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Rubens Reanimates Leonardo’s Lost Fury
Peter Paul Rubens’s “Copy of the Battle of Anghiari” (1603) is not a mere transcription of a famous composition. It is the most vivid conduit through which the explosive energy of Leonardo da Vinci’s lost mural still reaches us. Working a century after the Florentine master sketched and painted his tumultuous cavalry fight for the Palazzo Vecchio, Rubens studies the surviving graphic evidence and translates it into a Baroque idiom of muscle, dust, and shrieking motion. What we meet on this sheet is a relay across time: Leonardo’s theories of violent movement, nerve, and expression pumped through Rubens’s virtuoso hand until the melee feels present again. Four horsemen collide at the center around a captured standard; rearing mounts, slashing blades, and ground-level casualties interlock in a vortex that churns from left to right. It is a drawing about how bodies behave when the will turns to iron and the world frays.
History of a Lost Masterpiece and Why Rubens Looked Back
Leonardo’s “Battle of Anghiari” was conceived around 1503–1506 as a vast mural commemorating a Florentine victory. Technical experiments with an ill-fated medium caused the wall painting to deteriorate quickly, and by Rubens’s time the work already survived mainly in cartoons and copies. Rubens had intensely studied Italian art during his early career; copying was his way to wrestle with giants and carry their power forward. For a young painter refining his command over crowds, anatomy, and equestrian drama, Leonardo’s battle was the ultimate school. Rubens’s sheet thus records a double ambition: to absorb the science of movement Leonardians prized and to test how that science could fuel the more theatrical Baroque rhythm he was forging.
The Core Group: Struggle for the Standard
At the composition’s heart, four mounted warriors knot themselves around a single standard. Two pairs oppose each other, their arms scissoring through space as they thrust, parry, and wrench at the pole. The horses do not simply rear; they lunge with fear and fury, their eyes wide, nostrils torn open, lips peeled back to bare teeth. Leonardo designed this core knot to condense the dynamics of battle into one readable crisis—possession of the emblem equals possession of the field. Rubens preserves that logic while tightening the torsions and emphasizing the anatomy of strain: swollen deltoids, flared ribcages, taut forearms, and clenched hands that crush leather and wood. The standard becomes a pivot, a vertical axis around which action whirls.
The Serpentine Line and the Vortex of Motion
Leonardo believed in the “moto dell’anima,” movement of the soul made visible in bodily action. Rubens seizes that idea and visualizes it through serpentine lines that coil through horses’ necks, riders’ backs, and whips of mane. From the lower left where a fallen soldier shields himself, diagonals climb to the rearing mounts, crest in a crest-like wave at the standard, and crash toward the right where another fallen figure is trampled. This S-curving path keeps the eye circulating without escape. The vortex is not a circle but a spiral that builds pressure. Rubens manipulates the thickness of contours and the weight of hatching to energize the swirl; thick, dark strokes anchor hooves and heads, while lighter webs of line aerate the space between bodies so the whole event breathes while it convulses.
Horses as Emotional Engines
One of the astonishments of the sheet is its equine psychology. Each horse demonstrates a different register of terror or rage. The left mount, driven by a rider in patterned armor, turns its head with ears flattened, mouth stretched as if screaming. The central horse, chest heaving, surges forward with an expression of desperate attack; its rider raises a curved blade that arcs like lightning. To the right, another horse corkscrews, neck coiled, eye gleaming with panicked light. Rubens reveals tendons, veins, and muscle groups with near-anatomical accuracy, but he never lets description become static. Every mark participates in the animal’s feeling. The horses are not props for human glory; they are the battle’s raw nerves.
Faces in Extremis: The Grammar of Fury
Leonardo’s studies for the battle famously codified types of extreme expression—flared nostrils, clenched teeth, furrowed brows, and distended necks. Rubens rehearses those physiognomies and pushes them toward his own century’s taste for heightened theater. Mouths gape in triangular howls; cheeks pucker with effort; pupils sit like black nails in widened eyes. Even beneath helmets and turbans, we sense the heat of breath and the grit in teeth. The fallen combatants show a different syntax: grimace sliding toward slackness as consciousness flickers. By grading expressions from ferocious control to collapse, Rubens narrates the battle’s moral temperature without any banners of text.
Chiaroscuro Without Color
Working with black chalk heightened with white and enriched by brown wash, Rubens creates a chroma-free world where light is action. Highlights strike armor and polished withers; middle tones bulk the forms; deep shadows cut like wounds. The white heightening is never cosmetic. It sketches the splinter of sun on a blade, the wetness of a horse’s eye, the sheen on stretched skin. Because he keeps the paper’s mid-tone active, Rubens can leap from darkness to blaze with minimal strokes, producing a strobe-like sensation entirely suited to the violent theme. Color is unnecessary; tone alone sounds the alarm.
The Ground Battle: Bodies That Pay the Price
Leonardo placed fallen soldiers beneath the horsemen to tell the truth of war’s cost. Rubens honors that candor. At lower left a fighter crouches behind a round shield, his body still engaged in survival though the wall of hooves closes in. At lower right, a man is crushed under the brunt of a horse’s hindquarters, his torso twisted, neck arched, mouth open. These bodies are not ornamental rubble; they lead the viewer into the battle’s three dimensions and insist that narrative glory rides on human casualty. Rubens’s willingness to make these figures vivid—no blur, no decency veil—gives the drawing modern moral weight.
Steel, Leather, and Hair: The Tactile Chorus
One of Rubens’s particular contributions is his tactile orchestration. He differentiates surfaces so we feel the scene, not only see it. Steel is rendered through sharp highlights and strong edges; leather straps are softened by granular hatching and tiny buckles; horsehair is written in springing calligraphic strands. The patterned armor on the left rider catches the eye with its reptilian texture—perhaps a memory of the imaginary grotesques Leonardo loved. This tactile chorus prevents the seething mass from becoming a blur; each material sings its part inside the storm.
