Leonardo in 17th century France: paradoxical legacies
Italiano

Juliana Barone
Associate Research Fellow and Lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London

Saturday 21 April 2012, 10.30am
Vinci, Biblioteca Leonardiana

How was Leonardo received in seventeenth-century France? It was in France, in 1651, that his Treatise on Painting was published for the first time. The publication took the form of two editions: one in French by Roland Fréart de Chambray and the other in Italian by Raphael Trichet du Fresne. Although questions remain about the precise relationship and sources of these two editions, both provided illustrations based on a set of drawings designed by Nicolas Poussin. This ‘visual’ Leonardo has shaped the reception of his teachings not only at the time, but also in the following centuries. Poussin’s intervention in the visual form in which Leonardo’s ideas were conveyed was deliberate and involved a careful process of selection and reconfiguration of the human figure, one which had radical implications for forging a new way in which Leonardo’s ideas were transmitted, notably on human motion. However, does this new view of Leonardo, mediated through Poussin’s eyes, actually convey what was thought to be a Leonardo in the seventeenth century? Which were the paintings known at the time and believed to be original ‘Leonardos’? Seemingly, none of his paintings was the subject of the famous conférences in the French Academy. The visual exemplars in the Academy were provided by Poussin and Raphael. Although the theoretical Leonardo offered in the Treatise did not pass totally unchallenged, his text held a canonical status in the Academy. Moreover, it is the image of the theoretical Leonardo which emerges as praiseworthy throughout contemporary French biographies. Even his most admired painting in seventeenth-century France, the Last Supper, was overshadowed by a Poussin painting. The paradoxes between the visual and theoretical legacies of Leonardo are not accidental. The dichotomy that emerges helps us assess the historical process of the construction of an ‘authorised’ image, a process which had its climax in seventeenth-century France and which, nevertheless, is modern not only in its mechanisms but also in having filtered our own view of his teachings.