Leonardo da Vinci hid from the sensation. “The Battle of Anghiari” - the unfinished work of Leonardo da Vinci

In the mid-fifteenth century, all of Italy was fragmented into city-states, principalities and duchies, which fought territorial wars among themselves. In June 1440, one of many battles took place - the Battle of Anghiari, which gave a temporary truce to Milan and Florence. It brought victory to the Italian League, which was led by the Florentine Republic. This victory was given great importance. Seventy years later, the Great Leonardo was asked to paint a wall Great Council Palace of the Signoria. The theme was chosen by da Vinci himself. The Battle of Anghiari interested him. Another wall was painted by Michelangelo, and Niccolo Machiavelli, a young, promising official, watched the progress of the work.

Preparing for battle

This was one of the stubborn and bloody battles for the freedom of Tuscany. Coalition troops concentrated near the small town of Anghiari. They included about four thousand soldiers. The Milanese forces were more than twice the size of the league army. There were about nine thousand of them. In addition, two thousand more allies joined them. The Milanese believed that the key to their victory would certainly be a surprise attack. Therefore, they planned to start the battle on June 29. But the dust on the road raised by their army warned the leader of the Florentines, Attendolo, about the attack. He began to prepare for a decisive battle. Subsequently, it will receive the name - the Battle of Anghiari.

Progress of the battle

The vanguard of the Milanese army, consisting of Venetian knights, blocked the bridge over the canal. Namely, the water barrier served as protection for the Tuscans. But the Milanese advanced. And the fierce battle of Anghiari began. The Florentines desperately defended their freedom. Four hours later they cut off a third of the Milanese from the main army. Then the battle continued all night. And it ended with the victory of Florence.

Location of the fresco

In 1499, Leonardo once again left Milan and moved to Florence. He would stay there intermittently for seven years, until 1506. During these years, starting in 1503, he worked on a large commission for the Florentine seigneury - a fresco for the Council Chamber. The drawing was called “The Battle of Anghiari”. It was supposed to depict the victory won by the Florentines over the Milanese about 70 years ago. The wall of the Great Council Hall was huge, larger than the one on which Da Vinci wrote " last supper».

"Battle of Anghiari". Leonardo da Vinci

It remained only on the cardboard. Looking at him, I remember Pushkin’s “Poltava”: “Stamping, neighing, groaning, and death, and hell on all sides.” The “Battle of Anghiari” depicted by Leonardo represents a tangle of people and horses. They are intertwined so closely that the work looks like a sketch for a sculpture. The horses that reared up resemble those that strike early work masters "Adoration of the Magi". But there was joy, and here there was frenzy and rage. The hatred of the warriors who rush at each other is transferred to the horses, these fighting machines. And they bite the enemy’s people and horses, kicking.

It can be assumed that Leonardo’s idea was not to depict a mass battle scene, but to visibly reproduce people drunk with blood, brutalized, lost human species and people blinded by rage. "The Battle of Anghiari" by Leonardo da Vinci is considered by himself as an indictment of the war. He remembered all too well the military campaigns of Cesare Borgia, which he called “the most brutal madness.” This is topical and important to this day, almost five hundred years later. "The Battle of Anghiari" as an indictment of war is quite modern, since it responds to timeless problems.

“Battle of Anghiari”: description

There are no scenery or landscapes in it. And the warrior costumes are fantastic. They cannot be associated with any specific time. Trying to summarize the apotheosis of the battle so that it would make an even greater impression, Leonardo used an interesting compositional device- all lines are collected inside a simple geometric rhombus shape. IN vertical line, where the swords cross, there is one center of the composition. The second goes along a horizontal line that divides the cardboard in two. It is impossible to take your eyes off, and the genius himself removed everything unnecessary from the center, where the chaos that brings death and unbridled rage are revealed to us in all their unsightly nakedness. It distorts faces and bodies.

The facial expressions of the people depicted are worked out in detail. The movements are frantic. Horses are cut down, people are crushed... And no one cares about them. Whether Leonardo depicted the apogee of the battle or the entire course of the battle seemed to him as such is difficult to judge. It is known that he worked a lot with historical sources and wrote a letter to the signoria, which has not survived. In it he expressed his thoughts related to the future fresco. What remains is his “Treatise on Painting,” in which Leonardo writes that he wanted to create a large-scale work. It was supposed to consist of a number of episodes. The huge space of the wall made it possible to accommodate a large number of people participating in the battle. But the plan was not realized.

Two geniuses

Michelangelo painted his cardboard "Battle of Cascina" in his own workshop. The two geniuses did not seek to compete with each other. They worked in different time and did not want to compete. However, competition in some sense still took place. When da Vinci depicted horses, he understood that he was the best at them. And Michelangelo also used his most powerful skill - showing nudes male bodies. Like da Vinci, Michelangelo did not complete his work. It remained only on the cardboard. And for several months the two cardboards were in the same room. At this time, both of these creations were a school for all artists: both young and experienced. People came to them and made copies of them.

