Read about the works in this gallery, or view images from the exhibition (see below).

Leonardo's Codex Leicester (cat. no. 114) served as a draft for a treatise on the movement of water and other subjects. It is among the latest of Leonardo's extant notebooks. Eight double-sided pages of the codex (dismembered in 1981), which reveal a telling diversity of execution, are exhibited with a selection of other pen-and-ink drawings from 1508–12. At about this time, Leonardo also undertook the design of a funerary monument to Gian Giacomo Trivulzio (cat. no. 111), which included an equestrian statue that he never executed. The use of tonal, somewhat scratchy curved hatching and straight parallel hatching is typical of Leonardo's late period.

Leonardo's closely observed, analytical studies of hydrodynamics in the Codex Leicester and other notes are given a great expressive purpose in his series of Deluge drawings of about 1515–17. The drawings (cat. nos. 115, 116) portray the destructive vortices of tidal waves furiously rebounding over the diminished forms of man and nature. They are powerful works of the imagination but conceived with an eminently rationalized knowledge of the dynamic principles governing the behavior of water. Leonardo understood imagination as fantasia, the ability to recombine images or parts of images into entirely new compounds or ideas. Since classical antiquity, poetry had been assessed in terms of "invention" of subject matter and composition, as put forth, for example, in Horace's Ars poetica. Inspired by an ancient literary topos, Leonardo forcefully argued in his Paragone (comparison of the arts) of the early 1490s that the painter was superior to the poet, because sight was by far greater than all other mental capacities, and "the [poet's] imagination cannot see with such excellence as the eye." Drawing offered him a most essential tool in capturing the magnificence of sight.

The Graphic Work of Leonardo's Pupils in Milan and the Dissemination of Leonardo's Style and Designs

Leonardo's small drawings of grotesque heads—often imprecisely called "caricatures"—comprise the genre that made him famous, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the wide dissemination of countless copies and reproductive prints. Leonardo's drawings appear to have been copied first by his beloved pupil and artistic heir Francesco Melzi (see cat. no. 121). Melzi's drawing imitates Leonardo's originals (cat. no. 73, nearby) with great precision, down to the left-handed, diagonal parallel hatching, as do two later copies (cat. nos. 136, 137). The small selection of finished studies by Leonardo's Milanese pupils and followers that concludes the exhibition also demonstrates that, at least in their drawings, Leonardo's followers—"Leonardeschi"—were most often interested in renderings of the human head and its potential for expression. The theory of the moti mentali (the motions of the mind) was one of Leonardo's major legacies as a teacher. The studies of heads by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, the Master of the Sforza Altarpiece, Francesco Melzi, Andrea Solario, Bernardino Luini, and Giovanni Agostino da Lodi vividly attest that, at times, Leonardo's followers could take his styles and techniques to inspired heights. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo's Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et archittetura (Milan, 1584) states that Leonardo frequently drew with pastels, citing the example of his studies for the heads of the apostles in the Last Supper; however, no such securely attributed studies for the mural survive. The great master's own notes refer to pastels, and one describes a recipe for their making. The exhibition includes a group of monumental pastel drawings by Leonardo's earliest pupil, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, as well as by his more distant Lombard followers Bernardino Luini and Andrea Solario, illustrating the impact of Leonardo's new pastel technique on North Italian artists.

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