct treatise written in 1435 and soon spread in manuscript copies. To this first phase of the theoretical activity by Leonardo refers the eldest memory of the Book of Painting, that by Pacioli of 1498, in which it is said that Leonardo, by then, was dealing with mechanical studies, especially on de ponderibus [on the weights], "having already finished the worthy book of painting and human movements with all diligence" [note of the editor: see the dedicatory letter of De Divina Proportione].
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| Leonardo, Study of two warriors heads for the Battle of Anghiari Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts Source: Google Art Project |
Leonardo's notes of the early Lombard years have focused on the practical aspects of painting technique, with a certain insistence on the preparation of the colours and with occasional references to the elementary rules of artificial perspective. The idea of painting as a science, as a form of creative knowledge and then as a philosophy, according to a formula of passionate rhetoric that will culminate with the intense arguments of the time of the anatomical studies of 1510, began to emerge around 1490, with proems and comparisons, as if he wanted to identify himself with the commitment that Alberti himself, at the conclusion of his treatise, declared to expect from those who would follow him: "who will follow us, if perhaps will be anybody with more powerful study and talent than us, he – as much I can assess - will do what I could consider the absolute and perfect practice". Thus, in this way was born the Book of Painting by Leonardo, intended to not run out in a first phase of compilation where precepts were predominant, but to grow and expand in the performance of multiple and complex problems of a more and more theoretical, namely, scientific nature, through each stage of the career of Leonardo as a painter. This is documented not only in the progressive intensification of studies of optics and anatomy, which has a subtle and distinct echo in the Book of Painting, but especially in the case of observations on the shadow, light and colour, and so on plants and the landscape. In the relevant sections of this book, these themes are presented with a preponderance of texts from manuscripts and loose sheets dated after 1510. The observations on clouds and horizon, the issues with which ends the Book of Painting, are reflected in notes on sheets of the Roman period and the following French one, from 1515 to 1518, the year before he died.
Originate in fact from that time some references of Leonardo in a working plan of the Book of Painting, which prove with what commitment and determination, to the utmost of his artistic career, he intended to carry out this work, which should have been an unprecedented theoretical trilogy, alongside the planned books of anatomy and perspective. Only now, with the systematic publication of all his autograph work, it is possible to assess the magnitude of the project, because even many pages of great literary force, such as the descriptions of deluges and cataclysms, are now proven to have been destined to that book.
Leonardo, then, ordered his writings on painting for more than thirty years, in view of a book whose final compilation would be eventually entrusted to a disciple with the qualifications to implement it. You can think of a preliminary phase during which Leonardo himself would have suggested to his assistant how to articulate the various sections of the planned book, preparing the manuscripts and notebooks in which he was well aware to have collected, over the years, most of the comments on the painting intended for that book: eighteen "pieces" overall, which are in fact listed, identified by their initials, at the end of the Codex Urbinas.
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| Leonardo, Self-Portrait. Turin, Royal Library Source: Wikimedia Commons |
But who was the student responsible for implementing this work? There is no doubt that the author should be identified with Giovanni Francesco Melzi (1493 ca.-. 1570 ca.), his favourite pupil, who at Leonardo's death in France in 1519 would inherit all manuscripts and drawings. The confirmation comes not so much from the comparison with the note attached to the well-known drawing of the head of an old man at the Ambrosiana Library: (“1510, adì 14 agosto, prima cauata de releuo. Francescho da Melzo de anni 17” - Today, 14 August 1519, first draft, by Francesco from Melzi at 17 years), but from the comparison with a more formal inscription, written in fact three times in ever smaller calligraphic characters, with which Melzi proves to be owner of a manuscript of Spanish poems now in the Library Trivulziana: “Joannes Franciscus Meltius hic scripsit die xiij mensis Junij 1546” (Giovanni Francesco Melzi here wrote on 13 June 1546).
A facsimile of the page with this inscription proves beyond all doubt that the Book of Painting was filled by the same hand. And it would not be surprising if even the pen and ink proved to be the same. The date 1546 could also come closer to that of the code of the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Lat. 1270. As a further evidence of its attribution to Melzi, one could refer to a small folio of the Atlantic Codex, the number 290, on the reverse of which still appears the same writing, beside pen tests in French. It is in fact a piece of paper belonging to a series of studies by Leonardo for a fountain at Amboise, and it is known that the only students of Leonardo in France were Messrs Melzi and Salai, latter being a personality which, for obvious reasons, can be excluded as author of that writing.
