June 29, 1440, the battle of Anghiari and the mystery of Leonardo’s fresco

Florence, June 29, 2025 – Today in Tuscany it is a day with a hot heat and crowded beaches. But on this same day, of 1440the land of the plain east of Anghiari It was hot, as well as of the summer sun, also of the blood that was poured. Today is the anniversary of one of the Most famous battles of the fifteenth century In Italy, important because it marked a turning point for Tuscany in the political balance of Renaissance Italy. There Victory of the Florentine Republic against the Duchy of Milan He influenced the territorial borders and consolidated the power of Florence in the region. However, this battle is also famous for another reason: being portrayed by Leonardo da Vinci in a famous unfinished fresco on which the mystery. Praised by contemporaries and copied by an entire generation of artists, he would have to decorate a wall of the large classroom of Palazzo Vecchio who at the time housed the meetings of the Maggiore Council of the Republic of Florence, now known as Five hundred salon. Leonardo received the assignment from the lordship of Florence, lined up by the banner Pier Soderini, in 1503. For many months he studied how to represent that battle won by the Florentines against the Milanese in 1440, making different designs and one or more preparatory cartoons. In the meantime, the Lordship had commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to represent a second battle in the same room, won by the Florentines against the Pisans in Cascina in 1364. In 1505 Leonardo finally began to paint on the wall of the hall the scene of the battle of Anghiari known as the struggle for the banner, but the work was soon interrupted because, due to a defect of the experimental technique used by him, the painting did not dry out. The Maestro abandoned the company, to move to Milan to the service of Charles d’Amboise and the remains of his painting did not end up lost in the subsequent transformations of the room. The ancient replicas of the work, taken from his preparatory cardboard or by the Lacerto of painting, and the other testimonies that have handed down his memory, between myth and history, have always aroused great interest, for the extraordinary expressive power of the new and original way of conceiving the representation of a battle of which Leonardo gave proof of his unfinished masterpiece. And the writing “Search Find “ Painted on a banner in thefresco by Giorgio Vasari In the Salone dei Cinquecento, it was interpreted by some researchers as an exhortation to “seek and find” under it just ‘the battle of Anghiari’ of the genius of Vinci.