Lomazzo's Treatise on Painting

Abstract

G. P. Lomazzo, the Milanese painter (1538–1600), wished to give in his theoretical writings the final and conclusive argument for the nobility of painting. By demonstrating that the painter's primary and most important activity was intellectual, and that his manual activity was in all cases simply an execution of ideas mentally conceived, he extended to painters the dignity hitherto enjoyed by poets and rhetoricians. By supplying rules for the seven parts of painting that he had logically deduced from a careful definition, he “reduced painting to an art,” and elevated it to an academic subject. These demonstrations were to result in a single and complete treatise that covered theory, technique, and subject matter.