Tavola Doria

Leonardo never finished the Battle of Anghiari, the wall painting he began in 1503 for the council hall of Florence, and what he did paint has vanished under later work or time. This panel is the best surviving record of its central knot, horsemen and horses locked in a fight over a standard, faces twisted with fury. It was copied by an anonymous hand in the 16th century, close enough to the original to matter. Its own later history reads like a caper. Sold in 1939, smuggled out of Italy in 1940, it surfaced in Munich, then Switzerland, then a Tokyo museum that had bought it in good faith. In 2012 Japan agreed to give it back under a deal that shares it between the two countries until 2037, when it settles for good at the Uffizi.