18

The 1721 English Treatise of Painting: a Masonic Moment

in the Culture of Newtonianism
Richard Woodfield

The first English translation of Leonardo’s Trattato was published in 1721

by John Senex (bap. 1678, d. 1740) and William Taylor (d. 1723);1 it was one
of a series of collaborations listed in the advertisement at the back of the
volume. Taylor had made his fortune in 1719 by publishing Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe and it is likely that he provided the financial support, in lieu
of a subscription list, for the publication of the Treatise. Senex had made an
independent name for himself by publishing maps after having served an
apprenticeship as a bookseller.2 He was also an accomplished cartographer,
engraver, globemaker and publisher of scientific books. He would be made a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 1728 for his work on globes though its archive
simply lists his occupation as ‘shopkeeper.’ I will argue that the Treatise was
part of Senex’s project to promote Newtonian culture and advance the cause
of speculative freemasonry.
Senex was no ordinary bookseller. He was actively involved in, and
at the front of, the promotion of Newtonian culture. We know very little
about his personal life. His father was described as ‘gentleman’ and he was
a churchwarden in his parish church at Ludlow. Senex was apprenticed to
Robert Clavell (master of the Stationers’ Company successively for 1698–99
and 1699–1700) as a bookseller. He was intellectually ambitious. As early as
1705 he published a translation of Edmond Halley’s Latin ‘Synopsis of the
Comets.’3 He taught himself engraving and cartography and, remarkably,
took time out of his business life to develop new and up-to-date maps,
departing from the prevalent tradition of ‘cut and paste’ and based on actual
survey and measurement. In 1707 he launched into a major mapmaking
project with Charles Price: ‘we design to publish a new sett of maps, which
shall in all correctness, and all other particulars, far exceed any yet done.’4
The partnership lasted until 1710. In 1713 he published William Whiston’s
iconic wall chart of the solar system, with the orbits of the planets and Halley’s
comets. It was annotated with quotes from Isaac Newton and the ‘chart

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remained in print throughout the century and became a key icon of the period
– imbued with a sense of wonder at the vastness of the unknown, and yet with
a certainty that mankind was poised on the threshold of understanding.’5 In
1714 Senex linked up with William Taylor, of the Ship in Paternoster Row,
and took on Ephraim Chambers as an apprentice. In 1715 he published, with
Edmund Curll, John Theophilus Desaguliers’ translation Fires improv’d: being
a new method of building chimneys, so as to prevent their smoaking: ... / Written
in French, by Monsieur Gauger. Whiston and Desaguliers6 were both leading
lights in the promotion of Newtonian culture and from 1715 Senex published
a stream of books that were central to its development, starting with Halley’s
map of the forthcoming eclipse, ‘A description of the shadow of the moon
over England.’ In 1721 he experimented with a new system of mapmaking by
firing rockets off selected hilltops and triangulating the results; unfortunately
that project proved too expensive to pursue. For his work on globes he was
elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1728. Ten years later he read a paper:
‘A contrivance to make the poles of the diurnal Motion in a celestial Globe
pass round the Poles of the Ecliptic Invented by John Senex.’7 It is clear that
he both promoted and engaged in the kinds of observation and experiment
communicated by images and texts central to Newtonian culture. There were
a growing number of people like Senex in the eighteenth century and their
activities were supported through organizations like the Freemasons8 and
various philosophical clubs .9
The particular significance of the Treatise, as well as its likely audience, or
intended market, can be assessed from the translator’s preface to the work
and the advertisement at the end. The books advertised were, amongst others,
Isaac Newton’s Universal Arithmetic, his successor John Keill’s Introduction to
Natural Philosophy and Halley’s A New and Exact Map of the Zodiac; also the
works of leading Newtonian experimentalists Francis Hauksbee, Physico
Mechanical Experiments on various subjects, a number of works by Whiston,
including Elements of Euclid, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Philosophy more
easily demonstrated, and Dr. Halley’s Account of Comets illustrated, Astronomical
Principles of Religion, Natural and Revealed, Desaguliers’ translations of Edmé
Marriote’s Hydrostaticks and Willem Jacob s’Gravesande’s Mathematical
Elements of Natural Philosophy.10 Hauksbee and Desaguliers were both Fellows
and Curators of Experiments at the Royal Society. These experimentalists
also gave public lectures and demonstrations in London and the provinces,
generating substantial audiences among the general public.11 Their interest
was to demonstrate the mechanical and technological consequences of
Newtonian science: to put theory into practice.
The translator’s preface commends the study of Leonardo to contemporary
painters within the context of the new experimental philosophy:

The Example, and Success of Leonardo, cannot fail, sure, to animate our Painters
to the Study of Philosophy, and Mathematics. If their Great Master could turn the
old Philosophy of his Age to so good an Account in Painting; what might not be

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expected from the System of Nature, as it stands under its present Improvements by
the Moderns? We see what Laudable Uses he makes, even of a defective Doctrine of
Light: To what a pitch wou’d he have carried his Art, had he been acquainted with the
New, the Noble, the Newtonian Theory of Light and Colours? What Improvements
wou’d not he have made, had the Discoveries of a Bacon, or a Boyle been known
in his Days, or had it been his fortune to have lived in ours? I know not how our
Painters will answer it, if their Art should seem to decline, at a time, when the
Knowledge of Nature, and of Geometry which are the very Basis whereon it is built,
is so wonderfully improved: But this I dare venture to pronounce, that they will never
reach Leonardo in Painting, ’till they have first rival’d him in Philosophy.12

The advantage of Leonardo’s manner of writing, his ‘lack of method,’ was

that although his explanations of observed phenomena may have dated, the
observations themselves had not. In this respect the utility of the Treatise of
Painting could be compared to Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum:

