Leonardo da Vinci on Colour, Light and Vision Selections from the presentation Leonardo da Vinci on Colour, Light and Vision by David Briggs for the CSA NSW Division, Albion Centre, Surry Hills, May 29 th , 2019. This year marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci on May 6th, 1519. Leonardo’s writings on colour, light and vision have received considerable scholarly attention over the last few decades, some of which has tended to emphasize his debt to and misunderstandings of medieval sources, and thus to diminish his contribution to the progress of science. Nevertheless, Leonardo’s copious notes on specular and diffuse reflection, shading and shadows, coloured illumination, atmospheric perspective and other visual phenomena, and of the appearance of specific subjects such as figures, trees, water and mountains, remain relevant for many artists and illustrators as foundation documents in the applied science of depicting visual appearance. Leonardo’s ideas about colour, light and vision are known to us from his remaining notebooks, less than half of which survive today, and from the Treatise on Painting compiled from both surviving and now lost notebooks by his heir Francesco Melzi. Melzi’s handwritten manuscript of the treatise (the Codex Urbinas 1270, above) was lost until the nineteenth century and although it has now been published in English editions (including McMahon, 1956), Leonardo’s treatise today is still known to most from translations of various early printed editions that were all based on selectively abridged copies of the treatise.