Mirror Room

In his quest to capture every aspect of what he was painting, Leonardo designed a mirror room in which he would place his subjects. He could look through a peep hole and see the subject “endless times”. The subject would stand or sit in the room and would not know when they were being looked at, hence Leonardo thought they would more likely relax and adopt a more natural pose, and possibly reveal their inner soul, the essence he hoped to capture. Whether he actually used this room in practice is not known, but his notebooks describe an eight-sided room with eight flat mirrors as walls. He noted that, if a person stood inside, he “will be able to see every part endless times”.