Opinion | A 'lost' da Vinci painting the art establishment doesn’t want to find - Washington Post

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Four cavalrymen collide on a battlefield. They are grappling for the standard, their swords raised, their faces twisted into monstrous snarls. Bodies of men and horses converge unnaturally in a maelstrom of urgency and rage. As they struggle for their prize, we can almost hear the clash of armor, the snapping of equine teeth, the pounding of hooves and hearts in the scalding fog of war.

This frenzied scene is from Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Battle of Anghiari,” a lost masterpiece whose imagery has survived thanks only to later copies by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens (image below) and Gérard Edelinck. Astonishingly, the original might still be extant, hidden behind a fabricated wall at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, although this has been the subject of controversy and debate for more than 50 years.
A drawing by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) after da Vinci's "The Battle of Anghiari" (Vladimir Polotovskiy/Getty Images)

If “The Battle of Anghiari” were to be found, its value would be inestimable. The “Salvator Mundi,” a painting whose attribution to Leonardo is highly questionable, was sold for $450 million to a Saudi prince in 2017, a record high for a work at a public auction. “Salvator Mundi” has since been in hibernation, but there are rumors about its imminent awakening as the centerpiece of a new museum in Riyadh. If a disputed Leonardo has this much cachet (Christie’s auction house billed it as “The Last da Vinci”), the appearance of “The Battle of Anghiari” would be even more seismic. Fewer than 20 paintings exist that have been definitively attributed to Leonardo.

Unfortunately, “The Battle of Anghiari” is unlikely to be retrieved because the art establishment has united to prevent further investigations at the Palazzo Vecchio. The consensus is that there is no Leonardo to discover because he never painted it. As we shall see, the historical record plainly tells us otherwise. This is a story of experts hindering what could be the most significant cultural discovery of our time.

Leonardo had been commissioned in 1503 to create an elaborate mural in the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred) — commonly known as the Sala Grande (Great Hall) — of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

People are silhouetted near the Palazzo Vecchio, on May 11, 2018, in Florence. (Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images)
(Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images)

A photo taken on February 23, 2021, in Florence shows the 15th century Hall of the Five Hundred (Salone dei Cinquecento), the largest and most important room in terms of artistic and historic value in Palazzo Vecchio. (Photo by Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images)
(Vincenzo Pinto/ AFP/Getty Images)

This is the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where Leonardo’s lost masterpiece is thought to be.

The painting was commissioned for the palace’s Hall of the Five Hundred, shown here.

Leonardo’s fresco is thought to be hidden roughly behind the wall highlighted on the right.

He suspended the project after painting that one battle scene, the capture of the standard, which occupied a space roughly 10 feet tall by 16 feet wide. It disappeared in the 1560s when the artist and architect Giorgio Vasari renovated the hall and decorated it with murals of his own. But rather than deprive future generations of “The Battle of Anghiari,” Vasari probably painted his own fresco on a second wall, a kind of membrane to preserve one of the defining achievements of the era.

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It sounds like the stuff of fiction, and yet the evidence is compelling — as is the story of the painting’s origins.

Piero di Tommaso Soderini, the gonfalonier of the Republic of Florence, had simultaneously commissioned Leonardo and his younger rival, Michelangelo, to immortalize the battles of Anghiari and Cascina, respectively, on opposite walls of the Sala Grande. This meant that, for a short time at least, the greatest of all artistic duels was being played out in the epicenter of Renaissance Italy.

Although both Leonardo and Michelangelo abandoned their projects, the remaining cartoni (preparatory full-size cartoons on paper) were displayed for many years and were described by the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini as “the school of all the world.” This quality is precisely why so many artists were inspired to make copies, thereby preserving at least a glimpse of Leonardo’s vision. Nobody knows for sure what happened to these designs, although it is said that Michelangelo’s cartoon was ripped to shreds by a jealous artist, Baccio Bandinelli.

One of the first to argue that “The Battle of Anghiari” might still exist behind one of Vasari’s paintings was Carlo Pedretti, who made the case in his 1968 book “Leonardo da Vinci Inedito.” He was convinced that Vasari would never have willingly obliterated the work of the man he regarded as the preeminent genius among artists, and whom Vasari had praised so fulsomely in his 1550 book, “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”. In September 1979, Italy’s Ministry of Culture authorized the removal of sections of Vasari’s fresco on the west wall depicting the rout of the Pisans near the tower of San Vincenzo. Nothing was found. But they were probably looking in the wrong place.