If we consider the Age wherein the Author wrote, we shall find ourselves furnish’d
with one further Argument, in favour of his want of Method: For, as the Work now
stands, loose, and unconnected; such of the Obsolete Dogmata of those Days, as
occur, lie entirely at the Readers Mercy, and may be thrown by, and passed over,
without the least Damage to the rest of the Work: Whereas had the whole been
woven into a Regular System, there had been no taking out, without tearing; the
drawing of a few Threads, wou’d not only have disfigured the Rest, but have even
endangered the whole Piece. ’Tis for this Reason perhaps, that my Lord Bacon’s Silva
Silvarum, which is written perfectly in Leonardo’s manner, continues still in Use and
Esteem; while the more Methodical Productions of our System-Mongers, are become
antiquated and out of Date.13

For Senex, Leonardo’s experimental approach, both to the observation of the

natural world and to its depiction and its emulation by contemporary artists,
would have contributed to the development of a Newtonian culture and the
ultimate glory of the art of painting. By linking Leonardo with Bacon, Senex
placed him in the pantheon of heroes of the experimental method.
In 1721 English painting was in a parlous state. As an art it was just going
through a process of discovery.14 Earlier, Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke of the
Governour … and Henry Peacham in The Compleat Gentleman … had advocated
the ability to draw as an instrumental skill, in Elyot’s case to pursue war and
in Peacham’s case as a gentlemanly amusement. The appreciation of painting
as an art became more serious in the circles of Lord Arundel and Charles I
but this experienced a set-back in the interregnum. With the return of the
monarchy in the person of Charles II, the cultivation of artistic taste was re-
legitimated as a conspicuous social practice and revivified as a luxury trade.15
For luxury the English bought European goods, conspicuously Italian and
French, but from the Netherlands as well. They also imported artists to
delivery a quality of product that was not available at home. English virtuosi16
also familiarized themselves with continental art theory, starting with Richard
Haydocke’s translation A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Painting
Caruinge & building written first in Italian by Jo: Paul Lomatius painter of Milan

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(Oxford, 1598). Franciscus Junius wrote De picture veterum, translated as The

Painting of the Ancients (1638), for the Arundel circle.17 John Evelyn translated
Fréart de Chambray’s An Idea of the Perfection of Painting (1668) as part of his
larger contribution to the Royal Society’s project for the history of trades.18
He also wrote Sculptura: or, the history and art of chalcography and engraving
in copper, which was presented to the Royal Society in a written form on 10
June 1662 but not printed until 1759, and published a translation of Fréart de
Chambray’s A Parallel of Architecture in 1664. It is significant that Evelyn did
not translate Leonardo’s treatise but did translate Fréart’s work that had been
written in declared criticism of Leonardo’s failure to offer an account of the
‘parts’ of painting, along the lines already established for poetry and rhetoric,
that could be applied to the judgement of individual works. More translations
followed: Henri Testelin’s The sentiments of the most excellent painters concerning
the practice of painting; collected and composed in tables of precepts (1688), Charles-
Alphonse Du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica (trans. John Dryden, 1695), Charles
Le Brun’s The Conference … upon Expression (1701), André Félibien’s The tent
of Darius explain’d: or the queens of Persia at the feet of Alexander … with a print
of the Tent, engraven by Mr. Gribelin (1704). These were followed by Roger de
Piles’s The art of painting & the lives of the painters (1706) and his Dialogue upon
colouring (1711).
English authors on painting had largely concerned themselves with
producing pattern books, recipe books and manuals like Alexander Browne’s
Ars Pictoria (1669), William Salmon’s Polygraphice (1672, 1685 and 1701), John
Elsum’s The Art of Painting in the Italian Manner (1703 and 1704) and Thomas
Page’s The Art of Painting in its rudiment, progress, and perfection (1720) amongst
many others. William Aglionby’s Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues (1685)
was an exceptional attempt to domesticate European ideas19 until Jonathan
Richardson published, in quick succession, An Essay on the Theory of Painting
in 1715, with a second edition in 1725, and Two Discourses in 1719.
Before Richardson English writers had typically been concerned with the
craft of painting while the French writers in English translation had been
concerned with what we would now call its art. The French academicians
were concerned to establish a poetics for painting equivalent to the ancient
treatises on poetry and rhetoric. Junius’s De pictura veterum (1637) had self-
consciously modeled his work on Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace and his
aesthetic categories were followed by Fréart de Chambray, setting an example
to following writers. The works of the French authors in combination with
Richardson formed the basis of the subsequent development of English art
criticism and instruction. Painting manuals and pattern books continued to
be produced through the eighteenth century into the present day. Insofar as
any of Leonardo’s maxims had been absorbed into those works his treatise
itself became marginal to English art criticism. It does not, for example, figure
in Chambers’s Cyclopedia (1728), which instead cites Du Fresnoy, Félibien,
Testelin and de Piles as authorities in its treatment of painting and drawing.
Any attempt to trace the impact of the 1721 Treatise of Painting on later writers

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would be undermined by the fact that many of its ‘Excellent Maxims’20 had
already been circulated by English translations of French texts written in
response to the original French translation of 1651. It would be useful to draw
a distinction between Leonardo’s trattato21 and its translations as text or parole
and its appearance as book. In this way one can recognize that his maxims
could emerge without a familiarity with Senex’s book.22
It might just be thought that Senex’s publication of Leonardo had been
produced with the St. Martin’s Lane Academy in mind. This is possible
but improbable. The Academy had been set up by Louis Cheron and John
Vanderbank in 1720 but it was a studio academy ‘for the Improvement of
Painters and Sculptor by drawing from the Naked.’23 Unlike the French
Academy, which positively encouraged a verbal and literary approach to
the practice of art and based teaching on lectures and critiques of selected
paintings, the tutors at St. Martin’s Lane had a decidedly more hands-on way
of dealing with the craft of drawing.
There was a definite gap between Richardson’s and the French attitude to
the practice of art and Senex’s views on the construction of visual imagery,
including painting. The academicians had talked airily about the breadth of
knowledge requisite for a painter and Jonathan Richardson emphasized its
kinship with poetry, history and letters. Fundamental to the Academy, and
to Richardson, was Bellori’s doctrine of the Idea, circulated in Britain through
Dryden’s ‘Parallel of Poetry and Painting’ first published in 169524 and then
constantly republished through the eighteenth century. The artist had a duty
to rise above the contingencies of observed nature to capture the ideal. This
had a real impact on the effect of empirical discovery on artists’ practices:
some features of nature should not be observed in the painted image.25 Insofar
as Richardson was concerned to promote portraiture he did that in terms of
its idealizing possibilities, emphasizing throughout the notion of refinement.
Senex, by contrast, was engaged with science in its practical form of technology.
As the Preface says:

