A study of a nude man standing facing the spectator, seen from the waist down, with his legs well apart and his body thrown back. The right leg is carefully modelled and the left is only sketched.

Leonardo’s most ambitious painting was the Battle of Anghiari, a huge mural commissioned by the Florentine government for the Great Council Chamber of the Palazzo della Signoria. It remained unfinished when Leonardo was called back to Milan in 1506, and was obliterated fifty years later. Leonardo returned to the study of anatomy to allow him to paint the monumental figures of Anghiari with complete confidence. Unlike his surveys of the human body around 1490 (see eg. RCIN 919132, 912601), there was now no attempt to derive a system of proportions: instead we see an empirical investigation of the appearance of the body, resulting in some of Leonardo’s finest chalk studies.

Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: A life in drawing, London, 2018