Two drawings of a fountain, designed as an Ionic column on a base. On the capital stands a naked man bent forward under the weight of a huge basket. Water is squirted from a pipe in his hands into the basket.

This is one of two fragments probably cut from a single sheet, with designs for a ‘Heron’s fountain’, a hydraulic curiosity in which a reservoir of water emptying by gravity into a lower chamber sends a small fountain of water back into the upper reservoir. The device gives the impression of being a perpetual motion machine, though eventually the reservoir empties and the fountain stops. See also RCIN 912691.

The designs offer a rare glimpse of Leonardo thinking as a sculptor in a context other than an equestrian monument. Their scale is hard to determine: they were probably table fountains to be cast in bronze or silver, but the columns seem monumental in conception and they could have been full-scale fountains for a garden.

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