Non mi fuggir, donzella...». Leonardo regista teatrale del Poliziano

It has long been established that the sketches of a revolving stage on two sheets of Leonardo's Codex Arundel pertain to a project for the staging of Politian's Orfeo. They have been dated to about 1506-1508 on the basis of drawing style and the ductus of the handwriting, and thus it follows that they are from the period of Leonardo s activity as architect in the service of Charles d'Amboise, French governor of Milan, whose fondness for theatrical performances is well documented. This evidence, combined with a newly discovered sheet identified as formerly belonging to the Codex Atlanticus, leads the author to raise the question as to what Leonardo's overall plan consisted of. The turning point in the unfolding of the play is obviously the dramatic change from the pastoral to the underworld scenery, from day to night, as a mountain in the center opens onto a view of the underworld, where Orpheus goes to meet Pluto with the purpose of retrieving his beloved wife Eurydice. According to the plot of Politian's work, the sudden death of his wife from a snakebite occurred just before, as she was fleeing from Aristeus around the closed mountain in a day-light scene. A small sketch at Windsor, dating from the time of this project, shows a man pursuing a woman on a sloping terrain, a motif that would fit in perfectly with the foreground of the scenery represented in sheets in the Codex Arundel. Once granted that his wife would follow him back to the world of the living, Orpheus however failed to keep his promise not to turn around to look at her, and so she had to go back to the underworld. In desperation, Orpheus refused to have anything more to do with women, and openly praised homosexuality. This infuriated the Bacchantes, who tore him to pieces, sacrificing him to Bacchus in the whirling of a madly macabre dance. As a working hypothesis, the famous Leonardo drawing of Dancing Maidens in Venice is now considered as a reflection of Leonardo's ideas for the spectacular conclusion of Politian's tragedy.