The Province of a Painter, as our Author has fix’d its Boundary, seems too wide and
spacious to have been ever discharged in its full Extent, by any Man but himself.
The Management of the Pencil, and the mixture of Colours, with the Knowledge
of Perspective, and a habit of Designing, wherewith most Painters seem to content
themselves, make but a part of the Art as understood by Leonardo. To these he calls
in the assistance of other Arts; Anatomy, Opticks, Meteorology, Mechanicks, &c.
Searching attentively into the Powers of Nature, in order to form an Art that may
imitate her; and from the Depths of Philosophy, drawing Means for the improvement
of Painting.26

Leonardo’s Treatise of Painting was quite unlike any other publication

on painting in England before 1721. While Richardson had developed
an English version of French theory, Senex proposed something quite
different by publishing Leonardo as the first of a number of ‘philosophical’
or scientific/technological works for the benefit of the visual artist. In

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the space of four years from Leonardo’s Treatise of Painting in 1721 Senex
published: Claude Perrault’s A treatise of the five orders in architecture27 and
William Cheselden’s The anatomy of the humane body in 1722;28 Nicolas Bion’s
The construction and principal uses of mathematical instruments … To which are
added The construction and uses of such instruments as are omitted by M. Bion:
particularly of those invented or improved by the English; by Edmund Stone29 and
Bernardino Genga’s Anatomy improv’d and illustrated with regard to the uses
thereof in designing: not only laid down from an examen of the bones and muscles
of the human body, but also demonstrated and exemplified from the most celebrated
antique statues in Rome in 1723; Sébastien Le Clerc, A treatise of architecture,
with remarks and observations: Necessary for young people, who wou’d apply
themselves to that noble art, translated by Ephraim Chambers in 1723/24;
Willem Jacob s’Gravesande’s An essay on Perspective, written in French ... and
now translated [by E. Stone] in 1724 and Andrea Pozzo’s Rules and examples of
perspective proper for painters and architects in 1725. The collected set, with the
notable exception of Bion, follows the French Academy’s notion of suitable
materials for the education of an artist.30 There was, however, a fundamental
difference between Senex and the French art theorists and that lay in their
priorities when assessing the relative merits of the contribution of the study
of paintings and science to the practice of an authentic art. If Senex had
known that the French academy had evicted its teacher of perspective,
Abraham Bosse, using Leonardo’s Traitté to undermine him, he would, no
doubt, have been horrified. The French academicians did not share Senex’s
enthusiasm for the stringencies of science. Their critical debate would have
focused on judgements on painting from the Royal Collection based upon
the ‘parts’ of painting identified by Fréart and along the lines exemplified by
the academicians’ publications listed above. As Nikolaus Pevsner established
a long time ago, Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s ambition to establish rules for the
production of painting was gradually eroded by the battle between the
Poussinistes and Rubenistes, culminating in the election of Roger de Piles to
Honorary Membership of the Académie:

The academy in admitting the point of view of the Rubenistes had parted with its
fundamental principle of the exclusive validity of rule and form. Couleur became
an accepted value as important as dessin, and sentiment was allowed to guide the
judging of pictures where before the application of fixed precepts had reigned.
Venetian qualities were appreciated besides Roman, and Flemish besides French.31

The fact that there had been compromise did not alter the centrality of
the doctrine of ‘parts’ to the intellectual discussion of selected paintings.
In this context, Charles Le Brun’s introduction of Leonardo’s Traitté into
the Académie’s discourses was intended to undermine Abraham Bosse’s
doctrinaire insistence on the rules of perspective. Bosse was a champion of the
innovative mathematician Desargues, having published Manière universelle
de Mr. Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective in 1636. Although the Académie
delivered lectures on perspective, geometry, and anatomy and housed a

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growing reference library, science was not,

it would seem, a leading preoccupation of
the painting academicians or their pupils.
In the event, Leonardo’s Treatise did
not match the popularity of Richardson
and the French treatises through the
eighteenth century amongst the art-loving
public. This is not to say that artists did
not read Leonardo but that the project
of the Treatise, as presented by Senex,
would not have been uppermost in their
minds. It did not advocate the principle
of idealizing refinement. The depiction
of seen experience would have needed
to be moderated by the demands of taste
if not just satisfied by the prevailing
formulae. Hogarth, for example, did not
feel constrained by Genga’s anatomically
informed rendition of Venus (Figure 18.1)
to produce his own image of Venus in
The Analysis of Beauty (1753) (Figure 18.2)
and neither the illustrator of the Treatise
(Figure 18.3) nor Desaguliers’s A Course
of Experimental Philosophy (Figure 18.4)
showed themselves able to transcend
formulae for muscular action to match
Leonardo’s own precise observations.
The operations of light in nature and
the mechanical behavior of bodies,
topics both central to the Treatise, were,
however, popular with the public that
literally bought into Newtonian culture
by either paying to buy books or attend
lectures.
There was, however, another more
compelling motive behind Senex’s
publication of the Treatise in 1721 and that
was his participation in the establishment
of modern Freemasonry, starting with
the creation of a Grand Lodge pro tempore
in 1717, the approval of its Book of
Constitutions in 1721 and the publication of
James Anderson’s The Constitutions of The
Free-Masons Containing the History, Charges, 18.1  Venus, Table XL, from Bernardino Genga,
Regulations, &c. of that most Ancient and Anatomy improv’d … (London, 1723)

