Page 126 of 443
IX._The Practice of Painting._ - The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci| Set Display | Please Turn On Your Virtual Bookmarks | You Can Help This Site | Table of Contents | Leonardo da Vinci |
Page 126 of 443
IX._The Practice of Painting._ - The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
IX._The Practice of Painting._
_It is hardly necessary to offer any excuses for the division carried out in the arrangement of the text into practical suggestions and theoretical enquiries. It was evidently intended by Leonardo himself as we conclude from incidental remarks in the MSS. (for instance No_ 110_). The fact that this arrangement was never carried out either in the old MS. copies or in any edition since, is easily accounted for by the general disorder which results from the provisional distribution of the various chapters in the old copies. We have every reason to believe that the earliest copyists, in distributing the materials collected by them, did not in the least consider the order in which the original MS.lay before them._
_It is evident that almost all the chapters which refer to the calling and life of the painter--and which are here brought together in the first section (Nos._ 482-508_)--may be referred to two distinct periods in Leonardo's life; most of them can be dated as belonging to the year_ 1492 _or to_ 1515. _At about this later time Leonardo may have formed the project of completing his Libro della Pittura, after an interval of some years, as it would seem, during which his interest in the subject had fallen somewhat into the background._
_In the second section, which treats first of the artist's studio, the construction of a suitable window forms the object of careful investigations; the special importance attached to this by Leonardo is sufficiently obvious. His theory of the incidence of light which was fully discussed in a former part of this work, was to him by no means of mere abstract value, but, being deduced, as he says, from experience (or experiment) was required to prove its utility in practice. Connected with this we find suggestions for the choice of a light with practical hints as to sketching a picture and some other precepts of a practical character which must come under consideration in the course of completing the painting. In all this I have followed the same principle of arrangement in the text as was carried out in the Theory of Painting, thus the suggestions for the Perspective of a picture, (Nos._ 536-569_), are followed by the theory of light and shade for the practical method of optics (Nos._ 548--566_) and this by the practical precepts or the treatment of aerial perspective (_567--570_)._
_In the passage on Portrait and Figure Painting the principles of painting as applied to a bust and head are separated and placed first, since the advice to figure painters must have some connection with the principles of the treatment of composition by which they are followed._
_But this arrangement of the text made it seem advisable not to pick out the practical precepts as to the representation of trees and landscape from the close connection in which they were originally placed--unlike the rest of the practical precepts--with the theory of this branch of the subject. They must therefore be sought under the section entitled Botany for Painters._ 
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