Maurizio Seracini, an engineer who has pioneered multispectral imaging and the scientific analysis of historical artworks, has been searching for the lost Leonardo since the early 1970s. His epiphany came in 1975, as he was examining the upper register of Vasari’s fresco of the Battle of Marciano on the east wall, when he noticed something that had escaped the attention of art critics for hundreds of years. In a banner carried by one of the enemy soldiers there was a message painted in small white letters: “cerca trova” — he who seeks, finds.
Study for "The Battle of Anghiari" by Leonardo da Vinci. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Had Vasari left a clue? Further archival research into the Palazzo Vecchio determined that the section of the mural directly below the flag was the probable original location of Leonardo’s painting. Then, in 2002, Seracini’s thermographic analysis revealed a gap behind the wall of up to four centimeters, or a little more than an inch and a half. After the city council gave permission for Seracini to explore further, his team drilled holes through previously restored areas of Vasari’s mural so that an endoscopic camera could be inserted into the thin, flat cavity. Samples of pigment were retrieved which seemed to tally with those used by Leonardo in the “Mona Lisa” and “Saint John the Baptist.” When these results were announced in 2011, more than 100 art historians signed a petition calling for the end to this investigation, which, they felt, was needlessly jeopardizing Vasari’s work.

These experts were furious over Seracini’s explorations and promptly exacted their revenge in the only way they knew how: They held a conference. Likeminded men and women of letters descended from their gilded aeries to debate and assess the evidence. Their conclusions were published in 2019 in the form of a 600-page anthology of essays entitled “La Sala Grande di Palazzo Vecchio e la Battaglia di Anghiari di Leonardo da Vinci.” Then, on Oct. 8, 2020, the editors of this volume — Roberta Barsanti, Gianluca Belli, Emanuela Ferretti and Cecilia Frosinini — marched on to the Uffizi Galleries for a roundtable meeting in which they insisted that Seracini’s maniacal conduct must cease. “The Battle of Anghiari” only ever existed in cartoon form, they proclaimed, so there could be no mural to recover. Their efforts were successful, and Seracini was ordered to stop.

The experts may have achieved their decisive blow, but they were almost certainly wrong. One of their key arguments is that there are no records of painting materials in the surviving inventories of supplies ordered for Leonardo’s worksite. This, they claim, proves that his work had not moved beyond the preparatory stage. However, as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. When it comes to the study of history, it is a sad truth that more documents have been lost than preserved, which is why historians are essentially a breed of detective. (In any case, one inventory does include an order of 20 pounds of “biacha alexandrina,” a white lead pigment used as pure white and a mixing agent to create lighter shades of colors.)

Then there is the question of plausibility. One of the authors of the 2011 petition, Tomaso Montanari, spoke for many of his colleagues when he scoffed: “Vasari knew how to remove works by other people while keeping them intact. What sense would there have been sealing up the Da Vinci, unless you get into childish Dan Brown logic?”

Yet Vasari adopted precisely this strategy when he was commissioned to renovate the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence circa 1568. Rather than remove Masaccio’s groundbreaking “Holy Trinity” fresco, Vasari positioned a new altarpiece directly in front of it to shield it from harm. It was only during construction work in 1860 that Masaccio’s painting was rediscovered. Vasari had praised both Masaccio and Leonardo in his ,“Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,” but his remarks about the latter were tantamount to idolatry. It defies credulity to suppose that he would make use of this technique to conserve the “Holy Trinity” but not “The Battle of Anghiari.”

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Those who insist that Leonardo never painted his scene rely on the hypothesis that it was only ever executed in cartoon form. They point to Leonardo’s own notebooks, in which he recalls abandoning the mural after a sequence of terrible omens. “On the 6th June 1505, a Friday, at the stroke of the thirteenth hour, I began to paint in the palace,” he says. “At the moment of applying the brush, a storm broke and the bell started to toll, calling the men to court. The cartoon was torn, the water spilled, and the jar carrying it was broken. And suddenly the weather worsened and it rained heavily until evening. And it was as dark as night.” (My translation.)

Yet in the memoirs of the 16th-century historian Bartolomeo Cerretani — unearthed in the Vatican archives in the early 1990s — it is suggested that Leonardo resumed this work months later, perhaps to coincide with the hanging of flags in the hall after their seizure at the battle of San Vincenzo. In his 2007 book “Finding Leonardo” art historian Rab Hatfield makes a strong case that this might have informed his decision to begin halfway through his proposed battle sequence, at the moment when the standards of Anghiari were captured.
Infantry and knights on a study for "The Battle of Anghiari," by Leonardo da Vinci. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Not only does Cerretani appear to confirm that Leonardo resumed work directly on the wall, but he even specifies the location as being “sopra dove stanno et 12 Buoni Huomini” (“above where the Twelve Good Men are”). These 12 men formed one of the governing bodies that sat on the council and met regularly in the hall to debate on legislative matters. Had Leonardo still been working on his cartoon and not the painting, such a precise detail would make little sense.

