Leonardo: Water

The Benefit

Join us on May 14 for a vibrant art auction, live music, and a delicious spread from local vendors. This fundraising event supports the museum's efforts to teach Leonardo's idea of improvisational creativity to K–12 learners, dedicated apprentices, and the Greater New Haven community.

If you are interested in supporting this event through a sponsorship, contact 203.777.1833 or email manager@eliwhitney.org.

Artist's Challenge

The Artist's Challenge is to create a piece that embodies the idea of water. Leonardo da Vinci closely studied water. His observations are prevalent in the paintings familiar to many. Look closely at Leonardo's depictions of coursing through the countryside. Imagine the possibilities of water's power. Consider the generative and destructive forces.

It is your challenge to depict, ponder, or produce a reflection on water for the art auction.

Interested in participating as an artist? Click the button below:

Water

Water fascinated Leonardo da Vinci throughout his life. He observed water in rivers and rain, in the tides of the sea, and in the shifting currents that shape the land. To Leonardo, water was never still. It moved, transformed, and revealed the hidden forces of nature.

“Water is precisely that which is dedicated to the vital humor of this arid earth.”      
Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Arundel, 236v

Water is life. Water is turbulent. Water holds immense power.

Between 1506 and 1512, Leonardo devoted extensive study to water in the pages of the Codex Leicester. Across its seventy-two pages, he recorded observations, sketches, and questions about the behavior of water in motion. He examined how rivers carve valleys, how waves travel across oceans, and how water cycles endlessly through the natural world.

From mountains to rivers, from rivers to the sea, and from sea to sky, water moves through a perpetual cycle. Clouds gather, rain falls, streams flow, and oceans rise and fall with the pull of distant forces.

But water is more than motion. It is also reflection.

What do you see when you look into water? Your reflection? The sky above? Beneath the surface, entire worlds exist—plants, animals, and unseen currents shaping life below.

Water guides human journeys as well. It carries ships across oceans, powers mills and machines, and sustains communities along its shores.

For Leonardo, studying water was a way of understanding the living earth itself—its motion, its power, and its endless transformation.