Colour Harmony, Contrast, and Painting on White Grounds
Dark heightens light, green graces red, and transparent colours glow like glass over white
A text leaf of the Treatise on Painting developing the rules of colour. Leonardo teaches that contrast heightens colour, an excellent darkness set against an excellent whiteness, pale making red appear more fiery beside purple, and that a second rule concerns companionship, green giving grace to red and to blue, while blue with yellow or white makes a graceless pairing. A further section advises preparing a most white ground for transparent colours so they may glow, as the colours of glass do when held between the eye and the luminous air, and opens the question of the colour of shadows.
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Contrast heightens colour: dark against light
To make an excellent darkness, give it an excellent whiteness for comparison, and make excellent whiteness against the greatest darkness. Pale will make red appear of more fiery redness than it would by itself when set beside purple. This rule of comparison will be set out more fully in its place.
Companionable and graceless colour pairings
A second rule aims not at making colours more beautiful than they naturally are, but at their companionship giving grace one to another, as green does to red and red to green, and as green does with blue. There is also a rule of graceless companionship, as blue with yellow, which whitens, or with white and the like.
Transparent colours glow like glass over a white ground
For colours you wish to have beauty, first prepare a most white ground, but only for transparent colours, since for opaque ones a bright ground does not help. The colours of glass teach this: interposed between the eye and the luminous air they show excellent beauty, which they cannot do with tenebrous air or darkness behind them.