A Treatise on Painting

...dge, and with contempt for the common crowd, spend their lives among books, exercising themselves for the sole love of virtue in laborious and unprofitable pastimes. I have added hereafter the life of Leonardo original: "Lionardo" newly written by me; should anyone seek more minute details—such as knowing if, in his time, the winter was occasionally harsher than usual, or when a little glutton of a servant stole some household item from him, or how much he owed for house rent in some circumstance or other, or what color cloak and breeches he wore, and other similar trifles—he may profitably consult the memoirs written about the same Leonardo by Amoretti Carlo Amoretti (1741–1816), a scholar who published a famous biography of Leonardo in 1804. While Amoretti, with laudable study and effort, has given us much solid information regarding this artist, he has also added such trivialities, perhaps eager to meet the applause and approval of those who—contrary to the judgment of the ancients and our great modern writers—love to see the Histories and Lives of illustrious men written in the manner of Commonplace Books Zibaldoni: miscellaneous notebooks or hodgepodge collections of facts and anecdotes.

Since the past editions of this author are nothing in comparison to this greatly expanded one, it is not worth my while to discuss their quality or arrangement. I will only say that, besides having corrected infinite errors in the printed portion that distorted the meaning, there were also many chapters truncated at the end or in the middle, which have now been completed. I mention this because such growth will not be visible without a direct comparison, as I found no suitable way to distinguish them for the readers—as was done for the entire chapters, where those existing in the old editions are marked with an asterisk. This can be clearly seen in the Index, which shows at a glance the notable expansion of the work in the present edition.

To ensure this edition was in no way inferior to previous ones, even in its adornment, we have added the Portrait of Vinci Leonardo da Vinci engraved by a capable artist after the original by the author's own hand which exists in the Florence Gallery The Uffizi Gallery. These, O most refined readers, have been the cares I have undertaken so that this edition might be corrected according to the text, leaving nothing to be desired, and being, in short, worthy of you and of its author—whose concepts, through my efforts, will for the first time be [presented] more completely and more purely...