"La natura in qualsivoglia aspetto non è mai circondata da questa linea". L'eredità di Leonardo nell'opera e nel pensiero degli incisori Giuseppe Longhi e Luigi Calamatta

The paper aims to put in relation the early Nineteenth century debate on the outline engravings and the growing interest for Leonardo’s Treatise on painting. Giuseppe Longhi, in his La calcografia propriamente detta (Milano 1830), strongly condamned those kind of engraving (as Tommaso Primoli’s prints after Flaxman drawings, 1795), repeatedly speaking og ‘aerial perspective’, which they lacked. A new edition of Leonardo’s Treatise was indeed recently published in Rome, edited by Guglielmo Manzi (1817), and Longhi surely read it. The famous Luigi Calamatta engraving after the Gioconda (1826 – 1855) has to be interpreted in the same context: Calamatta was first of all an admirer of Raphael but to show how the engraving could emulate the painting, he choose a painting by Leonardo, and the result was someting very far from the Primoli’s prints.