Cats, lions, and a dragon

Around 1513, in one of his notebooks, Leonardo reminded himself to write a separate treatise on the movements of four-footed animals, among which, he added, is man, who also crawls on all fours as an infant. This sheet, drawn a few years later, around 1517 or 1518, is that interest turned on the cat family.

The Royal Collection reads it as two kinds of looking. The cats curled up asleep, the most finished studies on the page, were probably drawn from life, because a sleeping cat holds still. The cats fighting, twisting and pouncing had to be pieced together from fleeting impressions, from memory. A prowling lioness appears seven times, remembered from caged animals he had seen in Italy. Among them coils a small dragon, and its body bends and turns through the same movements as the cats around it.