Trees at a Distance: From Form to Light, Dark, and Color
How leaves lose their true shape with distance; leaf-pairing exceptions; sprouts on cut branches
This leaf gives Leonardo's account of how a tree dissolves with distance: first the true shape of its leaves is lost, then only the placement of the branches remains, then merely the sum of its light and dark, and finally only its color, which distinguishes it from unlike things. A labelled chapter restates the rule that the sixth upper leaf stands above the sixth lower one, noting exceptions such as the traveller's-joy and jasmine, whose leaves are paired crosswise, and adds that trees backlit by the sun are dark toward the middle. A final chapter opens on the shoots a cut branch sends out in a year, relating their quantity to the cambium between bark and wood.
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A tree lost to distance: form, then tone, then color
When distance no longer carries the true shape of the leaves to the eye, only the placement of the branches remains; when that too fails, only the sum of the tree's light and dark is left; and beyond that only its color, which sets it apart from unlike things and, among like things, cannot be distinguished at all.
The sixth leaf and its exceptions (f)
All the branchings of trees have the sixth upper leaf standing above the sixth lower one, save exceptions; the same holds for cane-vines such as the vine, plum, and bramble. The traveller's-joy (vitalba) and jasmine are excepted, their leaves paired one above the other and set crosswise.
Backlit trees are dark at the center
All trees that have the sun behind them appear dark toward the middle. The observation belongs to the treatment of light and shade in painting foliage.
Shoots on a cut branch (g)
The quantity of the shoot that sprouts on a cut branch, compared with the shoots the branch would have produced that year, is as the quantity of the cambium lying between bark and wood, that is, its circumferential line drawn over the cut with the length of the diameter of the shoot.