Tread the deep sand and shout with raised voices.
One we see staggering; others seem to stumble,
One clashes the cymbal; others seem to laugh.
One drinks from a horn, one from his hand.
One has grabbed a nymph, and one turns handsprings.”
Leonardo and the Academic Idea of Painting
The extraordinary mixture of liberality and dogmatism, of naturalism and taste in Leonardo is best illustrated from his own Trattato della Pittura. I quote from the standard edition of H. Ludwig, Vienna, 1882, using his paragraph numbers:
Modelling in Chiaroscuro as the Painter’s First Object
¶ 412. “The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane, and he who in such art excels the others, deserves the greater praise, and such research, or rather crown of such science, is born from light and shade, or I mean chiaroscuro. Then he who flees from shadows, flees also from the glory of our art among noble spirits and gains it with the ignorant herd, which desires nothing in painting but beauty of colors, forgetting entirely the beauty and wonder of showing a flat thing as if it were in relief.”