SOURCE: “Leonardo's Defense of Painting,” in Leonardo da Vinci's Paragone : A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas, E. J. Brill, 1992, pp. 92-117.

In the following essay, Farago outlines the method by which Leonardo distinguished painting as superior to poetry, music, and sculpture. She also analyzes Leonardo's treatment of painting as a science, discussing his views on the creation of optical effects.

An Overview of Leonardo's Arguments

The 46 passages compiled in the Parte Prima originate in various manuscripts of which only two are identified today.¹ The heterogenous nature of the Parte Prima is due in part to its being an anthology of excerpted paragraphs and in part to the many sources of its richly conceived arguments. None of Leonardo's defenses of painting seem to derive wholesale from another source, but most of his individual arguments do have precedents, in some cases so...