Great Works: A Cloudburst Of Material Possessions (c 1510), Leonardo da Vinci

Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

Things do fall from the sky. Sometimes their fall has a fluky, farcical quality, as when an especially odd thing falls, or it happens to fall plumb on a victim. Almost always, these events conjure up the idea of an act of God. The sky is the God-direction.

The Book of Revelations in the Bible has various episodes of heavenly pelting. When the Seventh Seal is opened, "the first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth", and ruin follows. But there's also the story in the Book of Exodus, of manna falling from Heaven to feed the Israelites as they wander in the wilderness. Things from above can bring miraculous blessings, too.

Leonardo lived in apocalyptic times. The year 1500, the one-and-a-half millennium, had frightening significance. In Florence, the Dominican monk Savonarola preached the end of the world, and organised Bonfires of the Vanities, in which luxury goods – paintings, books, dresses, mirrors, make-up, musical instruments – were destroyed in public fires. Savonarola had artistic followers. Botticelli was a passionate believer. Michelangelo was a sympathiser. Leonardo was not.

But at some point in the early 1500s Leonardo made a small visionary drawing. It's normally called A Cloudburst of Material Possessions, and it shows a bank of clouds from which a multitude of objects are raining down. Its sheet has been sliced, cutting off the left side of the image, so that it now lies uncentred on the page.

There are also two rather obscure lines of writing in Leonardo's backwards hand. The one above the image says, "on this Adam and on that Eve." The one below says, "O human misery – how many things you must serve for money." It seems the artist intended a severe, antimaterialistic moral.

Still, the objects don't look like vanities. A close squint reveals a strange miscellany. There are bellows, bagpipes, pots and pans, rakes, stools, set-squares, pliers, ladders, and things sketched down so briskly that they can't be identified. It's hard to fit them to a theme. They are mainly functional items. (Even bagpipes are the least fancy type of musical instruments.)

If there is something blameworthy about these items, it is possibly that they represent the human need to work at all. These implements are a consequence of The Fall. Due to Adam and Eve's sin, we have been expelled from Paradise. We can no longer live without labour and without tools. We are slaves to economics.

But to show things falling from the clouds may carry very diverse meanings. Perhaps these handy things are good gifts after all, delivered like manna to needy humanity. Perhaps they are bombing us, raining punishment on us; a punishment for needing them? Perhaps they are being smashed to pieces. It's a heavenly, hardware-store version of a Bonfire of Vanities.

No humans appear in the picture, though, to receive or suffer. So gifts or bombs seem unlikely interpretations. And apparently the objects aren't being destroyed either. They are falling and landing without breaking up.

So what's this fantasy-drawing about? We should look not only at its incidents but at its structure.

A Cloudburst of Material Possessions may have a cataclysmic subject, but it has a strictly contained shape. The image fits within an approximate oblong. Its space makes an orderly, box-like formation. Along the top, there is a horizontal layer of clouds. Beneath that, driving vertical lines of rain – or whizzing cartoon speed-trails – accompany the plunging objects. And beneath that lies the ground, a flat surface defined by the fallen objects already scattered about it.

The scene has a regular construction, which suggests that its action is regular and non-chaotic too. The things fall from the sky with a repetitive, continuous, unrelenting operation. They come slamming, hammering down, with an almost mechanical violence. This takes the divine edge off the vision. It becomes a more impersonal disaster.

This astonishing catastrophe is simply something taking its course. It's a phenomenon wide open to interpretation. You can stress the falling objects themselves, and their fate – or the earth that they're falling upon, and its fate. Are these material things being thrown away, wasted? Do they manifest their crushing, triumphant rule over the world? Falls have this inherent ambiguity. But the image, seen as a process rather than an act of God, doesn't force a choice.

And then, half-hidden in the clouds, there's the figure of a little lion. Yes, it really did rain cats...

About the artist

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) – what don't you know? He painted the most famous picture in the world, and ('The Last Supper') possibly the next-most famous, too. He did everything: painter, inventor, anatomist, engineer, architect, theorist etc. He was the original genius, the exemplary ideas man.

His notebooks show us the human brain working at its highest level, asking questions, trying things out, multi-tasking, thinking outside the box. He was a great beginner, always starting things – a completist but not a completer, many of whose pictures and projects remained unfinished. "Tell me if anything was ever done," he would ask disconsolately. On his deathbed, he apologised to "God and Man for leaving so much undone". His unplumbable mind makes him a magnet for all kinds of fantasies – conspiracy theories, imaginary inventions. There's a book that claims he created photography in order to fake the Shroud of Turin.