12
The Biographer and the Doctored Book
Giorgio Vasari was an excellent artist and a formidable storyteller. He was the perfect court artist for the Florence of the 1550s and 1560s, which was a very different place from the city Leonardo had known. No longer a republic, the city was now the capital of the Duchy of Tuscany, a state ruled by the Medici, who, in 1532, had taken over the republic in a coup and established a hereditary monarchy in its place.
It might seem hard to imagine what a book on painting could possibly have to do with a political coup. And, furthermore, how Leonardo—thirteen years dead by the time of that coup and buried in France, no less—was still relevant in this new Florence and these new times. But art was highly relevant, and Leonardo’s in particular. For in these preliteracy days, when very few people could read or write in the vernacular, let alone Latin, art was never just about pretty pictures. It was the medium in which every institution, from the government to the church, told its story—the lingua franca, so to speak, through which those in power communicated what was expected of those under their authority. If you wanted to change the ways or values of a society, you did it through art.
No one understood this better than the second duke of Florence, Cosimo I de’ Medici, not to be confused with the founder of the Medici dynasty, Cosimo the Elder. Think what you will about the entire Medici clan (in large part an unpleasant bunch), and the ruthless and violent Cosimo I in particular (he had his brother-in-law and sister killed when they challenged his authority). Still, it is no exaggeration to suggest that, in all of Europe, no ruling family had ever showed more panache or sophistication in its artistic tastes, or devoted more time and attention to “painting” its way to public acceptance and legitimacy. During his reign of almost forty years, Cosimo I spent a king’s ransom paying artists to paint over the great murals of republican Florence, including the wall that had been destined for Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, and replace them with new murals that seamlessly intertwined the Medici story with those of ancient heroes and Roman emperors. In this way, Cosimo made the Medici takeover seem like a natural outgrowth of the republic in the service of the greater good.
At Cosimo’s court, no position was more coveted than that of chief court painter. The court painter was influential. He worked closely with the duke, making sure that each fresco, parade, stage for a play, altarpiece, or display for festivities, court entertainment, or public event reinforced the same basic message: that the Medici were the legitimate heirs of the Florentine republic. The court artist worked efficiently—often under pressing deadlines—to create artwork to mark special events such as ducal marriages, baptisms, funerals, ambassadors’ visits, or religious festivities. An army of artists, each specializing in a specific subject—wars, soldiers, landscapes, buildings, flowers, city views, etc.—worked with him, side by side. Each artist understood he was merely part of a team, charged primarily with working in concert with others as a cohesive unit. These artists were not universal painters (pittori universali). They did not know the science behind what they painted, nor were they familiar with Leonardo’s notes on painting. They did not need to be. Their job was to follow exactly the instructions of the court artist.
Giorgio Vasari aspired to the position of court painter, and eventually he got it—but thanks only to his old friend Vincenzo Borghini (1515–1580), who was one of Cosimo’s trusted advisors. This old friend knew how to convince Cosimo, Renaissance-style, to appoint Vasari: to ensure that the duke was indebted to the artist. That was easily accomplished by Vasari following his friend’s suggestion to dedicate the book he was writing to Cosimo.
Vasari, furthermore, was not writing just any old book. His Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors from Cimabue to Our Times, then acclaimed as the definitive history of Renaissance art, is still in print today. It told the story of art from the Middle Ages to Vasari’s time through brief biographies of individual artists. In the introduction, Vasari declared that he did not expect fame “as a historian or writer of books” as his “business in life is to paint, not to write.” He wished merely to write “as a simple painter” using his “own language” and to offer artists a history of their predecessors and a good vocabulary with which to describe their craft.
Little did he know that his fame would come from this book, not his paintings.
He intended to write accurate biographies that portrayed the real character of each artist. “It is my task to dwell upon those actions which illuminate the workings of the soul,” he wrote, “and by this means to create a portrait of each man’s life.” But when his research did not provide the information he had hoped for or yielded contradictions, he made things up. Today, we might call it fiction at best. He invented great stories. Dramatic stories. Stories that always found a way to express an artist’s character, or at least Vasari’s impression of it. His biography of Leonardo was filled with invented facts and anecdotes, all quite charming. Had that been his only sin, Leonardo aficionados might be able to forgive him.
