Commissioned from Leonardo da Vinci in 1503 for the Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, 'The Battle of Anghiari' was intended as a pendant to Michelangelo's unfinished 'Battle of Cascina' on the opposite wall. Leonardo's experimental wax-and-oil binder failed and the central episode — the 'fight for the standard' between Florentine and Milanese cavalry — decayed before completion. It survives only through 16th-century drawings, prints, and Peter Paul Rubens's celebrated copy (Louvre). The original wall was repainted by Giorgio Vasari in the 1560s; recent non-invasive research has proposed that fragments of Leonardo's original may still lie hidden beneath Vasari's fresco — a controversy that continues to shape Renaissance scholarship.

Exhibition Venue

Palazzo Vecchio

Florence, Italy