A drawing of a deluge that has broken over a rocky hillock. It bends trees so that they are swept down the hill. The rain flows from the hill in a waterfall, so that the foreground is filled with bubbling, swirling water. 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. Melzi's number 141.

During the last years of his life Leonardo repeatedly treated the subject of a cataclysmic storm overwhelming a landscape, in both his drawings and his writings. This series of eleven drawings of a mighty deluge (RCIN 912376 - 912386) are among the most enigmatic and visionary works of the Renaissance. Modest in size and densely worked, each shows a landscape overwhelmed by a vast tempest. Leonardo was fond of writing accounts of deluges, and the drawings may simply have been made for his own satisfaction rather than as studies for any project. 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.

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