f the Palazzo Vecchio. In the choice of theme, the Battle of Anghiari, patriotic references and the wish to show off Leonardo's special skills were both apparently required. Leonardo depicted a cavalry battlea small skirmish won by Florentine troopsin which horsemen leap at each other, churning up dust, in quick interlocking motion. The work today is known through some rapid rough sketches of the groups of horsemen, careful drawings of single heads of men which are extraordinarily vivid in suggesting immediate response to a stimulus, and copies of the entire composition. Leonardo began to paint the scene, experimenting with encaustic technique (the paint is fused into hot wax on the surface of the panel), but he was called back to Milan before the work was completed. A short time thereafter, the room was remodeled and the fragment was destroyed.Both the Battle of Anghiari and the Mona Lisa contain their animation in neatly balanced designs. In the battle scene, the enemies are locked in tense symmetry; in the portrait, the crossed arms form the base of a pyramid capped by the head, which gives the lady her quality of classic rightness and prevents the less than full-length portrait from seeming incomplete and arbitrarily amputated at the lower edge.Called to Milan in 1506 by the French governor in charge, Leonardo worked on an equestrian statue project, but he produced no new paintings; he was more intent on scientific observation. Most of his scientific concerns were fairly direct extensions of his interests as a painter, and his research in anatomy was the most fully developed. Verrocchio and other early Renaissance painters had attempted to render the human anatomy with accuracy, but Leonardo went far beyond any of them, producing the earliest anatomical drawings which are still considered valid today, although he occasionally confused animal and human anatomy and accepted some old wives' tales.Leonardo began filling the notebooks wi...
