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280 Mara
Chapter 11 Leonardo and Architecture in the Critical Views of Giuseppe Bossi (1808-1810)
Silvio Mara
Was Leonardo really an architect? Among the first scholars to pose themselves this question, the primacy seems to belong to the artist-connoisseur Giuseppe Bossi.1 In April 1807 he had been entrusted by the viceroy Eugène de Beauhar- nais with the task of producing a faithful copy of The Last Supper. Soon, how- ever, he realized that it was necessary to undertake a systematic study of Leonardo so as to enter into sympathy with his work. Bossi carefully gathered information and collected as much as he could, both from primary sources and from recent bibliography. In May 1808 he fi- nally decided that he would write a volume entirely dedicated to the topic of The Last Supper. At first he did not have a clear idea of how he would structure his monograph, because the material he had collected exceeded the theme, but in the end, after long and profound reflection, in the first months of 1811 he decided on the title Del Cenacolo di Leonardo da Vinci (On The Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci).2 The volume collects, in a historical and philological frame- work, all the evidence on the artist’s masterpiece and all the copies made of it, with a final chapter entitled Opinioni di Leonardo intorno alle proporzioni del corpo umano (Opinions of Leonardo regarding the proportions of the human body), which resulted from a study undertaken by Bossi to understand the can- ons of proportionality in Leonardo. This fourth chapter, which includes print reproductions of drawings in Venice of the Vitruvian Man (Fig. 11.1) and of the Bust of a man with a pattern of proportions (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, inv. 236), constitutes a stand-alone dissertation, and as such it was published in 1811 with the title Delle opinioni di Leonardo da Vinci intorno alla simmetria de’ corpi umani (On the opinions of Leonardo da Vinci regarding the symmetry of human bodies).3.
1 This primacy has recently been acknowledged in Paola Cordera, L’architettura, le feste, gli ap- parati. Disegni di Leonardo dal Codice Atlantico, (Milan: De Agostini, 2010), 19–21. 2 Giuseppe Bossi, Del Cenacolo di Leonardo da Vinci libri quattro (Milan: Stamperia Reale, 1810). 3 Giuseppe Bossi, Delle opinioni di Leonardo da Vinci intorno alla simmetria de’ corpi umani. Discorso di Giuseppe Bossi pittore dedicato al celeberrimo scultore Antonio Canova (Milan: Stamperia Reale, 1811).
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Leonardo And Architecture In The Critical Views Of Giuseppe Bossi 281
Figure 11.1 Giuseppe Bossi, copy from the Vitruvian Man for the print reproduction in Del Cenacolo (1810). Busto Arsizio, Carnaghi Collection
In the initial stages of his research, Bossi began exploring scarcely known sectors of Leonardo’s activity; among these, he was interested in the possible involvement of Leonardo in some architectural building sites in Milan. In the documentation by Giuseppe Bossi preserved at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, among the autograph papers that the painter used to prepare his vol- ume, there is a curious unnamed notebook. In its initial lines, Bossi annotated his intention of writing “a separate article” (“un articolo a parte”) that was to be entitled “Dell’architettura del Cenacolo e delle opinioni di Leonardo intorno all’architettura in generale” (“On the architecture of The Last Supper and the opinions of Leonardo regarding architecture in general”).4 For this reason it
4 The folder is at Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, henceforth cited as BAMi, shelf mark ms. & 239 sup.; it was transcribed with various inaccuracies that alter its meaning in Stephanie Bai,