La Battaglia di Leonardo. Fortune alterne del dipinto e del cartone

In a letter written in 1549 to Alberto Lollio, Anton Francesco Doni described Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari in Palazzo Vecchio as a “marvelous thing”. Doni’s letter is currently interpreted in relation to the remains of Leonardo’s wall painting visible in the Sala Grande before its radical restoration by Vasari. Yet, according to the Eighteenth Century erudite Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, Doni’s letter refers to the now lost cartoon of the battle then displayed in the Sala Grande, and not to the wall painting. According to Bottari, nothing of the wall painting, nothing worthy of being seen, had survived at Doni’s time. Reconsidering the entire critical reception of the Battle, this paper recovers Bottari’s interpretation as a plausible basis for a reconstruction of the intertwined history of the cartoon and the wall painting of the Battle. It also shows that the commonly accepted opinion, based on a record in Marcello Oretti’s manuscript account on artworks in Florence, published by Carlo Pedretti in 1968, that Leonardo’s cartoon was displayed in the Palazzo Medici in Via Larga in the second half of the Eighteenth Century, should be discarded. The history of the building and an analysis of Oretti’s manuscript shows that the bolognese polygraph should no longer be considered a reliable source for the fortune of Leonardo’s cartoon.