The air full of images: mirrors reflecting light to infinity
A treatise passage on how every body fills the air with its likeness and the eye both sends and receives species
A full page of continuous prose headed 'Perspective' argues that the air is filled with the infinite likenesses ('species') of all things, each represented everywhere and in every smallest part of the air. Leonardo demonstrates this with facing mirrors that reflect one another to infinity, with a lamp set between two mirrors that multiplies into countless diminishing lights, and with a lamp lighting the walls of a room. From this he reasons about vision: the eye sends its likeness out to objects and also receives their species onto its surface, whence the common sense passes them to the memory.
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Facing mirrors reflect to infinity
If two mirrors face one another in a straight line, the first mirrors itself in the second and the second in the first, each carrying the likenesses already within it, so that from likeness to likeness they multiply to infinity, one image smaller than the next. A light set at night between two flat mirrors a braccio apart is seen as infinite diminishing lights, and rays rebound from mirror to object and back again endlessly.
The eye sends and receives the species of things
Every thing sends its likeness into all places that can see it, and is likewise able to receive into itself the likenesses of all things before it. So the eye sends its likeness through the air to the objects opposite it and receives them upon its surface, whence the common sense takes and considers them and sends those that please it to the memory; the sun's rays offer the same demonstration.
