Pages containing human figures and a horse, which accompany the precepts of Leonardo's Treatise on Painting taken from the editio princeps printed in Italian in 1651 in Paris (in the same year an edition in French will be released). This work saw the light thanks to a group of personalities linked by a great passion for art and a profound culture. First of all the Cavaliere Cassiano dal Pozzo, descendant of a noble Piedmontese family and personal secretary of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, known as the Cardinal Padrone. Cassiano used the iconographic part of his painter friend Nicolas Poussin, who created splendid drawings but with a graphic interpretation of Leonardo's artistic theory far removed from his original cartoons, and closer to the style of the time. The drawings of the diagrams that demonstrate scientific arguments will be drawn for the editio princeps by Pierfrancesco degli Alberti (1584-1638), former author of the maps of the underground Rome of the Bosio.

"... already having with all diligence the worthy book of pictures and human movements put an end ...": this passage is one of the first testimonies of Leonardo's work on his Book of Painting and is found in the letter addressed by Luca Pacioli to Ludovico Sforza printed in the "Pars prima" of his Divina Proportione. Pacioli was a friend of the "compatriot" Leonardo and met him in Milan in 1496 when he was called by Duke Ludovico il Moro to teach public mathematics. When he compiled the Divina Proportione, which originated, as we learn from the dedication of the work, from the scientific conversations of that brilliant environment that was the court of Ludovico il Moro and to which Leonardo also belonged, he felt the need to complete it with figures necessary geometries and made use of the very skilled hand of Vinci, whose original drawings he personally kept with him to exhibit them for the admiration of visitors.

This is the fourth edition of the Latin version of Unterweisung der Messung, the four-book measurement course composed by Albrecht Dürer and first printed in his workshop in Nuremberg in 1525. This work derives from a larger project by Dürer aimed at to create a book in his own language on art and painting, which included the knowledge necessary for the training of the painter, a project that was never completed, but from which several treatises were born, including this one. In fact, the master wanted to offer German artists and artisans texts in which the theoretical foundations and practical applications of their activity were laid. This need arose from his first trip to Italy in 1494-1495, where he was able to see the flourishing of reflections on the arts, their way of representing them and the proliferation of writings on these topics, the basis of the new Renaissance art. All this was lacking in the Nordic German countries: in fact we read in the preface of the work that “… so far in our German countries many skilled young people have been directed to practice painting by instructing them only with daily practice but without inculcating the foundations of their art. "

Lomazzo, a friend and frequenter of Melzi, a pupil and heir of Leonardo's manuscripts, was able to know the writings of the master and to remember them repeatedly in his works, and therefore also in the Treatise on the art of painting, printed in Milan for the first time in 1584. Lomazzo was also the owner of writings on the arts of the master, and thanks to these he provides us with an important testimony recalling in his work a part of the famous Paragone, (comparison between the arts written by Leonardo where the privilege belongs to painting ), which did not converge in the Vatican Codex Urbinate lat. 1270 (manuscript compiled after Leonardo's death by his pupil and heir, Francesco Melzi). It is a praise of the plastic that Lomazzo himself acknowledges having drawn from Leonardo and which has been lost. Lomazzo's work should be considered as one of the main sources of reference that contributed to spreading Vinci's precepts in the field of painting, and this sixty-seven years before the publication of the editio princeps.

Apograph manuscript of Leonardo da Vincia's Treatise on Painting Purchased on 25 October 1940 from the Hoepli antiquarian bookshop in Milan. This apograph is kept in the Vinciana Collection and was the subject of an essay by Carlo Pedretti published in 1959 (C. Pedretti, A new apograph of Leonardo da Vinci's "Treatise on Painting", in Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, Volume XXI , Librairie E. Droz, Genève, 1959, p. 446-50), as the manuscript was not cataloged by Steinitz in her bibliography, like the other apograph owned by the Collection, as it was erroneously registered in the library catalog under a non The writing of the manuscript is uniform from beginning to end, but another hand, or probably just a pen with different ink, has made small corrections to the text that denote the check made on a more correct source.

Autographed notes by Stendhal. As is clear from his Journal, Stendhal purchased the volume on 19 September 1811, eight days after his first visit to the Last Supper, during a stay in Milan that lasted a couple of weeks. However, two dates inscribed on the front counterplate of the binding and on the front of the guard sheet, respectively November 19, 1814 and October 12, 1816, would seem to indicate a delayed and dragged reading over time. The French writer, now engaged in the drafting of a Histoire de la peinture en Italie, to be contrasted with that of Luigi Lanzi, which was to be published in 1817, filled the copy in his possession with numerous annotations (pp. 117, 118, 119, 122, 135, 146, 13, 164, 231, 232), substantially neutral at first, an indication of a dispassionate approach despite the controversies that accompanied the release of Bossi's book, then gradually more and more impatient and finally of the all slaying: L'auteur n'a aucun talent, Tedio and huge yawning, for example.