Abstracts

Paul Barolsky

Commonwealth Professor of Art History, University of Virginia

"Leonardo's Lion and Other Radical Inventions in the Art of Painting"

Broadly and briefly surveying the paintings and related drawings of Leonardo from his early Annunciation (1470's) through his St. John now in Paris (1510's), this lecture, will also comment on the artistic innovations of his Adoration of the Magi, St. Jerome, Virgin of the Rocks, Cecilia Gallerani, Last Supper, Battle of Anghiari, Mona Lisa, and Virgin and St. Anne. Emphasis will be placed in this overview on the close ties between aesthetics and theology in the play of Leonardo's imagination.

Juliana Barone

Lecturer in Art History, Birkbeck College, University of London

"The Manuscript H 228: a 'Composite' Copy of Leonardo's Trattato"

The H 228 is a seventeenth-century manuscript copy of Leonardo's Trattato now preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The manuscript was prepared by the editorial team of Cassiano dal Pozzo, with the intention of publication. Like the many other seventeenth-century manuscript copies, the H 228 offers an abridged version of Leonardo's teachings on painting. However, were they aware that the Trattato was itself an abridged version? What was actually known of Leonardo's written legacy at that time? My paper examines the production process of H 228 and its multi-layered corrections, in order to shed light on the type of text, which was produced. It will, ultimately, provide first-hand evidence for tackling crucial issues arising from how Leonardo's theoretical legacy was constructed and from what was used as one of the primary references for the eventual publication of the Trattato in France in 1651.

Roberto Bellucci

Conservator, Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro, Florence

"The Under-drawing of the Annunciation and Leonardo's Perspective"

Claire Farago

Professor of Art History, University of Colorado Boulder

"Leonardo's Trattato and his Workshop Practices c. 1490-92"

A key period for the development of Leonardo's theoretical considerations on painting and his innovative workshop practices is the final decade of the Quattrocento that he spent in Milan, when he was associated with Ambrogio de Predis, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Francesco Napoletano, and Marco d'Oggiono, among others. The recent cleaning and scientific analysis of the London Virgin of the Rocks suggests a new understanding of artisanal epistemology at the time when Leonardo's first students and collaborators are documented in Milan, from c. 1490 on. "Is the painting autograph?" Is perhaps not the right question to ask - or at least not the only one that the physical and literary evidence considered in conjunction raise. This paper will argue that direct connections can be made between this painting and other Milanese works, and concerns recorded in Ms. A, c. 1490-92, specifically the passages drawn from Alberti's della Pittura as they are mingled with problems of representation partly drawn from treatises on formal optics, and with notes about workshop procedures. This paper will provisionally chart the transmission of knowledge from the studio to the autograph Ms. A to the selection and redistribution of passages in the Libro di Pittura (Codex Urbinas 1270), to the drastic culling of that text by an anonymous editor, c. 1570-82, basis for the widely read printed edition of the Trattato, published in 1651. Can this evidence also answer key unresolved questions of how Leonardo had a hand in the treatise on painting that bears his name?

Cecilia Frosinini

Art Historian, Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro, Florence

"Recent analysis on Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi"

Paolo Galluzzi

Fellow, the Royal Swedish Academy, and the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei

"Lost in the Atlanticus: A Route to Firmer Ground?"

For those who have not spent their entire lives orienting themselves around the rugged archipelago that are the Vincian manuscripts, the consultation of the Codex Atlanticus represents a challenge comparable perhaps to the daunting one early navigators faced. The explorers distrusted the immense expanse of the Atlantic ocean, for they lacked proper knowledge and tools for reaching terra ferma. If used adequately, information technology could alleviate the risks of becoming lost in the Codex Atlanticus' vast ocean of drawings and notes. This paper presents an innovative, model digital edition of Leonardo's codex that allows each folio a smooth contextualization. The presentation seeks to fully insert this extraordinary resource into the general horizon of study on Renaissance culture.

Martin Kemp

Professor Emeritus of Art History, Oxford University

"Looking Again at the Codex Leicester for Bill Gates"

The paper will report on the state of play in the research on Leonardo's codex being undertaken for Bill Gates, including a new transcription and translation.

Matthew Landrus

Lecturer, Rhode Island School of Design

"Leonardo's Lost Book on Painting and Human Movements"

In his 1498 De divina proportione, Luca Pacioli praises Leonardo's development of, "an inestimable work on local motion, percussion, weights and all the forces, that is, accidental weights, having already with great diligence finished a worthy book on painting and human movements." So little remains of the second portion of this book that it is known mainly for its first portion, the Treatise on Painting, often without consideration of related drawings on human movements. Around 1570, Carlo Urbino copied some of these drawings, or copies of them, in a manuscript he titled, Regole del disegno (rules of design), now known as the Codex Huygens. Surviving Leonardo drawings that compare with Urbino's illustrations are now at the Venice Academy and Windsor Royal Library. Leonardo's "treatise on painting and human movements" potentially contained practical lessons for representing the human and animal figure, as well as humanist arguments on the superiority of painting among the liberal arts, a paragone that Francesco Melzi included in the manuscript, Libro di Pittura di M. Leonardo da Vinci, around 1550. As a compliment to his book on mechanics - "local motion, percussion, weights" - Leonardo's book on human movements would have formed an organic, interdisciplinary and practical addition to his book on painting.

