Codex Atlanticus (F0033)

Around 1485 Leonardo was in his early thirties and working in Milan for its ruler, Ludovico Sforza. A few years earlier he had sent Sforza a long letter that dwelt almost entirely on war: portable bridges that could be burned behind an army, ways to drain a moat, cannon and mortars of every kind. Painting came near the end, almost as an afterthought. This sheet belongs to that offer of service. It shows mortars lobbing shells over a wall, each shell bursting in the air and raining smaller charges into a circular fort, so the whole enclosure is struck at once. Leonardo laid out the trajectories as tidy fans of dots, the way one might chart the spray of a fountain. It is one of about 1,100 loose sheets that a collector mounted around 1600 on large, atlas-sized pages, which is how the bound volume came to be called the Codex Atlanticus.