13
The Best Editor, an Obsessed Painter, and a Printed Book
It never occurred to readers to wonder if the text of what they thought was Leonardo’s book on painting had been tampered with or was in any way inauthentic. In those days, errors in handwritten books were common, but readers were used to them and knew how to compensate for them, either by ignoring them or by mentally correcting the incongruences. As far as everybody knew, what they read in those handwritten copies was the real Leonardo, plus some minor mistakes. Nobody knew that the book was only a doctored version of a compilation assembled by a pupil (albeit a skilled one) from his master’s notes. So much so that one of the most learned and influential men in Baroque Rome thought it would be “for the common good” to publish Leonardo’s writings for the first time, even a small selection of them, even only his notes on painting. Such a book would bring the genius back to life, so to speak.
Books were everything to Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657) because learning was everything. But it took Cassiano several years and the help of many to get this book into shape. His attempt to publish it succeeded—and yet it also failed. It succeeded because eventually the book was printed and some of Leonardo’s thoughts became easily accessible to a broad public. His edition was a failure, however, because despite Cassiano’s best efforts, he excluded from the book the glimpses of the real Leonardo he had been afforded by pure chance—circumstances that surely constitute one of the great what-ifs of art history.
What was printed instead was a beautiful book crafted for the high-end market, one that perpetuated the incomplete version of Leonardo in spite of Cassiano’s extraordinary encounter with some of Leonardo’s notes—notes that had remained virtually unseen for decades.
Here is what happened:
Cassiano was a powerful man from a family deeply connected to the Medici (an uncle was the secretary of Grand Duke Ferdinando). Raised in Florence, he had become a discerning art collector and bibliophile from a young age. His palace in Rome, where he moved in 1612 at the age of twenty-four, was filled with medals, prints, paintings, anatomical drawings, precious stones, and mechanical instruments. Anything and everything stoked his endless curiosity. One day it might be a new scientific discovery that a friend in Paris wrote to him about. Another day, an exotic item brought to him by travelers returning from Mexico. His library, which he filled with five thousand volumes, was the Roman equivalent of a salon, the place to be for everybody who was anybody in Rome. A special treat for favored guests was to peek over the desks of the scribes and artists who worked on what Cassiano called his “paper museum,” or museum cartaceum, an immense collection of over seven thousand drawings he commissioned to record ancient and medieval buildings and specimens from the natural world—plants, fruits, minerals. To give you a sense of its scope, the paper museum filled twenty-three volumes; an entire book of 118 drawings was dedicated solely to different types of citrus.
Cassiano’s library was at the center of everything because Cassiano was at the center of everything. He befriended artists, scholars, travelers, collectors, and, above all, influential cardinals. Among his dearest friends was Federico Cesi, the founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, an association of prominent scientists who professed an experimental approach to the study of nature, especially astronomy and botany. Cassiano was a member (as was Galileo Galilei). Another close friend was Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who was a prominent man of culture, art, and science; when his uncle Maffeo Barberini was elected pope with the name of Urban VIII, Cassiano’s influence grew exponentially. Cassiano became Cardinal Francesco’s secretary and had access to any book or curiosity or artwork he wished.
In 1625, during a diplomatic trip to the French court, Cassiano saw the Mona Lisa and the Virgin of the Rocks in the royal collections at Fontainebleau; in his travel diary he reported that the Mona Lisa was in a frame of “carved walnut” and that it “lacks only the power of speech.” Around the same time, or slightly earlier, he learned that Leonardo’s original notebooks still existed and that a fellow bibliophile, Giovanni Ambrogio Mazenta, had once owned thirteen of them, all written alla mancina, or in the artist’s signature mirror-writing—although by the time Cassiano met Mazenta in Rome, the notebooks were no longer in his possession. Mazenta told him about the dispersal of Leonardo’s writings, which Francesco Melzi revered as relics but which Francesco’s son and heir Orazio had allowed to “lie neglected under the roof in his villa” for years before selling them off. Now Leonardo’s writings were scattered across various private libraries, and even if one managed to gain access to them, it was hard to get anything useful out of them because of the intrinsic difficulty of deciphering Leonardo’s incomplete drafts (much less his mirror writing).
To make Leonardo’s legacy even more difficult to gauge, almost all his paintings were in private collections; the only exceptions were the Last Supper, which was quickly deteriorating, and a version of the Virgin of the Rocks that hung in a dimly lit chapel in Milan.
