I wanted to briefly revisit the subject of my last posting, about the announcement that the Italian art researcher Maurizio Seracini will resume his attempt to determine if completed portions of The Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo’s never finished and long lost masterpiece, might be hidden behind a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The news is still exciting. We know from copies made before the painting was lost in the 1560s that Leonardo’s scene of four horsemen battling in a ferocious tangle predict the whirlpool energies of the Baroque. (No wonder Rubens loved it.) So to disinter the original would be a major event.
Or a major disappointment. Even if the mural is waiting for us where Seracini suspects — in a cavity behind Vasari’s later wall painting — what hope is there that much will be left of it after being stashed away for almost five centuries in something less than ideal conditions? (“Cavity” is not a word you associate with “climate controlled”.) To complicate the problem, we know that Leonardo, he of the questing, scientific mind, treated painting as a technology-in-progress, meaning he routinely experimented with technique. To achieve a greater depth of tone in The Last Supper, before applying the color he laid down an unusual layer of white lead on top of his final layer of fine plaster. That brought him the effects he was looking for, but also contributed to the fast deterioration that produced the work as we know it today, a flaking remnant.
To see what was known about Leonardo’s working methods on The Battle of Anghiari, I checked in with the updated edition of Martin Kemp’s Leonardo da Vinci, one of the standard references. Bad news. Comparing Anghiari with The Last Supper, Kemp writes:
For the Battle he seems to have adopted an even more unconventional method, close to a technique later described but not recommended by Vasari. The materials suggest that a layer of granular plaster would have been laid down, and primed to a hard, flat finish with a layer of resinous pitch applied with sponges.
There’s more:
Early sources indicate that he lit a fire beneath his painting to dry the pigments on the wall, a procedure that was probably necessitated by his use of faulty linseed oil. Antonio Billi, writing about 1518, recorded that Leonardo had been cheated by his supplier of oil — perhaps he had been supplied with oil which had not been fully concentrated by heating until it reached the proper consistency.
From the several surviving copies we know that the picture fared well enough for the 60 or so years that it remained visible on the wall where Leonardo left it uncompleted in 1506. All the same, experimental technique plus questionable materials doesn’t sound like a promising formula for long term survival, especially survival in a cavity. In his book Kemp is skeptical that anything much could be back there. If the Italians do eventually decide to go in after it, the “rediscovery” of Anghiari could be the biggest disappointment since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s all but empty vault.