Da Vinci, Traité de la peinture, [1796].

Leonardo da Vinci; Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) [ills, after]; Roland Fréart de Chambray (1606-1676) [transl.]; anonymous [edit.].

Traité de la peinture.

Paris, Deterville, printed by Crapelet, An IV [1796].

8°. [VIII], LIX, [1], 333, [1 blank] pp. With 34 plates (some folding) and several woodcut diagrams in text.

Later (circa 1900) vellum, new endpapers.

Third French edition of Da Vinci’s influential and famous painting manual. Francesco Melzi, Da Vinci’s student, compiled the text from his master’s notebooks. He titled it Trattato della pittura and is now known as the Codex Urbinas 1270. The manuscript remained unpublished until 1651, when an Italian and a French edition appeared simultaneously at Giacomo Langlois, Paris. This was accompanied with illustrations by Nicolas Poussin, including a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and a portrait of Da Vinci. Most plates depict instructive models to learn the different disciplines of painting. The second French edition was published in 1716, in octavo, titled Traité de la Peinture par Léonard de Vinci. This was illustrated with new plates, copied after those in de first edition. The present third French edition has the exact same illustrations as the second edition, indicating that the copper plates from the second edition were reused. The text of the present third edition is enlarged with a biography of Da Vinci in the preliminaries. According to the anonymous editor the text follows that of the first edition closer than the second edition did.

Condition: faded stain in the first and last part, otherwise in good condition, wholly untrimmed.

Reference: Brunet V, 1258 (dated 1798); Steinitz, L. da Vinci’s Trattato della Pittura, A Bibliography, pp. 157-158.