IAS Turbulence: Representing Turbulence

by Alison Wright

Figure 1. Leonardo Da Vinci, A deluge c.1517-18, Black chalk, pen and ink, wash, 16.2 x 20.3 cm (sheet of paper). By permission of the Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020 [RCIN 912380].

 

The discussion ‘Engaging with Turbulence’ that prompted this historical consideration was publicized under an ecstatically energetic drawing of a deluge by Leonardo da Vinci (figure 1). It is perhaps the most decorative and legible of a series of works produced towards the end of his life, for his own satisfaction, with no commission in mind. These ‘finished’ drawings are the culmination of a lifelong interest in natural forces, their movements and their effects. They are also visionary, even apocalyptic, meditations at the limit of life, the visible and the representable. At the panel I contrasted the effects of ambitious fifteenth-century gold-ground painting, notably the ‘apocalyptic’ gilded grounds of images of the Passion, and the pictorial order in which Leonardo produces his representations of turbulence. In the former, the cosmic rupture of the death of God is figured in the flash of gold which, seen at an angle, will turn dark to re-enact solar eclipse and disrupt perspectival vision. At the moment of writing this, Leonardo’s obsessive late returns to cataclysm appear together — all about the same size and landscape format — in the Queen’s Gallery in London and they prompt closer investigation of viewpoint.

In the polite hush of the gallery, visitors peer in to their layered and atmospheric depths, perhaps to distinguish signs of human life beneath the tumbling elements. Most will struggle to read the inverted writing in the clouds which are Leonardo’s orderly directive to the painter: 'Of rain. You will show the degrees of falling rain at various distances and of varying degrees of obscurity, and let the darkest part be closest to the middle of its thickness.’ While gathered clouds or falling rain are experienced as phenomena of light, the body feels and hears but does not see a gust of wind, a peal of thunder or a sudden drop in temperature. Still less can a human subject, caught up in turbulent — especially destructive — forces, find the shape of the storm or sense where it may be sweeping them. The loss of orientation, control and threat of bodily annihilation are total. To conjure up these impossibly beautiful storms, dropping like curls of hair (figure 2), Leonardo was sitting safe somewhere searching his imagination, experience and pushing at the boundaries of drawing, as much as any memory of ‘nature’. Black chalk, in its nuanced smoke (sfumatura), clouds the white paper with powdery films that evoke the dust caught up in the air. Ink reinforces coiled, claw-like or cuboid forms (toppling columns of exploded rock, figure 1). Though imminent in effect, the imagined vantage point of the draughtsman is lofty, even as scale is hard to gauge. Some ‘views’ open up sublime distances by offer glimpses of cities overwhelmed, others suggest the collapse of mountains, most show trees flattened to the ground, or clumped, peaceable but doomed, in the foreground. In one only do tiny figures appear, naked wind gods perhaps, riding and merging with the clouds, intimating that they or their masters have unleashed the disaster upon the earth to satisfy inscrutable urges.

Though conceived with very different ends, these drawings of deluge bear clear visual similarities in their ornamental analysis of movement and turbulent flows to those Leonardo produced as an engineer and early natural scientist.[i] Alongside notes that complement the scrolling or wheeling forms of water in a controlled, first-hand observation or, more radically, viewed in plan from above, Leonardo sought to reveal the motive force of flowing water and the effects of its obstruction (figure 3). Part of the fascination of turbulence in Leonardo’s draughtsmanship is the way its force combines ornament and violence. It is the order of ornament, described by scrolling flow and internal coiling, that conjures the all-important relation between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic, between the great forces and the storm in the teacup — or water conduit.

Together these analyses of fluid motion and turbid weather systems raise a host of still contemporary questions, above all in their relation to unpredictable and dramatic, as well as slowly mounting, environmental change that threatens existence, human and non-human. What surfaces in turbulence? Or rather: what does it allow to be seen (figure 4)? Can forces on the edge of present understanding or control — cosmic, microcosmic, economic — be represented and what do the attempts to do so show of the effects and limitations of our image systems, our world view or cosmos? What is the relation of turbulence to ‘order’? Are turbulent events temporary fluctuations, or do they presage some more permanent or irreversible damage? And how does turbulence challenge human power and capability? Can mounting storms be resisted by force, by ingenuity, by technology or is the best one can do to try to ride them out? Leonardo’s viewpoints on flow and its disruption offer contrasting, but always ‘masterly’ or mastering, responses to turbulence of a kind that have proved central to western scientific method, as well as to modern subject formation, in particular its fascination with destructive force and fantasies of control.

The London exhibition includes a drawing for the Florentine government representing, from above, a stretch of the river Arno showing the disruption of its flow produced by a weir and its consequences (figure 5). Leonardo’s pen develops a persuasive, fluid notation for the repeated eddies or reeling waters produced by currents moving at different speeds, and he maps them to measure the systems at play. Erosion at two points downstream appears as the progressive result of an emboldened flow of water, undermining artificial attempts to contain the bank. It is a flow which has an order of behaviour that Leonardo visualises, analyses and so makes available for application elsewhere. Ultimately, Leonardo was keen to direct these forces (as a further drawing bears witness with a megalomaniac scheme to bypass the river altogether) where they served both trade and warfare. Looking at his ambitions to understand ‘natural laws’, and to harness them to the interests of the territorial state, one is easily encouraged to another leap of scale, recalling what has since been realized, over staggering distances and giant environmental impacts, along the Yangtze river. And from this post twentieth-century perspective the Deluge drawings begin to evoke manmade cataclysm, like the massive flooding required for the Three Gorges Dam — or indeed, a terrible vision of dam burst, as at Guajataca or Jakarta.

