The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete · Chapter 106How a Cast Shadow Can Never Be of the Same Size As the Body That Casts It
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If the rays of light proceed, as experience shows, from a single point and are diffused in a sphere round this point, radiating and dispersed through the air, the farther they spread the wider they must spread; and an object placed between the light and a wall is always imaged larger in its shadow, because the rays that strike it [Footnote: 7. The following lines are wanting to complete the logical connection.] would, by the time they have reached the wall, have become larger.
165.
Any shadow cast by a body in light and shade is of the same nature and character as that which is inseparable from the body. The centre of the length of a shadow always corresponds to that of the luminous body [Footnote 6: This second statement of the same idea as in the former sentence, but in different words, does not, in the original, come next to the foregoing; sections 172 and 127 are placed between them.]. It is inevitable that every shadow must have its centre in a line with the centre of the light.
On the shape of derived shadows (166-174).
166.