BEELDEN IN VEELVOUD

'Penetrating to the heart of nature deeper than nature itself- that is his
dream. It is the ambition of a cold-blooded Prometheus, who instead of
insultingjupiter, studies hisworkson hisbehalf to discover their secret.
As an artist all hè asks of knowledgc is the power to create, to give life.'22
Séallles' interpretation of Leonardo's drawings as the expression of a visionary
dream would probably have appealed to Kandinsky. The samc goes
for Eugène Müntz's ideas in hïs Leonard de Vind; l'artiste, lepemeur, Ie savantof
1899. Müntz saw Leonardo's texts on storms and the deluge - to
which hè however devoted less attcntion than Séaiiles — as proof of an exceptional
poctic genius. Da Vinci might have been inspired by Petrarch
and his texts also vied with Virgil's dcscriptions of nature in his Georgics;
'lóth century Italian literature has produced nothing better in the field of
descriptive poetry, the recording of landscapes, or of chc phenomena of the
atmosphere and of light'.23 According to Müncz, these poetic descriptions
'of the Zephyr and the storm' (de Zéphyr et de l'ouragan) demonstrated Leonardo's
ability to go to the heart of divine nature (l'essence divïne); they also
cestified to his sense of his affinity with God, who both creates and destroys.
The prevailing image of Leonardo was thus expanded by Séaiiles and
Müntz and this formed the framcwork for their analysis of his writings
about and drawings of the deluge and storms. Moreover they could draw
on recent editions of Leonardo's texts. The fashionable interpretation of
Da Vinci's work had also created a dcmand for biiingual publications of his
writings. There were successive editions in the i88os in Germany, England
and France, all of them including the texts on the Deluge and on storms.24
The extract in Merezhkovskv's later novel, the note that is in Beltraffio's diary,
is just a very concise summary.
Leonardo's original instructions for illustrating a storm and the Deluge are
too numerous anddetailcd to quote here in full, so I will confine myself to
itemizing the most salient motifs not mentioncd in Merezhkovsky's novel
— the downfaü of cities whose walls and high buildings are shattered by the
forces of nature; ships that capsize or are wreckcd by the fury of the waves;
forests on fire; landslides; broken boulders that fall into the torrents,
blocking thevalleys andcausing chcswollen rivers to break their banks;eddying
whhipools; heavy downpours of rain in the atmosphere; waves
brcaking against each other or against cliffs or rebounding off various drifting
objects only to surge up as foam into the air before falling back; a sky
full of scactered clouds and of the dust thrown up by horses as they panic
and bolt and by the broken pieces of rocks and buildings, rendering the
motion of the wind and currcnts of air visible.25
Reading Ober das Geistige in der Kunst, one can hcar the echoes of Leonardo's
account of the down fall of cities. If Kandinksy did indeed consult
a translation of Da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura, it may have been the
460 Paul van den Akker