Francesco Melzi
The Faithful Heir
It would be impossible to express the grief that the death of this man brought me. Until the day I die, I shall feel it perpetually. He was like the best of fathers to me.
— Francesco Melzi, letter on Leonardo's death (1519)
The Pupil
Francesco Melzi was not, strictly speaking, a scholar. He was something more intimate: the person Leonardo trusted with his life's work.
Born into a Milanese noble family around 1491, Melzi entered Leonardo's household as a young pupil around 1506–1507 and remained with the master for the rest of Leonardo's life. He accompanied Leonardo to Rome and then to France, was present at his death in Amboise in 1519, and was named heir to all of Leonardo's manuscripts, drawings, and instruments.
Melzi carried the entire collection back to Italy and installed it at his family villa in Vaprio d'Adda, near Milan. For the next several decades — perhaps as many as forty years — he devoted himself to a single massive project: extracting Leonardo's scattered writings on painting and compiling them into a single organized manuscript.
The result was the Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, better known as the source text for the Trattato della Pittura (Treatise on Painting). It is the first — and in many ways the most intimate — attempt to make sense of Leonardo's notebooks.
The Compilation Method
Not organization but extraction — assembling a treatise from chaos
What Melzi Did
Melzi's approach was fundamentally different from every later scholar's. He did not try to organize Leonardo's notebooks — he tried to fulfill Leonardo's intention. Leonardo had repeatedly expressed his plan to write a treatise on painting. He never finished it. Melzi, who had heard the master discuss these plans, took it upon himself to assemble the treatise from the raw material of the notebooks.
His method:
- Read through all of Leonardo's manuscripts (he had access to the complete collection — far more than survives today)
- Identified every passage related to the theory and practice of painting
- Copied these passages in his own hand into a new manuscript
- Organized them into a roughly systematic order: beginning with the superiority of painting over other arts, moving through perspective, light and shade, colour, to practical advice on composition and studio practice
- Added marginal notes indicating which source manuscript each passage came from
These marginal source notes are invaluable to scholars — they reference manuscripts by letters (A, B, etc.) that sometimes correspond to surviving codices, providing evidence of notebooks that have since been lost.
The Structure of the Trattato
Melzi organized the compilation into eight parts (later editors would restructure it variously):
| Part | Subject |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | The Paragone — comparison of painting with poetry, music, and sculpture |
| Part 2 | Precepts for the painter — how to study, observe, and practice |
| Part 3 | The movements of the human figure — proportion, gesture, emotion |
| Part 4 | Drapery and the treatment of surfaces |
| Part 5 | Light and shadow |
| Part 6 | Trees and landscape |
| Part 7 | Clouds, horizon, distance |
| Part 8 | Colour and the effects of light on colour |
What Melzi Reveals
- Leonardo's intended coherence — the Trattato shows that Leonardo's scattered painting notes were meant to form a systematic theory
- Lost manuscripts — Melzi's source references mention notebooks we no longer have, proving the collection was once much larger
- Priority of painting — Leonardo considered painting the supreme art, and Melzi's compilation makes this argument more forcefully than any other document
- The master's voice — as someone who knew Leonardo personally, Melzi's editorial choices carry an authority no later scholar can claim
What Melzi Misses
- Everything non-painting — anatomy, engineering, flight, water, philosophy, personal notes — all deliberately excluded
- The drawings — Melzi copied text only; Leonardo's illustrations were not reproduced
- The chaos as content — by extracting and reorganizing, Melzi eliminated the multi-subject texture of the original pages
- Chronology — passages from different decades are merged into a single "treatise" with no temporal context
The Afterlife of the Trattato
Melzi's compilation was not published in his lifetime. Instead, it circulated in manuscript copies — abbreviated, rearranged, sometimes illustrated by other hands. The first printed edition appeared in Paris in 1651, over a century after Melzi's death, with illustrations by Nicolas Poussin. This edition shaped European art theory for the next two hundred years.
The Codex Urbinas itself — Melzi's original compilation — was rediscovered in the Vatican Library only in 1817. A scholarly edition was finally published in 1956, revealing how much the 1651 print edition had distorted Melzi's arrangement.
Today, the Trattato della Pittura is recognized as the most influential text on painting to emerge from the Renaissance — ironic, given that Leonardo never wrote it. Melzi did. His decades of patient compilation produced the book that Leonardo always intended but never completed. It is a monument to scholarly devotion that began not in a library but in a household, not with a researcher's curiosity but with a son's love.
Melzi's tragedy is that after his death, the collection he'd so carefully guarded was dispersed. His son Orazio didn't understand what he had. The notebooks were given away, stolen, sold piecemeal. By the time serious scholarship began in the 19th century, Leonardo's manuscripts were scattered across Europe. What we have today is about 25-30% of what Melzi inherited. The rest is gone. -D