For my first post of the new year, I’m starting with a claim I made some seven months ago: that the likeness of God in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel panel depicting the Creation of Man represents Leonardo da Vinci – so does the reclining figure of Adam, for “God created man in the image of himself” (Genesis 1 : 27).

Adam’s lounging pose and limp left hand is intended to mirror the sleeping figure of Mars in Botticelli’s painting of Venus and Mars. Botticelli’s Mars is also a representation of Leonardo.

In Ancient Roman religion and mythology, Mars, a god of war, was a son of Jupiter, the god of the sky, or heavenly father. 

While the seductive figure of Venus is unable to stir the dormant Mars, Adam comes alive when God sends him into the world he has created.

On the fourth day of creation God said: “Let the waters teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth within the vault of heaven” (Genesis 1 : 20).

Living creatures are referenced above the head of Adam, aka Leonardo, although in a very much disguised fashion. The bird reference is Adam’s untidy, swept-back hairstyle, an upside-down bird nest, while the living creatures of the sea is the fish-head shape of the distant blue-stack mountain. Birds and mountains were of great interest to Leonardo da Vinci, as evidenced in his notebooks.

It was while a young Leonardo was walking the Tuscan hills that he came upon an entrance to a large cavern. As he began to explore inside the cave, his eyes set upon an embedded fossil of a large whale. He later wrote of this experience:

“O powerful and once-living instrument of formative nature, your great strength of no avail, you must abandon your tranquil life to obey the law which God and time gave to creative nature. Of no avail are your branching, sturdy dorsal fins with which you pursue your prey, plowing your way, tempestuously tearing open the briny waves with your breast. […] O Time, swift despoiler of created things, how many kings, how many peoples have you undone? How many changes of state and circumstances have followed since the wondrous form of this fish died here in this winding and cavernous recess? Now unmade by time you lie patiently in this closed place with bones stripped and bare, serving as an armature for the mountain placed over you. (Codex Arundel, folio 156 e)

Leonardo also embedded references to this experience in the  background of two of his early paintings: The Baptism of Christ (attributed to both Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo), and the Annunciation.

Michelangelo’s whale-shaped feature is a pointer to the whale and dolphin shaped mountains rising from the sea in the distance.

Leonardo was fascinated by flight. It is said that he once attempted to fly from a hillside nearby to Florence but the attempt was short lived and crash landed. The bird nest reference may be Michelangelo’s suggestion that the flight came down in a tree, but it also refers to another bird feature disguised in the Baptism of Christ painting. More on this part of the story at another time.

Leonardo also made reference to a failed flight attempt in his painting of the Annunciation. Gabriel’s extended wax wing is a pointer to the embedded narrative of the Greek mythology figure, Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and fell to earth.

Verrocchio also alluded to Leonardo’s fall to earth when he featured him as a fallen angel on the breastplate of the terracotta bust of Giuliano de’ Medici.

Leonardo also gets a showing In Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco, painted later on the Altar Wall of the Sistine Chapel, and he appears, too, in some of the frescoed panels on the Southern Wall.

In the Last Judgment fresco Leonardo is portrayed as Adam in the Fall of Man (the Damned Man) and as one of the group of  Trumpeting Angels.