Knight, Centaur and Soldiers in Battle

This drawing was completed around 1504, when Leonardo da Vinci was 53 and in the midst of creating a monumental fresco of the Battle of Anghiari for the Great Hall of Florence’s city hall — this sheet is believed to be a preparatory study for that unfinished project. It now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery and is among the most compositionally complete of Leonardo’s rare surviving battle drawings.

Three Species on One Sheet of Paper

The drawing looks chaotic at first glance, but examined closely it reveals a carefully orchestrated melee. At least three categories of beings are battling across the sheet: mounted warriors in armor, foot soldiers, and the most unexpected presence of all — centaurs, the creatures of Greek mythology with human upper bodies and horse lower bodies. Centaurs fighting alongside humans on a battlefield is a setting charged with Leonardesque philosophical meaning: he has compressed myth and reality, animality and humanity, savagery and civilization into a single battlefield, forcing the viewer to ask: in the face of violence, where is the boundary between human and beast?

How Did Leonardo Paint War?

Leonardo was not the kind of painter who glorified warfare. In his notebooks he described war as “the most bestial of madness” (pazzia bestialissima). Yet he accepted the commission for The Battle of Anghiari and researched it with extraordinary depth — studying how horse muscles contract during running and struggle, studying the expressions of the human face under extreme pain and terror, studying the physical mechanics of sword strikes and combat. Every line in this drawing carries traces of that research: the angle at which a horse’s front hoof lifts, the twisting arc of a soldier’s torso, the cutting trajectory of a sword blade in motion. This is not a painter documenting war but a scientist dissecting the nature of violence.

The Battle of Anghiari: History’s Most Famous Missing Fresco

The commission Leonardo accepted was to paint a monumental fresco commemorating the 1440 Battle of Anghiari in the Salone dei Cinquecento — the Hall of the Five Hundred — in Florence’s city hall. He produced detailed preparatory drawings and devised an experimental technique (attempting to use wax to bind the pigments, imitating ancient Roman encaustic painting), but ultimately failed: the paint began peeling off the wall due to problems with the heating process, and he abandoned the project in frustration, leaving only the central portion ever completed. The hall was later redecorated by Vasari; the Battle of Anghiari may have been painted over, or may have deteriorated and disappeared long before. Today, we can only imagine what that unfinished masterpiece might have looked like through later artists’ copies — most notably Rubens — and through preparatory studies like this drawing.

What Is a Centaur? And Why Did Leonardo Put One in a Battle Scene?

For anyone who never took a course in Greek mythology, a centaur is this: half human from the waist up, half horse below, inhabiting the wilds of Greek mythological landscapes. In ancient Greek visual tradition, centaurs typically represented savagery against civilization — when myth pits humans against centaurs, it is fundamentally a metaphor for the clash between reason and bestiality, order and chaos. Leonardo did not place centaurs in this battle scene arbitrarily. In his notebooks, he returned again and again to the nature of war: is warfare the extreme release of humanity’s animal nature, or some higher-order contest of forces? Mixing centaurs and human soldiers in the same melee is equivalent to asking: when a human picks up a weapon, does he still count as human? The question had no answer in his era, and it has none today either.

Did Rubens Actually See the Lost Fresco?

In 1503, while Leonardo was still struggling to paint the Battle of Anghiari, a 9-year-old Flemish boy named Peter Paul Rubens was growing up in the north. He would go on to become one of the most important painters in 17th-century Europe. In 1603, Rubens visited Florence, and legend holds that he saw whatever remained of the Battle of Anghiari with his own eyes — he left behind a drawn copy depicting the central cavalry melee of the fresco, the closest visual record we have today to Leonardo’s original composition. This drawing in the Uffizi is an even earlier artifact — a study from the embryonic stage before the painting that later stunned Rubens was ever made. A hundred years later, one genius copied another genius’s masterwork; five hundred years later, you look at this paper and try to imagine, through layers of accumulated time, a painting that was never truly finished. That is why a single drawing can still take your breath away.