Index to Part Three: figures, distance, and animal motion
Chapter list [425]-[441] of the treatise's third book, keyed to folio numbers
This page continues the chapter index of the Treatise on Painting's third book, listing entries [425] through [441] with cross-references to their folios. The headings concern the loss of surface detail and color with distance, the contours of bodies, figures set against the wind or framed in windows, and why a face painted at its measured size looks larger than life. Others address the motion and course of animals, the construction of colossal figures that read as forty or fourteen braccia tall, and the definition of painting in universal light.
On this page
Loss of surface detail and color with distance
Several entries treat the surface 'accidents' that vanish first as objects recede or move away from shadowed bodies [427]-[428], whether the surface of an opaque body partakes of the color of the object it faces [433], and painting under a universal light [440]. This is the substance of the treatise's aerial perspective.
Colossal upright figures in constrained space
Entries [436]-[437] explain how to make a figure appear forty braccia tall within a space of twenty, with proportioned limbs and standing upright, and how a wall figure of twelve braccia can be made to read as fourteen. A related heading treats the figure that walks against the wind [430].
The motion and course of animals
Two headings address living movement: the motion and course of animals [434] and bodies that move of themselves, whether swiftly or slowly [435]. They sit within the treatise's broader concern with depicting figures and creatures in action.