The Battle of Anghiari

The Battle of Anghiari is a fresco by Leonardo da Vinci, now lost, which was meant to decorate one of the walls of the Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. It was painted between 1503 and 1506, as part of a commission shared with Michelangelo: while Leonardo worked on the right-hand wall with the battle of Anghiari, a victory for the Florentines, Michelangelo was to depict an episode from the battle of Cascina. Both works were large, roughly seven metres high and seventeen long, and the fact that two artists of this stature worked on the same room makes the project a singular episode in Renaissance history.

The painting is distinguished above all by its subject. Leonardo did not aim for an orderly combat but for a confused and violent struggle, in which horses twist together in powerful movement and men fight over a standard. This central scene, known as the Fight for the Standard, is the best documented part, thanks to early copies and an engraving by Lorenzo Zacchia the Younger. The most famous of these reproductions is a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens, now in the Louvre, which gives a fairly clear idea of the original composition.

Technique was the main difficulty. Leonardo was uneasy with fresco, which demands rapid execution, and chose encaustic, a method described by Pliny the Elder that involved heating the painted surface to fix the colours. When applied to the wall, the heat did not dry the paint evenly: the lower part set, but the upper part flaked away and the colours ran together. Leonardo abandoned the project, though the work was practically complete in its essentials. Documents from 1505 record that he had several assistants, among them a painter named "Ferrando Spagnuolo", whose identity is usually linked to Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina or, more probably, Hernando de los Llanos.

The painting remained visible for some years, but during the reworking of the hall commissioned from Vasari in the second half of the sixteenth century it disappeared, probably covered by new frescoes. Some experts have claimed it may still survive hidden behind that wall, though this has not been confirmed. Its importance lies less in what can be seen today than in the reference it left: a bold attempt to bring battle painting to a scale and complexity without precedent.

Painter

Leonardo da Vinci

Date

1503

Medium

fresco

Museum

Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

Movement

High Renaissance

Genre

battle painting, history painting

Depicts

Battle of Anghiari

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