And then the thunder spoke…
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
On the verso of the Angelo incarnato are three words in Leonardo’s hand, originally written in red chalk, then gone over, by him, in the same black chalk or charcoal that he used for the drawing on the other side. They read:
astrapen
bronten
ceraunobolian
This curious list is a transliteration of three Greek words, meaning ‘lightning flashes’, ‘storms’, ‘thunderbolts’. They have been related to a description by Pliny of the legendary prowess of the Greek painter Apelles, who could ‘depict that which cannot be depicted’, namely atmospheric phenomena such as these.35 Leonardo was often compared to Apelles in gratulatory poems, and mentions him admiringly as one who painted ‘fictions full of great meanings’;36 now, near the end of his career as a painter, we here find him pondering the magical power of the painter or draughtsman to capture the fugitive, inexpressible effects of Nature in violent agitation – Sturm und Drang.
Leonardo had always vibrated to the drama of storms. That early literary fragment about the cave actually begins with a description of a storm – ‘a whirling wind racing through a deep sandy valley, its rushing movement driving to its centre everything that obstructs its furious course’. In his painter’s notes of the early 1490s there is a passage on ‘How to represent a tempest’:
You must first show the clouds scattered and torn, and flying with the wind, mixed with clouds of sand blown up from the seashore, and boughs and leaves swept along and scattered with other light objects which are flying around… while the wind flings sea-spray around and the stormy air takes on the look of a dense and smothering mist.37
In these descriptions there is a sense of huge vectors and currents at work, and of the different materials which move in different ways through them, and act as markers of the storm’s invisible potencies. We have glimpsed him on the rainswept strand at Piombino, studying the complex mechanics of crashing breakers. On another occasion, near Florence, he watched with awe the effects of a whirlwind:
The returning eddies of the wind… strike upon the waters and scoop them out in a great hollow, and lift them into the air in the shape of a column with the colour of a cloud. I saw this on a sandbank in the Arno. The sand was hollowed out to a depth more than the height of a man, and the sand and gravel were whirled around in a scattered mass over a wide area. It appeared in the air in the form of a great bell-tower, and the top spread out like the branches of a huge pine tree.
Another tornado or gale is recorded in a note of 1508: ‘I have seen motions of the air so furious that they have caught up in their course whole roofs of great palaces and carried them away.’38
Now in Rome he returns intensively to this ‘fury’ of whirling movements, and pens a series of writings and drawings on the theme of ‘The Deluge’. Put together they add up to a kind of portfolio: they may be part of the ever-intended treatise on painting, or they may represent thoughts for an actual painting of the biblical flood. There are half a dozen texts on the subject, all dating to around 1515. The longest, which fills both sides of a sheet at Windsor, is divided into two sections entitled ‘Description of the deluge’ and ‘How to represent it in painting’; the style is big and rhetorical, as he tends to be with this sort of subject. A note headed ‘Divisions’ summarizes the ingredients of the Leonardian tempest. It begins with the physical – floods, fires, earthquakes, whirlpools, etc. – then focuses on the human dimensions of the catastrophe:
Broken trees loaded with people. Ships broken in pieces, smashed against rocks. Flocks of sheep; hailstones, thunderbolts, whirlwinds. People on trees which are unable to support them; trees, rocks, towers and hills covered with people; boats, tables, troughs and other means of floating. Hills covered with men, women and animals, and lightning from the clouds illuminating everything.39
These mental images of refugees, and makeshift boats, and flocks of sheep in a hailstorm, suggest the mapping-out of a large-scale painting or fresco. So too does another note, titled ‘Representing the deluge’, which says, ‘Neptune will be seen in the midst of the water with his trident, and Aeolus with his winds ruffling the trees.’40 But if there was a specific project – an apocalyptic Noah’s Flood to rival Michelangelo’s Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel – it came to nothing.
Or rather it resulted in the ‘Deluge drawings’ (Plate 27), which are collectively a late masterpiece. There is a series of ten, done in black chalk on uniformly sized sheets of white paper (6 х 8 inches).41 They are explosive, convulsive; the pen-strokes curl and jab to express churning vortices of energy, centrifugal tunnels of water, bursting scattershots of rock. What exactly is being shown? We could be looking back to some bleak cataclysm in distant astronomical time, or forward to the thunderbolt of nuclear fission, to the mushroom-cloud and the fallout. They are in one sense ‘scientific’: part of Leonardo’s inquiry into the ‘marvellous works’ of Nature. They are a test he has set himself: to represent accurately – which means also to understand accurately – the mechanics of upheaval, to discern in it some subtle, elastic pattern, like the fractals of modern chaos theory. They are attempts, one might say, to anatomize a storm. Yet they convey also that the attempt may fail. They speak of categories engulfed, of illusory mental constructs swept away in this ‘deluge’ of destructive power.
The force of the drawings is such that they seem to burst upon the paper. You sense the physical event of their composition – the sudden, intent, strenuous gestures; and you sense something too of the accidenti mentali, or mental events, which they express. Leonardo is confronting the raw energy of Nature; the confrontation is harrowing. These whirling banshee-forms seem like an onrush of mental disruption and chaos: a brain-storm. Some of the drawings have an almost hallucinogenic quality, as if he were passing through some kind of interior shamanistic ordeal. But then as you continue to look at them, and into them, you perceive that they contain also a kind of peace. They become mesmeric. Their curvilinear force-fields resolve into mandala-like forms. You regain a sense of the surface of the drawings: marks of black chalk on rough white paper, interweavings, fantasie fetched back from the abyss.