The artist was considered a genius, but very little was available to show for it.
Cassiano thought he could rectify the situation.
He brought to the table one distinctive talent: he was a highly skilled editor. No editorial project was too daunting for him, and this is why the publication of what was believed to be Leonardo’s book on painting seemed like just the right project for him to take on. Like everybody else, he did not know that the text he wanted to edit was only a doctored version of what Leonardo and Melzi had intended.
By the early 1630s, he was at work.
In the past, Cassiano had corrected corrupted texts by gathering multiple copies of each book and comparing one to another: where one copy made no sense, another eventually did. Given his reputation for quality work and his access to a vast intellectual network, no man was better positioned to locate whatever copies of Leonardo’s book were available and start the long and tedious process of comparing one with another, word by word. He put together a team and worked to come up with a publishable copy to give to a printer.
Soon, a task that had begun with excitement led to despair.
The job of checking every single word, paragraph, and figure across many manuscripts was thankless. Often it was also useless. Numbers mentioned in the text did not match the figures that were supposed to illustrate them. But that was just the beginning of the problems Cassiano and his team had to deal with. Some paragraphs were cut off midsentence. Phrases appeared several different times, and there was no way to know for sure where the sentence really belonged. Illustrations looked so different from one manuscript to the next that there was no way to tell what Leonardo even intended.
And then a most unusual offer of help arrived from Milan.
A Milanese nobleman, Galeazzo Arconati, volunteered his services. His offer was not completely disinterested: in exchange for his assistance, he wanted Cassiano to lobby Cardinal Barberini to appoint his illegitimate son to the post of “master of theology” in Rome. This was no small request. But in return he had something exceptional to offer Cassiano.
A Leonardo enthusiast, Arconati owned twelve notebooks written by Leonardo in mirror writing, in addition to two large cartoons—one representing Leda (now lost) and another representing the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (the so-called Burlington House Cartoon now in London).
The Milanese scholar was not offering to sell the notebooks or even to send them to Rome for examination. Unlike Orazio Melzi, he knew exactly their worth. In fact, he had already arranged for their safekeeping for posterity. In 1636, he donated them to a private library in Milan, the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana. He did retain, though, the privilege of consulting them whenever he wished. In exchange for a favor for his son, he offered to go through the notebooks and answer any questions of Cassiano’s upon which they might shed light.
And so the process began.
Cassiano sent to Milan dozens of questions on specific “chapters in which we have difficulty in understanding the work of Leonardo da Vinci.” Arconati sat in the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana with two assistants, searching for relevant passages and reporting back to Cassiano: “the marked chapters have been compared and the others are not to be found in these books.”
In the midst of this back-and forth process, the Milanese aristocrat let Cassiano know something else. He sensed the importance of one notebook in particular, a notebook in Leonardo’s handwriting filled with geometrical diagrams. The topic was so different from any other he knew. Leonardo gathered there notes on light and shadows. (This was the notebook that is known today as Manuscript C.) Although Cassiano had sent no questions about “shadow and light,” and the Milanese scholar was aware of the fact that these were not part of Leonardo’s book on painting—that is, they were not part of the doctored version he knew—he thought they might be of interest to Cassiano. Clearly, they were optical drawings, which suggested to him that they were meant to answer some question related to painting.
Did Cassiano want the scholar to copy these notes and drawings on light and shadow? Of course.
Arconati promised to send a copy of these materials. Months later, on May 21, 1639, Cassiano was still waiting “to receive what I am expecting about light and shadow.” He even begged Arconati, through an intermediary, “to have the book on light and shadow copied.” But after whetting Cassiano’s appetite, Arconati was now withholding the copy in the hopes of getting a maximum return on his investment—a better chance of winning Cardinal Barberini’s favor.
Eventually, sometime in 1639, the materials arrived in Rome, all grouped under one heading: “Shadow and Light” (Ombra e luce).
The Leonardo that emerged from this dispatch was very different from the Leonardo Cassiano knew.
Cassiano had no way of knowing that Leonardo intended these notes and sketches to be a key part of his book on painting.
But Arconati, who had deep, firsthand knowledge of Leonardo’s writings, offered him some thoughts.
