How to depict a battle: smoke, dust, and gunfire
The colours of powder-smoke and dust, and figures dimmed within the turbulence of combat
A clean text page of the Treatise on Painting. It opens with the close of a passage on storms — whirling winds on the mountain peaks and air darkened by dust, mist and thick cloud — and then gives the famous chapter on how a battle should be painted. Leonardo analyses the mingling of artillery smoke and the dust raised by horses and combatants, the bluish tint of the smoke against the earthy colour of the dust, and the way light strikes the turbulent mixture. He tells the painter to redden the faces and figures near the gunfire and to lose the legs of distant fighters in the thickest dust near the ground.
On this page
The close of a tempest: whirling winds and darkened air
The page begins mid-passage with winds beaten upon the high mountain peaks, twisting into wrapped eddies like waves breaking upon rocks. The air is made fearful by the dark gloom that dust, mist and dense cloud produce within it. It is the tail of an instruction on painting a storm before the battle chapter begins.
Smoke, dust and the reddish glow of gunfire
To depict a battle the painter first mixes the smoke of the artillery into the air with the dust stirred by horses and men. Because dust is earthy and heavy it tends to fall again, so at its highest it thins toward the colour of the air, while the smoke rising above it reads as a dark, bluish cloud. On the side the light comes from the mixture appears brighter; combatants deep in the turbulence grow indistinct, faces and figures near the musketeers redden, and the legs of distant fighters vanish in the thick dust near the ground.