Word: leonardo
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...instrument for expressing all this was his drawing. The existing corpus of Leonardo's drawings and notes is no more than a fragment of his life's work, now mutilated and dispersed; still, it runs to thousands of pages, some 600 of which are in the collection of the English royal family at Windsor Castle. In aesthetic terms the Windsor drawings are of incomparable interest, not least because they include so many of Leonardo's most developed studies of inanimate nature-plants, landscapes, the effects of weather and light. A group of 50 of these nature studies...
...sheets are very small, and the detail in some of them is carried out at an almost microscopic level-a difficult enough feat with "hard" tools like pen or silverpoint, but an impossible one (or so one would suppose) with red crayon. One of the minor technical mysteries surrounding Leonardo's work was how he made his chalk hard enough to hold a needle point when sharpened. The steadiness of his hand was almost inhuman-helped, no doubt, by the diet of fruit and water he was always recommending to others, and by his justified refusal to have anything...
This power of detailed synthesis was not the end of drawing, however, only the means. Leonardo could bring a steely exactitude and transparent freshness of observation to a botanical drawing, like the star-of-Bethlehem plant that he drew as a study for his lost painting of Leda and the swan. Yet the consciously serpentine wreathing of its leaves proclaims the image to be formed as much by style as by the impulse to "objective" description. The two work perfectly together. To see why, one may look at the most famous of his water studies, the image of water gushing...
...motion of water was Leonardo's key image of natural energy: braiding, coiling, spiraling, impartially taking form as hair, or leaves, or even wind. This apprehension of energy acted upon his drawings almost irrespective of their mood. It is present, for instance, in the exquisite black chalk study of the "pointing lady" standing by a stream, with her veil-like gathering and wreathing of drapery all' antica: a Leonardesque muse if ever there was one, pointing with a mysterious smile of affirmation toward something we cannot see. But its tragic form is in his visions of universal disaster...
...most worked-out emblem of Leonardo's pessimism occurs toward the end of his life, in the 1510s, with the deluge drawings. In them, the spiral that was his sign for life becomes the symbol, and instrument, of ultimate destruction. Perhaps the germ of these drawings lay in his witnessing, as Clark has suggested, some great flood resembling the one that hit Florence in 1966. In those rhythmical, abstract spirals, like vast shavings from a plane, that emanate from the tumbling mountain, the exploding lake and the destroying clouds, Leonardo found his sign for the dissolution of all matter...