These notes showed “the capricious, or better still the mysterious, disorder of their author” as Leonardo did not “express clearly all that would have been required to make this treatise perfect.” At times, the artist talked about light but forgot to talk about shadows; other times he did exactly the opposite, talking about shadows and omitting mention of light. Readers could paste the pieces together and understand his thoughts, but the notes were not an easy read. And yet Arconati felt strongly that this new section and the shadow drawings that accompanied it “had to be united” with the book on painting because they dealt with the same topic: “To this same treatise belong all the chapters on reverberations and reflections which are from number 75 to 88 on the topic on painting.”
Arconati was the first to sense that the book on painting by Leonardo he knew was not as complete as he had thought it was. And he also understood that Leonardo’s shadow drawings did not study only light and shadows scientifically but also the entities that are inseparable from them, colors and their reflections.
The Milanese scholar also told Cassiano that he wanted to capture “Leonardo’s style” as a writer and did not want to “alter Leonardo’s wording,” no matter how awkward and unclear it often was. If he “found something that did not make sense, or that some words were missing,” he wrote, “we left it as is to keep it in conformity to the original, but these matters will have to be corrected by someone with better judgment.” He hoped Cassiano would be the editor who might polish these writings for publication.
Not knowing Melzi’s Book on Painting, Cassiano had no way of finding the right place for the shadow drawings in the book by Leonardo he was editing. Ultimately, after frequent correspondence with his Milanese contacts, he did nothing with them. He merely cataloged the drawings and put them on the shelf.
He stuck with his original plan: to “copyedit” the existing text as best he could. He decided to trust the earliest copies that had originated in Florence in the library of Niccolò Gaddi and made for himself a master copy. He kept updating his master copy as new information reached him. He improved some passages and corrected spellings and other minor details, but ultimately his master copy was not that different from the doctored version of Melzi’s Book on Painting. It contained only one-third of Melzi’s original text and only one-fourth of the drawings he had intended. Cassiano had seen the shadow drawings and had sensed their relevance to Leonardo’s art, but even he had been unable to restore them to their proper place within Leonardo’s book.
Cassiano also decided to have the illustrations redrawn.
Melzi had based his sketches on Leonardo’s original drawings. Some were geometrical diagrams; to redraw them, a competent draftsman was sufficient, and Cassiano hired Pierfrancesco degli Alberti (1584–1638), who had worked for him previously and who delivered his sketches. But many were sketches of human figures in various active poses—lifting weights, preparing to throw a stone, or holding a stick. All these drawings showed exactly how the limbs were activated by each movement. The details were beautiful but hard to see, as the drawings were so tiny. For these human figures, Cassiano wanted the best.
He knew just the man for the job. Indeed, his choice was far better than even he realized.
Years earlier, a struggling French artist, Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), had come to Cassiano’s attention, and the editor had helped the young man launch himself in Rome. Now the painter was one of the most sought-after artists in the city, and their friendship had grown closer and closer. Cassiano had never asked Poussin for anything in return for his support. That is, he never asked until Cassiano had the idea of redrawing Leonardo’s sketches. The job was simple—even demeaning. All Cassiano asked was for Poussin to create figures “for the demonstration and for the understanding of [Leonardo’s] discourse as in the original these were only sketches.”
But Poussin found the work compelling, and soon was not “satisfied to simply read Leonardo’s writings” or to draw “very correctly all the figures.” He wanted to know more about Leonardo, and that led him to poke around Cassiano’s library. He found the notebook with the shadow drawings that had been sent from Milan and asked to borrow it. Cassiano, who was meticulous about keeping track of his books, recorded that “Mr. Poussin must return one [book] on light and shadow with separate illustrations.”
Like Leonardo, Poussin had been a keen observer of nature since childhood. In his native Normandy, he had grown up surrounded by spectacular views that were not dissimilar to the ones Leonardo saw as a child around Vinci. And like Leonardo, he was a compulsive draftsman: he filled “without cease […] his books with an infinite number of different figures that his imagination alone made him produce”; there was nothing his father or master could do to stop him. Unlike Leonardo, though, Poussin was schooled in Latin, rhetoric, mathematics, and the classics. In Paris he befriended artists and learned men, but his dream was to move to Rome, which he did in 1624.
As soon as he arrived in Rome, in his thirties, handsome, and a great talker, he acquired the fame of “a young man who has the fury of a devil.” In the Eternal City, Poussin learned how to combine the depiction of nature with the art of the ancients. His small, intimate, superbly executed canvases—by now artists preferred to paint on canvas rather than wood—illustrated learned themes inspired by the classics. Influential patrons sought his company, opened the doors of their palaces, and could not get enough of his works.
