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machines of destruction—bombards, explosive cannonballs, catapults, giant crossbows, and the like, even as he remained adamantly opposed to war and violence.
    As biographer Serge Bramly points out, despite his many years of service as military engineer, Leonardo never participated in any offensive action. Most of his advice consisted of designing structures to defend and preserve a town or city. 12 During a conflict between Florence and Pisa, he proposed to divert the river Arno as a means to avoid a bloody battle. He went on to add that this should be followed up with the construction of a navigable waterway that would reconcile the combatants and bring prosperity to both cities.
    Leonardo’s most explicit condemnation of war consists of a long and detailed description of how to paint a battle, written when he was in his late thirties. Even a few excerpts from this text, which runs over several pages, reveal how vividly the artist intended to picture the horrors of war:

    You will first paint the smoke of the artillery, mingled in the air with the dust raised by the commotion of horses and combatants…. Let the air be full of arrows of all kinds, some shooting upwards, some falling, some flying level. The bullets from the firearms will leave a trail of smoke behind them…. If you show a man who has fallen to the ground, reproduce his skid marks in the dust, which has been turned into blood-stained mire…. Paint a horse dragging the dead body of its master, and leaving behind him in the dust and mud the track where the body was dragged along. Make the vanquished and beaten pale, with brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain…. Represent others crying out with their mouths wide open and running away… others in the agonies of death grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies, and their legs contorted. 13

    A decade after he wrote this, Leonardo, who was then over fifty and at the height of his fame, received a commission for a huge mural, which gave him the opportunity to turn his words into action. The Signoria, the Florentine city government, had decided to celebrate the military glory of Florence by decorating its new council chamber with two large frescoes depicting its victories in two historic battles—against Milan at Anghiari and against Pisa at Cascina. The Signoria commissioned the former fresco from Leonardo and the latter from his young rival Michelangelo.
    The Battle of Anghiari
was the most important public commission Leonardo had ever received. He completed the huge cartoon (or sketch) within a year, as stipulated in his contract, and then spent over half a year painting the fresco’s central scene, a group of horsemen fighting for a standard. Because of technical problems that resulted in the rapid deterioration of the mural, he never completed the huge painting. (Michelangelo left Florence for Rome to paint the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, without starting his
Battle of Cascina
.) The central part of Leonardo’s composition, known as
The Struggle for the Standard
, remained on the wall of the council chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio for almost sixty years before the Signoria finally had its last traces removed. During those decades it dazzled spectators and was copied by several other Renaissance masters.

    Figure 1-2: Peter Paul Rubens after Leonardo,
The Struggle for the Standard,
c. 1600–1608, Musée du Louvre, Paris

    Leonardo left many preparatory drawings for
The Battle of Anghiari
, from which art historians have reconstructed the painting’s general composition. 14 While he intended to present the unfolding of the battle with great clarity and historical accuracy, Leonardo used the central episode as a symbolic statement exposing the fury and “bestial madness” of war.
    The superb copy of
The Struggle for the Standard
by Peter Paul Rubens (Fig. 1-2), now at the Louvre, shows Leonardo’s