La battaglia di Anghiari

There is nothing here to stand in front of. Leonardo was commissioned in 1503 to paint a huge battle scene on a wall of the great council hall in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, facing a companion piece begun by the younger Michelangelo. Leonardo got as far as the central tangle of horsemen fighting over a standard, but he tried an experimental technique with oil and heat that would not set, the colours ran, and he abandoned it around 1505. When the hall was rebuilt in the 1560s the unfinished wall was lost. What we know of the composition comes from copies by other artists, above all a drawing later worked up by Rubens. Whether any trace survives behind a later fresco has been argued over for years and never resolved.