Florence, c. 1503-1504

Having returned to Florence, the City awards Leonardo the most important commission of his life, the Battle of Anghiari. In the same period, he begins masterpieces such as Sant’Anna and Mona Lisa. In a studio set up in Santa Maria Novella, he works on the cartoon (full scale preparatory drawing) of the Battle, and meanwhile drafts (in the Codex Madrid II) his most complete book list “kept safe in the chest”. The list includes 116 titles that give evidence of the expansion of his reading into every discipline: literature, poetry, history, religion, philosophy, natural sciences, physics, mechanics, mathematics, geometry, medicine, anatomy. After meeting Luca Pacioli in Milan (1496), Leonardo deepens his study of geometry, absorbing the works of Euclid and Archimedes. He envisions the possibility of re-establishing painting (defined as scientia) itself on a mathematical basis, and of determining a unifying principle common to all the sciences.

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