14.

The Da Vinci Notebooks at sacred-texts.com

14.

ON THE THREE BRANCHES OF PERSPECTIVE.

The plan of the book on Painting (14--17).There are three branches of perspective; the first deals with the reasons of the (apparent) diminution of objects as they recede from the eye, and is known as Diminishing Perspective.--The second contains the way in which colours vary as they recede from the eye. The third and last is concerned with the explanation of how the objects [in a picture] ought to be less finished in proportion as they are remote (and the names are as follows):

Linear Perspective.
The Perspective of Colour.
The Perspective of Disappearance.

 ¹⁵ .

Footnotes

16:15 : 13. From the character of the handwriting I infer that this passage was written before the year 1490.