The other day it became known that the fate will remain unknown.

Study at the Palazzo Vecchio. Photo: David Yoder/National Geographic/AP

An ambitious project to recover a work thought to have been lost has been suspended indefinitely, and the scaffolding erected at the Palazzo Vecchio will be dismantled at the end of September. In total, a team of researchers tried to discover a fresco under the arches of the former building of the Florentine council for more than ten months.

To minimize damage to Vasari's fresco, seven areas were selected that had already been damaged by time, or had already undergone restoration, where the Italian Ministry of Culture allowed work to be carried out.

Described by the mayor of Florence as “the great secret of the Renaissance,” The Battle of Anghiari was conceived in 1503, when Leonardo and Michelangelo were commissioned to paint two frescoes of the historic Florentine victory on opposite walls of the Palazzo Vecchio. On June 6, 1505, at the age of 53, Leonardo began work on the central battle scene known as the Battle of Cassina.

In his book, Vasari will mention that Leonardo abandoned the project due to technical problems associated with his experiments in mixing oil paints. Historians, however, question his conclusion. Some speculate that Vasari made up the story and that the fresco was in fact completed. And ten years later, a fresco by Vasari himself was painted on this site. And, as historians assure, da Vinci’s fresco is not the only one that “dissolved” under Vasari’s brush.

In 1861, a fresco of the Trinity painted by Masaccio was found in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. The fresco was walled up (but not destroyed) by the same Vasari, who, by order of Duke Cosima I, painted his “Madonna of the Rosary” on top.

In 2000, at a conference dedicated to da Vinci, the idea of ​​​​the need to remove Vasari's fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio was first raised. And only in 2012 were convincing facts obtained about the possible existence of Leonardo’s masterpiece under the work of Vasari. However, the researchers were unable to move far forward. To continue the work, complex studies using XRD/XRF tomography are required, which are only possible at the European Synchrotron and Radiological Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.

In this regard, a number of scientists defended Vasari’s creation. Cecilia Frosinini, director of painting at the Opificio art restoration laboratory, immediately resigned in protest against the continuation of the work. “This is an ethical issue. I must protect the work of art from destruction,” Frosinini said.

After her reaction, many art historians signed a petition demanding that further drilling of the fresco be stopped, some began to question the very existence of Leonardo's work underneath it.

“Vasari would never have destroyed the work of an artist whom he admired so much. This whole story is good for Dan Brown, but not for art historians,” said Tomaso Montanari, an art historian at the University Federico II in Naples.

Cristina Acidini, caretaker of the Polo Museale Fiorentino, in response to a request from the research team, allowed endoscopic examination of the seventh hole, but ruled out the possibility of further drilling. This decision caused fierce controversy in interested circles. But no matter what, a few days ago the Italian Ministry of Culture made a final decision on the need to seal the holes in Vasari’s fresco and dismantle the scaffolding. Thus ended the search for the mysterious work of Leonardo da Vinci.

Anna Sidorova

Return to Florence. "Battle of Anghiari"

Leonardo spent almost twenty years in Milan, organizing festivities, working on The Last Supper and the monument to Francesco Sforza. At the same time, several more paintings were painted - such as “Portrait of a Musician” and “Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani” (“Lady with an Ermine”). By the way, the painting “Lady with an Ermine” can serve as an excellent illustration of such a technique as contrapposto, which the Master constantly used. Contraposto allows you to add dynamism to the image due to the fact that the resting position is created from opposite movements (the lady’s body in the portrait is turned in one direction, and her head in the other).

Leonardo spent a lot of time on scientific research. It was in Milan that he began to make records systematically, rather than sporadically. Here he studied Latin and mathematics. But suddenly measured and, probably, happy life The master has changed dramatically.

Leonardo was far from politics, and the French who entered Milan did not seem to bother him at all. Yes, the Gascon marksmen actually destroyed the unfortunate “Horse,” but Leonardo himself was not in danger. However, he no longer had a patron, and there was no income, so it also made no sense to remain in the captured duchy. At the end of 1499, the Master left the city, where belated fame finally came to him. He decided to return to Florence - albeit in a roundabout way - through Mantua and Venice. IN hometown it appeared only in 1500.

Immediately upon his return to Florence, he received an order to paint an altarpiece from the Servite monks. According to Vasari, the monks took Leonardo “to their monastery, providing him and all his household with maintenance, and so he pulled for a long time, without starting anything. In the end he made a cardboard with the image of Our Lady, St. Anna and Christ, which not only amazed all the artists, but when it was finished and stood in his room, then for two days on end men and women, young people and old people came as if they were going to special holidays, look at the miracles created by Leonardo that stunned all these people.”

However, Leonardo never painted a picture for the monastery. The disappointed monks had to turn to other artists, albeit less famous, but more reliable in terms of fulfilling the order.