But Vasari explicitly promoted the view that Florentine art was the pinnacle of Renaissance art, and that Michelangelo was the greatest artist of all. He also argued that the first obligation of a painter was to please his patron, and that the second was to work quickly and efficiently. These “obligations” did not correspond to the actions and beliefs of Leonardo, who nonetheless figured prominently in the book.
Leonardo, after all, painted very little, and what he did paint he painted slowly. He failed to complete much of what he began. And above all, he painted on his own terms. Leonardo argued fiercely that the speed of execution and judgments of patrons were not the criteria by which art should be judged: “If you wish to study well and profitably,” Leonardo told artists, “accustom yourself in your drawing to work slowly and use your judgement as to which lights have the highest degree of brightness, and similarly, among the shadows, which are the ones that are darker than the others, and in what way they merge.”
How, then, could Vasari give a fair account of Leonardo’s art—of his marriage of extraordinary competence with a distinctive vision and voice—while at the same time defending his own, very different notion of what art should accomplish? It seemed impossible to deny that Leonardo’s genius was the result of his curiosity and deep intelligence at work. Yet Vasari found a way, and the new Leonardo he created began to take on a life of its own.
Vasari’s chapter on Leonardo begins with an outright fabrication. It is written as though he personally knew Leonardo.
He did not.
Vasari was eight years old when Leonardo died. He did, however, interview many people who actually knew the master (strangely, he interviewed Melzi, who knew Leonardo best, only for the second edition of his book, although he surely knew of Melzi all along by way of a mutual friend, the doctor and historian Paolo Giovio). As a result, Vasari did manage to record some true stories. People who had met Leonardo told of his legendary beauty, that he was so strong that, with his right hand, “he could bend the iron ring of a door-bell set in a wall, and a horseshoe as if it were lead.” They reported that he was great fun to be around and “so pleasing in conversation that he drew everyone’s mind to his way of thinking.” He kept a large retinue of servants, assistants, and horses even though “he owned nothing and worked but little.”
But when his contacts did not produce the information he needed, he made it up.
The story of the French king at Leonardo’s deathbed is one of the most memorable fictional anecdotes. Another is the story of caged birds that the artist bought at the market and then freed because he loved nature so much. Another still is that he was a vegetarian. These are great stories—they show that royals paid their respects to Leonardo and that the artist loved nature above all else, and in this respect, they were truthful.
In another inventive lie, Vasari claimed that Leonardo worked in a trance, forgetting food, time, friends, and everything else. The artist had lizards, crickets, serpents, butterflies, grasshoppers, bats, and other animals brought into the studio and labored on them with such concentration he did not notice the stench of the dead animals in the room because “such was the great love he bore his art.” Guided by these dead creatures, he painted a monster on a small shield or “buckler,” which, Vasari tells us, terrified whoever saw it. The point of the story was that Leonardo was so talented at imitating nature that people thought his painted figures were alive.
Vasari’s Leonardo did in fact love nature—the properties of herbs, the motions of the heavens, the path of the moon, and the course of the sun—and believed it was “far more important to be a philosopher than a Christian.” But in Vasari’s account this interest in the natural world and in the scientific explanation of natural phenomena seemed unrelated to his art.
Five hundred years ago, Vasari was the first author to praise Leonardo for moving Renaissance art away from exterior beauty to the inner thoughts of people, a view we share to this day. He remarked that the apostles in the Last Supper expressed in their faces “love, fear, and indignation, or rather, sorrow,” and that Mary’s face in the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne showed “the modesty and humility of a virgin most content and joyous to witness the beauty of her son.” Vasari was the first to name Leonardo the initiator of modern art, which Vasari called “the third manner of painting.” Leonardo was so gifted and had such talent (talento) that “whenever his mind turned to difficult matters, he wholly resolved them with ease.”
Notably, Vasari did not say much about Leonardo’s science of art, nor did he acknowledge Leonardo’s view that “painting is philosophy.” But in all likelihood, Vasari knew much more than he revealed about Leonardo’s “obsession” with the role of optics in painting, a curious lapse in his Leonardo chapter.
Vasari was a good friend and frequent dinner companion of Paolo Giovio, the doctor-scholar who had gone to school with Francesco Melzi in Milan and who had met Leonardo in Rome in 1513. Giovio had reported that “nothing was more important to him than the rules of optics, which he followed to study the principles of light and shadow exactly and minutely.” Back then, what people knew about they talked about at these dinnertime “salons.” In fact, at a dinner in the Farnese palace in Rome, Giovio was the first to have the idea of writing an entire book dedicated to the lives of artists. Vasari, who was present, offered to assist him. Of course, Vasari did more than assist Giovio with this book—he stole the idea for the project entirely and wrote the book himself. It stretches credulity to believe that Vasari was absolutely in the dark about Leonardo’s fascination with optics. He was, more accurately, a man with his eyes on a very particular prize—a position at the Medici court.
