The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — CompleteLeonardo, da Vinci
Science
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete
Leonardo, da Vinci
Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452-1519 -- Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
If you want to acquire a practice of good and correct attitudes for
your figures, make a square frame or net, and square it out with
thread; place this between your eye and the nude model you are
drawing, and draw these same squares on the paper on which you mean
to draw the figure, but very delicately. Then place a pellet of wax
on a spot of the net which will serve as a fixed point, which,
whenever you look at your model, must cover the pit of the throat;
or, if his back is turned, it may cover one of the vertebrae of the
neck. Thus these threads will guide you as to each part of the body
which, in any given attitude will be found below the pit of the
throat, or the angles of the shoulders, or the nipples, or hips and
other parts of the body; and the transverse lines of the net will
show you how much the figure is higher over the leg on which it is
posed than over the other, and the same with the hips, and the knees
and the feet. But always fix the net perpendicularly so that all the
divisions that you see the model divided into by the net work
correspond with your drawing of the model on the net work you have
sketched. The squares you draw may be as much smaller than those of
the net as you wish that your figure should be smaller than nature.
Afterwards remember when drawing figures, to use the rule of the
corresponding proportions of the limbs as you have learnt it from
the frame and net. This should be 3 braccia and a half high and 3
braccia wide; 7 braccia distant from you and 1 braccio from the
model.
[Footnote: Leonardo is commonly credited with the invention of the
arrangement of a plate of glass commonly known as the "vertical
plane." Professor E. VON BRUCKE in his _"Bruchstucke aus der Theorie
der bildenden Kunste,"_ Leipzig 1877, pg. 3, writes on this
contrivance. _"Unsere Glastafel ist die sogenannte Glastafel des
Leonardo da Vinci, die in Gestalt einer Glastafel vorgestellte
Bildflache."_]
524.
A METHOD OF DRAWING AN OBJECT IN RELIEF AT NIGHT.
Place a sheet of not too transparent paper between the relievo and
the light and you can draw thus very well.
[Footnote: Bodies thus illuminated will show on the surface of the
paper how the copyist has to distribute light and shade.]
525.
If you want to represent a figure on a wall, the wall being
foreshortened, while the figure is to appear in its proper form, and
as standing free from the wall, you must proceed thus: have a thin
plate of iron and make a small hole in the centre; this hole must be
round. Set a light close to it in such a position as that it shines
through the central hole, then place any object or figure you please
so close to the wall that it touches it and draw the outline of the
shadow on the wall; then fill in the shade and add the lights; place
the person who is to see it so that he looks through that same hole
where at first the light was; and you will never be able to persuade
yourself that the image is not detached from the wall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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