How air receives bodies' images in light and shadow
A treatise passage on species in the air, the sun's light, and how the eye reads a body's edges
A page of continuous prose in which Leonardo argues that the air instantly takes up and releases the image (species) of every body it sees, and that the rising sun fills the whole hemisphere with its luminous likeness in no time. He describes how dense bodies are clothed in light and darkness, and how a body's true figure is best grasped when the eye is placed between its shadowed and luminous parts. Scholarly indexing shows the sheet also carries further, untranscribed matter on the rotating sphere of fire, waves in the air, projectile speed and geometry (a cube root, prism and pyramid). Only the optical passage is transcribed in the bundle.
On this page
The air carries the image of every body
The air is of itself apt to receive, in no time, and to release every species and likeness of whatever body it sees. The sun, rising in the east, penetrates and fills the whole hemisphere with its luminous likeness, and every dense body is surrounded and clothed with light and darkness.
Reading a body's figure by its edges
A body is ill known when only its shadowed part or only its luminous part is seen, and its figure is ill understood when its edges end in a color like its own. The figure is best grasped when the eye is placed between the shadowed and the luminous part.
Further untranscribed passages
Additional lines of writing continue across the sheet that are not included in this transcription. Scholarly indexing links them to the rotating sphere of fire, wave motion in the air and the speed of a projectile.