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18.2  ‘Venus,’
detail of Plate
1, William
Hogarth, The
Analysis of Beauty
(London, 1753)

18.3  Thrusting
and Pulling, front
p. 123, from
Leonardo da
Vinci, A Treatise
of Painting
(London, 1721)

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18.4  Feats of
Strength, plate 19,
from Desaguliers,
A Course of
Experimental
Philosophy
(London, 1745)

Right Worshipful FRATERNITY by Senex and John Hooke in 1723.32 During that
period of time Senex became Senior Warden of the Lodge at The Greyhound,
Fleet Street33 and then in 1723 Junior Grand Warden of the Grand Lodge to
Desaguliers’ Deputy Grand Master.34 As the historian of Freemasonry Andrew
Prescott observes:

At the end of the 1723 Book of Constitutions, there is a list of other books published
jointly by Senex and Hooke. These introduce a further and very important theme.
They comprise works on architecture including two sumptuously engraved folios,
the first a translation by the architect John James, a member of a masonic lodge at
Greenwich, of Andrea Pozzo’s Rules and Examples of Perspective Proper for Painters and
Architects and the second a translation of Claude Perrault’s Treatise of the Five Orders
of Columns in Architecture. Both these volumes were key texts for the understanding
of Palladian architecture. Their beautiful illustrations were engraved by the veteran

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book engraver John Sturt, who was also probably responsible for the ‘curious copper
plate’ which was made for tickets for the Grand Feast in 1722. The provision of these
Palladian handbooks as ‘further reading’ at the end of the Book of Constitutions is a
reminder that the legendary history provided by Anderson was as much as anything
a history of architecture and aesthetics, essentially telling the story of the loss of
the secrets of classical architecture, their rediscovery in the seventeenth century
and revival in the eighteenth century. It is easy to forget that when Anderson talks
about a ‘well built arch of the Augustan stile’ he was not indulging in symbolism
or masonic allegory – he meant exactly what he said. The Book of Constitutions was
Palladian propaganda, and the concerns of Senex and the others as much aesthetic as
scientific.35

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to enter into a detailed discussion of

Palladian architecture except for noting that it was regarded as the ‘true
style’: a rational theory of architecture par excellence reflecting in its very
nature the working of God’s laws. The treatises on perspective were ‘free’
in terms of aesthetic values; they could support baroque, rococo or classicist
styles, while Perrault obviously promoted classicism. Senex’s activities
in mapmaking and the publication of Newtonian texts had led him to
collaborate with Desaguliers in his efforts to promote Newtonian culture
through the Freemasons. Between 1717 and 1723 they actively recruited
new members. This drive for expansion concluded Anderson’s account of
the history of Masonry:

And now the Freeborn BRITISH NATIONS, disentangled from foreign and civil Wars,
and enjoying the good Fruits of Peace and Liberty, having of late much indulg’d their
happy Genius for Masonry of every sort, and reviv’d the drooping Lodges of London,
with several worthy particular Lodges, that have a quarterly Communication, and
an annual grand Assembly, wherein the Forms and Usages of the most ancient and
worshipful Fraternity are wisely propagated, and the Royal Art duly cultivated, and
the Cement of the Brotherhood preserv’d; so that the whole Body resembles a well built
Arch; several Noblemen and Gentlemen of the best Rank, with Clergymen and learned
Scholars of most Possessions and Denominations, having frankly join’d and submitted
to take the Charges, and to wear the Badges of a Free and Accepted Mason, under our
present worthy Grand-Master, the most noble PRINCE John Duke of Montague.36

Freemasonry was developed as an egalitarian movement in which members

of all ‘respectable’ social classes could mix and discuss matters of common
interest free from the constraints of politics and religion.37
Studies of the early history of the Grand Lodge have demonstrated that
a significant number of Freemasons were, or about to become, Fellows of
the Royal Society. For the period 1723 to 1741, 89 out of between 200 and
250 Fellows of the Royal Society were Freemasons and Senex himself was
to become a Fellow in 1728. Significantly for the practice of the visual art of
painting Sir James Thornhill was made FRS in 1723 and Senior Grand Warden
in 1729.38
Senex’s publication of treatises devoted to a scientific, and mathematical,
approach to the visual arts promoted a core element of the new Masonic
ideology: God the architect of a Newtonian universe. We do not know who

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bought the Treatise on its publication39 but we do have a subscription list for
Genga’s Anatomy improv’d: 32 (with a possible addition of 11) subscribers out
of 143 were Freemasons40 while only 9 identified themselves with the medical
professions; a number were also Fellows of the Royal Society. A significant
audience for the Treatise would have been Masonic but it would also have had
a wider appeal to readers interested in applied science.41 There can, though,
be little doubt that in his efforts to recruit interested members to Freemasonry
Senex would have sought out painters and engravers.42 As Laurence Worms
has established, a significant number of engravers became Freemasons:
Benjamin Cole, John Sturt, John Kirk, John Carwitham, Emmanuel Bowen
and John Pine.43 In the Constitutions:

we have a conjunction of four of my map engravers – Senex, Pine, Bowen and Sturt.
At the very least witnesses – but were they more than that? Let me use a word from
Desaguliers himself – in his later experiments in electricity he employed the word
‘conductor,’ in a specific electrical sense, for the first time. I would suggest that at the
very least this group of engravers acted as the conductor for the flow of ideas that
allowed organised modern freemasonry to grow at the pace it did. They produced
and dispersed the multiple copies of texts and images that underlay that rapid
expansion. They gave the movement the solidity, substance and sheer outreach of
print.

