A Treatise on Painting

by da Vinci Leonardo

Vasari, p. 36, mentions a little model by Leonardo in wax, but he does not say what was its subject.

DRAWINGS.

Vasari, p. 24, says, that it was Leonardo’s practice to model figures from the life, and then to cover them with fine thin lawn or cambric, so as to be able to see through it, and with the point of a fine pencil to trace off the outlines in black and white; and that some such drawings he had in his collection.

A head in chiaro oscuro, in the possession of Vasari, and mentioned by him as divine, a drawing on paper[i119].

A carton of Adam and Eve in Paradise, made by him for the King of Portugal. It is done with a pen in chiaro oscuro, and heightened with white, and was intended to be worked as tapestry in silk and gold; but Vasari says it was never executed, and that in his time the carton remained at Florence, in the house of Ottaviano de Medici. Whether this carton is still existing is unknown[i120].

Several ridiculous heads of men and women, formerly in Vasari’s collection, drawn in pen and ink[i121]. Aurelio Lovino had, says Lomazzo, a book of sketches by Leonardo, of odd and ridiculous heads. This book appears to have contained about 250 figures of countrymen and countrywomen laughing, drawn by the hand of Leonardo. Card. Silvio Valenti had a similar book, in which were caricature heads drawn with a pen, like that engraven by Count Caylus. Of these caricatures mention is made in the second volume of the Lettere Pittoriche, p. 170[i122]. The passage in the Lettere Pittoriche here referred to, is part of a letter without any name or date, addressed Al Sig. C. di C.; but a note of the editor’s explains these initials, as meaning Sig. Conte di Caylus, and supposes the author to have been the younger Mariette. The letter mentions a collection of heads from Leonardo’s drawings, published by the Count; and the editor, in another note, tells us, that they are caricature heads drawn in pen and ink; that the originals were bought in Holland, from Sig. Cardin. Silvio Valenti, and that the prints of which the letter speaks, are in the famous collection of the Corsini library. The author of the Letter supposes these caricatures to have been drawn when Vinci retired to Melzi’s house, that he invented them as a new sort of recreation, and intended them as a subject for the academy which he had established at Milan.

In another part of the same Letter, p. 173, 174, this collection of drawings of heads is again mentioned, and it is there said, that it might be that which belonged to the Earl of Arundel. This conjecture is founded on there being many such heads engraven formerly by Hollar. In fact, the number of the plates which he has done from drawings of this painter, are near one hundred, which compose different series. The author of the Letter adds, that, if a conjecture might be permitted, we might affirm, that this is the collection of heads of which Paul Lomazzo speaks; at least the description which he gives of a similar collection which was in the hands of Aurelio Lovino, a painter of Milan, corresponds with this as well in the number of the drawings as their subjects. It represents, like this, studies from old men, countrymen, wrinkled old women, which are all laughing. Another part of this Letter says, it is easy to believe that the collection of drawings of heads which occasioned this Letter, might be one of those books in which Leonardo noted the most singular countenances.

In p. 198 of the same Letter, Hollar’s engravings are said to be about an hundred, and to have been done at Antwerp in 1645, and the following year; and in p. 199, Count Caylus’s publication is said to contain 59 plates in aqua fortis, done in 1730, and that this latter is the work so often mentioned in the Letter.

Another collection of the same kind of caricature heads mentioned in Mariette’s Letter[i123], as existing in the cabinet of either the King of Spain or the King of Sardinia.