The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete


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should see an uniform deep and colourless shadow.  
The practice of the prospettiva de colori.  
2
94.  
HOW A PAINTER SHOULD CARRY OUT THE PERSPECTIVE OF COLOUR IN  
PRACTICE.  
In order to put into practice this perspective of the variation and  
loss or diminution of the essential character of colours, observe at  
every hundred braccia some objects standing in the landscape, such  
as trees, houses, men and particular places. Then in front of the  
first tree have a very steady plate of glass and keep your eye very  
steady, and then, on this plate of glass, draw a tree, tracing it  
over the form of that tree. Then move it on one side so far as that  
the real tree is close by the side of the tree you have drawn; then  
colour your drawing in such a way as that in colour and form the two  
may be alike, and that both, if you close one eye, seem to be  
painted on the glass and at the same distance. Then, by the same  
method, represent a second tree, and a third, with a distance of a  
hundred braccia between each. And these will serve as a standard and  
guide whenever you work on your own pictures, wherever they may  
apply, and will enable you to give due distance in those works. [14]  
But I have found that as a rule the second is 4/5 of the first when  
it is 20 braccia beyond it.  
218  


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Quick Jump
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