A Painting Can Never Look Like Something From Nature

The way you analyze and present your creation depends on how it is received: from up-close or from far away.

Avoid profiles, precise outlines of things. Do not make the outline of your figures a different color than that of the background that borders them, so that there are no dark outlines between the background and the respective figure. But don’t forget that in small things you get rid of mistakes faster than in big things.

For example, in small figures one can see neither the faults nor their manner, as they do in large ones; for the little figure being made after the likeness of a man or other living thing, its parts cannot be carefully finished, on account of the great diminution. So it is not completely perfected, and not being perfected, its faults cannot be proved. For example: he looks at a man from three hundred paces away and judges whether he is handsome, ugly, monstrous or like any other; but you will see that however great your effort may be, you will not dare to give yourself a true opinion, and this because of the distance in which man is so reduced that his details cannot be distinguished.

And if you wish to see better the diminution of the man spoken of above, put a finger within a palm of the eye, and keep raising and lowering that finger, until its upper end is below the feet of the figure looked upon, you will see an unbelievable shrinking appear. For this reason, you often doubt the arrival of a friend arriving from afar.

Can the thing on which you focus your attention imitate what is in nature, so as to facilitate the revelation of an idea through a comparison with the material world?

And I will tell you something important. A painting can never look like a thing in nature. Many times painters despair that they will be able to imitate what is in nature, their paintings having neither the relief nor the liveliness of things seen in a mirror – although they have at hand colors that, by their clarity or darkness, by far exceed the beauty of light and shadows of things seen in the mirror. They blame their ignorance and by no means the cause, because they do not know it. It is impossible for the painted thing to produce such a relief as to resemble the mirrored thing, although both make use of the same surface, except when we look with one eye.

The reason is that here two eyes see the same thing one after the other like A and B which see M and N at the same time, but cannot occupy M entirely because the base of the lines of sight C is so large that one eye sees the work of the second after the first. But closing one eye like S, the thing F will encompass K – because the line of sight comes out of a single focus and uses a body, so the second one of the same size will not even be seen.

Now, you may be wondering what is more useful: the lights and shadows of things, or their features? I believe that the features of things are of greater use than shadows and lights, because the lines of the bendable limbs are always the same and can never change, while the places and shadows in their quantity and quality are endless.

Leadership must unequivocally state the contours of a notion such as “looking in the mirror” when addressing creation issues or aspects of reality from the point of view of the processes of constituting creation.

A Painting Can Never Look Like Something From Nature, especially if we consider that the object of a painter’s attention is the “mirror view” that facilitates a double vision of the surrounding reality, a much larger image of which the spatial dimension is only one component.

* Notă: Leonardo Da Vinci - Tratat despre pictură, Editura Meridiane, 1971.