A drawing of a city at the centre of a vortex, with rocks about to fall and crush it. There are waves and water-spouts encircling it. Above are dark clouds with great curves of water descending from them. Melzi's number 145.

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 mountain fragments and collapses onto a distant city, the whole swept up in a great coil of energy. But far from being chaotic, it is drawn with the eye of a scientist, fascinated by the forms and optical qualities of clouds, rain, floodwater, debris and dust.

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