Murray Seminar: ‘Leonardo and Melzi: the role of illustrations in the composition and creation of meaning in the Libro di pittura’ with Juliana Barone, 12 February 2025 (5-6.30pm GMT)

12 Feb 2025, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, Keynes Library and Online, 17:00 — 18:30 GMT

It is well known that Leonardo intended to write a treatise on painting. His thoughts on the structure and content of his projected treatise are often found in his manuscripts. But no final piece of writing has come down to us, at least not as a complete work in our sense. Where we now find the bulk of his ideas on painting is in the sixteenth-century compilation by his heir and student, Francesco Melzi. Housed in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and titled Libro di pittura di M. Lionardo da Vinci pittore et scultore fiorentino (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270), Melzi’s compilation offers materials extracted from eighteen of Leonardo’s manuscripts (some now lost). This paper newly discusses some of the difficulties that Melzi must have faced during the rather complex process of selecting and extracting materials from a large number of Leonardo’s manuscripts in composing the Libro di pittura. More specifically, it sheds lights on some key ways in which Melzi used Leonardo’s illustrations for composing and creating meaning. In also discusses the extent to which Melzi’s choices are a direct translation of Leonardo’s ideas and affected the visual corpus of a book that was meant to be seen as Leonardo’s official treatise on the art and theory of painting.

Dr Juliana Barone is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Associate Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute. She was awarded her Doctorate at Trinity College, Oxford University. Her research encompasses European Art, theory and culture in the period of 1400-1700,  with a focus on Leonardo da Vinci and the ways in which knowledge has been expressed, assimilated and transmitted. Her main publications include: Leonardo da Vinci: A Mind in Motion (2019); Leonardo in Britain: Collections and Historical Reception (with Susanna Avery-Quash, 2019); Leonardo in Seventeenth-Century France: Paradoxical Legacies (2013); I disegni di Leonardo da Vinci e della sua cerchia. Collezioni in Gran Bretagna (with Martin Kemp, 2010); The Codex Arundel (2008). She has also curated exhibitions in London (British Library; Peltz Gallery); Milan (Biblioteca Ambrosiana) and Florence (Museo Galileo). She is currently working on a volume entitled Leonardo da Vinci’s Papers: Invention and Reconstruction.

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