Then there are the multiple testimonies of those who admired Leonardo’s painting throughout the first half of the 16th century. To make the case that “The Battle of Anghiari” was never created, one would first have to address why so many people claim to have seen it. This is explained away in the 2019 anthology’s concluding essay (by Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini) asserting that all of these accounts are describing the framed remnant of Leonardo’s cartoon, not the painting itself: “This cartoon, whole, or more likely a partial survival of it, was later displayed, protected by a wooden frame, and was seen by some visitors who bore witness to it as a ‘remnant’ of Leonardo’s grandiose project.” (My translation.)

Although there is no doubt that the cartoon of “The Battle of Anghiari” was displayed in the hall for a time, many of the reports are clearly referring to a wall painting. It would appear that these academics have collectively reached a conclusion that defies the evidence but justifies their earlier objections to Seracini’s research. In such circumstances, it is not uncharitable to assume that confirmation bias has played a major role.

Let’s consider some of the eyewitness accounts. Firstly, there is Francesco Albertini’s “Memoriale di molte picture e statue sono nella inclyta cipta di Florentia” (1510), recognized as the earliest guidebook to the city of Florence. Albertini refers to artworks in the Palazzo Vecchio that include a panel by Fra Filippo Lippi (“una tavola di fra Philippo”), drawings by Michelangelo (“li disegui di Michelangelo”) and Leonardo’s horses (“li cavalli di Leonar. Vinci”). It is striking that the format of Leonardo’s work — as either a cartoon or a painted mural — is the only one not specified, which strongly suggests that it was a permanent fixture. But taken on its own, this evidence is inconclusive.

Then there is the anonymous author of “Il Codice Magliabechiano” (circa 1540), who describes how Leonardo had used the fresco secco method of painting directly onto the wall rather than wet plaster. He had apparently attempted to dry his preparatory stucco with hot coals and, while the lower part dried, the material above dripped down. The writer specifically states that the image from the cartoon was implemented (“mettere in opera”). Not only does this clarify that the image was painted on to the wall, but he also tells us that it “can still be seen today” (“come anchora hoggi si vede”). This tallies with the testimony of the artist Gian Paolo Lomazzo, who, sometime before he went blind in 1571, had observed that Leonardo’s experimental binding formula on “The Last Supper” and “The Battle of Anghiari” had caused the paintings to “detach from the walls” (“spiccate dai muri”). Again, we are informed that the latter “can be seen among others” (“come fra l’altre si vede”) in the Sala Grande.

In 1550, Vasari’s “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects” told a similar story. He explained that Leonardo moved on from the cartoon to the mural, and “imagining that he could paint the walls in oil, he created a composition so thick for the coating of the walls that while he continued to paint in the hall, it began to run, so that he soon abandoned the work, seeing that it was ruined.” This damage to the piece was further recorded by the physician and historian Paolo Giovio, bishop of Nocera de’ Pagani, who included a reference to “The Battle of Anghiari” in a biography of Leonardo written in Latin around 1525. Giovio clearly indicates that the picture survived in the hall at this time:

“The battle and victory over the Pisans still remains in the Council Hall of the Florentine Republic, most excellently begun but unfortunately marred by a defect in the plaster, which rejected the colors mixed with walnut oil with singular defiance. The justified grief caused by this unexpected damage seems to have added a great deal of grace to the unfinished work.” (My translation.)

It is at this point that concerns might be raised about the reliability of the prevailing academic narrative. Though Bellucci and Frosinini do cite Giovio in their conclusion to the 2019 anthology, they omit the two most important words: “Manet etiam” (“It still remains”). I am not suggesting any deliberate intention to mislead, but when quoted in full it is absolutely clear that Giovio is referring to an extant mural, not an exhibited cartoon.

Although it might have deteriorated over the decades, “The Battle of Anghiari” was still reasonably intact by 1549, when one of Michelangelo’s friends, the writer Anton Francesco Doni, penned the following advice in a letter (translated by Hatfield) to the scholar Alberto Lollio: “… and having climbed the stairs of the great hall, diligently take a look at a group of horses and men (a battle piece by Leonardo da Vinci), which will strike you as a miraculous thing.”

When this letter was eventually published in 1759, the volume’s editor — Vatican librarian Giovanni Gaetano Bottari — added a footnote in which he speculated that Doni was referring to the unfinished cartoon. However, as we can see, nothing in the text itself supports this view.

