Gli ‘Esopi’ di Leonardo: l’ascia e il noce

Leonardo’s ‘Aesops’: The Axe and the Walnut. Through a comparison between Leonardo’s manuscripts and the editions of Aesop belonging to his library, the essay examines the development of narrative texts and Leonardo’s visual sequences. In particular, the essay shows how the illustrative apparatus of the Aesopus is recalled in a series of Da Vinci’s drawings about the relationship between man and nature, and in his tales on plants. As showed in the reworked version of the tale of the walnut, Leonardo had not settled for stereotyped characters of Aesop’s tradition, but dramatizes them drawing on Alberti’s fables and on classic and contemporary poetical texts, with the goal to represent the natural dynamics in a concise and immediate form, and give an ethical-moral function to the phenomenon.