quote · Source-linked selection
Sculpture lacks the beauty of colours, the perspective of colours; it lacks perspective and it confuses the limits of objects remote from the eye, inasmuch as it represents the limits of objects that are near in the same way as those of distant objects; it does not represent the air which, interposed between the eye and the remote object, conceals that object but as the veils in draped figures, which reveal the naked flesh beneath them; it cannot represent the small pebbles of various colours beneath the surface of the transparent waters.
Sculpture lacks the beauty of colours, the perspective of colours; it lacks perspective and it confuses the limits of objects remote from the eye, inasmuch as it represents the limits of objects that are near in the same way as those of distant objects; it does not represent the air which, interposed between the eye and the remote object, conceals that object but as the veils in draped figures, which reveal the naked flesh beneath them; it cannot represent the small pebbles of various colours beneath the surface of the transparent waters.
Approximate author period: c. 1486 AD · medieval
Meaning not yet available
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Begin with source-checked readings and explanations ↗Attribution & collection notes
- Author or tradition
- Leonardo da Vinci
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
A country attribution does not establish the earliest origin. - Historical period
- Approximate author period: c. 1486 AD · medieval
author lifetime midpoint (1452–1519); not quotation composition date
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- Thoughts on Art and Life (1906 English edition) (1906 AD)
Thoughts on Art, complete printed unit 39; Maurice Baring translation; Boston: The Merrymount Press,1906
A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.
The voice behind the words.
Represented by the complete source-numbered selections in Thoughts on Art and Life, Maurice Baring’s1906English translation, edited by Lewis Einstein. The catalogue records1452–1519; the historical collection is a selection from notebooks, not a continuous book composed by Leonardo or independent authentication of every attributed passage.
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