«I denti spartiti in modo di gridare con lamento»: la battaglia come gesto sonoro in Leonardo

This paper’s starting point is the famous passage from Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise on painting concerning the description of battle. In the text, da Vinci evokes the “sound” of violence. We wonder whether this notion, as described by da Vinci, was already part of a well-established iconographic and literary tradition. Surprisingly, the study of the battle painting genre has revealed that open mouths revealing bared teeth, so as to express a cry of desperate violence, are rare. In the past, these expressive attitudes were sometimes given to animals, and to humans only when the artist wished to express their animal nature (in depicting the enemy, for example). In this sense, the cross-study of education manuals has allowed us to better define how the social and cultural connotations of the wide-open mouth displaying dentition to demonstrate a strong connotation of human degradation. The semiotic value of this facial expression therefore perfectly illustrates da Vinci’s idea of war as “pazzia bestialissima” (bestial madness).