Painters on Painting - Leonardo da Vinci

If one goes back to the time luhen The Last Supper was executed, one can do no less than wonder at the immense progress that Leonardo caused his art to make. . . . He freed himself with one bloiu from the traditional painting of the fifteenth century; without errors, without weakening, without exaggerations, and as if with a single bound, he arrives at that judicious and learned naturalism, equally separated from servile imitation and from an empty chimerical ideal. How singular it is that the most methodical of men, the one among the masters of this time who was most occupied with the processes of execution and who taught them with such precision that the works of his best pupils are confused luith his own every day — this man, whose manner is so strongly characterized, is without rhetoric.

WHAT PAINTING IS CONCERNED WITH

Painting is concerned with all the ten attributes of sight: darkness and light, solidity and color, form and position, distance and nearness, motion and rest.