Cassiano welcomed the artist to his library and helped him when Poussin fell sick with “un autre mal de France,” most probably syphilis. “I beg you with all my strength to help me with something,” Poussin wrote to Cassiano, “as I am in great need: most of the time I am sick and I have no resource to live upon except the work of my hands.” Cassiano sent him forty scudi, which was help enough. More important, Cassiano became a close friend, the fulcrum of a group of like-minded French expats Poussin gathered around him. Years later, many of Poussin’s friends ended up playing a role in the printing of what people believed was Leonardo’s book on painting.
What united Poussin and his friends, and what brought them close to Cassiano, was a deep dissatisfaction with the art of their contemporaries. They admired ancient art and had grown increasingly critical of the Tenebrists—the followers of Caravaggio—who favored highly dramatic indoor scenes illuminated by candlelight that resulted in sharp contrast between light and shadow. It was reported that Poussin said that Caravaggio “came to the world to destroy painting.” The judgment was harsh, but no doubt Caravaggio and his followers paid little attention to delicate expressions and subtle atmospheric effects. The dramatic Tenebrist paintings that many patrons admired looked highly simplified to Poussin and his friends.
For they were seeking a new balance in art. They sought it in nature and the works of the ancients. They took long strolls around “one Rome and the other [l’una e l’altra Roma],” modern Rome and ancient Rome, along the Tiber riverbanks, and in the Roman countryside. They measured all the body parts of ancient statues, from fingernails to busts, heads, limbs, and noses, trying to obtain from those ancient figures the secrets of their timeless perfection. Poussin was more obsessed than the others, and patrons delighted at guessing the exact ancient model he used for the figures of his paintings.
Poussin and his friends also experimented with novel ways to render nuanced colors and shadows. They preferred outdoor settings with many intermediary planes between the foreground and background; as one proceeded toward the background, each plane would be characterized by less saturated colors, less defined outlines, lighter shadows, and more suffused light.
Poussin took a personal liking to painting after nature. On his excursions, he collected pebbles, flowers, and moss to paint in his studio later. He painted with tiny brushstrokes. He became meticulous about the execution of his art. As he said later to a friend who asked him why his art was so great, it was because he “did not neglect anything [n’a rien négligé].”
The secret of Poussin’s art lay in the perfection of the smallest details.
Leonardo would have agreed.
Building on Cassiano’s instructions, Poussin redrew the illustrations for Leonardo’s book—and just as Vasari had done fifty years earlier, he remade Leonardo to fit his own artistic purposes. For instance, he rendered all the human figures in motion with the proportions of Antinous, an ancient statue he admired.
Cassiano was pleased with Poussin’s work, and pasted his drawings into his master copy of the treatise with the intention of including them in the printed edition. Indeed, about ten years later, Poussin’s sketches would become the model for the illustrations in the finished book.
Though he, too, ended up playing a role in the adulteration of Leonardo’s work, Poussin was nonetheless fascinated by the shadow drawings from Milan that Cassiano kept in his library.
Poussin made his own personal copy of these shadow drawings. It was later said that Poussin “spoke cleverly on optics” and that he wrote “a book on lights and shadows.” At times, he was even portrayed holding in his hands a book titled Light and Shadow (Lumen et Umbra). But the reality is that Poussin never wrote his own book on light and shadow. He did keep a copy of Leonardo’s shadow drawings close at hand, however, because these drawings were becoming increasingly important to his own art.
A painting on canvas, The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert, that Poussin painted while working on the sketches for Cassiano’s book shows the extent of his debt to the shadow drawings of the Renaissance master. He painted it for his dear friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou (1609–1694), describing the figures as “a mix of women, children, men of different temperament and age.” There are those “who languish, those who admire, or have pity, those who do charity, some who show great necessity, or desire, repentance, consolation, and so on … read the story and the canvas, to know if everything is appropriate to the subject.” Some figures were enlarged copies of the small sketches from Leonardo’s art book that he had redrawn. Others were based on ancient statues and Renaissance paintings.
But what made the work a masterpiece in the vein of Leonardo was the way Poussin treated colors, outlines, shadows, and lights. Each color gradually diminishes in brightness, each outline becomes less sharp, each light less bright, each shadow less dark, as the foreground gives way to the background. Poussin understood Leonardo’s shadow drawings and their relation to color—that light and color are inseparable—like no other artist had before him.
In Poussin’s estimation, the painting was worth “five hundred ecus,” but because of the effort it required, it was the result of “five hundred minds.”
