Vision, radiant powers and the pinhole image of an eclipse
The eye that sends out rays; musk, bells and the basilisk; a box camera obscura for sun and moon
Continuing his optics, Leonardo maintains that the visual power reaches out along rays to the surfaces of bodies while every body fills the air with the likeness of its form and its power — as the sun spreads form, splendour and heat by radiant lines without diminishing. He refutes the mathematicians who deny that any virtue issues from the eye, answering with examples of powers that fill space without being consumed: musk scenting the air, a bell's sound filling a countryside, and lore of the basilisk, the lamia snake, the wolf, the ostrich and a luminous fish off Sardinia. He locates the soul or common sense in the middle of the head, sending its faculties out to the fingertips in touch and along visual rays in sight. Finally he gives a pinhole apparatus — a thin iron plate pierced with a small hole, or a closed box lined with paper — to project the crescent sun during an eclipse, and the moon, stars or a candle flame, inverted upon the paper.
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Visual rays and the likeness of powers
Leonardo holds that the visual power extends by rays to the surfaces of opaque bodies while those bodies extend their virtue back to it, each body filling the surrounding air not only with the likeness of its form but of its power. This mutual filling of space is the foundation of his account of sight.
The sun's radiant form, splendour and heat
The sun in mid-hemisphere spreads the species of its form, its splendour and the likeness of its heat everywhere it is seen, all descending by radiant lines born in its body and ending in opaque objects without any diminution of itself. At the close he lists the sun's qualities: body, figure, motion, splendour, heat and generative virtue.
Powers that fill space without being consumed
To answer those who say the eye would be consumed if it sent out virtue, he cites musk that fills miles of air with its odour, and a bell whose stroke fills a whole country with sound, neither being used up; he likewise invokes the lodestone-like north (tramontana) that keeps its power extended in rare and dense bodies alike.
Pinhole projection of the eclipsed sun
During an eclipse, when the sun is crescent-shaped, a thin iron plate pierced with a small hole and turned to the sun casts on a paper half a braccio behind it the likeness of the sun, crescent in form and true in colour. The same works by night for the moon and stars, best inside a square wooden box with the plate in front and thin white paper or papyrus behind; a tallow candle before the hole appears elongated and inverted.
Bestiary examples of power in the gaze
Among his proofs Leonardo gathers popular lore: the snake called lamia that draws the nightingale to its death as a magnet draws iron, the wolf that makes men's voices hoarse by its look, the basilisk that kills all living things by sight, the ostrich and spider said to hatch their eggs by gazing, maidens who draw men's love with their eyes, and a fish off Sardinia (called of Saint Ermo) whose eyes light the water and kill the fish caught in its glow.
