A Treatise on Painting

teachings that he gave to his pupils; and what effects he knew how to derive from them is told by his divine paintings, which in all times have formed the wonder of the world. It is also told by the contempt in which those teachings are held today by those who clutter the halls of public exhibitions with paintings dashed off haphazardly original: "alla brava," meaning done with a superficial boldness or lack of care without study and without concept, which are outrages to nature and to art. Despite all the progress that the sciences applied to the arts have made in our day, we believe that Leonardo’s precepts always possess a very great value; and although some could today be demonstrated with a greater rigor of scientific principles, the observation of the fact from which they are deduced remains nonetheless true. And it is not to be wondered at that this master of art studied his paintings in such minute detail that he seemed to his contemporaries to be wasting time trifling with unproductive preparations; for it is only with this study and with these scrupulous precautions that one can make of a portrait of a woman, such as the Mona Lisa original: "Gioconda", a masterpiece to stand on par with paintings of grand composition.

Leonardo is truly one of the greatest and most brilliant figures of the Renaissance, one of the most universal and original minds that Italy has ever had. In that singular era, which has no parallel other than in the most beautiful century of ancient Greece, Italy possessed a portentous fertility of men of genius who ensured her primacy in letters and the arts, while the rest of Europe struggled to emerge from the darkness of the Middle Ages. The character of that era was the beauty and elegance that sprang from all manifestations of life. The ugly and the deformed were not only not represented, they were not even conceived. It was a spontaneous flowering of intellects who felt all the harmonies of beauty and knew how to represent it in all its forms.

Art was the luxury of those times, and the Courts of the Medici The ruling family of Florence, the Este original: "Estensi," the rulers of Ferrara, the Sforza The ruling family of Milan, and the Gonzaga original: "Gonzaghi," the rulers of Mantua were schools of refined manners