The task of Melzi was to track down the relevant texts and mark them with a headband that, once transcription had occurred, would have been crossed with a diagonal stroke of pen, as you can see in the original surviving sheets. Because at the end of each section of the Urbinate Code a certain number of sheets is left blank, it is clear that it was expected to add materials to be found after a more thorough investigation, and possibly extending it to other sheets or manuscripts. Florence, Milan, Rome and France are the main stages of the movements of Leonardo, and they refer, for a singular coincidence, also to the events of the Book of Painting, compiled after his death. Even the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, where the compilation by Melzi had been received at an unspecified date, is a location visited by Leonardo himself, and in the notebook which remembers that occasion, in 1502, there are two notes on painting transcribed in the Codex Urbinas. On the provenance of the manuscript, nothing else is known but the following: an inventory of 6th June 1631 includes it among the records of the books brought to Urbino, together with the library of the Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere (1548-1631) in Casteldurante. These books were later one transferred to the Vatican in 1657 and finally catalogued around 1797.
It would be interesting to determine whether this code had been seen at the beginning of the eighteenth century by one of the first scholars of Leonardo, the Swiss painter Ludovico Antonio David, who at that time consulted - at Ghezzi’s private home in Rome - the Leonardo code today in Los Angeles. It is certain, however, that the Codex Urbinas was "rediscovered" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as evidenced by the correspondence between the librarian of the Vatican Library, Gaetano Luigi Marini, and the Milanese painter Giuseppe Bossi between 1808 and 1810, when a transcript of the entire code was requested by the latter in order to publish it. The project could not be realized due to the death of Bossi in 1815 [note of the editor: in his diary, Giuseppe Bossi notes on 1 January 1810, among the projects to be developed during the year: "To prepare for the publication of the complete treatise of the great Leonardo" (p. 32), and on 11 October 1811: "I began to wrote a comment on the great treaty of Leonardo, and I finished the first of seven sections" (p.43)]. Two years after, Guglielmo Manzi published for the first time the Urbinate Code in Rome at the De Romanis Printing House, complementing it with a volume of 22 copper plates in which G. Francesco De Rossi reproduced the 221 illustrations in the text.
The publication of the Code prepared by Manzi did not have the immediate impact that could have been expected. It is true that Giambattista Venturi took account of it in an important memory of 1818 (unfortunately remained unpublished until 1924), but for a long time and even in the twentieth century, the shortened version of the Treaty published in Paris in 1651 continued to be printed in France, England, Holland and Spain. This was also the case of the Italian edition of 1859, which reproduces the issue in the Classici Italiani (Italian Classics) series of 1804, only adding a selection of texts drawn from the edition of Manzi. Excluding the appreciation by Goethe in a concluding paragraph of his famous book review of Bossi’s book on the Cenacle, published for the first time in German in 1818 and then in English in 1821 [note of the editor: the first Italian edition was only of 2004], it could be said that the great work of Manzi passed almost unnoticed until the time of the essay by Mr Uzielli in 1869 on botanical observations of Leonardo, and the pioneering study of Max Jordan in 1873, which compared the Urbinate code with the apographs of the abbreviated issue. It is with the latter contribution that the Treatise on Painting by Leonardo was rightly designated as Malerbuch – Libro di Pittura - Book of Painting - as it would be the case with the monumental critical edition by Ludwig published in 1882, the work which would soon give a decisive impetus to the study of Leonardo’s artistic theory, especially in relation to the still unpublished material which was spreading through the publication of his manuscripts.
Nearly two centuries after the discovery and the publication of the Codex Urbinas, the project has been conceived of producing a final facsimile edition which aims at the maximum philological rigor in the critical transcription of the text and in the reading of the illustrations, and which therefore also aims to satisfy old and new study needs, such as those expressed in all frankness by Gerolamo Calvi in 1919: "A job returning to their real lesson those fragments, which have served to compose the Treatise on Painting (both using any sources where these may offer the original, as well as amending the text, in other cases) does not exist yet. So, although reluctantly, I also quote most of the time the ‘second hand’ compilation which is the Treatise, as we have it today. That Treatise was certainly not the most correct result – both in terms of Vinci’s as well as of Italy’s art - of the edition by Ludwig".
[4] The operation of philological recovery of the Urbinate Vatican Code is of extraordinary quality and this edition deserves all praise. However, one cannot remain silent on the debate that the version edited by Pedretti aroused. In essence, Pedretti believes that the Book of Painting can be considered as any other autograph manuscript by Leonardo. Thus, Melzi would have organized it exactly as Leonardo would have done it, if he had the chance. This claim is widely disputed (and in my opinion, rightly so) by a number of scholars, who believe there is more than one reason to suspect that this is not true, and that in any case it is not correct to describe as an 'autograph by Leonardo' a text that results from the collation of different manuscripts, completed by a third party. Morever, it should be added that (but that is another story) that the historical importance of the Book of Painting is extremely limited. To have it now available is a large fortune, but we must not forget that the image of Leonardo produced in cultural circles in Europe is determined by reading the Treatise on Painting published for the first time in 1651 in Paris. And so, it is with that version that one must confront himself historically. For all these aspects, see Claire Farago, Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1990.
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