A Treatise on Painting

humanity—things ignored by famous printers rich in capital and equipment—but they wish to choose books that honor literature and aim to improve rather than corrupt.

The promise of these laudable intentions is meanwhile found in this first volume, which they offer to their fellow citizens; and from which they hope for an honest profit as well as the approval of all those who see in the humble beginnings of things the importance of the effects that may derive from them in the future.

This reprint of Leonardo’s work, although conducted accurately based on the best editions produced in Italy and compared against the Vatican Codex original: "codice Vaticano." This refers to the Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, the primary source for Leonardo's Treatise on Painting., does not have the ambition of providing a genuine text supported by all the aids of modern criticism. The goal proposed by the editors—to make Leonardo’s book accessible to the greatest number of readers, even those with a modest education, and especially to artists—led to the necessity of modernizing the spelling and punctuation, and of removing archaisms Archaisms: Outdated words or expressions that are no longer in common use. that made understanding the text exceedingly difficult. In this, they mostly followed the reading adopted by De Romanis in the edition published in Rome in 1817. By conducting the printing in this manner, they did neither more nor less than what previous Italian editors had done. However, they studied the collation of the Vatican Codex with greater accuracy, correcting the other editions wherever they had strayed from it, and placing in their proper positions the additions that are found confusedly within it. Anyone who looks at the edition of the codex produced with a great display of scholarship by Heinrich Ludwig in Vienna in 1882 will be easily persuaded that the text, if left in that antiquated and incorrect form, might have satisfied critics—who today demand, not without reason, the faithful reproduction of texts—but it certainly would not have increased the number of readers for this new reprint. And of this opinion were Commander Filippo Mariotti and Professor Giovanni Mestica,