THE GENIUS OF LEONARDO DA VINCI

This handsome book is a re-arranged and selected edition of Leonardo's Treatise On Painting (with some additions from the Notebooks) with 132 illustrations-mostly drawings, and a few colour plates. Leonardo's Treatise was never prepared by him for publication, so the manuscripts are unorganized jotting. In this selection, Andre Chastel, Professor of the History of Modern Art at the Sorbonne and art critic of Le Monde, has put the text in logical order, but the result retains the fragmentary nature of the original. The material is partly theoretical and partly practical. Leonardo advises and instructs the aspiring painter on perspective, light and shadow, the human figure, and colour. Although the technical sections will be mostly of to painters and , they are not difficult to understand, and are more ? than his on whether painting is a 'higher' art poetry. For the lover of Leonardo, the books' chief attraction will be the splendid small drawings, mostly from the collection at Windsor Castle, which are placed throughout as Leonard ? The editor has added translations of three early biography I sketches of Leonardo, including that of Vasari. The complete facsimile text and English translation of the is available in a scholarly edition (Princeton) but this is the first rearranged selection in English for the general reader.