The Battle Of Anghiari

There is a road that runs straight as a stretched string from Sansepolcro, in the Tuscan Valtiberina, across the valley and then steeply uphill to the most perfect Italian hilltown you are ever likely to visit. There are magnificent medieval walls, towers, cobbled lanes, arched passages, stairs, and views over the countryside. Although tourists are few, the town is famous, because of what happened down the hill, along the same straight road, long ago.

Piazza Baldaccio boasts an excellent gelateria, and splendid views of the valley below. You can eat your ice cream, and imagine the scene on 29 June, 1440, when the brave Florentine soldiers defeated the fearsome Milanese in a titanic struggle. Or so it was said. It lives in history as the Battle of Anghiari.

Actually, according to Niccolo Machiavelli, it was a fairly sedate event lasting four hours, between hired armies on both sides, in which the only casualty was a man who fell off his horse. Machiavelli disliked mercenary armies, who often waged their battles carefully, to fight (and get paid) another day. Possibly Niccolo was exaggerating to make a point. There is a museum in town about the battle; you can decide for yourself.

But it’s not only ferocity that makes a battle famous. In 1503, after exiling Piero the Fatuous and the rest of the Medici, and after Savonarola met his fiery fate, the Florentines celebrated the return of their Republic by commissioning, from Leonardo da Vinci, a vast mural of the Battle of Anghiari for one wall of the Palazzo Vecchio’s Council Hall. (For the opposite wall, they commissioned another battle scene, from Michelangelo.)Michelangelo completed his preparatory drawings quickly. But before he could begin painting, he was called away to Rome by Pope Julius II.

Leonardo made his preparations, and began to paint. But Leonardo hated fresco, so perhaps he used oils, or an encaustic (coloured wax) method he read of in Livy. Unfortunately, the colours would not dry properly. He built a fire to dry the upper part of the image, but humidity from a sudden rainstorm caused the lower part to run. Leonardo gave up.

The abandoned painting remained on the wall, deteriorating. Leonardo’s fame ensured that artists flocked to view and copy it. Rubens made a famous copy of a copy, depicting a fierce collision of snarling horsemen. But in 1563, Duke Cosimo I ordered Giorgio Vasari to cover the walls with frescoes of his own. Giorgio was not a man to leave a job undone – Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari was seen no more.In Vasari’s painting, among a crowd of soldiers, a pennant flies, bearing the words Cerca, Trova – Seek and Find.

Did Vasari preserve Leonardo’s picture behind a fake wall, and leave a cryptic clue for us? Perhaps. In 2012, holes were drilled in Vasari’s fresco. An airspace was found behind it. A little paint residue was retrieved. But art historians and conservators objected strenuously to damaging Vasari’s work, and for now the investigation has stopped.