The Drawings of Leonardo.—These are among the greatest treasures ever given to the world by the human spirit expressing itself in pen and pencil. Apart from the many hundreds of illustrative pen-sketches scattered through his autobiographic and scientific mss., the principal collection is at Windsor castle (partly derived from the Arundel col lection) ; others of importance are in the British Museum ; at Christ Church, Oxford; in the Louvre, in the Uffizi, the Venice academy, the Royal library at Turin, the museum of Budapest, in the Bayonne museum and in the collection of Lord Melchett Leonardo's chief im plements were pen, silverpoint, and red and black chalk (red chalk especially). In silverpoint there are many beautiful drawings of his earlier time, and some of his later ; but of the charming heads of women and young men in this material attributed to him in various collections, comparatively few are his own work, the majority being drawings in his spirit by his pupils Ambrogio Preda or Boltraffio. Leonardo appears to have been left-handed ; a contemporary and intimate friend, Luca Pacioli, speaks of his "ineffable left hand"; all the best of his drawings are shaded downward from left to right, which would be the readiest way for a left-handed man ; and his habitual eccentric practice of writing from right to left is much more likely to have been due to natural left-handedness than to any desire for mystery or concealment. A full critical discussion and catalogue of the extant drawings of Leonardo are to be found in Berenson's Drawings of the Florentine Painters.
The Writings of Leonardo.—The only printed book bearing Leo nardo's name until the recent issues of transcripts from his mss. was the celebrated Treatise on Painting (Trattato della pittura, Traite de la peinture). This consists of brief didactic chapters, or more properly paragraphs, of practical direction or critical remark on all the branches and conditions of a painter's practice. The original ms. draft of Leonardo has been lost, though a great number of notes for it are scat tered through the various extant volumes of his mss. The work has been printed in two different forms ; one of these is an abridged version consisting of 365 sections ; the first edition of it was published in Paris in 1551, by Raphael Dufresne, from a ms. which he found in the Bar berini library ; the last, translated into English by J. F. Rigaud, in Lon don, 1877. The other is a more extended version, in 912 sections, divided into eight books ; this was printed in 1817 by Guglielmo Manzi at Rome, from two mss. which he had discovered in the Vatican library ; a German translation from the same ms. has been edited by G. H. Ludwig in Eitelberger's series of Quellenschriften fur Kunstge schichte (Vienna, 1882 ; Stuttgart, 1885). More recent publications of the Treatise on Painting are:—Leonardo da Vinci, Traktat von der Malerei ( Jena, 1909) ; and Leonardo da Vinci, Traite de la peinture (19i0). On the history of the book in general see Max Jordan, Das Malerbuch des Leonardo da Vinci (Leipzig, 1873). The unknown com pilers of the Vatican mss. must have had before them much more of Leonardo's original text than is now extant. Only about a quarter of the total number of paragraphs are identical with passages to be found in the master's existing autograph notebooks. It is indeed doubtful
whether Leonardo himself ever completed the ms. treatise (or treatises) on painting and kindred subjects mentioned by Fra Luca Pacioli and by Vasari, and probable that the form and order, and perhaps some of the substance, of the Trattato as we have it was due to compilers and not to the master himself.
In recent years a whole body of scholars and editors have been engaged in giving to the world the texts of Leonardo's existing mss. The history of these is too complicated to be told here in any detail. Francesco Melzi (d. 1570) kept the greater part of his master's bequest together as a sacred trust as long as he lived, 'though even in his time some mss. on the art of painting seem to have passed into other hands. But his descendants suffered the treasure to be recklessly dispersed. The chief agents in their dispersal were the Doctor Orazio Melzi who pos sessed them in the last quarter of the 16th century ; the members of a Milanese family called Mazzenta, into whose hands they passed in Orazio Melzi's lifetime ; and the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who at one time entertained the design of procuring their presentation to Philip II. of Spain, and who cut up a number of the note-books to form the great miscellaneous single volume called the Codice Atlantico, now at Milan. This volume, with a large proportion of the total number of other Leonardo mss. then existing, passed into the hands of a Count Arconati, who presented them to the Ambrosian library at Milan in 1636. In the meantime the earl of Arundel had made a vain attempt to purchase one of these volumes (the Codice Atlantico?) at a great price for the king of England. Some stray parts of the collection, including the mss. now at Windsor, did evidently come into Lord Arundel's possession, and the history of some other parts can be followed; while much, it is evident, was lost for good. In 1796 Napoleon swept away to Paris, along with the other art treasures of Italy, the whole of the Leonardo mss. at the Ambrosiana: only the Codice Atlantico was afterwards restored, the other volumes remaining the property of the Institut de France. These also have had their adventures, two of them having been stolen by Count Libri and passed temporarily into the collection of Lord Ashburnham, whence they were in recent years made over again to the Institut. The first important step towards a better knowledge of the mss. was made by the beginning, in 1880, of the great series of publications from the mss. of the Institut de France undertaken by C. Ravaisson-Mollien; the next by the publication in 5883 of Dr. J. P. Richter's Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (see Bibliography) : this work included, besides a history and analytical index of the mss., facsimiles of a number of selected pages containing matter of auto biographical, artistic, or literary interest, with transcripts and transla tions of their ms. contexts. Since then much progress has been made in the publication of the complete mss., scientific and other, whether with adequate critical apparatus or in the form of mere facsimile without transliteration or comment.