The Battle of Anghiari (Leonardo)

The Battle of Anghiari was a mural Leonardo da Vinci began in 1505 for the Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, commissioned to depict the Florentine victory over Pisa at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. Leonardo's surviving central composition showed four horsemen fighting fiercely over possession of a standard, but he had experimented with an unstable walnut-oil technique on the wall, and when he tried to speed the drying with braziers the upper colors ran and the project was abandoned unfinished. The remains were later painted over by Giorgio Vasari's own frescoes in the 1560s, and the original is known today only through copies and Leonardo's studies.