Leonardo da Vinci, artist, thinker and man of science (1898) (14761549756)

An emaciated female figure with sagging breasts sits astride a skeletal mount, clutching a snake and a bundle of foliage. The skeleton carries a quiver of arrows on its back and moves in a beast-like crouch across the ground. The composition uses grotesque anatomical details and symbolic attributes to illustrate the predatory and self-consuming nature of vice.

This drawing reflects Leonardo’s interest in the 'passions of the soul' and the moral categorization of human vices common in Renaissance Neoplatonism. In his notebooks, Leonardo describes Envy as a wizened creature that poisons itself, using this specific iconography to show how moral corruption physically distorts the human form.