Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

Perspective is a most subtle discovery in mathematical studies, for by means of lines it causes to appear distant that which is near, and large that which is small.

There are three aspects to perspective. The first has to do with how the size of objects seems to diminish according to distance: the second, the manner in which colors change the farther away they are from the eye; the third defines how objects ought to be finished less carefully the farther away they are.

The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That's the real problem, the perspective picture.

Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.

Size, perspective- large objects, when you make them too 3D, you dimensionalize them too much, they appear tiny, so you have to be careful about things like that.

At a distance this fine oak seems to be of ordinary size. But if I place myself under its branches, the impression changes completely: I see it as big, and even terrifying in its bigness.

There are forms that can only be seen when you are near a painting, others only appear when you are far away.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

The problem with filming something is that we struggle desperately to make three dimensions out of two dimensions. It can't be done.

I remember being fascinated by the graduated sizes and perspective on the sets [of Star Wars]. And how they put shorter people and kids in the uniforms and placed them in the distance to give the idea that these sets had more depth than they really did.

Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.

A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.

It is the eye which makes the horizon.

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn't. It's a convention.

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.

Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull . Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light).

May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth... lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.

I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

All objects transmit their image to the eye in pyramids and the nearer to the eye these pyramids are intersected the smaller will the image appear of the objects which cause them.

Photography sees surfaces, it doesn't see space. We see space but the camera doesn't.

Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!