CHAPTER 3 Leonardo’s Lost Book on Painting and Human Movements Matthew Landrus In his 1498 manuscript of the Divina proportione, Luca Pacioli (ca. 1447–1517) notes that Leonardo had “already with great diligence finished a worthy book on painting and human movements.”1 This book no longer survives, but related notes and drawings in Paris MS A and the Royal Library at Windsor do, enabling us to draw connec- tions between Leonardo’s autograph writings and sixteenth-century copies of lost notes and drawings that passed through the studios of practicing artists. Francesco Melzi (ca. 1491–ca. 1568/1570) pre- served some of Leonardo’s ideas on movement in his Libro di pit- tura di M. Lionardo da Vinci, pittore e scultore fiorentino; his associate Carlo Urbino da Crema (1525/1530–1585) preserved a different set of those ideas in his 1560–1580 manuscript Regole del disegno (rules of design). This latter document is currently in the form of 128 loose sheets of approximately 135 × 180 mm, marked primarily with pen and ink over black chalk, and tucked between 140 sheets of a mo- rocco leather–bound volume entitled the Codex Huygens, located at The Morgan Library in New York. Named after Constantin Huygens II (1628–1697), the original “boeckje” was unbound, arranged, num- bered, and tucked into the leather codex by him ten months after he purchased it on 3 March 1690. He wrote to his brother, the fa- mous physicist Christiaan, “I accepted here a book in quarto writ- ten and drawn by Leonardo da Vinci…. I paid 3 1/2 guineas, but I would not sell it for four times as much.”2 As a record of Milanese responses to Leonardo’s legacy in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, these Regole contributed to a dialogue among painters, sculptors, and architects about the notebooks, diagrams, theo- ries, and lessons that were most useful in their professions, their studios, and the traditions they wished to follow. Carlo Urbino’s Regole provide evidence of the reception of Leonardo’s ideas, there- by refining and expanding the discourse on his intended and un- intended content for a book “on painting and human movements.” As Claire Farago argues in Parts Two and Three of Chapter Two, Urbino’s Regole and the abridged version of Leonardo’s treatise on painting were—especially for a Milanese group of visual artists © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/9789004353787_005 184 Landrus and art theorists around 1560–1580—among the best remnants of Leonardo’s advice for the painter and his studio. The present chapter locates Leonardo’s advice in the Codex Huygens, among Carlo Urbino’s contributions to rules of design, while also examining the significance of this advice for Leonardo’s lost book “on painting and human movements.” Although this comparison must generally exclude associations with some of Leonardo’s other books, such as his book titled “On mechanics” (Codex Madrid I) and his “120 books” on anatomy, it should be recognized that the intended book on painting was, particularly for Leonardo, necessarily situated within a holistic program that included mechanics and anatomy, as well as the development, “attitudes,” “effects,” and “senses” of man, as in the “order of the book” referred to in this chapter. Focusing on new evidence of similarities between Leonardo’s work and the Codex Huygens, the fol- lowing discussion addresses the context of approaches by Francesco Melzi, his associate Carlo Urbino, and other contemporaries to Leonardo’s theoretical and practical advice for the visual artist. At issue is the extent to which these approaches mark developments in the abridgment of Leonardo’s notes on painting for the 1651 Trattato della pittura. To offer evidence of these developments, a new set of comparisons identifies associations on forty-three pages of Urbino’s Regole with autograph Leonardo drawings and three drawings by Francesco Melzi. Urbino’s interpretation and representation of those notes preserves a portion of Leonardo’s book “on painting and human movements,” some of which editors included in the 1651 Trattato. Carlo Urbino's Regole del disegno Moreover, analysis in the present chapter offers new evidence of Urbino's access to original or copied portions of Melzi's unabridged Libro di pittura. Leonardo’s lost book “on painting and human move- ments” might have employed not the sparsely illustrated format of Melzi’s Libro di pittura, but instead the form of Leonardo’s treatise on mechanics of around 1493, now known as Codex Madrid I. He proudly referred to the latter a number of times as a necessary prepa- ratory resource for several disciplines, and Pacioli praised the book as “an inestimable work on local motion, percussion, weights and all the forces, that is, accidental weights.”3 It is Leonardo’s most attrac- tive design for a book, with richly illustrated, precise demonstrations that were evidence of his expertise as an engineer, as well as an in- novative designer and author (fig. 3.1).4 Thus, his early intentions for a formal treatise on painting would doubtless have compared with .