And Leonardo soon left the city, as he entered the service of Cesare Borgia as a military engineer. In the service of the Borgia, he had to carry out maps and plans for a military campaign.

It is worth saying a few words about Florence itself, while Leonardo travels with Borgia and draws maps, and at the same time conducts conversations with Niccolo Machiavelli. The Medici family, which ruled Florence for more than half a century, was expelled, Savonarola, who had been rampaging for a short time in the city, was burned at the stake. Florence briefly became a republic again. The arts revived, everyone in the city was talking about the new genius - Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Soon after his short service with the Borgia and return to the city, Leonardo receives an order for a grandiose painting. Most likely, this could not have happened without the help of Niccolo Machiavelli, with whom Leonardo became friends during his short service with Cesare Borgia - Machiavelli was not last person in the government of Florence.

In honor of the expulsion of the Medici, the city council decided to order two great masters to paint the walls in the Hall of the Señoria - on one wall Leonardo was asked to paint a picture on the theme “The Battle of Anghiari” (when the Florentine troops defeated the Milanese), and a year later they invited Michelangelo to paint on another wall in in the same hall. He was supposed to depict the “Battle of Kashin”. Between these two frescoes it was planned to place a marble statue of Christ the Redeemer in memory of the expulsion of the Medici on November 9, 1494. The great victories of the Florentines actually looked very modest (for example, only one person died in the Battle of Anghiari), but the artists had to glorify these victories with their inimitable art.

Peter Paul Rubens. "The Battle of Anghiari. Copy of a fresco by Leonardo da Vinci. Around 1603

Michelangelo was twenty-five years younger than Leonardo, but no less famous - he was already a recognized master in Florence, after he made his David from a huge marble block. But Leonardo’s fame also thundered throughout Italy - the wonderful “Horse”, with which no sculpture could compare, and the fresco, which artists from all over Italy were sent to copy, were talked about everywhere. The French king even asked his engineers if it was possible to break down the wall with the fresco and take it to Italy.

There is a version that the rulers of Florence decided to arrange something like a competition between the two most famous artists cities.

The new fresco in size (6.6 by 17.4 meters) turned out to be almost three times larger than the Last Supper. It was supposed to be located in the northern part of the eastern wall.

As already mentioned, the fresco was supposed to glorify the victory of the Florentine arms on June 29, 1440 in the battle with Milanese troops. The Milanese had much more soldiers in this battle, but they were defeated by a small Florentine detachment.

Leonardo signed the contract for the work in May 1504. Leonardo was given a salary of 25 florins a month. A hall at the Church of Santa Maria Novella was allocated as a workshop. Here Leonardo designed special scaffolding, with the help of which he rose to the required height when working on cardboard. Given the size of the fresco, it was impossible to get to the painting site simply by standing on a stool or on a ladder.

For their frescoes, both Leonardo and Michelangelo made many preparatory drawings and then produced cardboards, which were exhibited in the Signoria Hall for public viewing. These cardboards were called the height of perfection, and spectators never tired of admiring the drawings.

According to Vasari, Leonardo's cardboard amazed the imagination, as it was a thing “outstanding and executed with great skill due to the amazing observations he applied in the image of this dump, for in this image people show the same rage, hatred and vindictiveness as horses , two of which are intertwined with their front legs and fight with their teeth with no less ferocity than their riders fighting for the banner ... "

Of course, forced to work on frescoes for the same room, Leonardo and his younger rival were, intentionally or unwittingly, competing with each other. Everyone decided to focus on what they did best.

Da Vinci, above all, sought to convey emotion and movement. On his cardboard, people and horses are intertwined in a fierce battle, riders snatching the Milanese banner from each other's hands. Horses kick each other with their hooves and bite. Neither Leonardo's cardboard nor the fresco itself have survived - and we can judge Leonardo's work mainly from a copy made a hundred years later by Peter Paul Rubens. However, if we imagine that the fresco was supposed to be huge (the people on it are one and a half times larger than their natural size), the two side parts of the picture were also supposed to depict intense fights, and in the background the Master planned to paint a landscape, we can imagine what an impression this work could have provided if it had been completed and if it had been preserved...

Michelangelo in his “Battle of Cascina” planned to depict the moment when the soldiers are bathing in the river, but then an attack occurs and a trumpet calls them to battle. Michelangelo placed eighteen people on cardboard who either crawl out of the water or dress and grab weapons to engage in battle. Judging by the surviving copy of the cardboard, the picture has no center, all eighteen figures are equally valuable, and if each drawing and sketch amazes with the perfection of the body depicted, then the whole picture as a whole looks more like confusion and porridge. According to the laws of composition, a painting cannot have more than nine points of attraction. The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are still far from perfect, while Leonardo's composition is impeccable in its completeness and integrity. But the Florentines adored their new young genius, who gave them the marble David, and therefore admired the cartons of both masters equally, without giving preference to anyone. For several months the cardboards were on display to the public. Benvenuto Cellini, who saw both cardboards some time later (they were still intact), called the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo “a school for the whole world.”

