A drawing of a hurricane assailing a band of horsemen, with trees bent to the ground. In the upper part flood water full of wreckage, is touched by clouds and rain from a gigantic water spout. In the clouds are storm gods, and on the left child wind gods control the water spout. The lower left corner has been cut off. Melzi's number 107.

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. This is the most elaborate of Leonardo’s deluge drawings. Among dense clouds, wind-gods hurl thunderbolts or blow the storm along with trumpets, while at lower right the tempest overwhelms a party of horsemen who cower on the ground as broken trees fall among them.

Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: A life in drawing, London, 2018