… to Desaguliers, and to Senex, and to others, what they were doing in science, in
freemasonry – and in architecture – was all of a piece. One of Desaguliers’ less well-
known publications was a poem – ‘The Newtonian System of the World the Best
Model of Government: an Allegorical Poem’ (1728). It was all a matter of the routing
of goths and vandals – a new, orderly and benign world. But of course in a way Senex,
and the map engravers, were already remapping and reshaping that world before
Desaguliers arrived on the scene. Sturt was already publishing the new architectural
texts. Senex was publishing Halley, Whiston and Newton before he came into contact
with Desaguliers – already making, publishing and distributing the texts and images
of the new science. He must have been an ally that those early modern freemasons
were very glad indeed to have.44

Membership of the Freemasons would be particularly useful to British painters.

They were going through difficult times in the early decades of the eighteenth
century as a result of competition from foreign art and artists. Richardson
offered one response, Senex another. One route to social recognition was for
artists to associate themselves with the connoisseurs and literati. Another was
to connect themselves to supporters of the new science who could be led to
appreciate the distinctive natural philosophical qualities of a sophisticated
art of painting. Senex made no bones about the fact that painting was one
of masonry’s allied trades. In its prefatory history of the Masons and their
accomplishments the Constitutions told its readers:

Nor should it be forgot, that Painters also, and Statuaries, were always reckon’d
good Masons, as much as Builders, Stone-cutters, Bricklayers, Carpenters, Joiners,
Upholders or Tent-Makers, and a vast many other Crafts men that could be nam’d,
who perform according to Geometry, and the Rules of Building …45

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Painters were specifically identified as potential recruits. They could find

commissions and support through the brotherhood.
The ‘Life of Leonardo’ that introduced the Treatise repeatedly remarks
on his range of skills. The English translator did not have to embroider
the original French text much to make Leonardo a suitable role model for
English painter Masons. His master Verocchio was ‘not only a Painter,
but an Engraver, Architect, Carver, and Goldsmith.’46 Leonardo, besides
being a painter, was ‘a good Architect, and able Carver and extremely well
versed in the Mechanicks.’47 As an architect he ‘banish’d all the old Gothick
Fashions … and reduc’d every thing to the happy Simplicity and Purity
of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.’48 He ‘spent several Years in the Study
of Philosophy and Mathematics.’49 He worked in Milan ‘Labouring for the
Service of Milan in Quality of Architect and Engineer; he was called by the
Dukes order, to Adorn and Beautify it with his Paintings,’50 elaborating
Giffart’s original ‘Après que Leonard eut travaillé pour la commodité de
la ville de Milan, il s’occupa par les orders du Duc à l’embellir & à l’orner
de ses peintures.’ He was skilled in anatomy ‘and made abundance of
Draughts from the Life.’51 In his school in Milan he ‘had made Painters,
Carvers, Architects, Founders, and Engravers in Cristal and Precious
Stones.’52 He made ‘a very Curious Automata.’53 In short:

Never was Painter more knowing in the Theory of his Art, than Leonardo. He was
well skill’d in Anatomy, a Master in Opticks, and Geometry, and applied himself to
the Study of Nature and her Operations, both on Earth, and in the Heavens,54 with
wonderful Alacrity. So many different Studies and such variety of Reflections, as they
present, furnished him with all the Knowledge which a Painter could wish for, and
rendered him the ablest Person that his Profession has ever known.55

Not only was Leonardo a good tradesman, Senex considered his interests
exemplary for Britain’s visual artists. If they followed his example they would
be worthy of public respect.56
The intended readers of The Treatise of Painting were practitioners of the
visual arts, Freemasons and people like John Senex himself. They would have
been an educated public interested in the idea of experiment with experience
that could be applied to the solution of practical problems. The illustrations in
Leonardo’s Treatise stood to his experimental observations as Desaguliers’s did
to his; their connection with luxury painting was not readily apparent though
their connection with scientifically informed image making was.57 The Treatise
of Painting did not exactly conform to eighteenth-century notions of what a
treatise of painting might be, precedent having been set by Du Fresnoy, de
Piles and Richardson.
The concept of ‘fine artist’ was a nineteenth-century invention. In the early
eighteenth century picture-makers worked in a number of allied trades58 as
portraitists, as painters of miniatures,59 landscapes, signs, and scenery, as
cartographers, topographers, illustrators and decorators. Sir Godfrey Kneller
ran a picture-making factory with assistants painting in the bits ‘after he

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had finished the face and sketched in the outlines of the shoulders etc.’60
Picture-making in England also became a shared public activity through
the invention of caricature and the rise of drawing and painting as forms
of leisurely accomplishment.61 Architects were ‘picture’ or ‘image’-makers
too. One possible schematization of picture-makers might divide amateurs
and professionals; another might divide the professionals into copyists and
originals. There certainly were not many originals in England in the 1720s
and Senex had tried to become an original through his new, observational,
methods of mapmaking. Given the states of image-making and medicine in
his day it is significant that he chose to describe the best kind of painter by
contrast with the quack:

Must it not be pleasant, to see Men about to represent Natural Objects, who are
unacquainted with the Nature and Properties of the Objects to be represented?
Quacks, indeed, there may be in Painting as well as in other Professions; but
to become a Regular Painter, ’tis indispensably necessary that a Man serve an
Apprenticeship to Philosophy. We have People who pretend to cure Diseases,
without knowing any thing of the Animal Oeconomy, or of the Powers of
Medicines; and we have others, who wou’d be thought to Paint by the mere
Mechanism of a Hand, and a Pencil moving in this and that Direction: but, as the
College will never allow the former to be Physicians; so, I see no reason why the
latter shou’d be complemented with the Title of Painter.62

The painter who practises his art by copying other painters is nothing less
than a fraud catering to the pretensions of the ignorant. If painting were to
regain the stature it had in classical antiquity and the Renaissance it would
have to be based on a thorough-going scientific understanding of the visual
world.
In the eighteenth century world of luxury commodities painters and their
patrons chose to follow artistic conventions rather than scientific procedures.
Their language and preoccupations followed those of the French academic
theorists and their English successor Richardson, who argued:

