The Doria Table is certainly the best known and most discussed (and also the best) of the copies of Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari. Let's take a closer look at it.
On June 12, 2012, the general secretary of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Antonia Pasqua Recchia, and the director of the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, Akira Gokita, signed an agreement whereby Italy regained possession of a precious sixteenth-century painting, universally known as the Tavola Doria, direct testimony to the lost Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452 - Amboise, 1519). The agreement signed between the two countries provided that the work would be returned to Italy, which would become the exclusive owner, and that it would be exhibited alternately between the two countries for twenty-six years (two years in Italy, four in Japan): once this long period of time is over, the table will return definitively to Italy. To understand how the agreement was reached, it is necessary to retrace the recent history of the work and return to 1940, when in Naples, at Palazzo d'Angri, the collection of its owner, Prince Marcantonio Doria, was auctioned. The work, notified by the ministry (and therefore unable to leave Italy), was purchased by another nobleman, Marquis Giovanni Niccolò De Ferrari, from Genoa, who disappeared in 1942: the heirs sold the Tavola Doria to the Florentine antique dealer Ciardiello, and somehow the work became the subject of an illegal purchase by a Swiss trafficker, Antonio Fasciani, who in 1962 sold it to a company in Munich, Interkunst GmbH. In 1970 the work was mortgaged and seventeen years later the painting was sold to a German consulting firm, which is 1992, in turn, sold it to the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum for a sum equivalent to about thirty million euros today. However, little time passes and the Japanese museum realizes that the work has left Italy illegally: the table is taken in Europe because Japan intends to submit it to some examinations, and in 2009 Italy learns that the Japanese museum has purchased it. The Carabinieri's Cultural Heritage Protection Unit identifies the Tavola Doria in a vault in Switzerland: negotiations are therefore underway with Japan (the museum had purchased the work in good faith), which concludes with the 2012 agreement.
The Tavola Doria has been assigned to the Uffizi Gallery, but when it is in Italy it is regularly lent for temporary exhibitions: in 2019, for example, the painting is among the protagonists of the exhibition Art of Government at the Battle of Anghiari. From Leonardo da Vinci to the Giovi series of the Uffizi (curated by Gabriele Mazzi and set up in Anghiari at the Museo Della Battaglia from 1 September 2019 to 12 January 2020), which provided an opportunity to retrace the studies that a great Leonardo, Carlo Pedretti, dedicated to the table.
As art historian Margherita Melani recalls in his essay, in 1968 Pedretti was the first scholar to publish color images of the Tavola Doria: at the time the painting was in Munich. Three years earlier, another art historian, Giorgio Nicodemi, had informed him of the presence in Germany of " memory of the Battle of Anghiari". The following year, Nicodemi wrote again a letter to Pedretti informing him of his willingness to publish an extended study of the Tavola Doria (which, however, was interrupted by the sudden death of the scholar on 6 June 1967). Pedretti then took on the task of studying the painting in depth and began to exchange letters with the owner of the table, Georg Hoffmann, owner of Interkunst GmbH. This correspondence, Melani underlines, "clearly shows Pedretti's attention to all the problems relating to the lost Battle of Anghiari": Pedretti intended, in fact, not only to reconstruct the history of the panel in-depth but also "to carry out specific research", writes Melani, "in the Salone del Gran Consiglio of Palazzo Vecchio with the conviction, never abandoned, that he could find at least part of Leonardo's original painting". Pedretti, therefore, began "to move on two fronts: to try to launch an ambitious research project that provided for the detachment of Vasari's frescoes trying to mobilize public opinion through a popular article to be published in the famous American magazine Life and, at the same time, signal the Doria to scholars with an article to be published in the pages of L'Arte. The project for the detachment of Vasari's frescoes did not come to fruition (it would have been proposed again almost fifty years later by others, but even in the latter case, beyond some holes in Vasari's frescoes.
To be continued.