Seek Find

Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari is much like a myth. Like the latter, it inhabits our cultural heritage. Just as a myth is passed down from mouth to mouth, from bard to bard, before finding written form, Leonardo’s work has also been handed down from artist to artist, from copy to copy, overflowing to our time. Like a myth rooted in orality, the Leonardo painting also has its origin in an evanescent form: the fresco was in fact destroyed within a short time. Leonardo was experimenting with a new wax-based technique, with which he wanted to rediscover the ancient encaustic technique. Once the fresco had disappeared, all that remained of it was its echo.
Various artists, including Rubens, have given us a photograph of the heroic battle, perhaps drawing inspiration from Leonardo’s preparatory cartoons. Giorgio Vasari, called to the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence to execute some frescoes in the very place where Leonardo’s work was painted, created one that features a small green flag with a white inscription, “CERCA TROVA” (Seek and You Shall Find).

For years, researchers, animated by this enigmatic invitation, have sought to find the Battle of Anghiari, or at least some fragments of it. To do this, they have probed the mural palimpsest beneath the Vasari fresco, but without finding anything.

In this work, Riccardo Toso Borella takes inspiration from the at times enigmatic story that characterizes the history of this battle: he starts with the idea of ​​pretending that the scene is painted on the back of that Vasari flag. In fact, in the engraved work, not only can the folds of the fabric and a slight deformation of the figures be noticed, but on the back, it is painted with a white enamel the same Vasarian inscription: “CERCA TROVA”. It is the transparency of the glass that allows the artist to effectively and symbolically restore a vain illusion, that of suspending the bond of matter that perhaps hides Leonardo’s magnificent work in oblivion beneath the Vasari fresco. It is the glass that pierces Vasari’s flag/barrier and opens the doors to a mirror world beyond the limits of our own.

At the vertices of the composition and written in a specular manner as Leonardo used to do, the artist places a verse from the Arundel Codex; “Ciò che non ha termine non ha figura alcuna” (“That which has no end has no form at all.”). The juxtaposition chosen by Riccardo Toso Borella therefore suggests a reflection on the fact that it is the very Battle of Anghiari, precisely because it does not have a proper figure, is without end. The gold then contributes to sacralizing the mythical design in a timeless dimension, as the “exegesis” of historical-artistic language would have it.

In this work, various aspects come together: history, enigma, hope, the symbol of glass and gold, the specularity of glass and Leonardo’s writing; all this is welded together in the artistic vision of Riccardo Toso Borella.