Poussin did not keep Leonardo’s shadow drawings to himself. He shared them, or at least one of them (representing “shadows and penumbra created by sunlight in the countryside”), with his fellow painters in Paris. We are not absolutely sure to whom he sent it, but we know that the drawing was popular—and not just among the Parisian artistic community that gathered around the Louvre, the royal palace then undergoing renovation. The mathematician Girard Desargues (1591–1661), who pioneered the field of projective geometry and whose name is still attached to a geometrical theorem, for instance, praised it highly in his own writings: “the procedure” used to make it, he wrote, was “very difficult to execute if one wished to make it similar to reality.” This was no run-of-the-mill drawing.
The arrival of this copy of a shadow drawing at the Louvre buoyed Leonardo’s reputation in France—a development that culminated in 1651 with the publication of two sumptuous books bearing Leonardo’s name.
But why France?
Although a Florentine, Leonardo was viewed as something of a Frenchman as well; after all, he was said to have died in the arms of a French king (at least according to Vasari’s erroneous account). Many of Leonardo’s paintings were housed in Paris, too. But more important, Leonardo’s reputation helped to affirm the authority of the French royal family, just as he had helped to affirm the power of the Medici family some eighty years earlier.
During the seventeenth century, Paris grew into the second-largest city in Europe (Naples was the first)—and by far the liveliest. After the devastation of the Wars of Religion, Paris developed a unique reputation—for freedom, for energy, for transgressiveness. It was where people made fortunes, achieved fame, and accumulated power. Noblemen and commoners flocked to Paris from all over Europe, and stories of libertinisme and excentricité abounded. One of Poussin’s friends and early patrons, the poet Giovambattista Marino, told the best of them, capturing the spirit of the place.
The city itself was undergoing major changes: new bridges were built across the Seine, gardens were created, churches founded, trees planted along newly opened streets. The aim was to use art, architecture, garden design, and urban planning to make Paris the magnificent national capital that it still is.
The Louvre—which had been the stronghold of Paris for centuries until François I, the king who had brought Leonardo to France, started its transformation into the primary royal palace in 1528—was now the main royal residence and the epicenter of French art. New wings were erected, apartments and enfilades were created, galleries were decorated with frescoes and stuccoes, lawns were designed with beautiful parterres, and gardens were filled with exotic plants.
The Louvre was the product of many hands: those of painters, carpenters, and stonemasons, of course, but also scientists. Their knowledge of hydraulics was used to build waterways, design irrigation systems for gardens, and make fountains spray. Their geometrical skills were put to use for stonecutting, as precisely cut stones saved both time and money.
Girard Desargues, the mathematician who wrote about the copy of Leonardo’s shadow drawing, also worked at the Louvre. He was regarded as “one of the great minds” of Baroque Paris, a fact that may come as a surprise today, considering that he is no longer so well known. But at the time, he was at the center of a forward-looking circle of scientists who met informally in private houses to discuss new ideas (the French Academy of Sciences would not be established until 1666 under Louis XIV).
Among the people Desargues met regularly were some of the most original thinkers of the period. There was the philosopher René Descartes, who wrote extensively on optics although, unlike Alhacen and Leonardo, he separated the eye from the mind. According to Descartes, we understand the world through ideas, not perceptions. Then there was the mathematician Pierre de Fermat, who pioneered infinitesimal calculus; the tax collector turned scientist Étienne Pascal and his son Blaise Pascal, who designed a sophisticated computational machine to help his father collect taxes; and Marin Mersenne, who described a subset of prime numbers and is often regarded as the father of acoustics. Desargues himself pioneered the field of projective geometry, which had practical applications related to stone cutting—hence Desargues’s position at the Louvre and his association with artists.
Although these scientists had different interests, they were all interested in continuous quantities—sound, numbers, distances—which they divided into smaller and smaller units. In this respect, the question of their basic research was not that different from the question that had animated Leonardo’s optical studies—how to break down light and shadow into smaller and smaller sections in order to understand the geometry of penumbras. There is no question, though, that the mathematical skills of this Parisian group were considerably more sophisticated than Leonardo’s own.
We have no evidence that Poussin met Desargues or that he knew of him, but we do know that the reverse was true. Desargues wrote about Poussin and the shadow drawing the artist sent to Paris. He wrote about it because the procedure for defining penumbras geometrically was very similar to a method Desargues himself had developed to define the intensity of colors. Desargues called it the rule for the use of strong and delicate colors (règle du fort ou faible); for him it was “of such consequence in painting that it is in this part that resides mostly the ways that make us admire works of this nature.” It was almost as if the great Renaissance genius validated Desargues’s own règle du fort ou faible, even though Desargues thought his method was more accurate than Leonardo’s.
