The Battle of Anghiari, after Peter Paul Rubens, after Leonardo da Vinci

The Florentine army defeated the Milanese at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. Leonardo was commissioned a monumental fresco of the subject in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio in 1503. As with the Last Supper, his technique was experimental, the painting deteriorated almost immediately, and anything that remained was overpainted by Vasari in the mid 16th century. What we know of the appearance of the painting owes to copies. Based upon an earlier engraving, Rubens’s large-scale drawing in the Louvre is the most cohesive and energetic interpretation of the fresco’s principal motif of battling horsemen. Edelinck’s engraving is a suitably grand and pictorial reproduction of that drawing in a style derived from Rubens’s school of engraving. Famous in its own right, this print is frequently reproduced in place of Leonardo’s fresco.