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IX.
The Practice of Painting.
It is hardly necessary to offer any excuses for the division
carried out in the arrangement of the text into practical
suggestions and theoretical enquiries. It was evidently intended by
Leonardo himself as we conclude from incidental remarks in the MSS.
(for instance No 110). The fact that this arrangement was never
carried out either in the old MS. copies or in any edition since, is
easily accounted for by the general disorder which results from the
provisional distribution of the various chapters in the old copies.
We have every reason to believe that the earliest copyists, in
distributing the materials collected by them, did not in the least
consider the order in which the original MS.lay before them.
It is evident that almost all the chapters which refer to the
calling and life of the painter--and which are here brought together
in the first section (Nos. 482-508)--may be referred to two
distinct periods in Leonardo's life; most of them can be dated as
belonging to the year 1492 or to 1515. At about this later time
Leonardo may have formed the project of completing his Libro della
Pittura, after an interval of some years, as it would seem, during
which his interest in the subject had fallen somewhat into the
background.
340
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