More Leonardo-inspired shadow drawings arrived in Paris in 1640, when Poussin was appointed première peintre du roi. We do know he brought with him copies of the shadow drawings Cassiano had given him, for he had had his brother-in-law Jean Dughet make the copies. His friends and travel companions, Paul Fréart de Chantelou and his brother Roland Fréart de Chambray (1606–1676), who had been dispatched to Rome to summon him to Paris, brought back their own bounty: a copy of Leonardo’s book on painting. And not just any copy, but a copy of Cassiano’s master copy, the one version Cassiano kept improving day after day.
And so Poussin and the Fréart brothers returned to Paris bearing an incredible treasure trove—the most advanced studies on painting by Leonardo known to exist, materials that would prove helpful in training artists in principles of Poussin’s own art. The French court believed that Poussin would push French art to new heights, and his appointment as première peintre du roi was meant to further this end, not just provide embellishments for the royal residence.
Poussin was lodged at the Louvre, in the Jardin des Tuileries, upon his return to Paris. His friend Chantelou sent a barrel of wine to greet him upon his arrival. He lived surrounded by exotic plants, and reported back to Cassiano and Cardinal Barberini about the jasmine planted at Les Tuileries—for his Roman friends were both passionate about this plant, always on the lookout for new specimens in the gardens of Europe. Poussin worked for the king mainly at the Louvre, at times side by side with his old friends, the artists who shared his strong belief in the close connection among art, nature, and the art of the ancients. He helped Cassiano with the financing of some printing projects and designed frontispieces for the royal printing house. Occasionally, he painted for private collectors.
He was busy.
He was too busy.
He was busy with things that did not matter to him—book frontispieces, furniture, fireplaces—“bagatelles,” as he called them.
He was busy working for a royal patron, à la Vasari.
After just twenty-one months, he had had enough. Using the excuse of going to Rome to bring back his wife, he left.
In his absence, the political situation changed dramatically, making a return to Paris inadvisable. As a friend wrote to Cassiano from Paris, “Poussin is comfortable where he is [in Rome], and he should stay there.”
Poussin did stay in Rome—for the rest of his life.
And he did continue to value the teachings he had gleaned from Leonardo’s shadow drawings. Nowhere is this more evident than in a self-portrait he painted in 1650, right before Leonardo’s book on painting was printed with the title Treatise on Painting. Poussin depicted himself as a Baroque version of the “painter-philosopher” Leonardo had epitomized a century and half earlier.
Poussin was by this point fifty-six years old, accomplished and famous. His friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou commissioned the self-portrait for display in the French Royal Academy, and with it, Poussin hoped to cement his standing in the history of art. He painted himself inside his studio, looking straight out at his patron friend, wearing an elegant black cape of heavy fabric. He holds a gray folder, containing drawings, or writings, or both, closed by a length of red leather. Soft natural light filters in from a window to the left, creating subtle shadows and reflections. There are infinite variations of gray and blue, but only two areas of reddish paint—one depicting a chest on the left side of the painting, and another capturing the red leather of the folder’s closure. A few framed paintings lean against the studio’s wall, but, except for one in the back, they all appear blank. Poussin signed his name on one of these empty canvases—which on that uniform, grayish surface looks like the writing on a tombstone, immortalizing his name for posterity. The one painted canvas depicts a woman in a landscape lit by sunlight filtering through clouds—the style of illumination that Leonardo recommended for portraits, and that Poussin adopted in many of his canvases. The woman is embraced by another figure, and although all we see of this second figure is its arms, the meaning of their embrace is a clear reference to the friendship between artist and patron. The tiara this woman wears has an eye, the traditional symbol of optics, nestled at its center. She is a personification of the art of painting, but not a generic personification.
Rather, she is a personification of painting as an art based on optics, suggesting that this is what lay behind Poussin’s own art.
One wonders, then, if the folder that Poussin holds contains copies of Leonardo’s shadow drawings. This would be in keeping with the apparent message of his self-portrait: that he was a painter-philosopher à la Leonardo.
