A Treatise on Painting

who first encouraged the Cooperative Publishing Union, and advised them on the reproduction of Leonardo’s book on painting.

These things regarding the intentions of the publishers needed to be said at the very beginning, so that this reprint may be judged for what it is, and not for what others might perhaps have wished it to be.

Leonardo wrote this book on painting around 1498 for the school that Lodovico Sforza Ludovico "Il Moro" Sforza (1452–1508), the Duke of Milan and Leonardo's major patron. had founded in Milan, from which emerged that beautiful group of painters and sculptors who flourished for a long time in Lombardy, always maintaining a character that shares both in the Tuscan school of the fifteenth century original: "quattrocento" and the Roman school of Raphael and his imitators. Anyone who wished, moreover, to compare Leonardo’s school to the Academy founded later by the Carracci in Bologna The Accademia degli Incamminati, founded around 1582, which sought to revitalize Italian art through a systematic curriculum., would find in the comparison that the differences are far greater than the similarities. The Carracci intended to delay the decline of art with conventional rules; whereas Leonardo aimed to give the subsidy of science to a flourishing art. And a scientist, in the sense that could be given to that word at the time, Leonardo truly was; with the inventive genius with which he was endowed, he anticipated some modern discoveries in his observations of natural facts. This book on painting, like the others on perspective and on light and shadows, are collections of practical precepts deduced with great sharpness from the theorems of geometry, optics, and mechanics—sciences not yet formed into a body of doctrine in his time, but which he glimpsed in embryo with the eyes of his mind.

It will perhaps be said that all these precepts concern the technical part rather than the concept of art; but it is precisely the technical part that can form the subject of teaching, while everything that is ideality and sentiment—if the artist does not have it within himself—no master will be capable of teaching it to him. Leonardo applied to his works the teach—