This week the Washington Post published my article about Leonardo da Vinci’s lost painting “The Battle of Anghiari”. For over fifty years, a controversy has raged over whether this masterpiece might still exist, hidden beneath a fabricated wall in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The consensus among the art world is that it was never painted. In my article, I cite numerous historical sources that plainly tell us otherwise.
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I’m glad to finally see someone publicly push back on the so-called “consensus” that Leonardo’s Fight for the Standard was never painted. I’m not sure I’d call it a consensus—more like the latest attempt at gatekeeping the narrative and physical access to the Salone.
As Andrew noted, Leonardo wrote in Codex Madrid II that he was painting in the Sala on June 6, 1505. Payments to him and his assistants continued through December of that year. Records do, in fact, show reimbursements for his pigments, though vaguely itemized as “various colors.” It’s hard to imagine a master painter entrusting such critical materials to city bureaucrats, so it’s unsurprising he purchased them himself and was later reimbursed. When Leonardo took a three-month leave for Milan in early 1506, he agreed to pay a hefty fine if he failed to return and complete the project. Despite multiple communications between Florence and Milan referencing this obligation, the fine wasn’t levied until a full year after he left—nine months after he failed to return. None of this suggests the project was abandoned or fatally flawed due to technical difficulties, especially not in its early stages.
I was on the scaffold throughout the 2011 search, during which Dr. Seracini initially intended to use non-invasive methods. However, because the proposed technology required the wildly inconvenient use of a neutron generator during an election year—immediately following a national referendum rejecting nuclear energy and in the wake of the Fukushima disaster—local authorities instead mandated an invasive videoscope exploration, drastically altering the original plan.
The petition that was circulated—one I’d call willfully misleading—was signed by numerous academics despite readily available evidence that contradicted it.
The Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Italy’s foremost art conservation institute, carried out every bit of drilling and physical work on Vasari’s murals; Dr. Seracini himself never touched a drill or any Vasari pigment. No pigments were harmed. In fact, during that investigation, the Opificio took advantage of the costly scaffold to perform much-needed conservation, leaving Vasari’s walls and frescoes in better shape than before. Art conservation students gained a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to examine these frescoes at close range, and damage from a 1980 “strappo” attempt on the west wall was finally repaired.
Sadly, the true legacy of the 2011 investigation was drowned out by cynicism in the oversaturated field of Leonardo studies. One professor wrote that it was better not to know whether the painting survives—a truly odd stance for an academic. Then came the bizarre notion of blaming “the media,” as if journalists themselves had the authority to drill through Vasari’s murals.
A short reply can’t detail every reason—beyond Andrew’s excellent essay—why The Fight for the Standard may still survive somewhere behind Vasari’s bricks and frescoes, nor why it likely hasn’t suffered the same fate as The Last Supper. But probabilistic reasoning certainly points in that direction, and it deserves far more rigorous, good-faith exploration.