It was not Poussin but his friend Roland Fréart de Chambray, however, who saw to the publication of Cassiano’s version of Leonardo’s book on painting in France. Chambray and his brother Chantelou were both good friends and devoted patrons of Poussin, and when in Rome frequent visitors to Cassiano’s library. In the 1640s, they held important positions at the French royal court in matters of art and continued to do so in the following decades.
To publish Leonardo’s book, Chambray enlisted the help of two longtime friends, Raphael Trichet du Fresne (1611–1661) and Charles Errard (1606–1689), who had benefited immensely from his family’s patronage and had spent time with Poussin and Cassiano in Rome. Now they were frequent visitors to his family’s château at Dangu, the headquarters for editing Leonardo’s book, just as Cassiano’s library had been in Rome a decade earlier.
Chambray translated the text from Italian into French, focusing on capturing the sense of Leonardo’s thought rather than literally translating word for word. He did not hesitate to rework sentences when they were not clear. Trichet worked on the Italian text that Cassiano had prepared but that nonetheless Trichet further revised as Leonardo “did not give it the final edit.” Most chapters had “some snag” (qualche intoppo). Errard helped out with the illustrations, adding to Poussin’s sketches a plant here, a tree trunk there, and columns and balconies to suggest that the figures occupied ancient settings and bucolic landscapes. He invented new diagrams for chapters that had none, and added an engraving of the Mona Lisa to the chapter titled “How to Paint Portraits That Have Relief and Grace”—this was intended as an homage to the French king, who owned the work. Chambray was pleased with Errard’s work, and praised him as a modern Apelles in the dedication.
The French editors also consulted additional copies of the book that they were able to access beside Cassiano’s, and they must have had access to the shadow drawings that were available in Paris—but, like Cassiano before them, they did not integrate them into the printed book they were preparing.
When the translated text, images, notes, and dedication letters were ready, Chambray delivered them all to a publisher.
In 1651, Leonardo’s book on painting appeared in two printed volumes—one in Italian, which was based on Cassiano’s master copy (plus some additional edits by the French editors), and one in French, based on Chambray’s translation of Cassiano’s master copy.
Its title was Trattato della pittura, or Traité de la peinture—in English, Treatise on Painting.
It was a sumptuous book, with one specific goal in mind: to present Leonardo’s theories as the authoritative guide for modern art.
Every single detail was designed to reinforce this message.
The book was printed on folios of about fifteen by ten inches, a format that was reserved for special books. An elegant copper engraving with Leonardo’s likeness opened the book; his unmistakable profile, which was based on Vasari’s woodcut from his Lives, which was in turn based on Melzi’s portrait, sat above a structure that looked like an ancient sarcophagus. His name and the book’s title were sculpted in capital letters on the marble slab: LIONARDO DA VINCI TRATTATO DELLA PITTURA. The message of this first page was clear: Leonardo was the equal of the greatest authors of the past.
For page after page, the marvels continued: A luxurious title page displaying a royal privilege and decorative figures. Dedicatory letters addressed to famous people. Engravings inserted within the text, some representing diagrams, others human figures, other still landscapes and portraits. Additional decorative ornaments filled any blank spots on the page. Different fonts and typesetting to distinguish the text of chapters from the text of their titles.
Only the Bible and books by highly respected authors such as Ptolemy, Vitruvius, Pliny, Palladio, Vignola, and Vesalius were published in a comparable manner. Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting was printed like these special books: a luxury item targeted at the high end of the book market and dedicated to prominent people.
Those who read the French translation found a dedication to Poussin. Chambray saw in Poussin a second author because he had “given the final perfection to this rare book” with “the linear demonstrations” for the chapters that needed additional clarification. But the real reason Chambray dedicated the book to Poussin was because he wanted the whole world to know that this famous artist was a dear friend, un très cher ami, and because he wanted to use Poussin’s reputation to claim that the book ought to be “the rule and guide for all true painters.” We do not know what Chambray expected from Poussin in exchange—whether a deeper friendship, or a painting, or something else. Whatever he sought, he must have been disappointed. Poussin was quite critical of the finished book, as we shall see.
Those who read the Italian edition encountered a different dedication, as its editor had another agenda. Trichet, who was hunting for a job, dedicated the book to Christina, queen of Sweden, a royal who had achieved fame across Europe as a passionate student of Italian art and culture, and who eventually abdicated in order to move to Rome and dedicate her life to the arts. Trichet praised her as “the queen of Parnassus […] the most educated and glorious princess of the universe […] the protector and possessor of all the most recondite sciences.” The dedication achieved the desired outcome, and Trichet was appointed Christina’s keeper of medals and paintings.