After making the cardboard by the summer of 1505, Leonardo primed the wall and painted the central part of the fresco - the battle for the banner. Exactly what technique he used is still debated among art critics. According to one version, he again decided to paint with tempera and oil on dry plaster.

According to the second version, Leonardo found a recipe for painting a fresco with wax paints from Pliny the Elder, but incorrectly interpreted the Latin text. The technique mentioned by Pliny is called encaustic; paints are made from molten wax. Fayum portraits were made using the encaustic technique. Paints with melted (hot) wax were applied to the board with a special brush or spatula, the wax froze, the strokes turned out uneven, but a talented master could use this feature to give the image volume. To create a smooth, as if varnished, surface, the master brought a brazier to the painted work, the wax was heated, and the surface of the painting was fused into a single whole. This version is supported by the news that due to the fact that the huge wall could not be dried evenly (the heat from the braziers did not reach to the top), the fresco began to leak. It can be assumed that Leonardo wanted to make the surface of the central part of the fresco smooth, as if covered with varnish, and began to heat the surface of the wall with braziers. More than six meters in height – it is simply impossible to heat such a section of the wall evenly. Somewhere the heat simply “overheated” the surface of the painting, and the wax paints began to flow. The version that Leonardo tried to fix the painting with heat, but could not, seems strange. Leonardo did not paint this fresco in a day or two. While he was working on one part of the painting, the other should have dried long ago.

If you try to write oil paints Based on the most primitive primer on plaster, this painting can easily stand for twenty to thirty years without serious damage, but moisture will destroy the painting very quickly. However, oil paints themselves can flow only at first, until they dry, and only if they are made very liquid. But the message that Leonardo tried to correct the fresco with oil paints, but the nut oil was not absorbed into the wall, again brings us back to the version of wax paints. Perhaps Leonardo actually tried to paint with oil paints with a new layer, but the wax base did not allow the oil to be absorbed. However, until the fresco is found - and there is a chance that it may be found - we can only build theories.

One way or another, the fresco began to collapse during the creation process, and after unsuccessful attempts to fix it, Leonardo abandoned the work.

At this time, the French king Louis XII, who was a great admirer of Leonardo, turned to the Signoria with a request to release the Master to Milan. The Council of Ten was not happy with this proposal - they had already paid Leonardo a lot of money and would like to see a magnificent picture ready. According to the agreement, the Council could recover the amount received from the master, but Leonardo was too famous to treat him in this way. Therefore, the Council argued with the king for quite a long time. But finally, in May 1506, Leonardo went to Milan.

Work on the fresco was never resumed. Michelangelo did not begin his work either. But those two cardboards, which were seen by many artists and many copied (this is how Raphael’s ink sketch from Leonardo’s fresco was preserved), marked the beginning of two new styles in Western European painting - classicism and baroque. In 1605, Rubens made his drawing (most likely from someone’s copy).

In the middle of the 16th century, the Medici family (they returned to Florence again) decided to finally complete the decoration of the Hall of the Council of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio. That wall, which Leonardo worked on painting at the beginning of the century, was now given to Vasari. The same Vasari who wrote a multi-volume work on sculptors and painters and who left us a biography of Leonardo. As we know, the figures of the Renaissance were famous for their versatility.

So, instead of Leonardo’s creation, Vasari’s fresco “The Battle of Marciano” appeared on the wall with boring, tortured figures, without a hint of dynamics. Although Vasari’s horses allegedly gallop, and people energetically wave their arms, Vasari clearly did not know how to convey movement the way Leonardo did.

Only in the twentieth century, the Italian art critic Maurizio Seracini asked a simple question: what did Vasari do with the remains of Leonardo’s fresco when he began preparing the wall for his painting? Did Vasari, who wrote a laudatory review of Leonardo’s fresco and described the Master’s work in detail (and therefore saw it in such a state that he could leave these enthusiastic lines), dared to destroy the albeit damaged creation of a genius? What if Vasari decided not to touch the fresco of the great Leonardo, but created a new wall parallel to the one on which Leonardo painted his picture, and hid the Master’s creation in a secret place? After all, before starting to paint the wall, Vasari rebuilt the hall. Seracini pointed to the green pennant on Vasari's fresco with the inscription: "Cerca trova" ("The seeker finds"). What if this is a hint that there is a Leonardo fresco behind the wall? Acoustic studies have shown that behind the wall with the fresco “Battle of Marciano” there is in fact a small (from one to three centimeters) gap, quite sufficient to suggest that on a parallel wall, hidden from view, the waxy, unfading colors still sparkle "Battle of Anghiari". Fayum portraits, even after thousands of years, seem to have been painted only yesterday. Who knows, maybe someday Leonardo’s fresco will return to people, albeit damaged, but still unsurpassed.

