La battaglia del Taro

In 1579 Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga set Tintoretto to work on a run of eight large canvases for the ducal palace in Mantua, a painted family album of Gonzaga men winning their battles. This is one of them, and the fight it shows had happened 84 years before, in 1495, when Francesco Gonzaga led an Italian league against the retreating French army of Charles VIII by the Taro river near Fornovo. You can pick Francesco out on the left, in the thick of it, giving orders. The battle itself was short and bloody, and who had really won it was argued over for years, but that is not the story a ruling house orders from Tintoretto. The eight canvases still hang together, now in Munich, painted for a palace they left long ago.