’tis not every Picture-Maker that ought to be called a Painter, as every Rhymer, or
Grubstreet Tale Writer is not a Poet, or Historian: A Painter ought to be a Title of
Dignity, and understood to imply a Person endued with such Excellencies of Mind,
and Body, as have ever been the Foundations of Honour amongst Men.63

Richardson’s major concern was with style and social graces64 while Senex
was preoccupied with matters to do with the science of the craft and respect
within the philosophical community. He had no reason to feel troubled by
his social status as a tradesman, Freemason and future Fellow of the Royal
Society.
Senex saw Leonardo as an iconic figure, ideal for the promotion of a
Newtonian approach to the visual arts. What kind of painting would he have
thought worthy of admiration? Certainly not the sort he saw produced in 1720.
With the natural world available in all its glory, and the recent discoveries of

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modern science, he wanted nothing less than a Leonardo to do it justice. Sir

Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke had been such people but the future of
painting lay with Sir Joshua Reynolds, the annotator of Du Fresnoy, and the
Royal Academy.

Notes

1 Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise of Painting ... Translated from the Original Italian ...
To which is prefix’d, the author’s Life [compiled by Pierre François Giffart]; done from
the last edition of the French (hereafter Treatise) (London, 1721). It was translated
from Trattato della pittura di Lionardo da Vinci nouamente dato in luce, con la vita
dell’istesso autore, scritta da Rafaelle du Fresne (Paris, 1651). The Life of Leonardo
was modified in places to accord with the text of the Du Fresne edition. The
translator also referred to the first French translation, Traitté de la peinture ...
Donné au public et traduit d’italien en françois par R.F.S.D.C. (Paris, 1651). The
Treatise (1721) was not a complete translation of the Trattato (1651).
2 See Laurence Worms, ‘Senex, John (bap. 1678, d. 1740),’ Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), available at <http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/25085>, accessed 4 August 2006. I am deeply
indebted to Mr. Worms for two stimulating conversations about Senex’s books,
maps, and globes in the British Library, for commenting on this text and for sight
of his unpublished papers: ‘The Search for John Senex F.R.S.: an Aspect of the
Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade,’ given to the Bibliographical Society, 18
January 2000; and ‘John Senex: Publisher of the 1723 “Constitutions of the Free-
masons,”’ a paper given at the Centre for Research into Freemasonry, University
of Sheffield, 5 February 2003. Also see ‘The Maturing of British Commercial
Cartography: William Faden (1749–1836) and the Map Trade,’ The Cartographic
Journal 41, Issue 1 (June 2004).
3 A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets ... Translated from the Original, Printed at
Oxford. / [by HALLEY, Edmund] (1705), BL 532.e.7.
4 Worms, ‘The Search,’ pp. 5–6. ‘Proposals for a new sett of correct Mapps,’ BL
1240.k.9.(15.)
5 Worms, ‘The Search,’ p. 7.
6 On Desaguliers see Patricia Fara, ‘Desaguliers, John Theophilus (1683–1744),’
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edn, May 2006, available at <http://
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7539>, accessed 11 October 2006.
7 Printed in Philosophical Transactions 40 (1737): 203.
8 There is much useful information on the activities of the various lodges and
the book-collecting of their members in Trevor Stewart, ‘English Speculative
Freemasonry: Some Possible Origins, Themes and Developments,’ United Grand
Lodge of England Prestonian Lecture 2004. I am indebted for this and other Masonic
material to Dr. Estelle Stubbs and Prof. Andrew Prescott, erstwhile Director, of
the Centre for Research into Freemasonry at the University of Sheffield and for
their very helpful comments on this text.
9 Work needs to be done on the social composition of participants of such
organizations and communities following the example of Michael Hunter,
‘The Social Basis and Changing Fortunes of an Early Scientific Organisation:

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 Richard Woodfield 489

an Analysis of the Membership of the Early Royal Society, 1660–1685,’ Notes

and Records of the Royal Society 31 (1976): 9–114. It would be quite wrong to
assume that membership was necessarily confined to the upper end of the
social spectrum. Newton was a farmer’s son, Whiston a country rector’s son,
Desaguliers a teacher, Hauksbee a draper and Halley the son of a rich London
soap boiler.
10 In 1734 Senex would publish the first volume of Desaguliers’s A Course of
Experimental Philosophy, which was a collection of his lectures.
11 On their activities see Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart, Practical Matters:
Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire 1687–1851 (Cambridge MA
and London, 2004) and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton
and the Culture of Newtonianism (New York, 1995). Larger contextualization is
offered by Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
(London, 2000).
12 Treatise, translator’s preface, n.p. Italicization omitted from this and other
quotations from the preface.
13 Treatise, translator’s preface, n.p.
14 On this topic see Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: the Growth of Interest in the
Arts in England, 1680 – 1768 (New Haven CT and London, 1988).
15 For a sensitive and nuanced account of the luxury trades in seventeenth-century
England, see Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in
Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2005).
16 On virtuosi see Walter B. Houghton, Jr., ‘The English Virtuoso in the
Seventeenth Century,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1) (1942): 51–73; and 3 (2)
(1942): 190–219.
17 For the development of connoisseurship the following passage in Franciscus
Junius, The Painting of the Ancients (1638), p. 76, is significant: ‘The younger
Plinie sayth also expressly, none but an Artificer can judge of a Painter, Carver,
Caster in Brasse, or worker in clay. Observe in the meane time, that in these
words of Plinie we must understand by the name Artificer, not such a workman
onely as doth really paint and carve, but such a Lover and well-willer of art
as by a rare and well-exercised Imaginative facultie, is able to conferre his
conceived Images with the Pictures and Statues that come nearest unto Nature,
and is likewise able to discern by a cunning and infallible conjecture the
severall hands of divers great Masters out of their manner of working.’ Junius
was adviser to Arundel and De pictura veterum (1637) was used by Fréart de
Chambray.
18 On which see Walter B. Houghton, Jr., ‘The History of Trades: Its Relation to
Seventeenth-Century Thought: As Seen in Bacon, Petty, Evelyn, and Boyle,’
Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1) (Jan. 1941): 33–60.
19 Aglionby was elected Fellow of the Royal Society on 17 November 1667.
20 For which see Thomas Frangenberg, ‘Leonardo’s “Excellent Maxims” in the
Development of Seventeenth-Century Art Theory,’ in S. Schütze (ed.), Estetica
Barocca (Rome, 2005), pp. 141–5.
21 By ‘trattato’ is meant the ur-text sought by Leonardo scholars.
22 A fact remarked on by Kate Trauman Steinitz, Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della
Pittura/Treatise on Painting: a Bibliography (Copenhagen, 1958), pp. 10–11.

