In the early 18th century, between Morea, the Ionian Islands, and possibly Venice, the painter and soldier Panagiotis Doxaras (1662-1729) translated into Greek the treatises on painting by Leonardo da Vinci and the Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti, texts that are among the most important sources of the history of European art, as well as instructions for the art of wall painting by the Jesuit painter Andrea Pozzo. At the same time, he Hellenized thousands of names of painters included in the first artistic dictionary, as it was published in Italian in 1719, and translated a speech by Paolo Senieri, a prominent Jesuit preacher of the time. Doxaras collected these translations, as well as some smaller texts, in an illustrated manuscript, entitled "Art of Painting", which, for unknown reasons, was not published at the time and reached us in two copies: one in the Marciana Library in Venice and one, more complete in many respects, in the National Library of Greece. In this volume, the texts that make up the copy of the National Library are published for the first time, using diplomatic method.

Doxaras' initiative, who is usually identified as the first Greek painter or as the "post-Byzantine" who became "Western", apart from being a potential intervention in the artistic development of the Greek-speaking populations, both at a theoretical and technical level, also presents a more general interest: regarding the language used, as words were translated for the first time that corresponded to terms and concepts without analogy in the world for which the translations were intended, and regarding the dissemination of religious and, in the broad sense, political ideas from the Western to the Eastern-Orthodox world. It should be noted, finally, especially for the treatise of da Vinci, that Doxaras' translation is one of the first to be carried out at a pan-European level and that it remains, still, the only one available in the Greek language.