Trichet also wrote a new biography of Leonardo based on his own knowledge of “things from Italy,” and it related accurate information on Leonardo’s notebooks that had not been seen in print before. For the first time, readers learned from Trichet’s biography that Leonardo had planned an extensive list of books and that some of these books were mentioned in various chapters of the text that was printed. Leonardo’s book on anatomy, Trichet reminded readers, was mentioned in chapter 22 of the printed book, another on perspective was referenced in chapters 81 and 110, another on the movement of the human body and its parts, “a topic that had never been touched by any author,” was referred to in chapters 112 and 123 of the printed book. “The book on light and shadow today in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan,” Trichet reported, “is a folio-size notebook with a cover in red velvet” in which Leonardo treated the topic “as a philosopher, a mathematician and a painter” (this is the notebook known today as Manuscript C). Trichet reminds his readers that Leonardo referred to this work in chapter 278 of the printed book and that the artist was “miraculous” in this aspect of painting because he imitated “the effects of light on colors with such knowledge that his works looked as if they were more natural than artificial.” Like Cassiano and Poussin before him, Trichet understood that the shadow drawings pertained to colors as well, but like them he did nothing to reintegrate them into Leonardo’s book.
Many were enthusiastic about the new French and Italian editions of Leonardo’s book. Charles Le Brun, an academic painter who was skeptical about the use of science in art, praised the French edition precisely because there was no science in it. In 1653, he brought a copy to a meeting of the Académie Royale, the French equivalent of the Florentine art academy that had been founded in 1648, and unequivocally announced: “Here is the book to use when it comes to the things we have to discuss.”
The Leonardo that emerged from these sumptuous publications seemed authoritative. He was sensitive to light, shadow, and the effects of the atmosphere, but his instructions were not grounded in the science of optics—hardly any of it was included in these books. They circulated widely, and they did contribute to the dissemination of knowledge of Leonardo’s art, but a great deal was lost because his fascination with optics was obscured.
These printed books were based on the doctored version of Melzi’s Book on Painting. Like the heavily doctored, handwritten versions that took neither Melzi’s nor Leonardo’s wishes to heart, these new printed books were missing the sections on philosophy and science that were at the core of Leonardo’s art and that Melzi had included in his compilation.
Reading these printed books, no one would ever know that Leonardo had argued for the supremacy of painting by way of a philosophical discussion of sensory experience that was adapted from books on optics. The paragone that opened Melzi’s version of the book had been cut. Nor would anyone know that Leonardo’s seemingly generic piece of advice to artists—that they should strive to become “universal painters”—was backed by detailed, geometrical instructions on how to paint soft light and shadow. The entire section titled “On Shadow and Light” was missing.
Of course, had Leonardo himself finished his book on painting, or had his writings been more lucid, there would have been no issue in the first place. But no matter how much Leonardo wanted to write a book on painting, and no matter how intensely he worked and reworked his drafts, he never completed it. His notes on painting remained buried within his notebooks, to be unearthed by the dedicated work of his pupil and assistant Melzi. No doubt Melzi edited his master’s notes heavily, both their order and the wording itself. No doubt, too, he thought he understood better than anybody else his master’s intentions.
And yet even Melzi’s efforts did not pan out. Not only was his version of the Book on Painting never published, but it inadvertently provided the basis for the truncated and doctored versions to come that would end up distorting his master’s thoughts.
In some cases, these versions did more than distort the real Leonardo: they negated him entirely.
The printed books that, from 1651 onward, were considered the definitive version of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting were in fact nothing of the sort. They normalized the view of Leonardo as a typical Renaissance polymath, a “dual genius,” instead of as the brilliant, synthetic thinker that he in fact was.
The authority ascribed to Trichet and Chambray’s Treatise remained unchallenged for centuries. Even when Melzi’s version of the Book on Painting was rediscovered and finally printed in 1817, it was held that the Treatise was simply an abridged version of the original—and perhaps this is the most serious misunderstanding of them all. To “abridge” implies the deletion of the merely incidental, with the aim of revealing what lies at the heart of a text. But the abridged Book on Painting possessed only an unfaithful heart: its intention was to deceive, to disguise the fact that Leonardo the artist and Leonardo the scientist were in fact one and the same, and to keep hidden from the world the true author of one of the most extraordinary bodies of work in the history of painting.