About this work
What confronts you in this drawing is not beauty in any conventional sense — and yet it is undeniably beautiful. Executed in pen and ink around 1485 , the sheet depicts one of Leonardo's most arresting military inventions: a mortar system designed to deliver explosive fragmentation bombs onto enemy positions. The drawing shows a front mortar firing bombs that explode on impact into a cloud of metal shrapnel , while the back mortar is loaded with stones or small-caliber iron balls fired at the enemy like grapeshot. Leonardo renders the detonating projectiles with the same meticulous care he gave to human anatomy — arcing trajectories, bursting shells, and the physics of destruction all captured in crisp, confident line work. The visual rhythm of the composition, with its geometric precision and kinetic energy, reads almost like a choreography of force.
The drawing is held in the Codex Atlanticus, Folio 33r — a 12-volume bound set of drawings and writings by Leonardo da Vinci, the largest single such collection in existence.
The Codex comprises 1,119 leaves dating from 1478 to 1519, covering subjects from flight to weaponry to musical instruments and from mathematics to botany. The mortar sketch dates to Leonardo's first extended period in Milan, where he served Ludovico Sforza partly as a military engineer. The design for mortars with exploding shells was intended to gain an advantage over the enemy by producing copious amounts of small fast-moving shot which would cause maximum casualties.
The drawing depicts mortars firing mortar bombs — and seldom have deadly instruments of war been rendered more beautifully.
On a wall, this print occupies a singular category: neither pure art nor pure science, it is Leonardo thinking out loud in ink. It belongs in a space that rewards close looking — a study, a library, a design studio, or a well-lit hallway where a viewer can spend time with the detail. The designs are famous not just because of the visual artistry and intricacy, but because many of these structures and weapons were conceived long before the technologies needed to build them had even been conceptualised. That gap between vision and reality is precisely what charges the image with its quiet electricity. It speaks to the curious, the historically minded, and anyone drawn to the idea that the most radical act of intelligence is simply to imagine what hasn't existed yet.
