392.

You ought not to give to drapery a great confusion of many folds, but rather only introduce them where they are held by the hands or the arms; the rest you may let fall simply where it is its nature to flow; and do not let the nude forms be broken by too many details and interrupted folds.  How draperies should be drawn from nature:  that is to say if youwant to represent woollen cloth draw the folds from that; and if it is to be silk, or fine cloth or coarse, or of linen or of crape, vary the folds in each and do not represent dresses, as many do, from models covered with paper or thin leather which will deceive you greatly.

[Footnote:  The little pen and ink drawing from Windsor (W. 102), given on Pl.  XXVIII, No. 7, clearly illustrates the statement made at the beginning of this passage; the writing of the cipher 19 on the same page is in Leonardo’s hand; the cipher 21 is certainly not.]

VIII.

Botany for Painters and Elements of Landscape Painting.

The chapters composing this portion of the work consist of observations on Form, Light and Shade in Plants, and particularly in Trees summed up in certain general rules by which the author intends to guide the artist in the pictorial representation of landscape.

With these the first principles of a Theory of Landscape painting are laid down—­a theory as profoundly thought out in its main lines as it is lucidly worked out in its details.  In reading these chapters the conviction is irresistible that such a Botany for painters is or ought to be of similar importance in the practice of painting as the principles of the Proportions and Movements of the human figure i. e.  Anatomy for painters.

There can be no doubt that Leonardo, in laying down these rules, did not intend to write on Botany in the proper scientific sense—­his own researches on that subject have no place here; it need only be observed that they are easily distinguished by their character and contents from those which are here collected and arranged under the title ‘Botany for painters’.  In some cases where this division might appear doubtful,—­as for instance in No. 402—­the Painter is directly addressed and enjoined to take the rule to heart as of special importance in his art.

The original materials are principally derived from MS. G, in which we often find this subject treated on several pages in succession without any of that intermixture of other matters, which is so frequent in Leonardo’s writings.  This MS., too, is one of the latest; when it was written, the great painter was already more than sixty years of age, so we can scarcely doubt that he regarded all he wrote as his final views on the subject.  And the same remark applies to the chapters from MSS. E and M which were also written between 1513—­15.