Prophecies continued: distant speech, friars, cruelty
More 'profezie' — letters between countries, confession and indulgences, and the cruelty of man
The verso continues Leonardo's 'profezie', written in two columns of close script across the lower half of the leaf; the upper half is largely blank with a faint rectangular frame showing through. The riddles now turn on letters carried between distant lands, priests and confessors, the selling of paradise with 'invisible coins', and dowries. The sheet culminates in a long, unriddled invective, 'Of the cruelty of man', that calls mankind a pitiless monster that lays waste every living thing and wishes to rise to the sky.
On this page
Of speaking across the hemispheres
Writing letters between countries becomes 'men of most remote lands speaking and answering one another'. The infinite lines dividing the hemispheres, each man always having one between his feet, is dressed as men who 'touch and embrace standing each in the other's hemisphere and understand each other's tongues'. Priests at mass are richly dressed 'after the manner of aprons', and confessors probe women's secret sins.
Of selling paradise with invisible coins
An infinite multitude 'will publicly sell a thing of the greatest value that was never theirs nor in their power, and human justice will not provide against it'. Simple folk carry many lights to guide those who have wholly lost their sight — 'O human foolishness, O living madness!' Even the dowries of maidens are inverted into a time when fathers must pay men to sleep with their daughters.
Of the cruelty of man and of navigation
In 'the cruelty of man' Leonardo drops the riddle: animals fight endlessly and delight in giving death, fear and flight to every living thing, felling the forests and making of their bodies 'a sepulchre and passage' for all they have killed. Navigation becomes 'the trees of the forests of Taurus, Sinai, the Apennines and Atlas running through the air and carrying a great multitude of men' to death without burial. Bows of ox-horn make many 'die a doleful death'.
