A sheet of separate sketches showing scenes from the end of the world: above, fire rains down from a thundercloud onto tiny figures as a mountain and fortress crumble into an abyss; a great ball of smoke and fire burns over precipitous cliffs, surrounding a huge pit in which the sea boils; to the right, cowering figures are incinerated by an aerial fire; to the left skeletons climb from their graves. In contrast to these dramatic scenes, the notes on the sheet are coolly scientific, discussing the appearance of sunlit clouds. Melzi's number 200.

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 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