This is an example of a Chapter from the previous version of my book

"Discovering Da Vinci's Daughter"

 

This chapter is about how a mirror could inspire a perfect painting and give us a glimpse into the eyes of Da Vinci himself. I also explain the importance of the reflective properties of our vision and how Da Vinci used this in his art.

    "The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the color of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by images." - Da Vinci

You may have never thought about it, but mirrors are very interesting things. Under the right conditions you can't even tell if a mirror is a mirror or a window. Think about what that means. A mirror is flat right? So how is it that a flat surface could be portrayed as a 3 dimensional one? Is it really? It‘s not, it‘s an illusion.. Once you consider this you also start to realize that a flat surface contains all the visual information that it's reflecting. It's just reflecting light, but also everything that is reflected between the mirror and what's being reflected.. This means that although you can't see the air, or the dust in the air, or whatever else might be there - doesn't mean that its not there.              

As you're looking at this text and reading this - it's not empty space between your eyes and the page but space that's filled with air, elements, and light. When you're looking into a mirror it is doing the same thing but you just don’t notice, or can't see the things in-between you and the mirror. This can be shown when there is steam or smoke in the room between you and the mirror. Then you also notice that it can block your reflection. This seems complicated but only because it's so simple..

  Another interesting aspect to a mirror is the image that you see. It's in reverse of what is looking. This is very apparent when you look at letters or words. They are backwards - this is called mirroring. 


  Leonardo Da Vinci's handwriting was mirrored, most likely because he was left handed and it helped to not smear his ink.. But he could easily write with both hands and however he wanted. He could have wrote mirrored so someone would have to look through a mirror to read what he wrote, or to keep it secret until someone was smart enough to read it correctly. I personally think it was a combination of things. Practice, “dyslexia”, so the ink wouldn't smear as he wrote with his left hand, to keep it fairly secret - to make you look into mirrors. It could be any number of those, or a little bit of each. It's only important so you realize mirrors are very relevant to his work. One thing I’ll say about this that I don’t know if most people realize is that most people can actually mirror write if they tried. I tried it myself and found It was more natural to write backwards with my left hand. I couldn’t write very clear, but I could without much effort write mirrored.. SO it’s not that odd of a thing to do. Our brain seems somewhat hardwired for our hands to work in reverse of each other.  

I'm going to assert that Leonardo Da Vinci was the worlds first Photographer.

He didn’t have a camera or film but he did have his intuition and quest for perfection. Thinking about a mirror again, it's also essentially a constant photograph. If you stay in one spot, close one eye, and look at a mirror - what you're seeing is a photograph (If you could freeze everything that was seen) Now imagine if you were to draw what you saw in the mirror exactly and perfectly. Although this is considered drawing it could also be considered a crude photograph if it was done perfect. Taking that a step further, adding color and paint would increase the detail and get it even close to proper representation. Da Vinci would actually make devices that held his head still and then closed one eye, put a piece of glass in front of him, and then traced what he saw. This is essentially a photograph with his eye being the lens, his brain being the sensor, and his hand and pencil being the film.

This is where you should start to realize that there is a lot more to this painting than meets the eye. This is a painting from over 500 years ago, and for it to have ANY resemblance to a film negative means that it is also similar to a photograph. The image above is the Mona Lisa inverted. This is also where a mirror is left in the dust.. Da Vinci realized that if you could copy the image as it appeared in the mirror then you could also do even more. Where a mirror just represents what's there, a painting could hold whatever you wanted!

  Like I’ve said the Mona Lisa is made up of thousands of layers. No one fully understands his technique (how he applied the paint) there are even layers of color so small and transparent that they can't be seen with the human eye alone. Why would he add details no one could even see? That's the point, the Mona Lisa wasn't created for his time, but for ours. When we would catch up with him and be able to see the Mona Lisa as she really was intended. 

  Put another way. The Mona Lisa is a reflection in a mirror what was painted with even more precision and detail than a high mega pixel camera. But unlike a simple photograph or mirror Da Vinci was able to fabricate, manipulate, and include additional information. Think of it like this:

•   I take a picture of myself.
•   I take a picture of a background
•   I take a picture of air
• I take a picture of clouds
•   I take a picture of _____ (whatever else you would want to include)

I then combine all of these pictures into one single composite image that holds all the information from each. All of these pictures would be at different levels - Which ever I placed first would be on the bottom and then each additional picture would be a different layer. The final picture would be representative of what the Mona Lisa is! Do you get it? If not, don’t worry it’ll be expanded upon later. The Mona Lisa also includes the atmosphere that’s between the mirror and what’s being reflected but locked within that atmosphere are other images. Like a complex watermark. In this book you’ll hear me say “mirroring” a lot. Mirroring? Just like how you have to look at his writing through a mirror to read it, you have to do the same thing to see his paintings fully. When I say mirrored I mean reversed or how you would see it’s reflection in a mirror. When I say mirrored on itself I mean the image reflected on itself after being mirrored and then 50% transparent. 

