Francesco Melzi and the Making of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting

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Leonardo da Vinci never completed a book on painting. The work that later circulated under his name was assembled from his notebooks, organized by his pupil Francesco Melzi, and reshaped by subsequent editors.

Leonardo da Vinci left behind an enormous body of notes on painting, perspective, light, color, and the natural world. These writings were not a finished book waiting to be published. They accumulated over decades, recording observations, experiments, questions, and ideas in various stages of development.

Yet one of the most influential works associated with Leonardo is the Treatise on Painting, a text that circulated among artists and theorists for centuries. Its history raises an important question: how did Leonardo’s scattered notes become a book, and how much did the people who organized them influence what readers eventually understood as his theory of painting?

The answer begins with Francesco Melzi, Leonardo’s pupil and literary heir.

The pupil who inherited Leonardo’s writings

When Leonardo died in 1519, he left his books, papers, and drawings to Melzi. A member of a Milanese family, Melzi had accompanied Leonardo during his final years in France and was entrusted with preserving his written legacy.

Melzi undertook the considerable task of gathering Leonardo’s writings on painting into a more organized work. The resulting manuscript, known as the Libro di pittura, or Book on Painting, survives in the Vatican Library as Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270.

The manuscript contains hundreds of chapters accompanied by illustrations, assembled from multiple sources, including manuscripts that no longer survive. At the end, Melzi included a list identifying the manuscripts from which material had been collected.

This was a substantial act of preservation. But it was also an editorial undertaking. Leonardo’s original notes were not necessarily arranged in the sequence or conceptual structure that a reader would expect from a systematic treatise. Bringing them together required decisions about which passages to include, where to place them, and how to relate one subject to another.

Melzi, possibly working with assistants, preserved Leonardo’s words while helping create a new structure through which those words could be read.

Did Melzi organize the notes as Leonardo intended?

Art historian Claire Farago examines this question in her 2003 study, “How Leonardo da Vinci’s Editors Organized His ‘Treatise on Painting’ and How Leonardo Would Have Done It Differently.”

Farago compares the Libro di pittura with Leonardo’s surviving notebooks. Her analysis challenges the assumption that Melzi simply copied passages in their original sequence, preserving an organization already established by Leonardo.

One example involves passages on painting copied from a manuscript known as Libro A. Farago finds that consecutive passages in the source were frequently separated when they were incorporated into the Libro di pittura. Rather than reproducing the original sequence, the compiler rearranged material to create a different organization.

The distinction matters because arrangement can influence interpretation. Leonardo frequently approached painting through investigations of natural phenomena and their causes. When observations originally recorded in one context are redistributed into a thematic compilation, the relationships between those observations can change.

Farago argues that the editorial work therefore went beyond the activities we might associate with a modern copy editor. The compilers actively shaped how Leonardo’s ideas were presented to their intended readers.

There is an important qualification. We cannot reconstruct with certainty the exact book Leonardo would have completed had he lived to finish the project. Farago’s analysis provides evidence of editorial intervention, not a definitive reconstruction of Leonardo’s unrealized intentions.

Melzi’s achievement should therefore be understood in two ways: he preserved a substantial body of Leonardo’s thought, and he helped give that material a new editorial structure.

The treatise changed again before publication

The history did not end with Melzi’s compilation.

The Libro di pittura remained unpublished during his lifetime. A shortened version of its contents circulated in manuscript, and this abridged textual tradition eventually became the basis for the first printed editions of the Treatise on Painting in 1651.

Those editions did not reproduce Melzi’s complete manuscript. They represented a further stage of selection and editorial intervention, separating material that had appeared together in the fuller compilation.

Farago’s later research offers a revealing example. In her 2020 chapter, “‘Ingenuity’ and Artists’ Ways of Knowing,” she discusses Leonardo’s advice on the componimento inculto, an unfinished or rough compositional sketch.

Although the passage on componimento inculto survived in Melzi’s compilation, it was omitted when an unidentified editor abridged the text around 1570. Related advice on compositional sketching remained, but readers of the shortened treatise no longer encountered Leonardo’s fuller discussion.

The omission illustrates why the distinction between the Libro di pittura and the printed Treatise on Painting matters. A reader relying on the shortened text could encounter a different selection of Leonardo’s ideas from a reader consulting Melzi’s fuller compilation.

The original Libro di pittura was eventually published by Guglielmo Manzi in 1817, making its more complete contents available in print.

For centuries, therefore, Leonardo’s reputation as a writer on painting rested largely on a text that had passed through several stages of selection, rearrangement, and publication.

Whose book was it?

The Treatise on Painting is neither simply a book Leonardo completed nor merely a collection of his notes copied by a devoted pupil.

Leonardo supplied the observations and ideas. Melzi preserved a substantial portion of that material and helped organize it into the Libro di pittura. Later editors selected and rearranged material for the abridged versions that circulated and eventually appeared in print.

Recognizing those contributions does not diminish Melzi’s importance. Without his work, our access to Leonardo’s writings on painting would be considerably poorer. His compilation preserved material from manuscripts that have since disappeared and gave Leonardo’s ideas a form through which they could reach later generations.

But preservation and authorship are not the same thing. The surviving Treatise on Painting tells us about Leonardo’s thinking, but it also records the history of how other people organized, interpreted, and transmitted that thinking.

To understand Leonardo’s theory of painting, historians must therefore look beyond the familiar printed treatise. Comparing its contents with the Libro di pittura and Leonardo’s surviving notebooks reveals not only what Leonardo wrote, but also how his unfinished project became one of the most influential texts associated with his name.

Further reading

• Claire Farago, “How Leonardo da Vinci’s Editors Organized His ‘Treatise on Painting’ and How Leonardo Would Have Done It Differently,” Studies in the History of Art 59 (2003), 20–52.

• Claire Farago, “‘Ingenuity’ and Artists’ Ways of Knowing,” in Renaissance Futurities: Science, Art, Invention (University of California Press, 2020), 130–148.

• Carlo Pedretti and Carlo Vecce, eds., Libro di pittura (Florence: Giunti, 1995).