The Baton of the Standard and the Geometry of Weapons
Weapons carve directions through the page. Straight lances and the vertical standard organize the chaos into legible vectors, while the curved scimitar raised at center introduces a counter-melody of arc. These lines are not simply descriptive; they are compositional levers. Rubens uses the glint of a blade to pull attention from one face to another, from left mass to right mass, from high perch to low fall. The result is a battle you can read as well as feel, a carefully scored symphony of diagonals where every slant carries narrative intent.
Dialogue With Leonardo’s Science of Movement
Leonardo theorized about vortexes in water and hair, about how force transmits through limbs, and how expressions originate in the mind’s motions. Rubens turns those studies into performance. The spiraling manes behave like the eddies in Leonardo’s hydraulic drawings; the distribution of strain across abdominals and obliques corresponds to the direction of force; the hierarchy of expressions matches a ladder of interior states. Yet Rubens is not a pedant. He converts science to sensation, allowing the intelligence in the muscles to be felt viscerally.
From Florentine Experiment to Baroque Theater
The original mural was an experiment—new technique, new public scale, new theory of depicting instantaneous fury. Rubens’s copy is a different kind of experiment: how to make that instant feel boundless. He thickens outlines at focal points, adds a little more amplitude to twisting hips and necks, and clarifies the relationship between overlapping forms so the action reads at once even in reproduction. Where the High Renaissance sought sovereign clarity inside complexity, Rubens adds Baroque torque, coaxing more drama from every joint without sacrificing the essential geometry.
The Ethics of Violence and the Viewer’s Position
The sheet dazzles, but it also interrogates. Battle is portrayed as an ecstasy of will that disfigures faces and bends bodies past safety. The viewer is caught between admiration for heroic vigor and recognition of tragic waste. Rubens does not sermonize; he stages a predicament. Our eye thrills at the central knot of power then drops to the trampled and the terrified. That oscillation generates a contemporary relevance: spectacle remains seductive, but the drawing trains us to maintain moral focus within spectacle.
Technique as Thinking: How the Copy Was Made
Rubens likely combined direct observation of copies with memory of prints and his own analytic sketches. The sheet shows evidence of layered work: initial contour in black chalk to place the masses; wash laid to establish tonal fields; hatching to tighten shadows and build texture; final touches of white to ignite highlights. Slight corrections—shifted hooves, adjusted jawlines, reinforced reins—record his iterative reasoning. This is not copying as tracing; it is copying as problem solving. Rubens tests how energy crosses a page and revises until the crossing feels inevitable.
The Battle’s Soundtrack Imagined in Line
If you “listen” to the drawing, it speaks in layers. The thickest darks pound like drums under hooves. The jag of highlights on steel rings like clashing metal. The scribble in the manes hisses like wind tore through hair. The broader washes hum like dust hanging in the air. Such synesthetic design suggests how fully Rubens internalized Leonardo’s notion that painting should rival poetry and music in expressive power. The sheet is noisy in silence.
Influence on Rubens’s Later Hunts and Battles
This encounter with Leonardo haunted Rubens fruitfully. His later hunts of lions, boars, and wolves show the same torque of bodies, the same ladder of expressions from rage to panic, and the same compositional vortex that binds many actors into one catastrophe. Battle paintings after 1600—whether Amazons or contemporary cavalry clashes—inherit the Anghiari knot and elaborate it with Rubens’s color and atmospheric depth. The copy thus acts as a seedbed for a career-long exploration of crowd drama.
Why Copies Matter: Transmission and Transformation
Art history often treats copies as second-tier, but this sheet argues the opposite. When originals perish, copies become living archives—especially when the copier is a creator with his own power. Rubens’s version does not fossilize Leonardo’s invention; it reactivates it. We learn not only what the Anghiari looked like but how it worked. The drawing demonstrates how artists learn by reenactment and how traditions persist by being altered. In this sense, Rubens is Leonardo’s collaborator across a century.
The Viewer’s Route Through the Melee
Rubens guides our eyes with deliberate stages. We enter from the lower left with the crouched soldier; we are swept up the rearing horse’s diagonal into the tangle of heads; we jerk right with the arc of the curved blade; we crash downward to the trampled figure and ground-level chaos; we rebound toward the center on the bright blaze of a horse’s eye or the white edge of a bridle. This route takes seconds yet feels inexhaustible. Each pass reveals a fresh micro-drama—a grip tightening, a tendon leaping, a lip curling—so the experience renews rather than exhausts.
The Battle’s Legacy Beyond Painting
Leonardo’s lost mural, remembered through sheets like this, shaped Europe’s conception of violent motion for centuries. Sculptors seized its torsions; writers borrowed its metaphors; even military pageantry learned from its tight knot of courage and terror. Rubens’s copy keeps that legacy vivid for the Baroque and, by extension, for us. It is not only an art-historical resource but a cultural engine: a place where ideas of courage, competition, and catastrophe are perpetually rehearsed.
Conclusion: Two Geniuses, One Living Storm
Rubens’s “Copy of the Battle of Anghiari” is a handshake across time between two intoxicated minds. Leonardo supplies the science of motion and the archetypal knot of conflict; Rubens supplies the heat, the breath, and the Baroque drive that turns study into spectacle. The result is a drawing that feels uncannily present—horses shrilling, men howling, standards wrenching—though its source vanished five hundred years ago. In the friction of pencil, chalk, and wash, we hear the past insist that it is not dead. It is charging straight at us.