Assembled from Leonardo’s scattered notes, this treatise argues that painting is a science of nature grounded in observation, perspective, light, and anatomy. It is the fullest statement of his conviction that the painter’s eye rivals the philosopher’s mind.
Sources for Leonardo da Vinci — A Treatise on Painting
Leonardo da Vinci — A Treatise on Painting in Visual Art
Held in the Visual Art chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Vitruvius — De Architectura (c. 15 BCE)
- Cennino Cennini — Il Libro dell’Arte (c. 1400)
- Albrecht Dürer — Of the Just Shaping of Letters (1525)
- Giorgio Vasari — Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550)
- Giovanni Pietro Bellori — Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1672)
- Edmund Burke — A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
- Denis Diderot — Salons (1765)
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Theory of Colours (1810)
- M. E. Chevreul — The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours (1839)
- John Ruskin — Modern Painters (1843)
- John Ruskin — The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
- John Ruskin — The Stones of Venice (1851)
- John Ruskin — The Elements of Drawing (1857)
- Eugène Viollet-le-Duc — Discourses on Architecture (1863)
- Émile Zola — Mon Salon (1866)
- Charles Blanc — The Grammar of Painting and Engraving (1867)
- Walter Pater — The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873)
- Leonardo da Vinci — The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)
- Bernard Berenson — The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1896)
- Vincent van Gogh — Letters (1913)
- Clive Bell — Art (1914)
- Louis Sullivan — The Autobiography of an Idea (1924)