Weather
Tempests, Deluges, and the Fury of Nature
Describe a wind on land and at sea. Describe a storm of rain.
— Leonardo da Vinci, §605
Overview
Leonardo's weather passages are among the most extraordinary writing in all the notebooks. What begins as instructions for how to paint a storm becomes something far more powerful: a visionary, almost hallucinatory description of the Deluge — a universal flood that destroys everything in its path. Written in his final years (c. 1515), these passages are accompanied by the famous deluge drawings at Windsor Castle.
How to Represent a Tempest
§606 — Instructions for the painter
606. If you wish to represent a tempest consider and arrange well its effects as seen, when the wind, blowing over the face of the sea and earth, removes and carries with it such things as are not fixed to the general mass. And to represent the storm accurately you must first show the clouds scattered and torn, and flying with the wind, accompanied by clouds of sand blown up from the sea shore, and boughs and leaves swept along by the strength and fury of the blast and scattered with other light objects through the air. Trees and plants must be bent to the ground, almost as if they would follow the course of the gale, with their branches twisted out of their natural growth and their leaves tossed and turned about.
The Deluge
§608 — Leonardo's apocalyptic vision
608. Let the dark and gloomy air be seen buffeted by the rush of contrary winds and dense from the continued rain mingled with hail and bearing hither and thither an infinite number of branches torn from the trees and mixed with numberless leaves. All round may be seen venerable trees, uprooted and stripped by the fury of the winds; and fragments of mountains, already scoured bare by the torrents, falling into those torrents and choking their valleys till the swollen rivers overflow and submerge the wide lowlands and their inhabitants.
Again, you might have seen on many of the hill-tops terrified animals of different kinds, collected together and subdued to tameness, in company with men and women who had fled there with their children. And the waters which covered the fields, with their waves were in great part strewn with tables, bedsteads, boats and various other contrivances made from necessity and the fear of death, on which were men and women with their children amid sounds of lamentation and weeping, terrified by the fury of the winds which with their tempestuous violence rolled the waters under and over and about the bodies of the drowned.
Ah! how many you might have seen closing their ears with their hands to shut out the tremendous sounds made in the darkened air by the raging of the winds mingling with the rain, the thunders of heaven and the fury of the thunder-bolts. Others were not content with shutting their eyes, but laid their hands one over the other to cover them the closer that they might not see the cruel slaughter of the human race by the wrath of God.
MS. G
"The cruel slaughter of the human race by the wrath of God." This is the man who, everywhere else in the notebooks, insists on empirical evidence and dismisses superstition. But at the end, confronting the ultimate storm, even Leonardo reaches for the language of scripture. -D
This is Leonardo at the end of his life, and the writing has a force that borders on the apocalyptic. The deluge passages are the most powerful prose he ever wrote — not instructions for a painter, but a vision of the end of the world. Read them alongside the deluge drawings and you're looking at the work of a man who has seen too much and understood too much and can't stop seeing. -D