There are two things that everyone should know about the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. They help you to appreciate both his genius and his masterpieces.
First, Leonardo did not paint in lines. He did not add color to line sketches. The Florentine master had realized that there are no lines in nature. The human mind imposes them, as it notices sensory changes. Nature does not present a border line between the window and the window sill. That is how our mind organizes our perceptions, which is fortunate because otherwise all that we could see would be a rather meaningless mush, much like the vision of a newborn infant or a lower animal.
If you look closely at a painting by Leonardo, you will see that its colors overlap. One gradually gives way to another, so that they again form a line in our mind. But on the canvas itself there is an intermingling. We call this technique sfumatura, after the Italian for “smoky.”
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