Under the leadership of Maurizio Seracini, using probes that were passed through six holes in the wall with Vasari's work, scientists were able to take samples from the hidden wall - black and beige paint, as well as red varnish, were found in the samples. After analyzing the samples, scientists found that the black paint matches that used to create the Mona Lisa.

Further work in the Hall of the Señoria was prohibited for fear of destroying Vasari's fresco. So until it appears in a safe way look inside the discovered gap, we will never know whether there is any hope of seeing the “Battle of Anghiari” again as Leonardo wrote it.

But even when contemplating huge photo work by Rubens, enlarged to actual sizes Leonardo's frescoes give viewers goosebumps.

History of creation

The fresco was commissioned by Leonardo da Vinci by Gonfaloniere Soderini to celebrate the restoration of the Florentine Republic after the exile of Piero de' Medici.

At the same time as Leonardo, Soderini commissioned Michelangelo to paint the opposite wall of the hall.

For the battle scene, da Vinci chose the battle that took place on June 29, 1440, between the Florentines and Milanese troops under the command of the condottiere Niccolò Piccinino. Despite their numerical superiority, the Milanese were defeated by a small Florentine detachment.

According to the artist’s plan, the fresco was to become his largest work. In size (6.6 by 17.4 meters) it was three times larger than The Last Supper. Leonardo carefully prepared to create the painting, studied the description of the battle and outlined his plan in a note presented to the Senoria. For the work on cardboard, which took place in the Papal Hall at the Church of Santa Maria Novella, Leonardo designed special scaffolding that folded and unfolded, raising and lowering the artist to the required height. The central part of the fresco was occupied by one of the key moments of the battle - the battle of a group of horsemen for the banner.

According to Vasari preparatory drawing was recognized as a thing:

outstanding and executed with great skill because of the most amazing observations applied by him in the depiction of this dump, for in this depiction the people show the same rage, hatred and vindictiveness as the horses, two of which are intertwined with their front legs and fight with their teeth with no less ferocity than their horsemen fighting for the banner...

Sketch for the "Battle of Anghiari"

By the will of the Señoria, two great masters of that time worked on decorating the hall. This was the only time Leonardo and Michelangelo met on the same project. Everyone flashed strong point your talent. Unlike da Vinci, Michelangelo chose a more “down-to-earth” plot. His painting “The Battle of Cascina” was supposed to show the Florentine warriors at the moment when, while bathing, they were suddenly attacked by the enemy. Both cards were presented to the public for several months. Later, Benvenuto Cellini, who saw the cardboards when they were still intact, called the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo “a school for the whole world.”
According to many researchers, despite the fact that the work on decorating the Palazzo Vecchio was never completed (Michelangelo did not even begin painting), the two geniuses made a revolution in the development of Western European painting, which led to the development of new styles - classicism and baroque. One of the first copies (ink sketch) from the original da Vinci cardboard belongs to Raphael and is kept in Oxford, in the University Gallery. There is an unfinished copy in the Uffizi, possibly belonging to an amateur artist. According to Milanesi, it could have been used by Lorenzo Zacchia da Luca when creating an engraving in 1558 with the inscription: “ex tabella propria Leonard! Vincii manu picta opus sumptum a Laurentio Zaccia Lucensi ob eodemque nunc excussum, 1558." It is assumed that it was from Zaccia's engraving that Rubens made his drawing around 1605.

Leonardo continued the experiments with paint compositions and primers that he began when creating The Last Supper. There are various assumptions about the reasons for the destruction of the fresco, which began already in the process of work. According to Vasari, Leonardo painted on the wall with oil paints, and the painting began to become damp during the process of work. An anonymous biographer of da Vinci says that he used Pliny's mixture recipe (encaustic wax painting) but misinterpreted it. The same anonymous author claims that the wall was dried unevenly: at the top it was damp, while at the bottom it was dry under the influence of coal braziers. Leonardo turned to wax paints, but some of the pigments soon simply evaporated. Leonardo, trying to improve the situation, continued to work with oil paints. Paolo Giovio says that the plaster did not accept the nut oil-based composition. Due to technical difficulties, work on the fresco itself progressed slowly. Problems of a material nature arose: the Council demanded that either finished work or return the money paid. Da Vinci's work was interrupted by his invitation to Milan in 1506 by the French governor Charles d'Amboise. The fresco remained unfinished.

in 1572 the Medici family decided to reconstruct the hall. Vasari and his assistants carried out the restructuring. As a result, Leonardo's work was lost - its place was taken by Vasari's fresco "The Battle of Marciano".

