and devotee of Savonarola, drew up his plan
in consultation with Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo (although then
so young: only nineteen or twenty) and others. Its peculiarity is that
it is one of the largest rooms in existence without pillars. From the
foot of the steps to the further wall I make it fifty-eight paces,
and thirty wide; and the proportions strike the eye as perfect. The
wall behind the steps is not at right angles with the other--and this
must be as peculiar as the absence of pillars.

Once there were to be paintings here by the greatest of all, for
masters no less than Leonardo and Michelangelo were commissioned to
decorate it, each with a great historical painting: a high honour
for the youthful Michelangelo. The loss of these works is one of
the tragedies of art. Leonardo chose for his subject the battle of
Anghiari, an incident of 1440 when the Florentines defeated Piccinino
and saved their Republic from the Milanese and Visconti. But both
the cartoon and the fresco have gone for ever, and our sense of loss
is not diminished by reading in Leonardo's Thoughts on Painting the
directions which he wrote for the use of artists who proposed to paint
battles: one of the most interesting and exciting pieces of writing in
the literature of art. Michelangelo's work, which never reached the
wall of the room, as Leonardo's had done, was completed as a cartoon
in 1504 to 1506 in his studio in the hospital of the dyers in Sant'
Onofrio, which is now the Via Guelfa. The subject was also military:
an incident in the long and bitter struggle between Florence and Pisa,
when Sir John Hawkwood (then in the pay of the Pisans, before he came
over finally to the Florentines) attacked a body of Florentines who
were bathing in the river. The scene gave the young artist scope both
for his power of delineating a spirited incident and for his drawing
of the nude, and those who saw it said of this work that it was finer
than anything the painter ever did. While it was in progress all
the young artists came to Sant' Onofrio to study it, as they and its
creator had before flocked to the Carmine, where Masaccio's frescoes
had for three-quarters of a century been object-lessons to students.

What became of the cartoon is not definitely known, but Vasari's
story is that Bandinelli, the sculptor of the Hercules and Cacus
outside the Palazzo, who was one of the most diligent copyists of the
cartoon after it was placed in a room in thi