Domenico Laurenza

Science Historian, Museo Galileo, Florence and Independent Scholar (bgC3, Seattle-Kirkland)

"An Early History of 'Global Access' to Leonardo as a Scientist: the Codex Leicester and the Rise of Modern Geology"

The paper will present the first outcomes of an on going research dealing with the history of the Codex Leicester by Leonardo da Vinci in 16th-19th centuries. This research is part of a wider project funded by Bill Gates with the purpose to improve the global access to this unique document in the history of science and culture. The Codex Leicester deals mainly with cosmology, geology and hydrology. The paper will analyze the historical contexts in which the Codex Leicester and its copies circulated, their possible connection with the advancement of earth sciences between 16th and 19th centuries and will approach the difficult and largely unexplored problem of the early fortune of Leonardo as a scientist.

Romano Nanni

Director, Biblioteca Leonardiana, Vinci

"Surfing on the Tradition of the Treatise of Painting"

Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting, published in 1651, was the main vehicle of knowledge of Leonardo's aesthetic theories before the complete publication of the original manuscript, later on known as the Libro di Pittura, issued in Italy first in 1817 and in Germany in 1882. The comprehension of the ways in which Leonardo's theories on art influenced or didn't influence at all art and modern European intellectual lexis of aesthetics makes it necessary to draw attention to the Treatise considered as autonomous from the original manuscript, and to the tradition it became an essential element of: on the one hand the previous tradition of De pictura treatises it shared and on the other hand the European tradition of the 17th and 18th century translations into other languages it gave rise to.

The subject of this paper is a brief comparative survey within this tradition (of the theories of Leon Battista Alberti on the one hand, the 17th century German translations of the Treatise on Painting on the other hand), together with some suggestions based on wider researches in progress. Such researches rely also on the digital online archive e-Leo by the Biblioteca Leonardiana at Vinci where Leonardo's manuscripts and printed works are available for reference.

Pauline Robison

Independent scholar

"The Brooker MSS (MS Ganay & a newly identified MS from Cassiano's workshop): identifying sources for MS H228."

The 2 manuscripts in the collection of T Kimball Brooker, Chicago—pre-publication abbreviated versions of Leonardo's Trattato della Pittura—are products of Cassiano dal Pozzo's Roman workshop, ca. 1630-1640. Though they share common features (an index of chapters, copies of figure drawings by Nicolas Poussin and diagrams illustrating passages in the text—as found in MS H228, copies of the 'added chapters' with figure drawings and diagrams—corresponding to the text of Part 3 of MS H227 and the text and images of Part 1 of MS H229) the text of each derives from different manuscript versions of the Trattato available to Cassiano at the time. Together, the two MSS highlight the complex editorial process that Cassiano employed in creating MS H228—the basis of the 1651 printed edition. This paper proposes to identify the sources of H228, and clarify the character of the Brooker MSS in relationship to it.

Anna Sconza

Assistant Professor of Literature, University of Paris la Sorbonne

"Leonardo on Movement and Perspective: Connections Between the Codex Huygens and the Book on Painting (Libro di pittura)"

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the two transcriptions of selected writings of Leonardo, constituting respectively the Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270 (Libro di pittura) and the Codex Huygens, permitted the systematization and diffusion of his conceptions on painting (in the first manuscript), and on movement and perspective (in the second one).

The study of the passages on perspective contained in the Codex Huygens can contribute to comprehend which contents were regarded to be relevant to get transmitted, in a complementary view with the abridgment of the Libro di pittura on the same subject between 1560 and 1580. As in the case of the Codex Huygens, the abridged version of the Codex Urbinas tried to respond to the lack of knowledge of Leonardo's thoughts on painting and perspective in the artistic milieux. These two fundamental manuscripts of Leonardo's legacy had different circulations between the end of the Cinquecento and the following century, but they both reflect the choices underlying the transposition, through words and drawings, of Leonardo's writings.

David Summers

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Art, University of Virginia

"Chicaroscuro, or the Rhetoric of Realism"

In rhetorical terms, chiaroscuro (brightdark) is an antithesis, in Latin, contrapositum, whence Italian contrapposto. Antithesis--setting opposites against one another in order to make each brighter by contrast--was recommended as a fundamental compositional device as well as a major ornament to be used to persuade by placing the matter as if before the eyes. As Michael Baxandall demonstrated, Alberti translated Latin rhetoric into a program for painting in his De pictura, a text Leonardo knew well. "Composition" in this scheme is pleasing artificial order, and in this paper I will argue that Leonardo's chiaroscuro is composition in that sense, but based on the purely optical elements of light, dark and color. After Leonardo, chiaroscuro composition continued to be exploited by painters from Raphael to Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Goya, Courbet and Eakins, thus to become a continuing feature of the rhetoric of realism.

Carlo Vecce

Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Naples

"Leonardo and the War"

Around 1490-1492 Leonardo da Vinci (employed as an engineer and an artist at the Sforza Court of Milan) intensified his activity as a writer, composing a lot of texts destined mostly to a future 'book on painting'. One of these texts, the Modo di figurare una battaglia ('how to depict a battle'), is more a dantesque vision than a simple didactic grid for young painters. Of course, Leonardo could have read several illustrious literary examples of battle description, from ancient writers as Livy up to late-mediaeval chivaleresque poems and contemporary humanists and historians. But his 'battle' let us 'see' something completely new: the terrible spectacle of a 'modern' battle, with the mist of the gunpowder and the chaos of sounds and smells. It is also a 'Theatre of Cruelty', an allegory of war and violence as human folly (pazzia bestialissima).

Elizabeth Walmsley

Painting Conservator, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

"Technical Examination of the Ginevra de' Benci"

Focusing on Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, this paper will discuss findings from technical examinations carried out in the conservation studio that have aided art historians in formulating and/or confirming proposals about the commission of the portrait as well as its original appearance. Technical examination has also provided details about the evolution of the portrait, from a sketch on paper to a finished painting, through specialized imaging techniques (including the unpublished infra-red reflectograms and re-examination of the x-radiographs) and comparison with Leonardo's working