The manuscripts were begun in Milan while Leonardo was under the service of Ludovico Sforza and gathered together by his heir Francesco Melzi.

[7] Sometime before 1542,[citation needed] Melzi gathered together the papers for A Treatise on Painting from 18 of Leonardo's "books" (two-thirds of which have gone missing).

[8] After Melzi's death in 1570, the collection passed to his son, the lawyer Orazio, who initially took little interest in the journals,[6] but they were later dispersed.

[9][10] It was printed in an abridged form in French and Italian as Trattato della pittura by Raffaelo du Fresne in 1651.

[11] In 1937, Max Ernst wrote in Cahiers d'Art that Leonardo's advice on the studying of stains on walls caused him an "unbearable visual obsession".