Leonardo's writings about his art

Leonardo Da Vinci is one of the few great painters to leave us a quantity of writing about his art. I put it in this way, rather than saying a treatise on art, because his numerous notes on painting are hardly more systematic than his other observations. We have, however, more reason to believe that he intended a definite treatise on the subject, and he may even have given some shape to the part dealing with the human figure, since in his introduction to the Divina Proportione, written in 1498, Pacioli says that Leonardo had "finished with great diligence an admirable book on the depiction and movements of men" (de pictura et movimenti humani). This book is lost, but amongst Leonardo's anatomical drawings at Windsor are several studies of the human body in movement which date from this period and must be connected with the treatise. A great many of his original notes on the science of painting have also survived. Some of the manuscripts deal with the subject almost exclusively: the MS. C is concerned with light and shade, and MS. E with the understanding of plants and trees. The Ashburnham MS. No. 2 (now Bibliothèque Nationale, 2038 Italien) contains so many and varied instructions on painting that when it was discovered it was at first taken for the lost treatise. But the majority of such notes are scattered throughout the manuscripts in the pages of the Codice Atlantico and on individual drawings. These notes on painting, with a certain amount of writing on other subjects loosely related to it, were collected by J. P. Richter and published in 1883 under the somewhat misleading title, The Literary Works of Leonardo. A number of Leonardo's writings on art have not survived in their original form. Vasari tells us that beside the main body of the manuscripts which in his day were in the possession of Francesco Melzi, there were "in the hands of N. N., a painter of Milan, some writings of Leonardo likewise in characters written with the left hand, backwards, which treat of painting and of the methods of drawing and colouring. This person, not long since, came to Florence to see me, wishing to print this work; and he took it to Rome in order to give it effect, but I do not know what may afterwards have become of it." It seems reasonable to suppose that these papers in the possession of N. N. formed the first part of a selection from Leonardo's notes on art which was made about the middle of the sixteenth century and has come down to us in several manuscripts. The best of these comes from the Urbino library and is now in the Vatican library. This is the transcript of Leonardo's notes, known as the Trattato della Pittura--and as such I shall refer to it.

Some of the matter it contains can also be found in Leonardo's original autograph, and we can see that the copyist was, for the date, remarkably faithful in following Leonardo's actual word. It is important to be sure of this, since a great part of his transcript reproduces notes by Leonardo which are lost to us in the original, and which greatly enlarge our knowledge of his aims and character. The Trattato was copied and recopied with diminishing accuracy throughout the sixteenth century. One copy belonged to Benvenuto Cellini, another to Annibale Caracci, who said that if he had known it earlier it would have spared him twenty years of labour; yet another, in the Barberini library, was edited by Cassiano del Pozzo, who induced Poussin to draw illustrations to it. In 1651 it served as a basis for the first printed edition published by Raphael du Fresne. Other editions followed; but under the influence of contemporary art theorists they drifted farther and farther from Leonardo's original text, became, in fact, little more than case-books of academic classicism. This the Trattato remained until the rediscovery of the earlier manuscripts, with their relation to Leonardo's original notes, showed how far were the real workings of his mind from the formulas of Du Fresne, Roland Freart and Francesco Fontani.

The Trattato della Pittura is not an easy book to read. In the Vatican MS. it consists of eight books and 935 "chapters", some no more than a few lines, some covering several pages. Although the compiler has tried to arrange the entries under their subjects, very few have any sequence, and many repeat each other in slightly varying form. In a short summary we may say that the contents are valuable in four different ways. First, they give Leonardo's general views on the nature of art; secondly, there are notes on the science of painting; thirdly, there are notes on studio practice; and fourthly, there are entries, scattered through the Trattato, in which Leonardo expresses, sometimes half-unconsciously, his personal tastes and feelings as a painter.

Leonardo's general views on the art of painting are found for the most part in the first book of the Trattato, where he compares it to the arts of poetry, music and sculpture. These comparisons, or paragoni as they were called, were a standard form of critical literature at the time, and something of what they contain is derivative; but the presentation of the argument and, above all, the illustrative examples quoted are characteristic of Leonardo and of immense interest, since nowhere else does he allow himself to write in such generalised or such personal terms of the things which concerned him most deeply.