BUT, without a computer  in order to see a combined image and mirror it onto itself you would have to set up a mirror in perfect proportion with the painting – not easy, but possible. Alternatively Da Vinci could have had a lens on one eye that mirrored one eye and left the other normal. I think that makes some sense, or.. He was able to do it by changing it inside his mind. Which seems very possible if you could train your memory and your vision to do such a thing. I know I can’t even come close but Da Vinci had his whole life time to practice! OR, he could have done this unknowingly.. Yeah right! I read that when he was painting the Last Supper he would come and stare at the painting for hours and then make a couple brush strokes and leave, only returning the next day.

I think that would go towards supporting my theory he did it in his mind because they would have noticed if he had mirrors or goggles on! Imagine how amazing that would be. It’s the only explanation that makes my theory possible. I could be missing something too though! I’m excited to see what other people come up with. I’ll get into Da Vinci’s possible mental abilities later but just understand that mirrors and mirroring are important and used in almost all of his work. If you think about it – our eyes are seeing everything in reverse anyways, it’s our minds that control it. So it should be possible to learn to control whether we see something in reverse or not. Then it means it’s possible to mirror things in your mind - right? So he might have been “dyslexic”, or learned to educe it at will… If a mirror represents what's there, a painting of a mirror could hold even more..

I want you to imagine something to better describe what I mean. Imagine that you are in a hotel room. You’re a few levels up – there is a window looking out over some distance. There is also a mirror in the room, a bed, and a tv. Imagine yourself sitting on the bed closing your eyes. As you open your eyes you stay in the same position but look out the window. You can see some mountains in the distance, a blue sky, and clouds between you and the mountains. You realize that you are looking through glass.You also realize that everything you are seeing is coming in through that glass. If you were to move you would see the image outside change – your perspective is changed. You also realize that everything outside that window’s image is coming up and through the window and into your eyes. The glass is there but transparent. Now imagine looking at the mirror. It’s at an angle so you can not see yourself but a reflection of another part of the room. The mirror is crystal clear and clean. As you look at it, you start to notice that it appears to not be a mirror but a hole in the wall, one that you could walk right through. If you don’t move your head, and just keep looking at it – it doesn’t change. How could you tell if this mirror was a mirror and not a window or hole in the wall? It appears exactly the same as the window and is actually very similar. Now imagine looking at the tv. You’re also seeing an image, but it’s moving and changing.

It’s almost like looking through a window but having the other side not be transparent but a flood of images. In all three of these examples you were seeing something three dimensional on a flat surface. Surfaces that give the illusion of depth. Now you might wonder how a mirror is able to do this? It’s just reflecting light! What makes it so different than the wall right next to it? Isn’t the same light hitting the wall as the mirror? So what is on the surface of the mirror to not just take the light but reflect it? It’s like the wall does the same thing but not in a way you can see, it’s diffused. Everything that reflects light off itself is a mirror in a way, its just that only some surfaces are reflective enough to see the images being reflected.

This means that when you’re looking at anything that’s illuminated by light, you’re just seeing the light that is reflected off of it. So what is it about the mirror that reflects it back in such a way that we perceive it as real? Isn’t it weird that vision is just simply processing light and shadow and reflections? That you’re only able to read this because of the contrast between the letters and the page? What if this page was like a mirror and reflected your reflection back at you? Curiously, it is. When you’re looking at this page it is reflecting an image of everything around it, but the reflection is scattered and diffused so you can’t perceive it.. Da Vinci says that the air is filled with the images of everything around it. If you think about it the images and light that come through the window in the hotel room holds the images of more than you can see.