In his chapter, Vasari claimed Leonardo had exceptional ingeniousness (ingegno) and imagined marvelous “complexities,” but that these marvels “could never be realized,” not even by his skillful hands.
Leonardo gave “special power and relief” to his figures but “in the art of painting he contributed a certain shadowed manner [oscuritá] of coloring in oil.”
Leonardo liked to learn about many subjects and begin many things but he was so “various and unstable [vario et instabile]” that he finished none of them.
The artist was exceptional, in other words, but “he had given offense to God and to the people of the world for not having worked on his art as he should have done.”
Was Vasari, then, really praising Leonardo?
In fact, Vasari was just being true to a vision of art that suited his ambitions. He had already demonstrated that murals could be painted quickly and efficiently with one master designer overseeing a group of artisans, who would execute the coloring. He had even achieved a degree of fame—some said notoriety—as a result of a mural he had produced in just this manner in 1547 for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese’s residence in Rome. The mural was finished in a hundred days, a feat so sensational that the hall came to be known as the Sala dei Cento Giorni, Hall of the Hundred Days, a name it retains today. Of course, not everyone was impressed with the results. Michelangelo, having already fled Florence for Rome, knew about the haste, commenting, “And it shows! [e si vede!]” Even Vasari himself later admitted that in retrospect, he wished he had painted it “in 100 months” and “done the whole thing myself.” Nonetheless, the Sala dei Cento Giorni had given him the handy reputation of being the fastest and most reliable painter in the whole of Italy. Most important, the patron was pleased.
Efficiency, control, a happy patron: those were precisely the matters Vasari believed were important to painting, not the science of optics. He had no patience for Leonardo’s subtle pictorial effects, his blurred edges, his atmosphere, his elusive smiles, his delicate shifts in body motions, his imperceptible shades of skin tones—all traits that were achingly time-consuming to achieve and that defined Leonardo’s work. They distracted artists and inhibited their ability to produce work at the fast pace patrons demanded.
And so Vasari went out of his way to discredit Leonardo’s science of art.
And the best way to discredit is to misinform, which is precisely what Vasari did by way of a fictional story. It goes something like this:
Leo X, who was a Medici pope, commissioned Leonardo to make a painting. This was true. The artist took his time to start work, which was also true. When the pope learned that the artist spent his time distilling oils and herbs for varnishes rather than painting, he said: “Alas! This man will not do anything, in that he begins by thinking about the end before beginning the work.” The pope never uttered those words. Vasari made them up. His aim was to conceal how Leonardo painted.
For Leonardo did not finish his paintings with varnishes. He built them from the ground up with varnishes, one layer after another, and had become a master of glaze painting. Nobody knew this better than Vasari.
Vasari wrote extensively on painting techniques, including the use of varnishes and glazes. He saw some of Leonardo’s work firsthand and owned some of his drawings. He knew what Leonardo’s art was really about. But because he found this way of painting so deeply unsuitable to his own goal of pleasing his patrons, he misled generations of readers. He did not explain that Leonardo built a painting with varnishes from the start, one thin layer after another. Rather, he let his readers think that Leonardo was so scattered and disorganized that “he begins by thinking about the end before beginning the work.”
Not only this. Some of Vasari’s claims are dead wrong, such as the assertion that Leonardo left the head of Christ unfinished in the Last Supper because “he did not think it was possible to convey the celestial divinity required for Christ.” Vasari cannot possibly have missed Leonardo’s head of Christ—either from copies of the Last Supper he had seen or from his own observations when he saw the work in 1566. But his lie makes the point that while Leonardo was good at painting nature, he did not know how to paint the divine, which was what Michelangelo did best.
There was another reason for these claims, too. Vasari’s hero was in fact Michelangelo, not Leonardo. He favored Michelangelo’s stark, contrasting colors, his masculine bodies, his sharp lines. He also related deeply to the theology with which Michelangelo imbued his works.
And so Vasari disparaged what made Leonardo Leonardo, even his ability to copy nature: the master wasted his talent on marginal pursuits such as painting a monster on a buckler.
