I may here remind the reader that Leonardo prepared the cartoon in the Sala del Papa of Santa Maria Novella at Florence and worked there from the end of October 1503 till February 1504, and then was busied with the painting in the Sala del Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, till the work was interrupted at the end of May 1506. (See Milanesi’s note to Vasari pp. 43—­45 Vol.  IV ed. 1880.) Vasari, as is well known, describes only one scene or episode of the cartoon—­the Battle for the Standard in the foreground of the composition, as it would seem; and this only was ever finished as a mural decoration in the Sala del Consiglio.  This portion of the composition is familiar to all from the disfigured copy engraved by Edelinck.  Mariette had already very acutely observed that Edelinck must surely have worked from a Flemish copy of the picture.  There is in the Louvre a drawing by Rubens (No. 565) which also represents four horsemen fighting round a standard and which agrees with Edelinck’s engraving, but the engraving reverses the drawing.  An earlier Flemish drawing, such as may have served as the model for both Rubens and Edelinck, is in the Uffizi collection (see Philpots’s Photograph, No. 732).  It seems to be a work of the second half of the XVIth century, a time when both the picture and the cartoon had already been destroyed.  It is apparently the production of a not very skilled hand.  Raphael Trichet du Fresne, 1651, mentions that a small picture by Leonardo himself of the Battle of the Standard was then extant in the Tuileries; by this he probably means the painting on panel which is now in the possession of Madame Timbal in Paris, and which has lately been engraved by Haussoullier as a work by Leonardo.  The picture, which is very carefully painted, seems to me however to be the work of some unknown Florentine painter, and probably executed within the first ten years of the XVIth century.  At the same time, it would seem to be a copy not from Leonardo’s cartoon, but from his picture in the Palazzo della Signoria; at any rate this little picture, and the small Flemish drawing in Florence are the oldest finished copies of this episode in the great composition of the Battle of Anghiari.

In his Life of Raphael, Vasari tells us that Raphael copied certain works of Leonardo’s during his stay in Florence.  Raphael’s first visit to Florence lasted from the middle of October 1504 till July 1505, and he revisited it in the summer of 1506.  The hasty sketch, now in the possession of the University of Oxford and reproduced on page 337 also represents the Battle of the Standard and seems to have been made during his first stay, and therefore not from the fresco but from the cartoon; for, on the same sheet we also find, besides an old man’s head drawn in Leonardo’s style, some studies for the figure of St. John the Martyr which Raphael used in 1505 in his great fresco in the Church of San Severo at Perugia.