Recto: A stand of trees. Verso: A tree

A drawing of a stand of trees at the edge of a wood treated with an almost miraculous range of touch, the red chalk sharpened to a point or used broadly, and occasionally wetted on the artist’s tongue to add density in the shadows. A passage in Leonardo's contemporary notebook could almost describe the present study: Trees: Small, lofty, straggling, thick foliage, dark, light, russet, branched at the top; some directed towards the eye, some downwards; with white stems; this transparent in the air, that not; some standing close together, some scattered. On the verso Leonardo draws a single tree with great delicacy, to investigate the fall of light on the foliage. The note below explains that where the light falls, the clumps of leaves will be seen standing out in relief; where the tree is in shadow, it will read simply as a silhouette. Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: A life in drawing, London, 2018