When Vasari seemed to praise Leonardo, he was actually demolishing him. And he demolished him by deleting what had made Leonardo Leonardo. Not a single word is dedicated to his science of art. Nor to Leonardo’s notes on painting. Did none of his interviewees or correspondents mention that Leonardo thought that “painting is philosophy” or that without knowledge of optics, you cannot be a great painter?
Vasari’s Leonardo was highly talented and versatile, but his philosophical and scientific interests were completely detached from his art. He did not portray Leonardo as the artist who took painting to new heights through his determination to rethink its role, nor as the painter who mastered the science of optics to part the curtains of the human soul. He skipped over the importance of optics in Leonardo’s art and fixated instead on war machines and other scientific pursuits that were unrelated to painting. His very popular book created a different impression of Leonardo: one of the most striking examples in human history of a polymath, a brilliant artist whose mind was so fertile that he turned to science as an outlet for his intellect.
This is not just a semantic distinction without a difference. It is a view of Leonardo that leaves no role for philosophy or science in his painting—the “dual genius” hypothesis in its earliest and most consequential form.
The damage Vasari’s book did to Leonardo’s reputation was just beginning.
But Lives did a lot for Vasari and his career. Vasari wrote extensive parts of the book in Florence in 1546 and 1547, when his old friend Borghini was also in town. Later, between 1549 and 1550, when Vasari was away, Borghini saw the book through publication on his friend’s behalf. Borghini read the galleys, made the indexes, revised the conclusions, and advised Vasari on its dedication to Cosimo. In 1550, the book was printed. Four years later, the Lives achieved its intended goal when Cosimo appointed Vasari his chief court artist.
This meant that from 1554 until the end of his life, twenty years later, Vasari shared with Borghini the responsibility of pleasing the Medici duke in all matters related to art. They trusted each other, and the Medici duke trusted them. In fact, it was the three of them—Cosimo, Vasari, and Borghini—who determined the narratives depicted on the walls of the ducal palace.
Borghini suggested to Vasari the best stories to paint: Heroic stories. Accurate stories. He was assiduous, testing the accuracy of every historical event, the interpretation of each text, the meaning of every word, which he skillfully twisted to serve the master narrative of his patron. He was the mind behind Cosimo’s dramatic exercise in revisionist history that highlighted the positive role of the Medici family.
Cosimo almost invariably approved the selected stories, though he sometimes suggested revisions to how he was portrayed. Vasari oversaw the actual painting, employing an army of artists to do the work.
Vasari and Borghini worked together on much more than the murals of the ducal palace: they designed the sets and pageantries to celebrate all the major events of Cosimo’s reign. In 1565, when Cosimo’s son and heir, Francesco, married the Holy Roman emperor’s daughter, Johanna of Austria, they worked on her triumphal entry into Florence. When Francesco wanted a special room in which to keep his most precious collectibles, a “cabinet of curiosities” to rival those that European rulers had in their residences, Borghini devised a sophisticated series of mythological stories, which Vasari had painted by his assistants. In 1564, they planned a parade for Michelangelo’s state funeral, skillfully glossing over the fact that the artist was a staunch republican and refused to return to Florence after the Medici takeover. Ten years later, they organized Cosimo’s own elaborate funeral parade celebrating a reign that had lasted almost forty years.
They made sure that a steady supply of competent and docile artists was available to meet the artistic and propagandistic needs of their duke.
They created an art school.
Cosimo funded it.
Vasari designed its curriculum—some of it hands-on and some of it theoretical.
Borghini served as its first director, or luogotenente.
In late January 1563, the academy convened for the first time. It was named the Accademia del Disegno because its main tenet was that the arts were united under disegno, design. Borghini delivered the opening speech to the first class of students, exhorting them to “unity” under disegno and to “turn their [minds] to create works and improve through study.” It was the first art school of this kind, and the idea behind it was so compelling that soon other rulers founded their own and modeled them after Cosimo’s.
Another tenet was that it was “an academy to DO rather than TALK [accademia di FARE e non RAGIONARE],” as Borghini declared in another public lecture he delivered in 1564. He himself capitalized the words in the written remarks to remind himself where to place the emphasis.
In this academy premised on doing instead of talking, artists were fully trained in questions of design but not expected or permitted to do anything except execute the orders of others. Nor were they supposed to engage in conversations of a more theoretical or speculative bent. Since the director Borghini was part of Cosimo’s inner circle and Vasari’s good friend, we can take his view to be the official position on art at the Medici court at that time.
