Leonardo on Painting [antikvár]

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION »V- A treatise on painting by Leonardo? This will be a collection without order drawn from many pages which I have copied here, hoping to put them in order in their places, according to the subjects with which they will deal, and I believe that before I am at an end of this, I will have to repeat the same thing many times. (BL ir) Efc As far as Leonardo's projected treatise 'On Painting' is concerned, we know that he never did reach the 'end of this'. Indeed, it is unlikely fe that any of his many projected books - 'On Water', 'On the Elements of Machines', 'On the Human Body', 'On the Flight of Birds' and so I on - ever reached completion. What remained after his death in 1519 ij' was a magnificent legacy of personal manuscripts, consisting of large- h scale notebooks, small pocket-books, compendia of miscellaneous ^ sheets (some extracted from dismembered codices), and collections of p separate pages, including those containing drawings for works of art. i; The greater part of Leonardo's literary legacy became the treasured f property of Leonardo's favourite pupil and heir, Francesco Melzi, who, as the son of a noble family in Lombardy, was well enough educated to make sense of his master's notes. During the centuries following Melzi's death, his collection of drawings and manuscripts was dispersed and many of the items disappeared. p/ Melzi himself took the first important steps in editing Leonardo's ?' disorderly notes with a view to having them published. He went 1 through the notebooks in his possession to extract passages for a treatise on painting, presumably with some direct knowledge of what T. Leonardo himself had intended. The result was the manuscript anthology in the Vatican, known as the Codex Urbinas, the title-page of which announces that is the 'Book on Painting by M. Leonardo da Vinci, Florentine Painter and Sculptor'. Melzi's work was not only important as the first attempt to put Leonardo's writings in order but is also invaluable in that it preserves passages from manuscripts that are now lost. Of the thousand or so passages transcribed by Melzi, only a quarter come from manuscript sources still available to us. This provides some rough measure of the extent of the losses from Leonardo's legacy. If we allow that those of his manuscripts which were ''1 '. (•