"The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing that it reflects and which is filled by as many images as there are things placed before it."
— Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452-1519)
Work Title
Date
c. 1508?
Metaphor
"The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing that it reflects and which is filled by as many images as there are things placed before it."
Metaphor in Context
The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing that it reflects and which is filled by as many images as there are things placed before it. Knowing therefore that you cannot be a good master unless you have a universal power of representing by your art all the varieties of the forms which nature produces,--which indeed you will not know how to do unless you see them and retain them in your mind,--look to it, O Painter, that when you go into the fields you give your attention to the various objects and look carefully in turn first at one thing and then at another, making a bundle of different things selected and chosen from among those of less value. And do not after the manner of some painters who when tired by imaginative work, lay aside their task and take exercise by walking in order to find relaxation, keeping, however, such weariness of mind as prevents them either seeing or being conscious of different objects; so that often when meeting friends or relatives, and being saluted by them, although they may see and hear them they know them no more than if they had met only so much air.
(MS. 2038, Bib. Nat. 2 r.)
(MS. 2038, Bib. Nat. 2 r.)
Categories
Provenance
Reading M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford UP, 1953), 32.
Citation
Leonardo da Vinci's Note-Books, trans. and ed. Edward McCurdy (London and New York: Duckworth & Co. and Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906), p. 163. <Link to Google Books>
Date of Entry
06/06/2013