Search for the fresco

In 1975, Italian art critic Maurizio Seracini suggested that Leonardo's fresco was not in such poor condition as previously thought. He saw proof in an engraving, made, according to his assumption, not from cardboard, but from the fresco itself, and dated 1553. All the details of the painting are clearly visible in the engraving, therefore the “Battle of Anghiari” was in excellent condition fifty years after its creation. Seracini was sure that Vasari, who admired the “Battle of Anghiari,” would never have destroyed Leonardo’s work, but hid it under his fresco. Seracini drew attention to the image of a small green pennant with a mysterious inscription: “Cerca trova” (“The seeker finds”) and considered this a hint from Vasari that there was a fresco by Leonardo behind the wall. Acoustic studies showed the presence of a small (1 - 3 cm) air gap behind the wall with the “Battle of Marciano”. Seracini suggested that a new wall was built for Vasari's fresco, hiding the "Battle of Anghiari".
In 2002, the Florentine authorities banned Seracini from searching, fearing that Vasari's fresco would be damaged. In August 2006, research was allowed to continue. A special fund has been created to finance the Anghiari project. For testing purposes, it was decided to build a scaled-down model of two walls located at a short distance from each other. To create a copy, specialists from the main Italian reconstruction institute Opificio delle Pietre Dure had to use materials used in the construction of the eastern wall of the Salon of the Five Hundred, behind which, as Seracini assumed, Leonardo's fresco was hidden. The walls were supposed to be painted with paints that were used by Leonardo and Vasari.

Notes

Literature

• Vasari D. Lives of the most famous painters, sculptors and architects, Academia, vol.II, pp. 108 - 109.
• Zubov V.P. Leonardo da Vinci, -M. - L.: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1962

Links

There are many pages in the history of art that read like a gripping novel. Well, when detective intrigue and a high-tech search for a treasure lost half a millennium ago are woven into the plot, it turns out almost ready script for Hollywood.

⇡ Fresco by Leonardo da Vinci

Monday, March 12, 2012. City of Florence, Italy. In one of the main administrative buildings of the city - ancient and similar to a fortified castle, Palazzo Vecchio - a press conference was held in honor of important discovery, just made in the field of art history.

As one of the project’s speaking sponsors put it, “the joint efforts of art historians and scientists who combined historical evidence and modern technologies", the research team was able to lift the veil of secrecy that has been with us for more than 500 years."

Explaining the essence of the work they did, scientists led by Professor Maurizio Seracini said the following. Using miniature probes and video probes, their high-tech research project revealed compelling evidence that the famous Leonardo da Vinci fresco, lost five centuries ago, probably still exists - behind a false wall hiding it, right in the very hall where press conference.

Although this news undoubtedly sounded very interesting, it cannot be said that it was received like a bolt from the blue. Maurizio Seracini is looking for famous work the great master for more than 30 years, and almost the bulk of his efforts boil down to walking through bureaucratic authorities and asking countless officials for permission to carry out the next cycle of non-destructive analytical studies of works of art and architecture.

At the very Lately This entire project, known as “The Lost Leonardo,” began to be considered not only controversial and ambiguous among many art historians and curators of antiquities, but also simply harmful. The main reason for this is that due to “insurmountable circumstances” the researchers needed to drill several holes in an existing work of considerable historical value. And also because not all art historians agree with the idea that Leonardo’s grandiose fresco still exists.

⇡ Battle of Anghiari

The history of Leonardo da Vinci’s great work “The Battle of Anghiari” - three times the size of “The Last Supper” - hides many dramatic and mysterious pages. It all started in 1503. That year, Leonardo and Michelangelo, two of the most famous masters of their era, simultaneously received orders from the authorities of Florence for large frescoes that were to decorate opposite walls of the Hall of the Five Hundred, the main ceremonial hall in the Palazzo Vecchio.

This was the period of the next restoration of the Florentine Republic after the expulsion of the Medici clan. Both frescoes were intended to reflect the historical victories of the Florentines over their enemies. Well, the double order fueled the already heated rivalry between the two great masters.

However, according to the information available to historians, master Michelangelo did not manage to progress beyond a large sketch on cardboard when working on his fresco “The Battle of Cascina”. Soon he receives an invitation from the Pope and leaves Florence for Rome to start decorating the Vatican.

Leonardo, as is known with documentary certainty, not only exhibited a large cardboard with a sketch in the hall, but also began directly painting the “Battle of Anghiari” on June 6, 1505, when he was 53 years old. The fresco was supposed to record for centuries the outstanding victory of Florence over the troops of Milan in the summer of 1440, when, despite their numerical superiority, the Milanese were defeated by a small Florentine detachment.

In the book “Lives of the Most Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects,” written in the mid-16th century by the writer, artist and architect Giorgio Vasari, the completed fragment of this work by Leonardo is described as an absolute masterpiece:

“...He depicted a group of horsemen fighting for a banner - a thing recognized as excellent and in high degree workshop because of the most amazing ideas embodied in depicting this confusion. The rage, hatred and vindictiveness of people in him are expressed as clearly as in horses... It is impossible to convey how varied Leonardo painted the clothes of the soldiers, their helmets and other decorations, not to mention the incredible skill shown in the contours of the horses, the strength of the muscles Leonardo was able to convey the beauty of their appearance better than anyone else.”

