On the Folly and Glory of Summoning Weather Within Walls

Milan, this fourteenth day of March, in the year of our Lord 1500. A strange rumor has reached my workshop — carried by what messenger I cannot say, for the paper smells of no ink I recognize, and the hand is mechanical, as if pressed by a stamp of impossible regularity. It speaks of a man from the far north, of Danish and Icelandic blood, who constructs weather inside great halls. Weather! Not painted weather, not the sfumato suggestion of mist upon a panel, but actual fog, actual light bent through vapor, an artificial sun hung beneath a ceiling so that visitors might stand as if within the belly of the atmosphere itself. I confess: my heart races. For what have I attempted these thirty years if not precisely this — the union of nature's mechanics with the hand of art? Let me set down my questions, as is my custom: — By what apparatus does he produce mist indoors without flooding the floor? I have studied the behavior of water in all its states: how it rises as vapor from heated basins, how it condenses upon cold stone. Does he employ heated reservoirs? Mirrors to multiply a single flame into the semblance of the sun? I have myself designed mirrors for stage spectacles in the court of Il Moro. — He claims, so the dispatch says, to force the viewer to confront the mechanics of perception rather than the illusion of nature. Here I pause. Is this not what I have written in my own notebooks? That the painter must understand the eye before he understands the landscape? That light does not exist apart from the organ which receives it? The pupil contracts, the humor vitreous bends the ray — all painting is, at root, an investigation of this machinery. — And yet I wonder: if you reveal the mechanism, do you not destroy the enchantment? When I paint the Virgin among rocks, I hide my grinding of pigments, my geometry of shadow. The viewer weeps; he does not calculate. Perhaps this northern artist has found a third path — neither concealment nor exposure, but a state where knowing the trick deepens the wonder. List of things to attempt: a chamber of controlled vapor; a concave mirror of polished bronze, vast enough to cast a false sun; ducts beneath the floor to channel warm and cool air in alternation, so that one might walk from summer into winter in seven paces. Anatomy, hydraulics, optics, painting — they are one discipline. I have always said so. It seems the future agrees. Leonardo, servant of experiment.