Treatise on Painting: muscles through life's ages, and natural poses
Book II — recording the body's changes and men's spontaneous acts in a sketchbook
A text-only leaf of Book II of the Trattato della pittura, headed SECVNDA and numbered 49, with a few marginal glosses in a later hand. A memorandum (chapter 126) charges the author to describe which muscles and cords are revealed, hidden, or unchanged by each limb's movements, and to trace the whole life of a body from birth to old age through infancy, boyhood, adolescence and youth. Chapter 127 advises the painter to catch spontaneous natural acts men make on the spur of the moment, jotting brief records in his notebooks and later posing a model to study the limbs involved. A third precept (128) begins to argue that the nearer a thing is to the eye, the more distinct its outlines appear.
On this page
Muscles and cords across the ages of man
Chapter 126, a memorandum the author makes to himself (cross-referenced to 'L° B car. 20'), directs him to describe which muscles and cords are uncovered, hidden, or neither by the diverse movements of each limb, calling this most necessary for master painters and sculptors. The same is to be done for a child from birth to decrepitude through infancy, boyhood, adolescence and youth, recording the changes of members and joints and which fatten or grow thin.
Catching spontaneous natural poses in a notebook
Chapter 127 counsels the painter who would win honour to seek the readiness of his poses in the natural acts men make on the spur of the moment, born of powerful feeling. He should make brief records of these in his little notebooks, then employ them by posing a man in the same act to study the quality and aspect of the limbs used.
Distinct outlines belong to what is nearest
Chapter 128 begins a new precept holding that a thing, or the figure of a thing, shows itself with more distinct and ready outlines the nearer it is (the sentence carries over to the following folio).