A Treatise on Painting: Leonardo Da Vinci, Life of Leonardo and an Account of His Life (Great Minds)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Leonardo da Vinci, John William Brown Our price £9.99 New from £4.59 Used from £4.82 Pages: 364 (Paperback) ISBN: 1573929506 Pub: Prometheus Books Pub date: 2002-02-20 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 328811

Reader Reviews:

Time consuming, repetitive and dull (0/0 people found this helpful)

This is a collection of ideas drawn from Leonardo's notebooks after his death by one of his pupils who inherited all his belongings. This particular version has a translation from 1877 and includes diagrams by Brunelleschi and drawings by Nicholas Poussin.

It is a book written for the Renaissance student of art and covers key topics of the day including perspective, optics, light and shade and how to render objects in a life like way. It deals primarily with the big themes of the day, battle scenes and portraits, although it doesn't include much on religious themes.

It is broken into several categories, such as colour, perspective, the perspective of colour etc, but there is a great deal of overlap in the writings. Because Leonardo himself only made rough notes with an eye to creating a final more polished work, which never happened, the compiler here has numbered paragraphs and ordered them in these categories. Whether this is as Leonardo envisaged it is almost impossible to say.

I cannot understand why the drawings are by Brunelleschi and Poussin when one thing we are not short of from Leonardo is drawings, particularly figure drawings, which is what most of the book is concerned with. I feel this really lets this down and is a definite weak moment.

The text is repetitive, dense and at times difficult to understand. I feel that this would only be helpful to you if you wanted to understand the minute technical cut and thrust of Leonardo's methods of painting or if you needed to reproduce them yourself, or if you are a Leonardo completist and want to read everything about him. Otherwise it is hard going and not particularly inspiring.

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