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23 Announcement of October 1722 quoted in W.H. Whitley, Artists and their Friends
in England 1700–1799 (New York and London, 1968), vol. I, p. 18.
24 As a preface to his translation of Du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica.
25 Gombrich offers the example of Gilpin, writing in 1791: ‘The appearance of blue
and purple trees, unless in the remote distance, offends, and though the artist
may have authority from nature for his practice, yet the spectator, not versed
in such effects, may be displeased. Painting, like poetry, is intended to excite
pleasure: and though the painter with this view should avoid such images as are
trite and vulgar; yet he should seize only those which are easy and intelligible.
Neither poetry or painting is a proper vehicle of learning. The painter will do
well to avoid every uncommon appearance in nature.’ Art and Illusion (Oxford,
1986), p. 323.
26 Treatise, translator’s preface, n.p.
27 A re-publication of John Sturt’s original edition of 1708.
28 Cheselden worked on his drawing skills in the St. Martin’s Lane Academy.
Certainly his Anatomy had none of the artistic polish of Genga’s, which had the
trappings of a luxury volume.
29 Stone’s translation made important additions to the French text that made
the English edition vastly superior to the French and in line with English
technology. It would have made a perfect complement to Leonardo in terms of
the advanced knowledge of the age.
30 One can imagine a communality of interest between Senex and Giffart (b. 1637,
d. 1723), the producer of the French 1716 edition, who was himself an engraver
and publisher of numerous scientific studies. This emerges in the ways in which
they describe Leonardo’s skills.
31 Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art Past and Present (New York: Da Capo Press,
1973), p. 103.
32 For a discussion of the production of The Book of Constitutions and the particular
role played in it by Senex and his fellow craft- and tradesmen see Andrew
Prescott, ‘The Production of the English Books of Constitutions in the Eighteenth
Century,’ at <http://www.lodgehope337.org.uk/lectures/prescott%20S051.PDF>,
accessed 19 March 2007.
33 J.R. Clarke, ‘The Royal Society and Early Grand Lodge Freemasonry,’ Ars
Quatuor Coronatorum 80 (1967): 14.
34 The manuscript of Grand Lodge recorded:
This manuscript was begun the 25th November 1723.
The Rt. Hon (ble) Francis Earl of Dalkeith Grand Master
Dr. John Theophilus Desaguliers Deputy Grand Master
Francis Sorell Esq Grand Wardens
Mr. John Senex
In 1725 he was an ordinary member of the Lodge meeting at the Fleece in Fleet
Street. The members of that Lodge are recorded as follows: Dr. Natt. Hickman
(Master), Wm. Ffoulkes Esq. (Warden), Mr. Cha. Champion (Warden), Jn. Mead,
Sr., Tho. Jones, Edw. Metcalf, Tho. Bigg, Cha. Townsend Esq., Wm. Deard,
Jno. Senex, Hen. Ffoulkes, Wm. Mears, Wm. Goosetree, Sr. Wm. Rich Bar.,
Tho. Austin, Josh. Dickenson Esq., Jno. Atwood Esq., Edw. Cotton, Wm. Sayer.
Personal communication from Dr. Stubbs. Information drawn from a volume of

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Masonic reprints entitled Quatuor Coronatorum Antigrapha: Masonic Reprints of the

Quatuor Coronati Lodge, no. 2076, London, vol. X.
35 Prescott, ‘The Production,’ p. 5. It should be emphasized that for people like Senex
there was no contradiction between art and science. In its modern meaning and
as it emerged in the eighteenth century, the ‘aesthetic’ referred to the judgement
of taste standing in contrast to the judgements of reason and experience. In
eighteenth-century literary genres, the Treatise was not a text in aesthetics or in art
criticism but a technical manual, as were the architectural treatises.
36 John Senex and John Hooke, The Constitutions of The Free-Masons Containing
the History, Charges, Regulations, &c. of that most Ancient and Right Worshipful
FRATERNITY (London, 1723), pp. 45–6. A footnote at the bottom of the page
mentions the Earl of Burlington ‘who bids fair to be the best Architect of Britain.’
Although William Hogarth was a freemason, he fell out with the Burlington
Circle and also resigned his membership; whether or how these are connected
might be worth investigation. Laurence Worms comments in a personal
communication: ‘Hogarth – he too was originally an engraver – and in some
sense a map engraver – he engraved a number of plans for Aubry de la Motraye:
“Travels through Europe, Asia, and into Part of Africa” (1723).’
37 As Roy Porter observed, ’The lodge created a social milieu rejoicing in British
constitutionalism and prosperity, and dedicated to virtue and humanity
under the Great Architect; yet masonry was also riddled with typically British
ideological tensions, combining deference to hierarchy with a measure of
egalitarianism, acceptance of distinction with social exclusivity and commitment
to rationality with a taste for mysteries and ritual.’ See Porter, Enlightenment,
p. 38.
38 On the subject of the connection between Freemasonry and the Royal Society,
there is much useful information in Clarke, ‘The Royal Society’: 110–19. Robert
Lomas, in The Invisible College: The Royal Society, Freemasonry and the Birth of
Modern Science (London, 2002), has argued that the Royal Society was, itself, a
creation of the Masonic movement.
39 The scarcity of the Treatise would indicate that it was published in a limited run.
It did not really become generally popular until the late nineteenth century.
40 Information kindly supplied by Dr. Stubbs.
41 Prof. Prescott has raised the possibility that William Taylor, Senex’s co-publisher,
was a Mason as well: ‘There are a number of William Taylors mentioned in
the early membership lists, but since there is no qualifying information about
profession or residence, we cannot establish whether any of them was the
publisher.’
42 More work needs to be done on engravers, as art historians generally tend to
regard engraving as a minor art. It was, however, at the forefront of scientific
publishing and, as members of the Royal Society appreciated, there could be
little scientific progress without it. A useful start has been made by Martin
Kemp in ‘Coming into Line: Graphic Demonstrations of Skill in Renaissance and
Baroque Engravings,’ in John Onians (ed.), Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and
Culture in Honour of E.H. Gombrich at 85 (London, 1994).
43 Prof. Prescott also suggests that ‘there is an interesting further cross-connection
between Taylor, Senex and the first edition of the Book of Constitutions in that
Pine, the engraver of the frontispiece of the Book of Constitutions, had first
acquired his reputation as an engraver by the frontispiece to Robinson Crusoe he

