The Battle of Anghiari (Leonardo)

Common card · No. 256325

The Battle of Anghiari (Italian: La Battaglia di Anghiari, 1505) is a lost fresco painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred) in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Its central scene would have depicted four men riding raging war horses engaged in a struggle for possession of a standard at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. Leonardo never completed the commission and left the work unfinished in 1505. According to an early biographer, Leonardo had experimented working in a different fresco technique involving walnut oil but the colors were too unstable, leading the master to abandon the project. Leonardo's unfinished work remained on site for a while and was admired by many visitors and artists; it was ultimately destroyed and replaced by a new work (today, Giorgio Vasari's frescoes from 1563-65 can be seen in its place). Many preparatory studies by Leonardo still exist. The composition of the central section is best known through a drawing which was made...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Peter Paul Rubens / After Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain