Jean Paul Richter

The Scholar

Jean Paul Richter (1847–1937) was a German-born British art historian who spent decades studying Leonardo's manuscripts across the libraries and collections of Europe. At a time when Leonardo scholarship was predominantly Italian and French, Richter opened the notebooks to the English-speaking world.

His first edition of The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci appeared in 1883 — a landmark achievement that compiled, translated, and organized 1,566 passages from across the scattered manuscripts. A greatly expanded second edition was published posthumously in 1939, prepared with his wife Irma A. Richter, who later produced the popular Oxford World's Classics selection.

Richter was not merely a translator. He was the first to systematically visit all major collections holding Leonardo manuscripts and create a unified reference system. His passage numbers (Richter §1 through §1566) became the universal standard — when scholars anywhere in the world refer to a specific Leonardo text, they cite Richter's numbers.

The Central Dilemma

In his preface, Richter directly addresses the organizational problem:

A controversy arose among scholars as to whether the best method of publication was by individual manuscripts or collectively with some attempt at classification. Time has a way of proving most controversies vain, and in this instance it has shown the essential rightness of the position of both disputants.

Richter chose the subject-based approach: breaking apart the manuscripts and regrouping passages by topic. He acknowledged this was a trade-off — you gain the ability to read all of Leonardo's thoughts on, say, "Light and Shade" together, but you lose the manuscript context where that passage originally sat next to something about anatomy or architecture.

His Organizational Principle

Richter arranged his 1,566 passages into 22 sections, grouped under 8 major parts. The structure moves from Leonardo's primary vocation (painting) outward through his scientific investigations to his personal writings:

What the Structure Reveals

Richter's choice to lead with painting — assigning nearly half of all passages (1–705 out of 1,566) to the Art of Painting — reflects the hierarchy of Leonardo's own self-identification. Leonardo considered himself primarily a painter. Richter honored that, placing painting first and dedicating ten subsections to it before moving to any other topic.

The structure then radiates outward: from painting to sculpture (a related art), to architecture, then to the sciences (anatomy, geography, astronomy), practical engineering, philosophy, and finally personal writings. It's a portrait of Leonardo organized by discipline, moving from art to science to life.

What It Gets Right

• Subject access — if you want to read everything Leonardo wrote about light and shade, or anatomy, or architecture, Richter makes it possible
• Universal numbering — §62 means the same passage in every edition, every library, every language
• Comprehensive scope — 1,566 passages drawn from multiple collections across Europe, unified for the first time
• Scholarly apparatus — source identification, cross-references, notes on provenance

What It Misses

• Multi-subject pages — a folio with painting and anatomy side by side gets split across two sections, destroying the juxtaposition Leonardo intended (or at least tolerated)
• Chronology — passages from 1490 and 1510 sit side by side if they share a subject. Leonardo's evolving ideas appear static
• Visual content — the drawings are secondary to the text. For a man who thought in images, this is a significant limitation
• Completeness — even 1,566 passages represent a fraction of the surviving material, let alone what's been lost

Richter was a scholar with genuine literary sensibility. His preface is itself a significant work of Leonardo criticism. Some highlights:

The mightiest machine of the human brain acting on any set of facts known to a man of his time, he was a forerunner rather than an initiator.

Though he wrote indeed much of the theory and practice of painting, and of his many other activities, his writings were no more than part of a scheme of work. His real instrument of expression was not the pen but the point of silver or the charcoal.

Richter places Leonardo on a remarkable list — comparing him to the greatest minds in history. He cites a Princeton poll ranking the ten greatest intellects: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Leonardo, Pasteur, Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin, Einstein. "In all the world there is not, I suppose, a single student who would dispute the inclusion of this name," Richter writes.

And on the comparison with Goethe — another polymath who combined art and science:

[In Goethe's case] every single thought found perfect expression as it occurred to him, and consequently his writings are a much simpler record of his mind. Leonardo's many-sided genius could not find its full expression in any single medium.

Read Richter's complete Preface →

Browse Richter's complete Table of Contents →

Richter's system has been the backbone of Leonardo textual scholarship for 140 years. Every subsequent compiler — MacCurdy, Pedretti, Kemp — works either within Richter's framework or explicitly against it. His passage numbers are cited in virtually every scholarly article, auction catalogue, and exhibition guide that references Leonardo's writings.

Carlo Pedretti's monumental Commentary (1977) is organized entirely as corrections and annotations to Richter — updating dates, identifying sources, and expanding context while maintaining Richter's numerical structure as the spine. When Pedretti disagrees with Richter about the date of a passage, he still identifies it by Richter's number. That is the ultimate tribute to a reference system: even its corrections use it.

Irma A. Richter, Jean Paul's wife, produced the popular Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford World's Classics), which brought Leonardo's writings to a general audience. Her selections follow her husband's organizational principles — subject-based, with his numbering — but curated for accessibility rather than completeness.