¶ 59. “If you painter will seek to please the first painters, you will make your pictures well, because they alone can guide you truthfully, but if you wish to please those who are not masters, your pictures will have few foreshortenings and little relief or alert movement, and thereby you will fail in that part in which painting is held to be an excellent art, that is in giving an effect of relief where there is nothing in relief.” ON AVOIDING HARSH SHADOWS AND SUNLIGHT EFFECTS ¶ 87. “The light cut off from the shade too clearly is greatly blamed by painters. Hence to avoid such a fault, if you paint bodies in the open country, you will not make the figures as lighted by the sun, but imagine some sort of mist or transparent clouds to be interposed between the object and the sun, whence, since the figure is not emphasized by the sunlight, the demarcations of light and shade will not be emphasized.” ON THE MOST PLEASING LIGHT ¶ 138. “If you have a court yard that can be covered as you wish with a linen awning, that will be a good light; or when you wish to draw anyone, draw him in bad weather, towards nightfall, and make the sitter stand with his back to one of the walls of this court. In the streets set your mind towards nightfall on the faces of the men and women, in bad weather, how much grace and sweetness appears in them.” ON COUNTERPOISE OF THE FIGURE ¶ 88. “Do not have the head turned the way the breast is, nor the arm the way the leg is; and if the head is turned over the right shoulder make the parts lower on the left than on the right” [and vice versa]. At first blush this stylistic counsel flatly contradicts Leonardo’s principle that poses and emotions should express state of mind, but as a matter of fact many expressive movements obey this law of counterpoise or active equilibrium. Leonardo himself generally finds motives for such poses. Such successors as Raphael and Andrea del Sarto habitually used such poses without other excuse than that of their own inherent gracefulness. ON FREEDOM IN MAKING A COMPOSITION