Leonardo had also imagined an academy, but Leonardo’s academy could not be more different: there artists would learn how to become pittori universali, which for Leonardo meant that they had to be able to debate the nature of art and the paragone, and to learn the science of optics. The book on painting he had planned to write had been meant as a textbook for pittori universali.
One of the major differences between Leonardo’s academy and the Accademia del Disegno had to do with this paragone.
Years earlier, at a dinner party in Milan, Leonardo had articulated his reasons for believing that there was a hierarchy in the arts and that painting stood at the pinnacle—because it is “a mental discourse” that passes through the virtù visiva. So important to Leonardo was this idea that Francesco Melzi had dedicated the first thirty pages of his compilation to it. Even absent the publication of the Book on Painting, the idea took on a life of its own. Indeed, right around the time Melzi compiled the Book on Painting, a question was sent out to ten major artists (including Michelangelo and Vasari) by a famous scholar, Benedetto Varchi, asking their opinion on whether painting or sculpture was the superior art. Artists loved the debate on the paragone. For them, it was part of their struggle for power and recognition, as it argued that the visual arts were on a par with literature and poetry. And it was also an occasion to articulate the specific qualities of different forms of art: painting, sculpture, architecture, drawing.
But Borghini and Vasari were utterly committed to erasing the paragone and the philosophical speculation connected to it from artistic training, as they did nothing to meet the needs of their duke. The paragone also undermined their firm belief in disegno as the unifying principle of art. Borghini made clear to his students that whenever artists try to discuss intellectual questions, they are like “a tortoise which if it stays in its house is secure but as soon as it pulls out its head it gets beaten.” Anyone who expected to survive at that school no doubt got the message. Speculation on the nature of art was unwelcome. A new order had begun.
These views did not go unchallenged for long, however. Soon, Borghini and Vasari butted heads with Florentine artists, including with some associated with the new art academy.
The occasion was none other than Michelangelo’s funeral, which Borghini and Vasari had planned as an elaborate public ceremony to honor the great Florentine sculptor, celebrate the continuous glory of Florentine art thanks to Cosimo’s patronage, and promote the views of their new art academy. But they insisted on placing a personification of painting above one of sculpture in their design for their triumphal arch, which was the focal point of the entire celebration. The fact was puzzling since Michelangelo regarded himself as a sculptor, and also because it contradicted the academy’s teaching that the arts are united under disegno. In fact, the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini led a revolt, other sculptors withdrew in protest, and even Borghini lost his cool. “That pig Benvenuto,” Borghini called the leading dissenter in a letter to his friend Vasari.
Another major difference between Leonardo’s academy and the Accademia del Disegno had to do with shadow drawings and the science behind them.
There were plenty of books on linear perspective, architecture, and sculpture that could be adopted as textbooks by the academy—we have only to recall that in 1568 Leon Battista Alberti’s books on painting, architecture, and sculpture had been reprinted in Venice by a Florentine scholar and Medici courtier, Cosimo Bartoli. Melzi’s compilation based on Leonardo’s notes, the Book on Painting, was the only book that dealt with shadow projections, and with aerial and color perspective, and that contained both a qualitative or descriptive discussion and a quantitative or scientific analysis of those topics. It was not printed, but it was known that Melzi had written it.
And yet, as the academy prospered, the designer of its curriculum and its director would end up learning a great deal more about Leonardo’s writings and his art.
Emboldened by their successes, Vasari and Borghini made plans for a second edition of Vasari’s book. This enterprise led to Vasari finally meeting Melzi.
In 1566, sixteen years after the publication of his Lives, Vasari traveled to northern Italy to learn more about art in Venice and Milan. His friend Borghini helped him a great deal with this revised edition, reminding him that his task was to gather facts and that the work had to be “finished and perfect in every part.” It had to be “a universal HISTORY of all the paintings and sculptures of Italy.” He instructed his friend: “Here you have as your only object the art and work of [artists’] hands.” He wanted his friend to see “Genoa, Venice, Naples, Milan, and altogether as many things in each of these principal cities—paintings as well as sculpture and architecture—as possible, and to adorn your work with them.” During this research trip, Vasari visited Francesco Melzi and found him “a beautiful and gentle old man.”
