The Battle of Anghiari

Leonardo's friendship with Machiavelli was to have a more important result: the commission from the Signoria to paint a great fresco in the Sala di Gran Consiglio of the Palazzo Vecchio. The subject chosen was the victory of the Florentines over the Pisans at the Battle of Anghiari: and Solmi believed, on insufficient evidence, I fear, that the description of the Battle drawn up for Leonardo's use and still preserved in the Codice Atlantico was in Machiavelli's own hand.

Leonardo began the cartoon in October 1503. By May 1504 the work was so little advanced that the Signoria made an agreement by which it was to be finished in February 1505: and by the end of that year the cartoon actually was finished and Leonardo had begun to paint on the wall. We know from the Anonimo that he attempted a technical method learnt from Pliny--a sort of encaustic--and that the result was unsuccessful. The upper half dried too dark, the lower half melted. The general effect is given fairly well in an early copy in the Uffizi and as we can see, the painting was not entirely ruined. In 1513 a special frame was made to enclose it, and Anton Francesco Doni, in a letter to a friend, dated 17 August 1549, mentions it as one of the things most worthy to be seen in Florence. "Having ascended the stairs of the Sala Grande", he writes, "take a diligent view of a group of horses (a portion of the battle of Leonardo da Vinci) which will appear a miraculous thing to you." Even Vasari does not describe it as being in the dilapidated condition of the Last Supper, and he had good reason to make it out as bad as possible for it was he who finally obliterated Leonardo's work by painting one of his own feeble and turgid decorations over the top during the general reconstruction of the room in 1565.

The Battle of Anghiari was, in some ways, Leonardo's most important commission. At the height of his powers he was given a subject ideally suited to his genius. His work was to occupy a room of state in his native town; and in the same room the one man who could possibly be considered his equal was engaged on a similar commission, Michelangelo, who started work on his cartoon of bathing soldiers surprised at the Battle of Cascina a little later than Leonardo. Even Leonardo, so little moved by wordly considerations, must have felt that his honour as a Florentine was at stake. The idea of painting a battle had long been in his mind, and is described in the Ashburnham MS. I (4 verso), in a dramatic passage too long to quote in full. As so often happens when painters describe their subjects--Delacroix is another example--the result is far more 'literary' than modern critics would suppose. Leonardo's description contains incidents and details which might seem outside the true scope of painting.

You must make the conquered and beaten pale, their brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain, the sides of the nose with wrinkles going in an arch from the nostrils to the eyes, and make the nostrils drawn up and the lips arched upwards discovering the upper teeth; and the teeth apart as with crying out and lamentation. And make one man shielding his terrified eyes with one hand, the palm towards the enemy while the other rests on the ground to support his half-raised body. . . . Others their legs contorted. Someone might be shown disarmed and beaten down by the enemy, turning upon the foe, with teeth and nails, to take an inhuman and bitter revenge. . . . You would see some of the victors leaving the fight and issuing from the crowd, rubbing their eyes and cheeks with both hands to clean them of the dirt made by their watering eyes smarting from the dust and smoke.

We may be sure that Leonardo's cartoon included as many of these details as possible, and we know from copies that the man half-raised from the ground, shielding his eyes, was part of the central group. Another feature of this description is his impressionism--his interest in effects of atmosphere.

The higher the smoke, mixed with the dust-laden air, rises towards a certain level, the more it will look like a dark cloud; and it will be seen that at the top, where the smoke is more separate from the dust, the smoke will assume a bluish tinge and the dust will tend to its colour. This mixture of air, smoke and dust will look much lighter on the side whence the light comes than on the opposite side.

Of this, alas, we have no trace in the copies which have come down to us, and knowing his tendency to make his finished work more and more plastic, it may not have been carried out in the painting. But it is perceptible in the small preparatory sketches for the whole scene, which have survived. These fiery little scribbles show how Leonardo felt his way towards an elaborate composition by first setting down the general sense of the movement, and then condensing the motives which satisfied him. It is the method he himself suggests in one of the first of his notes on painting. "These rules", he says, "are of use only in the second stage (per ripruova) of the figure. If you try to apply them to [the first] composition you will never make an end and will produce confusion in your works." Two of the drawings in the Venice Academy show the main features of what was afterwards to become the standard group, though in more diffuse form. The horseman on the left who looks back over his horse's haunches, is already a dominant motive. Others contain figures which reappear in several drawings, but not in copies of the Standard group, and from them we can attempt to reconstruct the parts of the cartoon which are lost.