Francesca Fiorani
Associate Professor of Art History

The understanding of Leonardo's artistic theory is an accomplishment of modern scholars, who organized and published the myriad notes that Leonardo himself had left dispersed in his manuscripts. Renaissance artists and theorists, however, who did not have access to the artist's original manuscripts, knew Leonardo's artistic theory only through the so-called Treatise on Painting, a text that they regarded as an original book by Leonardo but that we know today was only a disorganized, selective compilation of his precepts on painting. Furthermore, the Treatise on Painting was an abridged version of the equally problematic text that Francesco Melzi, one of Leonardo's pupils, had compiled from Leonardo's manuscripts. The abridged Treatise on Painting is thus of minimal significance in the reconstruction of Leonardo's thought on art.

But the abridged Treatise on Painting was germane in disseminating, for better or worse, Leonardo's art theory in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. In spite of its cultural significance, however, we still have no idea why the abridged Treatise on Painting was compiled in the first place, why was it done the way it was, or who did it, and for what purpose. We also lack a fundamental understanding of Leonardo's influence on Renaissance and Baroque theorists, artists, and scholars. We have no clear answer to the pivotal question: What did Renaissance and Baroque artists know of Leonardo's artistic theory? To answer this question demands the crafting of new interpretative frameworks and methodological skills that integrate traditional scholarship in art history, philology, and cultural history with modern information technology.

The electronic archive is the first, systematic study of the many manuscripts of the Treatise on Painting. Characterized by variations of images and text, the manuscripts themselves contain invaluable internal evidence, which can be analyzed effectively only through information technology.

The electronic archive will make available the manuscripts of the abridged Treatise on Painting, allow for the search and comparison of their texts and images, and thus provide for the systematic study of the verbal and visual evidence of the manuscripts themselves. The electronic archive will also provide the ground work for the critical edition of Leonardo's Treatise on Painting , which was printed in Italian and French in 1651. The critical edition will result from the collaborative work of a group of international scholars.

International Workshop
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, 10-11 October 2005

Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities