Battle of Anghiari (Leonardo da Vinci)

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The Battle of Anghiari (1505) is a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci , which was found on the site of a later fresco by Giorgio Vasari in the Salone dei Cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence . The subject of the painting is a scene from the Battle of Anghiari from 1440, in which the army of Florence, with the support of the Papal States and the Republic of Venice, defeated a superior force of the Duchy of Milan .

The thesis of the Italian engineer Maurizio Seracini that the fresco is still behind a partition wall drawn in by Vasari has not been proven so far (2012).

Historical background

From 1500 to 1506 Leonardo stayed a second time in Florence, where he was initially involved in various engineering projects for Cesare Borgia and the Medici . From 1503 to 1506 he, like Michelangelo , who was commissioned in 1504 , was busy with preparatory work for the painting of the Salone dei Cinquecento ( Sala del maggior consiglio ), which was built in an extension under the architects Simone del Pollaiuolo and Antonio da Sangallo of the Palazzo della Signoria had been built to make way for the new city council, which at the time consisted of 500 citizens. According to Vasari, it was planned to furnish the hall with frescoes from the start. The themes of the monumental murals were, besides the battle of Anghiari, the battle of Cascina (1364), in which Florence had won a decisive victory over its rival Pisa and for which Michelangelo was commissioned. Macchiavelli and Marcello Adriani were probably involved in the invention of the image program .

Sala del Gran Consiglio, 1860/61

However, so far there are no contractual documents for both orders. The sparse sources for the two images are based on scattered data from material and craftsman invoices, as well as on reports by Vasari and other contemporaries. From 1503 Leonardo's first preliminary drawings for the Anghiari battle exist. In the autumn of 1503, Leonardo was given access to the Sala del Papa in the Santa Maria Novella monastery to manufacture the cardboard for the fresco. In 1506 he was given leave of absence for a three-month trip to Milan. Upon his return, he does not appear to have resumed work on the Anghiari battle. So far, both the dimensions of the paintings and their exact placement have not been clarified. From 1555 the Salone dei Cinquecento was completely redesigned by Vasari as an audience hall according to the wishes of Cosimo I de 'Medici . In 1558 Vasari had the hall increased by 8 meters and the windows enlarged. Whether Leonardo's picture was destroyed or walled up has not yet been clarified.

Studies

The box of the picture has not been preserved, but there are a number of preparatory drawings. Studies for the painting that were made around 1503 are in the Royal Collection in Windsor, the British Museum in London, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, but none of them include an overall concept.

  • Royal Library, Windsor

  • Accademia Gallery, Venice

  • Uffizi Gallery, Florence

  • Accademia Gallery, Venice

  • Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

  • Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

  • Royal Collection, Windsor

  • Royal Collection, Windsor

The execution of the painting

The preparatory work took place in the Sala del Papa, which was set up by the Signoria for Leonardo and his assistants. The roof of the sala was repaired, the windows were curtained. For the work on the cardboard box, Leonardo constructed a complicated, self-moving mobile frame. In June 1505, so Leonardo writes in his notes, there were heavy rains that lasted into the night and the box was damaged through a hole in the roof.

Leonardo did not execute the picture as a fresco , which would have required a quick method of working, but experimented with an oil technique on a plaster primer, similar to his Milanese Last Supper of 1494/1497. Here, too, there were technical problems with the painting because the paint did not adhere well to the primer. Inspired by the Roman technique of encaustic painting, he mixed liquid beeswax with oil and color pigments. To speed up the drying process, he had braziers placed on the wall. As Vasari reports in the first edition of his Vite , the added wax liquefied as a result and began to drip down the wall, and Leonardo gave up these attempts. When Leonardo went to Milan in 1506, the painting on the wall may already have been in a delicate condition. After returning to Florence, he did not resume work on the Battle of Anghiari.

Find the missing painting

The search for Leonardo's Anghiari battle began in 1967 with the investigations carried out by the then city architect of Florence, Piero Micheli, on the walls of the room, with expert advice from Carlo Pedretti . Pedretti has taught at the University of California UCLA since 1960 and is a recognized Leonardo specialist. Micheli had pieces taken from the frescoes about 5 meters high on both sides of the hall, but found no traces of paintings.

In 1976, a team led by Pedretti, in which his student Travers Newton was also involved, started another search operation in which they concentrated on the east wall of the hall. The campaign was funded by a $ 50,000 Kress Foundation fund, which was topped up with funds from Armand Hammer and the Smithsonian Institution . This search did not produce any results either.

In 1982 the historian John Spencer and Travers Newton tried again. After reinterpreting known sources, they assumed that Leonardo's picture was on the west wall of the hall and used infrared and ultrasound in their investigations. With the permission of the responsible ministry in Rome, they replaced a piece of Vasari's fresco with the Stacco technique , but found no traces of another painting there.

The last attempt to date in the search for the Anghiari battle was made in 2012 under the leadership of the Italian-American Maurizio Seracini . Seracini has made a name for himself by examining old master paintings using modern technical methods. According to his own statements, he has been working with the picture since 1975, was already involved in Pedretti's investigations in 1975 as an assistant and even made an appearance in Dan Brown's Leonardo thriller . National Geographic sponsored the project with a sum of $ 250,000. To get behind Vasari's fresco, six small holes were drilled. Tiny probes and special cameras that are commonly used in medicine were inserted through these holes. Except for a few color pigments, as Leonardo may have used, the holes remained without result. Seracini's actions provoked violent protests among art scholars and restorers and were discontinued in September 2012.

Exhibitions

  • I cavalli di Leonardo. Studi sul cavallo e altri annimali di Leonardo da Vinci dalle Biblioteca Reale nel Castello di Windsor . Florence, Palazzo Vecchio. 1984. Exhibition catalog. In it: Carlo Pedretti : La Battaglia di Anghiari. (14 drawings.) Pp. 54–62.
  • Leonardo da Vinci. Sulle tracce della Battaglia di Anghiari . Museo di Palazzo Vecchio Florence. February 23, 2019 - January 12, 2020.

swell

  • Giorgio Vasari : Le Vite de 'più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori, steps e di nuovo ampliate da Giorgio Vasari con i ritratti loro e con l'aggiunta delle Vite de' vivi e de 'morti dall'anno 1550 infino al 1567. 3 Volumes. Florence: Giunti 1568.
Edition Giorgio Vasari . Complete edition in 45 volumes + supplement volume. Berlin: Wagenbach 2015, ISBN 978-3-8031-5067-7 .

literature

  • Claire J. Farago: Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari: A Study in the Exchange between Theory and Practice . In: The Art Bulletin . tape 76 , no. 2 , June 1994, ISSN  0004-3079 , pp. 301-330 , doi : 10.2307 / 3046024 , JSTOR : 3046024 .
  • Claire J. Farago: Leonardo da Vinci. Selected Scholarship (= A Garland Series. ) Garland, London 1999, ISBN 0-8153-2935-0 .
Series II: Leonardo's Projects, 1500-1519. Inside: The Battle of Anghiari. With contributions by Johannes Wilde , Günther Neufeld, H. Travers Newton, John Spencer and Claire J. Farago, pp. 39–127.
  • Carmen Bambach : The purchases of cartoon paper for Leonardo's “Battle of Anghiari” and Michelangelo's “Battle of Cascina”. In: I Tatti studies. 8, 1999 (2000). Pp. 105-133.
  • D. Pieraccini, G. Mecatti, GM Luzi et al. a .: Non-contact intrawall penetrating radar for heritage survey, the search of the "Battle of Anghiari" by Leonardo da Vinci. In: NDT & E international. 38. 2005, ISSN  0963-8695 , pp. 151-157.
  • Frank Fehrenbach : Much ado about nothing. Leonardo's Fight for the Standard. In: Philine Helas (ed.): Picture history. Festschrift for Horst Bredekamp . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2007, pp. 397-412, ISBN 978-3-05-004261-9 ( uni-heidelberg.de PDF).
  • Rab Hatfield: The Case for Recovering the Battle of Anghiari. Fiorentine Press, Florence 2008, ISBN 978-88-902434-1-7 .
  • Gerd Blum : Giorgio Vasari, the inventor of the Renaissance. A biography. Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-61455-2 .
  • Federico Giannini: Ancora sulla battaglia di Anghiari: la bufala del 'Cerca trova'. In: Finestre sull'Arte. August 7, 2012 ( finestresullarte.info ).
  • Renate Prochno: Competition and their faces in art. Competition, creativity and its effects. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-05-004230-5 . Chapter: The Imposed Competition, Leonardo and Michelangelo. Pp. 113-126.
  • Giuliana Putti: The lost battle scenes In: Perini Journal. 46, 2016 ( perinijournal.it ).
  • Bernd Roeck : Leonardo. The man who wanted everything. Munich: Beck 2019. Chapter III.3: The unknown masterpiece.

Web links

Commons : The Battle of Anghiari  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dirk Schümer: If you look, you will find a crumb. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. March 11, 2012 ( faz.net , accessed May 13, 2019).
  2. ↑ Alessandro Cecchi: Ipotesi sul programma iconografico e l'assetto originario delle Battaglie di Leonardo e Michelangelo per la Sala del Maggior Consiglio in Palazzo Vecchio. In: Prospettiva. Volume 83/84. 1996, pp. 102-115;
    Daniel Arasse : Leonardo da Vinci. Cologne 1999, p. 429.
  3. ↑ a b c The Sala del Maggior Consiglio and its decoration , arthistoricum.net, accessed on May 13, 2010.
  4. ^ Christian Adolf Isermeyer : The work of Leonardo and Michelangelo for the large council chamber in Florence. In: W. Lotz, L. Möller (Ed.): Studies on Tuscan art. Festschrift for Ludwig Heydenreich . Munich 1964, pp. 83-130.
  5. ^ I cavalli di Leonardo. Studi sul cavallo e altri annimali di Leonardo da Vinci dalle Biblioteca Reale nel Castello di Windsor. (Exhibition catalog of the Palazzo Vecchio Florence). Giunti 1984, pp. 55-56, p. 137.
  6. ^ Frank Zöllner: Rubens Reworks Leonardo. The fight for the standard. In: Academia Leonardo Vinci. No. 4. 1991, pp. 177-178.
  7. ↑ Gerd Blum: Giorgio Vasari, the creator of the Renaissance. Beck, Munich 2011, p. 199.
  8. ↑ Bernd Roeck: Leonardo. The man who wanted everything. Beck, Munich 2019. Chapter III.3: The unknown masterpiece.
  9. ↑ Martin Kemp : Leonardo. Life and work. From the. Engl. By Nikolaus B. Schneider. Beck, Munich 2005, p. 292.
  10. ^ Anna Maria Brizio: Los codices de Madrid. In: The UNESCO Courier. accessed on May 16, 2019.
  11. ↑ royalacademy.org.uk RA Collection: Art, accessed May 21, 2019.
  12. ^ Clarie J. Farago: Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari. A Study in the Exchange between Theory and Practice. In: Claire Farago (ed.): Leonardo da Vinci. Selected Scholarship. Garland, London 1999, p. 105.
  13. ↑ a b c Lost Da Vinci Mural Believed Discovered The New York Times, November 2, 1979, accessed May 22, 2019.
  14. ^ Geoffrey Luck: The New Battle of Anghiari. In: Quadrant Magazine. Volume 56. No. 5. 2012, pp. 43-47.
  15. ↑ Riddle about the secret Da Vinci code merkur.de, March 14, 2012, accessed on May 24, 2019.
  16. ↑ Interview , accessed on May 24, 2019.
  17. ↑ Leonardo da Vinci discovered painting - or not? , artinfo24.com, accessed May 24, 2019.
  18. ↑ Renate Meinhof : Against the wall. Six holes and the colors of the Mona Lisa: Maurizio Seracini has been looking for a hidden image of Leonardo da Vinci for decades. Now he thinks he has reached his goal - and is in the middle of a crime thriller in: Süddeutsche Zeitung . March 30, 2012, p. 3;
    Battle of Anghiari timelinefy.com, accessed May 24, 2019.
  19. ↑ Press release from Palazzo Vecchio arte.it, accessed on May 13, 2019.