Grace of Faces, Portrait Light, and Beauty by Contrast
Composing beauty from many models, and the soft evening light for portraits
This page of Melzi's Treatise on Painting closes a chapter urging the painter to build graceful faces by combining the best features of many admired heads, warning that choosing faces resembling one's own leads to ugly figures, since works often resemble their maker. Chapter [138] recommends portraying sitters in a black-walled courtyard under a linen awning, or in the soft light of a cloudy evening, which lends grace and sweetness to faces. A brief chapter [139] observes that beauty and ugliness appear more powerful when set beside one another. The sheet is entirely text in a clear humanist hand.
On this page
Building a beautiful face from many models
The painter is told to take the good parts of many beautiful faces, judging their beauty by public repute rather than personal taste. Choosing faces that resemble one's own risks producing ugly figures, since works often come to resemble their maker. These chosen beauties are to be fixed in the mind.
The soft light that gives grace to faces (chapter 138)
For portraits, use a courtyard that can be covered at will with a linen awning, or paint in dull weather toward evening with the sitter's back to a wall. Leonardo prescribes a black-walled court about ten braccia wide, twenty long and ten high, with a projecting roof; cloudy or misty light is called the perfect light.
Beauty heightened by neighbouring ugliness (chapter 139)
A single-sentence chapter notes that beauties together with uglinesses appear more powerful, the one because of the other. A marginal reference points to Book A, folio 27.