Vasari did update his Leonardo chapter with information he gathered from Melzi. He learned from Melzi that on his deathbed Leonardo “wished to be fully cognisant of all things Catholic” and revised his earlier account of Leonardo’s death, although it is possible that Vasari adapted it to the expectations for pious artists living, as Vasari lived, in the age of the counterreformation—Leonardo took the last rites. From Melzi he learned that Leonardo followed people in the streets for a whole day to draw them, and that he made a silver lyre “in the shape of a horse’s cranium” for the duke of Milan.
We know that Melzi showed Vasari Leonardo’s anatomical drawings, which Vasari mentioned in the updated Leonardo chapter, although he scaled back their significance. Basically, admitting that he had not read a word, Vasari complained that all the pages were written “in ugly characters, made with the left hand, in reverse” and that “those who are not familiar with them cannot understand them, because they cannot be read without a mirror.”
Even more consequential was Vasari’s assertion that Leonardo’s anatomical drawings were intended as illustrations for Marcantonio della Torre, the doctor from the university of Pavia with whom Leonardo dissected cadavers. They were not part of Leonardo’s philosophical art at all.
It is impossible to imagine that Melzi did not at least mention to Vasari Leonardo’s belief that “painting is philosophy,” and tell him that he had gathered his master’s thoughts in the Book on Painting. And it is impossible to imagine that Vasari, looking for new material for his revised edition and for textbooks for his art academy, did not eventually read Melzi’s Book on Painting himself or have someone else review it on his behalf.
Perhaps Melzi also showed Vasari some of Leonardo’s shadow drawings. But if he did, Vasari did not understand much. His report on Leonardo’s light and shadows is rather wanting.
It is a remarkable thing that this genius, having the ambition to endow the things he was painting with the strongest modeling [rilievo], went so far with dark shadows as to exploit the darkest grounds, seeking blacks to make deep shadows, darker than the other blacks, and by their means to make his highlights seem the brighter. In the end this method of coloring was such that no light remained there, and his pictures assumed the guise of things represented at night-time, rather than in the brilliance of daylight. All this came from seeking to render things in greater relief, and to achieve the ultimate perfection in this art.
It is hard to imagine Melzi describing Leonardo’s construction of light and shadow the way Vasari reported it. Melzi would never have said that “no light remained” in Leonardo’s paintings or that his master represented things “at night-time, rather than in the brilliance of daylight.” More important, he would have taken the time to connect his master’s optical studies with the representation of emotions, as this was their ultimate goal.
When a painter from Milan came to see Vasari in Florence sometime before 1568, Vasari was no more receptive to Leonardo’s writings. This unknown painter had brought with him “other writings” by Leonardo “written in left-handed characters in reverse, which treat of painting and the methods of drawing and coloring.” The Milanese artist wanted to print them but found no takers in Florence. Vasari certainly did not provide any help. The Milanese painter subsequently traveled to Rome, but nothing came of it, as far as Vasari knew.
The undeniable fact is this: because Vasari’s biography was largely complimentary and appeared to accommodate all the generally known facts about Leonardo, Vasari’s Leonardo not only went unchallenged from 1550 onward—Vasari’s portrayal became dogma. The revised edition of the Lives, published in 1568, was even more popular.
Leonardo was a polymath, and his art was separate from his science.
Another undeniable fact is that sometime after Vasari published his revised book in 1568, a mess of a book about painting started to circulate in handwritten copies among an elite group of artists, scientists, philosophers, and other educated members of the public.
The first copies appeared in Florence, but soon they spread to other cities—Milan, Venice, Rome, Paris. The book was some two hundred pages long, and it contained some fifty diagrams. Its title changed from copy to copy. Sometimes it was Book. Other times it was Discourse on Drawing. In other copies the title was Precepts, Rules, Writings, Aphorisms, or Opinion. In one instance it had a long but precise title: How to paint perspective views, shadows, objects that are distant, high, low, both from nearby and from afar. Other times it bore no title at all. Sometimes “the second part” appeared in the title, implying that a first part existed but was not included. Most versions reported that the author was Leonardo da Vinci.
We still have no idea who put together this book, or where it was done. But whoever created the first of these handwritten copies unquestionably had access to Melzi’s work and his Book on Painting.