Above is an example looking down at the hotel. The box is the view out the window. The numbers represent the distance of the things outside the window. When you look out the window how is it that you can judge the distance? Something else to notice is that even thought you may only see the mountains in the distance – lets say they were at 10 – aren’t you also seeing all the other numbers as well? Even if they are just in the air? If there are clouds at #7 could you still see the mountains? Doesn’t it depends on how dense the clouds are? Da Vinci says that it’s the atmosphere, what’s in the air, that makes things get blurred in the distance. In the air between the mountains #10 and the window is not empty space, there is air there and everything that’s in the air. Dust, various gasses, birds – insects, light. So now as you’re sitting on the bed in the hotel room and you’re looking at the mountains, you may only perceive the mountains, but you are seeing so so much more. But you either don’t recognize it, notice it, or ignore it. When you look out beyond that glass window, the window is transferring the images of everything outside of it – into the hotel room, and then into your eyes. In the case of the mirror, it is doing the same thing. It’s reflecting the images of everything between your eyes and the mirrors surface, even if you can’t see it. All you have to do to understand this if you don’t already is imagine a puff of smoke in between your face and the mirror – then you’d realize you’re seeing the space in between as well as the surfaces. (Da Vinci called his painting Technique Sfumato – smoke) This may seem irrelevant but it’s actually more relevant to the Mona Lisa than everything else I’ve mentioned. I made up this example but Leonardo Da Vinci explained this in his journals.

“You should take the mirror for your guide – that is to say a flat mirror – because on its surface the objects appear in  many respects as in a painting. Thus you see, in a painting done on a flat surface, objects which appear in relief, and in the mirror – also a flat surface – they look the same. The picture has one plane surface and the same with the mirror. The picture is intangible, in so far as that which appears round and prominent cannot be grasped in the hands; and it is the same with the mirror. And since you can see that the mirror, by means of outlines, shadows, and lights, makes objects appear in relief, you, who have in your colors far stronger lights and shades than those in the mirror, can certainly, if you compose your picture well, make that also look like a natural scene reflected in a large mirror.”

He also said that if a mirror can display all the information in the air between the eye and the surface then a painting could do the same thing – but even better- with more information being packed into it. Think about it.. What we see in the mirror holds all the information about everything that it’s reflecting – even what we can’t see or perceive. Even if you can’t see it, the air, the dust, the bacteria that’s in the air or on the surfaces being reflected by the mirror, are displayed on the mirrors surface. Think of it like this; If you were to look into the mirror you’re just seeing the surface of your face right? What the light is able to penetrate to reflect. Now, if it were possible to change your transparency – your opacity – as if you were slowly disappearing what would happen to your reflection in the mirror? Wouldn’t the reflection start to include, not just the surface of your face but everything inside of it too?

Think of it like a dense cloud becoming less and less dense. You would be able to see through it at one point wouldn’t you? But as you’re seeing through it, you are also seeing it as well.. It’s like smog, sometimes you can see the mountains through it and sometimes you can’t – but the smog is always there, but in different densities. Now I want you to think of yourself as if you were a cloud looking into a mirror. Couldn’t you see yourself, and right through yourself? But not just that but everything in between as well?

Isn’t a mirror doing this anyways? It’s just that the light in the room isn’t’ strong enough to penetrate through your skin or head. But if it were, you would see completely through yourself and all the images inside your head would also be reflected.. You could also think about it in a graph. Everything that extends beyond the mirror could be graphed and then condensed in the reflection.  Your nose is 3 inches away from the mirror and 1.3 feet from the bottom of the mirror. The top of your head is 5 inches away from the mirror and 1.9 feet from the bottom of the mirror. This diagram shows what I mean. But then imagine it not just on two dimensions but three. It’s basically what a mirror is doing already but if you could make an artificial mirror that could see through things – like x-ray vision, then you would understand how Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa.

But how does that relate to the Mona Lisa? In my three days of semi insanity I was figuring this out – how to chart out 3 dimensions or more on a two dimensional one – a piece of paper. Then when I read about Leonardo talking about the very same thing in his journals it all started to make sense to me. The Mona Lisa wasn’t just 3d, she was something more than that. The invisible layers of paint that no one could see? The space in between the mirror and the thing being reflected.. Think about The Mona Lisa as a sculpture more than a painting. Like a carving out of wood, but built up, layer after layer. BUT unlike a sculpture with nothing surrounding it, the Mona Lisa was drafted with atmosphere.. She isn’t a painting but a multi-medium experience. Something that hasn’t been equaled in complexities until the computer and 3d technology. She is Leonardo’s own reflection in a mirror but so much more. He painted each layer with paint so fine and minute that his reflection held more information than the mirror itself. You could consider those invisible layers of paint, pixels in a screen. I know from his own journals he was capable of this, in his very own words he tells how it could be done –in theory. Now you might realize why there was all the explanations before simply saying she’s 3 dimensional or more."