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did for Taylor. It is a curious sort of inversion – most writers on freemasonry

have tended to assume that as a hidden secret network it explains connections
behind men like Desaguliers, Senex, etc., but in fact I think it works the
opposite way – as your article emphasises – namely facets of the Grand Lodge
in 1717 seem to have been the creation of a distinct scientific and literary set.’
Furthermore Prof. Prescott wonders whether ‘one function of Freemasonry
from the point of view of men like Desaguliers was that it enabled them to have
contact with practical scientific men like Sisson or Pine who were not FRS and
not likely to be.’
44 Worms, ‘John Senex: Publisher.’
45 Senex and Hooke, The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, p. 26.
46 Treatise, p. 2. Du Fresne: ‘Egli nella scuola d’Andrea, che non solo s’applicana
alla pittura, ma ancora su scultore, architetto, intagliatore, & orefice.’ Note that
in Giffart and Senex the engraver has moved up to exchange places with the
sculptor.
47 Treatise, p. 6.
48 Treatise, p. 8.
49 Treatise, p. 9.
50 Treatise, p. 10. Du Fresne: ‘Non content il prencipe che Lionardo come architetto
& ingegnero illustrasse il suo stato, volse ancora ch’egli l’ornasse con qualche
opera segnalata di pittura.’
51 Treatise, p. 13. This combination of trades would seem to be Giffart’s.
52 Treatise, p. 15. This formulation of trades is not in Du Fresne.
53 Treatise, p. 15. An interest in automation was at the heart of Newtonian
mechanics. Note Desaguliers’s later An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton
… By M. Vaucanson (London, 1742).
54 This elaborates Giffart’s original ‘il faisoit continuellement des observations
sur tout ce que la nature presente aux yeux’ to conform to a Newtonian
characterization of interest.
55 Treatise, p. 5.
56 His opinion echoed that of the distinguished architect Sir Christopher Wren, who
wrote that ‘English artists were accomplished at imitating others but wanted
“education in that which is the foundation of all Mechanick Arts, a practice
[drawing] which everybody in Italy, France and the Low Countries pretend to
more or less.”’ Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters
c. 1600–1800 (London, 2000), p. 104. Records in the Royal Society archives state
that Wren was adopted into the Fraternity of Accepted Masons on 18 May 1691:
see Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, transcript by Clerk to the Royal Society, Mr. B.G.
Cramer (Archives of the Royal Society, Misc. MS. 92, fol. 277: 373 pages). ‘Records
of the Lodge Original, No. 1, now the Lodge of Antiquity No. 2’ mention him as
being Master of the Lodge, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, vol. 109.
57 I will resist the temptation to dwell on the relation between ‘image-makers,’
‘picture-makers,’ and ‘painters,’ except to say that our notion of ‘artist’ does not
accommodate other varieties of activities that can be captured by these terms.
58 Being thought of as a tradesman clearly bothered Richardson; see his An Essay
on the Theory of Painting (London, 1725), pp. 26–36. It would not have particularly

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bothered Senex.
59 In the seventeenth century Edward Norgate, the author of Miniatura or the Art of
Limning was a herald, appointed Windsor Herald in 1633; see Edward Norgate,
Miniatura or the Art of Limning ed. Jeffrey M. Miller and Jim Murrell (New Haven
CT and London, 1997). The art of miniature painting carried through until the
nineteenth century and heraldry to the present day.
60 Whitley, Artists and their Friends, vol. I, p. 4.
61 The interest in drawing as an adjunct of science and as a leisure pursuit is
pursued by Anne Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of
a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven CT and London, 2000).
62 Treatise, translator’s preface, n.p.
63 Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London: A. Bettesworth
in Paternoster-Row, 1725), p. 17.
64 I have deliberately not raised the topic of ‘politenesss’ in this paper as it is
worthy of an extended discussion in its own right. It should, however, be
noted that Freemasonry and the Royal Society were bastions of male activity
and there was a difference between politeness male/male, male/female and
male/female and male. In this context issues of gender played a role in the
commission (which was a matter of business transaction), criticism (which was
a conspicuous demonstration of the judgement of taste) and appreciation of
works of art (which was the domain of subjective response). Intense subjectivity
and attachment to detail were regarded as feminine traits. The professional
production of works of art was regarded as a male domain though appeal to its
imaginative rewards could lead to its feminization.

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