Battle of Anghiari

After 400 years, art-theft-specialists of the Italian carabinieri have tracked down this Doria Panel, a copy of Leonardo da Vinci's fabled Battle of Anghiari. Leonardo used a disastrous experimental technique on his original painting and never completed the project. The work he had done deteriorated swiftly and was covered by a new version painted by the famous Renaissance biographer Vasari when the Hall of the Five Hundred was reconstructed. Leonardo's original would have vanished forever but for Vasari's glowing description and a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens. So the Doria Panel, although a copy, is extremely important. It was stolen from the Doria family in Naples after 300 years, passed to a Swiss art dealer, was sent to Germany for restoration in the 1960s, turned up at a New York art gallery in the 1970s and ended up in the hands of a Japanese collector in the 1990s. It will be displayed at the Uffizi Gallery next year (CLICK).