As a painter, Leonardo’s imaging and imagining of great waters relates to a longer trajectory of depicting turbulence in ancient poetry and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Several early-fifteenth-century descriptions of a lost mosaic by Giotto, and a painting by ‘Stefano’ assert the mimetic power of depiction to induce awe at fictive storms at sea, threatening shipwreck to terrified mortals. Such works showed Christ’s disciples on the sea of Galilee and were referred to as a ‘Navicella’, making them a theopolitical allegory of the Ship of the Church. An unnamed painting in Venice by Gentile da Fabriano suggests a more secular viewpoint, noted simply for ‘a whirlwind overturning uprooted trees and other things […] it induces fear and horror’.[ii] The peculiar mixed emotion provoked by observing the terrible at a distance would become a lynchpin of aesthetic theory as it emerged in the eighteenth century. The sublime ‘delight’ of horror, especially the spectacular fantasy of limitless power unleashed, continues to be recycled and snowball across ‘immersive’ film and gaming screens under technocapitalism. Leonardo’s own verbal ekphrasis of an ideal painting showing a deluge has no God, but rather the epic thrust of a disaster movie curiously morphing into a lecture on hydraulics:

And into the depths of a valley the fragments of a mountain have fallen, forming a shore to the swollen waters of its river, which has burst its banks and rushes on in monstrous waves, striking and destroying the walls of the towns and farmhouses in the valley. The ruin of these buildings throws up a great dust, rising like smoke or wreathed clouds against the falling rain. The swollen waters sweep round them, striking these obstacles in eddying whirlpools, and leaping into the air as muddy foam. And the whirling waves fly from the place of concussion, and their impetus moves them across other eddies in a contrary direction.[iii]  

He goes on to imagine with horrible specificity the array of the desperate, human and animal, surrounded by the bobbing carcases of the dead.

Tellingly, the word Leonardo uses to describe this scene is a ‘fortuna’, a term perhaps best translated as a natural disaster or accident. Fortuna was also represented allegorically in this period as a powerful, fickle woman whose turning wheel could elevate or cast down, acting cyclically then, but essentially by chance. Even the hall of the Florentine Priors, elected to head the state for short periods and by lot, boasted an image of Fortuna with this very warning of changing fortune attached to it.[iv] While in some representations Fortuna has a forelock that could be grasped, the natural misfortune imagined by Leonardo has rather the sense of an irresistible force majeure. It is to this sense — of a disastrous storm — to which Giovanni Rucellai speaks in his family commonplace book when he recorded at length a ‘marvellous fortuna’ that devastated the country towns around Florence on the Monday morning of 22 August 1456:

It appeared in Valdelsa beyond Lucardo on the said Monday before dawn, a great quantity of black clouds with great storm and ruin, and they came towards San Casciano and Santa Maria Impruneta [….] it rose and spent itself after a passage of about 20 miles and it was about 2/3 of a mile wide. The which clouds were very black and dark moving low over the land […] each one fighting the other like a skirmish and battle, they made a great and terrible noise, fearful and terrifying. Their force was marvellous; more than winds they seemed rather a bombardment, and […] there was in them throughout or in part a great quantity of matter and vapours of arrows [‘spetie di saetta’], as one can comprehend from the damage done as I will narrate […] 

Rucellai is at pains to authorize this marvel: ‘You can be sure of [the truth of] this because Giovanni Rucellai mounted a horse in company with Bartolomeo Ridolfi and took the day to search about the countryside and we saw with our own eyes and heard and saw all these things’.[v] His eye-witness account of flattened buildings, possessions spread across the landscape, trees and orchards scoured of leaves (‘sbarbati’ or de-bearded) and reports of farm workers caught up into the air, is the product of an early form of disaster tourism. But the inevitable slip into metaphor reveals it as more than that. Rucellai muses conventionally on the cruelty of this ‘fortuna’ and his precision as to time and date suggests a common undercurrent of concern as to whether such events were symptoms of cosmic turbulence that pointed to some larger, political misfortune on the horizon. Was such sudden disaster, like plague or flood, a sign of God’s displeasure, an ill wind? Rucellai, who had been denied political office because of his Strozzi father-in-law’s exile, chose a windblown and untethered sail as his personal insignia and was an avid consulter of authorities who might help him understand how to act nobly in the face of turbulent fortuna.[vi] Weighing the options like an early Renaissance Hamlet, he at one time absorbed Marsilio Ficino’s advice that it was ultimately best to conform to Her will and submit to the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. At another he preferred the image of the wise steersman who tries to ride the flood.

To study the representations of Leonardo and Giovanni Rucellai is to be reminded that turbulence is always a sign of the times. The representation of turbulence and its effects has, since the Renaissance, most often invoked a sovereign male subject position that observes and measures at a distance, imagines and orders its forces, surveys the results with sympathy or awe and tries to account for it. What complex interrelation of forces natural, political and social are at play, he asks, and how might they be played or directed? For those caught in the storm, or trying to access the boat, weathering turbulence is a very different matter.