This book “by Leonardo” was a highly condensed version of Melzi’s Book on Painting. It was one third as long as Melzi’s original and included only a quarter of the drawings Melzi had intended. What was removed entirely from this new book were the sections on philosophy and science that were at the core of Leonardo’s art, and that Melzi had included in his Book on Painting. Reading this condensed copy, no one would ever know that Leonardo believed that painters engage in a “higher mental discourse” because their work is based on sight, which is the noblest sense, or that he taught that “the soul of painting” resided in the illusion of relief created by light and shadow. These sentences and the entire section titled “On Shadow and Light” of which they were part had been cut. And the paragone that opened Melzi’s Book on Painting was gone as well.
Clearly, this book “by Leonardo” was a heavily doctored edition that had neither Melzi’s nor Leonardo’s wishes at heart.
Extensive portions of what remained were highly disorganized: text and figures did not correspond. And even when they did, the key letters in the figures did not necessarily match those in the text. The Leonardo of this book wrote about light and shadow in vague terms. One wonders what artists were supposed to make of statements such as “Painter, if you want to be universal and please people of different taste, you must have in the same painting figures with very deep and very soft shadows, but you have to make sure that the reason for such diversity is apparent.” No instruction was given on how to achieve those soft lights and shadows.
Where was this doctored version of Melzi’s book created? In Milan, where Melzi had compiled the Book on Painting and where the private library containing Melzi’s version was being stored? Or in Florence, where the oldest doctored copies survive? Or in Rome, where perhaps Melzi sent the book for consideration to some potential patron? We do not know. But whoever put this version together understood that the times had changed. The spirit that animated them is evident in a revision to the very first chapter of the doctored version, titled “What a Youth Needs to Learn First.” It read:
First a youth needs to learn optics [prospettiva] to understand the measure of all things, then, little by little, learn from a good master to get used to well-formed limbs; and then [learn] from nature to reinforce the reasons for the things learned; eventually youth should look at works from the hands of different masters in order to form the habit of putting [the things learned] into practice and make art.
But the editor of the doctored version changed the last few words from “make art [operare l’arte]” to “implementing everything learned [operare le cose imparate].” The intention was to limit what an artist was expected to do: not art, but just what one had learned.
The partial Leonardo of the doctored version seems perfectly suited to Cosimo’s Florence and his art academy. Is it possible that somebody in the immediate circle of Vasari and Borghini took Melzi’s Book on Painting and turned it into something more useful for these very different times, guided by a very different artistic philosophy? In Cosimo’s Florence, art served the ruler and his power and was not concerned with the inner lives of painted figures or with their impact on the inner lives of their beholders.
It is difficult to settle scholarly quandaries of this sort, but there is ample reason to suppose that the butchered Book on Painting was the work of Vasari and Borghini’s circle and may have been the work of either Vasari himself or, more likely, of Borghini. Vasari’s activities at the Medici ducal court, his circle of friends, and his role in the creation of the Accademia del Disegno, as well as the kind of art he was making at the time, seem to suggest so. Borghini was a skilled editor and had just acquired great fame for a censored edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron (it took generations of modern philologists to undo what Borghini did to Boccaccio’s text). In addition, the names of Vasari’s and Borghini’s closest friends and associates are revealing. They match the names of the owners of the oldest copies of the doctored Book on Painting. These owners kept this doctored book as a precious item in their libraries and made copies for their friends and for other artists in Florence and elsewhere. They were the de facto promoters and disseminators of a partial Leonardo.
One early owner was Carlo Concini, who was related to Bartolomeo Concini, the longtime secretary of Duke Cosimo. He owned one of the oldest and most polished copies. Its well-composed title page features Leonardo’s portrait, clearly copied from the portrait Vasari added to the 1568 edition of his Leonardo chapter, which means that Concini’s copy must date to after 1568. Its title, Discourse on Drawing: Second Part, refers more generally to disegno rather than to painting, and while this was a dramatic departure from Melzi’s original title (Book on Painting), it fit neatly within the scope of the Accademia del Disegno, which had disegno as the unifying principle of the arts. It also contained the telling reference to the claim that the text was only the “second part [parte seconda]” of Leonardo’s book, suggesting that a first part existed but was not included. Clearly, the text had been truncated, but there was no way to know the nature of this abridgment: did it just make the text shorter than the original, or did it alter the author’s intended meaning profoundly? In addition, the reference to the “second part” showed that this particular copy was one of the closest copies to Melzi’s Book on Painting, and in later copies, this reference was lost.