The same work reports that Leonardo managed to complete only a fragment (measuring 4 by 5 meters) of his large fresco, now known as “The Battle of the Banner”. But then, according to Vasari, the artist had to suspend work on this project, since the master had serious technical problems during experiments with mixing different techniques, used in oil painting and wall frescoes. (An unsuccessful experience with “The Last Supper” and constantly damp plaster due to rain forced Leonardo to look for new ways to fix paints on the wall.) In 1506, da Vinci moved to Milan at the invitation of the French governor Charles d’Amboise. And his fresco thus remained unfinished.

A few years after Giorgio Vasari described in his book the story of the painful creation of the Battle of Anghiari, he himself, as an artist and architect, was hired to reconstruct the Hall of the Five Hundred - at the behest of the new ruler of Florence, Grand Duke Cosimo de' Medici. The hall needed to be expanded and rebuilt, since the Duke wanted to have a larger room that could accommodate his entire court. Upon completion of the renovation of the hall, Vasari and his assistants painted the walls with new large frescoes. And the famous unfinished works of the previous masters, accordingly, were lost during perestroika - including the “Battle of Anghiari” by Leonardo da Vinci.

To date, little is known about this work by Leonardo, extolled by the artist’s contemporaries as his most remarkable work. Among the main traces of the Battle of Anghiari are several preparatory sketches made by the master himself, as well as an excellent copy of the Battle of the Banner made in 1603 by Rubens. The copy, naturally, was made not from the original, but from an engraving copy by another artist.

With the return of the Medici family to Florence, not only the frescoes of the Hall of Five Hundred disappeared. Following the urban renewal plan developed by Duke Cosimo I to perpetuate the memory of the Medici family, Vasari had to sacrifice other masterpieces - in particular, famous fresco"Trinity" by Masaccio in the Church of Santa Maria Novella.

Centuries later, however, it turned out that Vasari did not destroy Masaccio's work. He simply covered it with a false brick wall and added his own fresco “Madonna of the Rosary” along this wall. Masaccio's masterpiece remained hidden from human eyes for three hundred years, until 1861, when Vasari's wall was carefully removed...

⇡ The seeker finds

In 1975, after completing his engineering studies in the United States, Maurizio Seracini returned to his native Florence. And almost immediately he joined the study of the Hall of the Five Hundred, which was being carried out at that time by Carlo Pedretti, a researcher of Leonardo’s work, in the hope of finding there traces of the “Battle of Anghiari” - the largest-scale work of all that da Vinci undertook.

In the same 1975, when Seracini was studying the details of the battle scenes of Vasari’s large fresco “The Battle of Marciano”, at a height of 12 meters he discovered that a small green flag of one of the soldiers carried an inscription of two words Cerca Trova, that is, “The seeker finds” (sometimes translated as “Seek and you will find”). The discovery of this inscription seemed to strike a chord with Seracini: isn’t it a clue indicating that something very important is hidden here?

The technology of the 1970s, alas, could do nothing to help art experts answer such a question. So Seracini had to quietly move on to other tasks. Over the years, he has made a name for himself in the scientific examination and analysis of works of Italian art, including Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi. Along the way, working a lot in the USA, the scientist participated in the creation of a center for interdisciplinary study of art, architecture and archeology at UCSD, the University of California San Diego ( however, this happened already in 2007. — approx. ed. ). Only in 2000, Maurizio Seracini managed to return to the Hall of Five Hundred for research, now armed with new advanced technologies and enlisting the financial support of British philanthropist Loel Guinness.

Having probed the walls in the infrared spectrum and carried out laser scanning of the room, Seracini's team found the exact places where the doors and windows of the hall were located before Vasari began rebuilding the interiors. At the same time, new analytical results confirmed that the section of the wall once allocated by the authorities of Florence for Leonardo’s fresco turned out to be exactly where the flag with the inscription “The Seeker Finds” was located. Equally encouraging news was that Vasari, as it turned out, did not apply plaster for the new frescoes directly on top of Leonardo's work. As in the story with Masaccio’s masterpiece, Vasari erected new brick walls for his frescoes.

A few more years later, in 2007, Maurizio Seracini managed to obtain permission to examine the walls of the hall with GPR equipment, that is, a geophysical underground scanning radar. As a result of such high-frequency probing, it was established that one of Vasari’s false walls was not simple, but with a small, about 2-3 centimeters, air gap between it and the main stone wall - and exactly where, among the details of the fresco, a green banner with the motto of Cerca Trova...

On this wonderful discovery Seracini's search work was again significantly slowed down due to quite active resistance from officials of the Italian Ministry of Culture. But along the way, in 2005, speaking at one of the scientific conferences, the expert turned to the community of scientists for help - in the hope of jointly finding a non-destructive method of analysis that could reliably confirm or refute the presence of Leonardo’s fresco behind a brick wall with the “Battle of Marciano” Vasari.

