A deluge

A drawing of a bird's-eye view of a city on a hill, upon which a deluge has broken out. To the right, an outlying fortress on a rock is assailed by the elements, and a wood is almost overwhelmed. The foreground is filled with swirling, bubbling water. Melzi's number 143. During the last years of his life Leonardo repeatedly treated the subject of a cataclysmic storm overwhelming a landscape, in both his drawings (RCIN 912376 - 912386) and his writings. This obsession with death and destruction can be seen as the deeply personal expression of an artist nearing his end – an artist who had seen some of his greatest creations unfinished or destroyed before his eyes, and who had a profound sense of the impermanence of all things, even of the earth itself. In this drawing a city is seen in the distance, helpless amid the storm that engulfs it, with a fortress on a mountain at bottom right, surrounded by floodwater. But far from being chaotic, the scene is drawn with the eye of a scientist, fascinated by the forms and optical qualities of clouds, rain, debris and dust. Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: A life in drawing, London, 2018