Lines of enquiry

A cataclysmic storm is unfolding. Dense, thunderous lines of black chalk sweep rapidly around the paper in frantic curls of awesome energy. Rocks tumble beneath the irresistible force of an engulfing flood. Cloud and rain, vapour and water, both churned by the same punishing vortexes, become almost indistinguishable. The scale is hard to judge until you glimpse, in the foreground, a hilltop fortress, dwarfed and ruined by the relentless inundation. Man and his monument, both powerless in the face of almighty nature.

It’s a terrifying scene of chaos and one that Leonardo da Vinci revisited numerous times in his final years. Facing his own mortality, he produced a series of these intense, obscure drawings in which he imagined an apocalyptic storm obliterating the landscape. This obsession with the power of water was not new. His private notebooks are filled with observational drawings, visualisations and treatises on fluid dynamics, and his engineering expertise earned him the title ‘Master of Water’ from the Florentine authorities, but in these late drawings he merges that rigid scienza with quite startling fantasia.

We think we know Leonardo, the most scrutinised of artists, but delve into his private drawings and surprises can still emerge. In these papers, he recorded his observations obsessively, seeing and learning through looking and drawing. As we all know he was an artist, an anatomist and a botanist; he designed canals and weapons, buildings and balloons, he surveyed land and drew maps; he invented complex machines and simple tools. But he also glued wings and horns to his pet lizard and played tricks on his friends, pumping up a handful of bovine intestines, for example, until they ballooned so large they filled the room and sent everyone cowering into a corner. He found all this, his art, his science, his pranks, entirely compatible.