As a result, the idea was born of using a neutron activation device, otherwise called analytical technology of stimulated radioactivity. With the help of physicists from the United States, the Italian Nuclear Energy Agency, and Dutch and Russian universities, Seracini and his colleagues developed devices that, using a neutron beam, could identify the characteristic chemicals used in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. (By knocking ions out of a hidden stone wall with neutrons, it is possible to obtain data on the individual signatures of specific pigments. These signatures have already been collected and classified previously by researchers of Leonardo’s works, in particular at the Louvre.)

The opportunity to actually use this equipment in practice only appeared at the beginning of 2011, when the leadership in the Ministry of Culture changed, and a new mayor was elected in Florence, Matteo Renzi, who was also inspired by the idea of ​​finding Leonardo’s lost masterpiece.

Alas, such an impressive scientific project was in vain in this case. In March 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which caused a nuclear reactor disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, an extremely nervous and suspicious attitude towards any nuclear technology or devices arose everywhere - including Florence. So the researchers had to abandon the neutron activation equipment that had already been prepared for use.

⇡ We are not vandals

Well, then a small miracle happened, which Seracini and his team had not even hoped for before. At the end of last year, the authorities gave them permission to drill several holes in the brickwork with the Vasari fresco in order to try to determine with the help of microprobes what is covered with the main stone wall. And now, at a March press conference in the Hall of the Five Hundred, the researchers revealed what they had discovered when analyzing the sounding results.

First of all, the fact of the presence of a thin air gap between the brick and masonry has been fully confirmed. Since no other wall in the Hall of the Five Hundred has a similar niche behind it, this alone gives good reason to assume the presence of a fresco there.

Miniature, medical-grade endoscopes and other high-tech probes were used to capture accessible video images and sample materials found behind a brick wall. As Seracini said, traces of pigments were identified that have the same characteristics as materials already known to art experts for their use exclusively in the works of Leonardo.

In particular, one of the samples of black material found on the back wall and analyzed by a scanning electron microscope was found to be similar to the black pigment identified in the Louvre, in brown shades paintings "Mona Lisa" and "John the Baptist". It also makes sense to note that Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa in Florence at the same time he was working on The Battle of Anghiari. According to experts, this is a unique pigment, used only in the works of da Vinci, but not by any other artists.

Also found on the hidden wall, flakes of reddish material were identified as most likely a varnish coating used to protect paints. “This kind of material is unlikely to be found on a regular plastered wall,” the team said. In addition, endoscope images high resolution allowed scientists to establish that on the original stone wall there is a beige-colored material, the texture of which “could only have been applied with an artist’s brush”...

In short, as Terry Garcia, head of the US National Geographic Society, the main financial sponsor of this project, summed up the study, “there is complete confidence that something very significant has been found, and therefore we can consider this a historic day.”

Now, according to Garcia, it is up to the Italian Ministry of Culture to decide what the next steps of the study will be and whether other parts of the wall need to be studied. So far no one can say anything meaningful about current state hidden work of Leonardo. This will be shown in further stages of study. But whatever remains of Leonardo's fresco, Garcia and his team are sure, it is clearly behind this wall.

Despite all these strong statements, some Italian art historians continue to be extremely skeptical about Seracini's efforts. This side believes that the Battle of Anghiari fresco was most likely destroyed before Giorgio Vasari began creating his wall paintings.

When the last stage of work on the search project began, which included drilling holes, even several of those art historians who had previously generally agreed with the hypothesis of a false wall hiding the treasure refused to support the study. And the organization “Our Italy” (Italia Nostra), the country’s leading national structure for ensuring the preservation of nature and art, specifically appealed to the Florentine authorities with a request to stop the project. Because, firstly, this creates risks of harming the valuable Vasari fresco itself, and secondly, according to Italia Nostra, it is generally extremely unlikely to find a genuine Leonardo behind it.

Supporters of the continuation of work categorically disagree with such criticism. All the holes that were made in the wall, they emphasize, are located either in previously restored places or in cracks - so the original Vasari was not affected at all.

The mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, is confident that work on the project must continue in order to establish the general condition of Leonardo’s work, which, as he believes, is probably behind the wall. The mayor has already asked the Italian government for permission to carry out additional brick drilling in about a dozen more places where Vasari's fresco is not on the wall.

Mayor of Florence Matteo Renzi (center)

“We need to know how much of the painting is left there. We're not some crazy vandals destroying art. We are curious people who are not afraid to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the history of art,” Renzi explains his position.

In general, the mayor is confident that modern technologies should allow the public to enjoy both Leonardo’s work and Vasari’s fresco. “But if I had to choose,” Renzi admitted, “I would still prefer Leonardo...”