Narrative Must Move the Viewer; Leave the Limbs Rough
Contrast of opposites, matching gesture to emotion, and not finishing the outlines too soon
A text leaf of the Treatise on Painting continuing the precepts on composing narrative scenes. It opens by advising the painter to set contraries side by side, ugly next to beautiful, great to small, old to young, strong to weak, since they heighten one another. Leonardo then insists that a painted composition must move its beholders to the very passion for which it was figured, and warns the composer not to fix the limbs with finished outlines too early, for a beautifully finished limb-work makes the painter reluctant to alter movements that do not match the mental motion.
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Set contraries side by side to heighten each
Place the straight opposites near one another, for they give great comparison one to another, and the more so the nearer they are: the ugly beside the beautiful, the great beside the small, the old beside the young, the strong beside the weak. Thus one varies as much and as closely as one can.
The composition must move the beholder to its passion
Painted compositions must move their beholders and contemplators to the same effect for which the scene is figured, whether terror, fear and flight, grief, weeping and lamentation, or pleasure, gladness and laughter. The viewers' minds should move their limbs with acts that seem joined to the very case represented; if they do not, the maker's talent is in vain.
Do not fix the limbs with finished outlines too soon
The composer of narratives should not delineate the limbs with terminated outlines, as painters do who want every least mark of charcoal to be valid. Such men may gain riches but not praise, for often the figured creature lacks limb-movements fitting the mental motion, yet having made a beautiful finished limb-work the painter thinks it an injury to shift those limbs higher or lower.