Landscape

Mist, Rain, Wind, and the Painter's Eye

Source Words: ~7,100 Primary MSS: C.A., MS. A, MS. E Period: c. 1490–1515

Describe landscapes with wind and water and at the setting and rising of the sun.

— Leonardo da Vinci

Overview

Leonardo's landscape observations are instructions for painters on how to represent the visual phenomena of the natural world — mist, rain, wind-bent trees, the shadows of clouds on the earth, rainbows, and the way distance dissolves solid forms into blue haze. These notes connect his theories of color, light and shade, and perspective into practical guidance for painting the world.

Look at the backgrounds in Leonardo's paintings — the Mona Lisa, the Virgin of the Rocks — and you're looking at these observations made real. The blue mountains, the atmospheric haze, the way water and rock dissolve into each other at the horizon. He painted landscapes the way he painted because he understood what he was actually seeing. -D

Of Things Seen Through Mist

How atmosphere transforms vision

Of things seen through the mist the part which is nearest to the extremities will be less visible, and so much less when they are more remote.

C.A. 76 r. b

A mountain that stretches above a city which raises dust in the form of clouds, but the colour of this dust is varied by the colour of these clouds; and, where the rain is thickest, the colour of the dust is least visible; and, where the dust is thickest, the rain is least visible; and, where the rain is mingled with the wind and the dust, the clouds created by the rain are more transparent than those of the dust.

C.A. 79 r. c

Of Rain and Rainbows

Light effects in the atmosphere

Within the spaces between the rain one sees the redness of the sun; that is of the clouds interposed between the sun and the rain.

C.A. 38 r. b

When rain is falling from broken clouds one sees the shadows of these clouds upon the earth interrupted by the part of the earth that is illuminated by the sun.

When the sun is in the west, hidden behind some small and thick cloud, then this cloud will be surrounded by a ruddy splendour.

C.A. 97 v. a

Of Wind and Trees

Movement in the landscape

The trees, smitten by the course of the winds, bend towards the place where the wind is moving, and after the wind has passed they bend in the opposite movement, that is in the reflex movement.