Pictorial perspective can never make an object at the same distance, look of the same size as it appears to the eye. You see that the apex of the pyramid f c d is as far from the object c d as the same point f is from the object a b; and yet c d, which is the base made by the painter’s point, is smaller than a b which is the base of the lines from the objects converging in the eye and refracted at s t, the surface of the eye. This may be proved by experiment, by the lines of vision and then by the lines of the painter’s plumbline by cutting the real lines of vision on one and the same plane and measuring on it one and the same object.
Taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880.