The book itself was made of large folios of heavy paper. A professional scribe wrote the text between red margins. It was a clean copy, with hardly any corrections between the lines, the text neatly arranged on the page, the same number of lines on each. This particular codex was so well organized that one might think it was conceived as a presentation copy for a patron, hoping perhaps to entice him to sponsor its printing. One crucial aspect of Concini’s copy was that the images were placed in the margins, rather than imbedded in the text as Melzi had done. This simple rearrangement, though, complicated matters incredibly for later scribes, who often could not determine exactly which illustration belonged to which specific passage.
Another early owner of the doctored book was Niccolò Gaddi, a passionate Florentine bibliophile who kept an outstanding art collection in his palace that was thought to rival that of the Medici. His library was at the heart of Florentine cultural life, and Gaddi routinely had his books copied for his friends. To Cosimo’s sons, Francesco and Ferdinando, he was what Borghini had been for their father: a trusted courtier and a skilled disseminator of their cultural politics. In 1579, he was nominated director (luogotenente) of the Accademia del Disegno. Ten years later, he designed the pageantry to celebrate Ferdinando’s wedding. His library was one of the centers for the dissemination of Leonardo’s doctored Book on Painting. Not only did he own one of the oldest copies, but he bound it together with Giacomo Vignola’s manual on perspective. His copy offered a complete, albeit succinct, training program for young artists: basic instructions on linear perspective from Vignola, and abridged notes on aerial and color perspective from Leonardo.
Cosimo’s cosmographer Ignazio Danti, who also taught at the Accademia del Disegno, owned a copy of the doctored book, which he took with him to Bologna and Rome.
A copy belonged as well to Lorenzo Giacomini, another Medici courtier and a member of the Florentine literary academy who wrote, among other things, the funerary oration for Duke Francesco de’ Medici.
Whoever it was who actually abridged Melzi’s text, it seems he belonged to the Medici circle. Certainly this would explain why the paragone was removed and why the section titled “On Shadows and Light” was not included. For Borghini, the paragone was a waste of time, while Vasari thought that Leonardo’s way of painting left “no light” in his paintings. The finished product was a sloppy piece of work. It was not done by someone who sympathized with Leonardo’s wishes. It was done by people who wanted to appropriate Leonardo’s name and reputation for their own, more commercial attitude toward art.
And so, by way of Vasari’s approving but selective biography, his silence on the science of art, and a massacred version of the Book on Painting, a new Leonardo emerged. He was a polymath, and his art owed nothing to science. The Leonardo that emerged from the doctored text was a fake Leonardo, or at best, an incomplete Leonardo. Knowing little else, people regarded this figure as the man himself.
During the 1580s, interest in the doctored Book on Painting increased, and a flurry of activity around it emerged. Perhaps the idea of its formal publication resurfaced. In 1582, the academic painter Gregorio Pagani made a fully shaded drawing, which appears to be a preparatory drawing for a frontispiece for a book titled Advices and Discourses on the Art of Painting by Leonardo da Vinci, but this book was never printed. A woman dressed in a garment from antiquity, painting at an easel, is a personification of the art of painting. Two years later, the Florentine author Raffaello Borghini mentioned in his book Il Riposo that Leonardo “wrote some very beautiful precepts on the art of painting, which as far as I know have not been printed yet.” Between 1585 and 1586, some of the owners of the oldest doctored copies—Giacomini, Gaddi, and Danti (the latter had since moved to Rome)—exchanged letters about Leonardo’s doctored book among themselves and with collectors from other cities. One of these collectors was the scholar Gian Vincenzo Pinelli from Padua, who knew humanists and scholars across Europe.
The book had become a collector’s item in its own right, sought by top scholars and collectors throughout Italy.
Bibliophiles in Florence, Rome, Bologna, and Padua were all in search of accurate copies of the doctored Book on Painting. They consulted with one another and made copies for one another—and since errors in hand-copied books were common, they inadvertently set in motion a further corruption of Leonardo’s text. None of them had knowledge of Melzi’s compilation, which by then—we may safely assume—had disappeared from public sight.
It would take at least four decades before a little of the real Leonardo emerged—for just a brief moment. An artist with a talent very different from Vasari’s and an editor with knowledge much wider than Borghini’s would grasp what was behind Leonardo’s art. But the real Leonardo was so different from the Leonardo of the doctored treatise that even the most educated scientists and artists did not know what to make of this “new” Leonardo.
They hardly even tried.