There had been earlier efforts to preserve the mural. In 2007, Hatfield discovered a record of a transaction with local carpenters which proved that “a protective covering” (“un’armadura”) was constructed for the picture “so it would not be ruined” (“perche la non si guastassi”) when the Sala Grande was temporarily converted into a barracks between 1512 and 1513. In the 2019 anthology, Barsanti claims that the wooden covering would have been inappropriate for a painted mural and better suited to a moveable cartoon. Of course, the precise opposite is the case; the cartoon could have easily been moved without the cost and inconvenience of assembling a protective shield.

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The sheer weight of documentary evidence, then, tells us that the mural existed until Vasari’s renovations in the second half of the 16th century. To believe otherwise is to suppose that all of these commentators were hallucinating, misremembering or were engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to mislead future generations of art historians. This is surely the more Dan Brown-ish approach to take. Without wishing to intuit any motives, I have been fascinated by the serpentine contortions of experts who seem determined to theorize their way out of the most obvious conclusion.

Behind much of this elite opposition is a mistrust of populist narratives, a cynicism about the idolization of Leonardo as the preeminent talent of his age — what the editors of the 2019 anthology call “the evocative power of the Leonardian universe” (“La capacità evocativa dell’universo leonardiano”). They caution against the impulse of the media to sensationalize and distort reality for dramatic effect, dismissing it as “derealizzazione mediatica,” a phrase that could be loosely translated as “fake news.”

Though this phenomenon doubtless exists, it is no more confounding than the tendency of certain experts to prioritize their own ideological and political agendas over the pursuit of truth. Seracini attributes much of it to professional snobbery. “This had to be a competition,” he told ARTnews in 2020. “If you belong to academia, you must be better. If you’re a scientist, oh no.”

The sheer dogmatism of the new consensus is especially baffling given that the 2019 anthology upon which these conclusions are based is far more balanced. Though the book’s editorial line is clearly partisan, some contributors take a more open-minded view. For instance, an essay by Marco Ruffini candidly acknowledges that the mural must have still existed in 1512, albeit in deteriorated form, and that the wooden cover produced in that year was to safeguard the wall rather than a cartoon. This is in contrast to the anthology’s closing essay, in which Bellucci and Frosinini aver that Leonardo abandoned the work entirely in the preparatory phase.

Mauro Matteini’s essay on the technical and material similarities between “The Last Supper” and “The Battle of Anghiari” is also relatively evenhanded. Matteini presents a range of hypotheses, the most persuasive of which is that after the stucco was applied to the wall, dripping at the upper part but drying successfully in the lower, Leonardo seized the advantage and painted a limited portion of the battle. This would explain why so many later visitors to the Sala Grande were certain they had seen it, and why all surviving copies depict the capture of the standard. Though conceding that it is optimistic, Matteini acknowledges that the survival of Leonardo’s picture somewhere on the walls of the Sala Grande is a hypothesis that cannot be ruled out (“È un’ipotesi che non può essere esclusa”). He further posits that since Leonardo had already been paid a substantial sum of money, his commissioners might have insisted on his finishing this scene as compensation for his failure to complete the work.

Matteini ends his article by offering advice to anyone bold enough to resume where Seracini left off. Having determined that the stucco Leonardo developed for “The Last Supper” — a compound of oil and lime — was almost certainly reused in modified form for “The Battle of Anghiari,” he suggests that any future investigations into the original wall behind the Vasari fresco should be alert to traces of this particular binding material. Finding it would be the equivalent of discovering Leonardo’s fingerprints, given that his refinements to the technique were so specific.

Despite the academic world’s successful maneuvers to stymie the investigation, it should now be reactivated. Italy’s Ministry of Culture, Florence’s city council and mayor Sara Funaro should take seriously the overwhelming evidence that “The Battle of Anghiari” did once exist on the walls of the Sala Grande and might still be recoverable. Though conservation groups such as Italia Nostra claim that temporarily removing sections of Vasari’s fresco would be an outrageous form of vandalism, the author Charles Nicholl has pointed out that these risks are “certainly being exaggerated” because “though it sounds alarming, the detachment of frescos is fairly routine.” It has been done before; when researchers removed sections of Vasari’s work on the west wall of the Sala Grande in 1979, they used a nondestructive technique known as “strappo.”

One would have thought that the financial incentives to seek a “lost Leonardo” would be irresistible. Unlike the “Salvator Mundi,” if “The Battle of Anghiari” were to be found at the Palazzo Vecchio, there could be no disputing Leonardo’s authorship. The staggering sums of money involved must surely be sufficient to galvanize the powers that be. It might well transpire that the mural is not retrievable, or that it has deteriorated beyond repair, but if there is even a slim chance that remnants of this original Leonardo could be found, not making the attempt would be unforgivable. If the primacy of the arts is not a priority, good old-fashioned avarice will serve just as well.

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