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Gallery 5
Leonardo in Florence, ca. 1500–1507
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Read about the works in this gallery, or view images from the exhibition (see below). |
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Forced to leave Milan in December 1499, Leonardo seems to have passed through Venice and Mantua before reaching Florence about 1500. In 1502 Cesare Borgia (1475–1507), the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI and captain general of the Papal States, appointed Leonardo "family architect and general engineer." From the time of the siege of Pisa in 1503–4 and continuing sporadically until 1507–8, the Florentine Republic appears to have hired Leonardo as a hydraulic engineer on projects involving the canalization and embankments of the Arno River. By October 1503 Leonardo had secured the most prestigious public commission of his artistic career, the mural of the Battle of Anghiari in the Sala del Gran Consiglio (Great Council Hall) of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, where Michelangelo was to paint a pendant fresco of the Battle of Cascina. Neither wall painting reached a significant state of execution, and the final cartoons apparently were never completed; the fragments that were produced have long since perished. On view is a significant group of drawings by Leonardo for the Battle of Anghiari, including the famous monumental copy after the main episode of the Fight for the Standard that was reworked by Peter Paul Rubens (cat. no. 135).
Leonardo spoke candidly about the "stream-of-consciousness" solutions that arose from an intuitive process of exploration, and his approach was a great conceptual breakthrough in the history of art. This inventive process is most captivating in his "brainstorm" sketches for Leda and the Swan, which he began about the same time as the Battle of Anghiari (see cat. no. 88). The Leda studies displayed here reveal that Leonardo had begun experimenting with a drawing technique of thickly built up, pronounced curved hatching. In areas of shadow, the curved lines—either with or without cross strokes—follow the roundness of the forms in an exaggerated way. About 1506–8 Leonardo seems to have contemplated a design for a statue of Hercules, which is reconstructed and exhibited here along with the related drawings. Toward the end of the Anghiari project, Leonardo resumed his anatomical research. The large-scale studies for the Battle of Anghiari, Leda and the Swan, Hercules, and Neptune and Seahorses on view in this gallery demonstrate the grandeur of expression of Leonardo's mature figural vocabulary.
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