_full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en nul 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (oude _articletitle_deel, vul hierna in): The Treatise on Painting as a Guide to Nature _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0

The Treatise On Painting As A Guide To Nature 9

Chapter 1 The Treatise on Painting as a Guide to Nature: Light and Color

Janis Bell

In the century leading up to the publication of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting in Paris in 1651, copies circulated in manuscript in the Italian cities of Florence, Bologna, Milan, Mantua, Urbino and . The number of surviving copies is nearly fifty, yet may only represents a fraction of the number of copies created.1 Leonardo’s ideas on painting were valued by artists and litterati in the seven decades between the first documented appearance of these abridged copies in Florence (ca. 1580) and the Parisian publication.2 Even if some nega- tive comments about the utility of his precepts have come down to us, the fact that writers incorporated Leonardo’s ideas into their published and unpub- lished works testifies to their high valuation. Carlo Pedretti was the first to em- phasize these “plagiarisms,” but we now recognize these borrowings as typical of the way practical knowledge was regarded as shared wisdom, thus free from the confines of authorship given to ancient texts and philosophical specula- tions.3 Clearly, Leonardo had much to add to the developing discourse on

1 A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016): 17, n. 43 cites research of Eltjo Buringh, estimating the survival rate of medieval manuscripts at 1 out of 15 produced. I wish to thank A. Mark Smith for commenting on an early version and Claire Farago and the University of Colorado for supporting my research on this topic as part of our collaborative study of the Trattato. All translations of chapters quoted here derive from Claire Farago, Janis Bell, and Carlo Vecce, The Fabrication of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura, 2 vol. (Leiden: Brill, 2018) and the ideas I develop in this essay derive from that collaboration. 2 For a detailed history of this publication, see Farago et al, Fabrication, especially 1–72. 3 Carlo Pedretti, “Belt 35: A New Chapter in the History of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting,” in Leonardo’s Legacy: An International Symposium, ed. Charles O’Malley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969): 149–170; Carlo Pedretti, “Il ‘Trattato della pittura’ di Leonardo plagiato da Pietro Accolti nel 1625,” Raccolta Vinciana 19 (1962): 292–294. On issues of authorship and non-authorship in the written sharing of practical knowledge, see Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship. Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) and Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004398443_003 10 Bell painting, documented in a bibliography of printed sources that Raphaël Trichet Du Fresne, editor of the 1651 Trattato edition, appended to his life of Leonardo.4 Today, numerous manuscript treatises and letters supplement that bibliography, giving us a broader idea of the evolving discourse on art criti- cism.5 This study focuses on the chapters on light and color in the Trattato, which comprise a significant portion of the published work. The anonymous editors responsible for the abridgment of the Libro di pittura, Melzi’s compilation from the original manuscripts, left intact nearly all the chapters on color in Books 2 and 3 when they prepared a much shorter version.6 The Church wanted accu- racy in pictorial representations, thus providing a fertile environment for the return to nature, as later seventeenth-century writers would characterize the reform of the Carracci and , to whom the painters of their age were greatly indebted.7 Early art historians relying on formal analysis such as Walter Friedlaender and Sidney Freedberg reinforced that idea of a return to nature after a period of excessive artifice (labelled as a period style called “Manner- ism”) and those who followed emphasized the importance of light and color in this reform, particularly on the part of artists working around 1600, including Barocci, the Carracci, and Caravaggio.8 Bellori and Félibien both mentioned Leonardo’s treatise in connection with —not because he had access to it but because they believed his works exemplified Leonardo’s

4 Kate Steinitz, “Early Art Bibliographies. Who Compiled the First Art Bibliography?” Burlington Magazine 114 (1972): 829–837. 5 There is currently no overview to supplant the erroneous conclusion of Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (London: The Warburg Institute, 1947) that a lack of publications indicates a lack of interest in ‘theory’ by early Seicento artists and collectors, but many manu- scripts have now been published; see Giulio Mancini, Considerazione sulla pittura, Ed. by Adriana Marucchi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1956); Vincenzo , Discorso sulle arte e sui mestieri, ed. Anna Banti (Florence: Sansoni, 1981); Elizabeth Cropper, The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa’s Düsseldorf Notebook (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1984). Filippo Camerota, ed., Linear Perspective in the Age of Galileo. Ludovico Cigoli’s Prospettiva pratica (Florence: Olschki, 2010). 6 Farago, et al., Fabrication (as in n. 1): I: 233–238. 7 Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori, e architetti moderni (Rome: Mascardi, 1672); Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice: vite de’ pittori bolognesi (Bologna: Barbieri, 1678). The return to nature is only a part of these writers’ views of the reform. 8 Walter Friedlaender, Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (New York: Schocken, 1957); Sidney Freedberg, Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). In particular, Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (Glückstadt: Augustin, 1977), argued that Annibale presented a new solution to the integration of color and chiaroscuro.