Da Vinci's Ghost by Toby Lester Page B

should there be one class of people who worked only with their minds, and another only with their hands. To that end, unusually for his time, he produced two versions of the treatise. The first he wrote in Latin, for the edification of well-born patrons and scholars; the second he wrote in Italian, for practicing artists. Both were circulating widely in Florence by the 1460s. Leonardo would come to know it well—and would take many of its lessons profoundly to heart.
    In many ways,
On Painting
represented the perfect supplement to the medieval
Craftsman’s Handbook
. It introduced and explained, for example, one of the most important artistic developments of the early Italian Renaissance: linear perspective. The technique, which involved organizing the space of a picture into a mathematically consistent grid, enabled artists for the first time to render a three-dimensional subject realistically on a two-dimensional surface. It had been perfected earlier in the century by Brunelleschi, and in
On Painting
(the Italian edition of which was dedicated to Brunelleschi) Alberti codified it for the very first time, a move that would have profound consequences for Renaissance art and science.
    But explaining artistic technique wasn’t the point of
On Painting
. Whereas
The Craftsman’s Handbook
had taught that proper materials and practices were the foundations of good art,
On Painting
put its emphasis elsewhere: on the cultivation of a painter’s mind and character. Learning how to paint still meant learning how to prepare to paint—but now that preparation involved not grinding bone and mixing colors but educating oneself roundly in the liberal arts. Only then could one tap into the unified principles of harmony and proportion that governed the makeup of the world. As an art rather than a craft, painting as Alberti described it provided a powerful visual means of capturing truths about the natural world and human nature, and then conveying them to others in beautiful, instructive works of art. Hence the importance of linear perspective: it gave an artist of exceptional ability and great learning the almost godlike ability to re-create the world in miniature. “Painting,” he wrote, “ possesses a truly divine power .”
    That Leonardo knew
On Painting
well is clear from his notebooks, which are shot through with echoes of Alberti’s ideas. One that recurs repeatedly is the notion of the artist as a figure who, thanks to his careful study of the workings of the world, has become a Creator. “The divine character of painting ,” Leonardo wrote at one point, “means that the mind of the painter is transformed into an image of the mind of God.” At another point he elaborated on the idea. “The painter is lord ,” he wrote, and then continued, “In fact, whatever exists in the universe—in essence, in appearance, in the imagination—the painter has first in his mind and then in his hand; and these are of such excellence that they can present a proportioned and harmonious view of the whole, which can be seen simultaneously, at one glance, just as things in nature.”
    A small sketch in one of Leonardo’s notebooks, datable to sometime between 1478 and 1480, gives this idea a strikingly visual form. It shows a young artist, possibly Leonardo himself in his studio, drawing with the help of what he calls a “perspectograph,” a device that corresponds nicely to one described by Alberti in
On Painting
. And what the young artist is putting into perspective, so that it can be seen at one glance, is surely not just a random choice. It’s a miniature model of the cosmos, known as an armillary sphere—a device at the center of which artists and theologians of the period sometimes imagined they could see the figure of Christ embodying the earth ( Figures 17 and 18 ).

    Figures 17 and 18. Top:
A possible self-portrait of the young Leonardo, drawing an armillary sphere with the help of his “perspectograph” (c.