In this drawing we see a model posed in the standard manner of figures in antique sarcophagi, with one leg flexed and the other extended straight behind. Such a figure seems to have been intended for the left side of the Battle of Anghiari and may be prefigured by the swordsman in RCIN 912340, where the legs are reversed. The right leg shows individual muscles more distinctly than surface inspection of a living model can reveal, suggesting that Leonardo now had access to human corpses for dissection or flaying of the skin, by a medical collaborator if not (yet) by Leonardo himself. Melzi's number 73.

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