Stones on Canvas and on Stage. Early Earth Sciences in Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks and Shakespeare's The Tempest

The fascinating strangeness of an object, the ‘fossil’, which seems to be related both to the inorganic and the organic world, and consequently to resist the passing of time, surfaces both in Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks and in Shakespeare's The Tempest. In Ariel’s song, in particular, the witty spirit soothes Ferdinand for the death of his father suggesting that the King of Naples’ body has suffered a «sea-change» which transformed it into something hard and, apparently, unalterable by time. Given that the esoteric figure of Prospero has been drawn on the model of the Renaissance sage, such as Leonardo was, I consider the King of Naples’s metamorphosis in the light of Leonardo's theory of fossils as compared to more widely spread theories current at the time of Shakespeare.

Il saggio si propone un’analisi comparativa fra la pittura leonardesca e l’ultimo dramma shakespeariano alla luce del sapere proto-geologico che si stava sviluppando nella prima modernità. Le pioneristiche ipotesi geologiche formulate da Leonardo, leggibili in parte anche nei suoi dipinti, diventano chiave di lettura per alcune metafore e immagini adottate da Shakespeare nella Tempesta, come per esempio la trasformazione cantata da Ariel del corpo del re in una sorta di prezioso fossile.