Tavola Doria returns to Tokyo

The Tokyo Fuji Art Museum is exceptionally presenting, for the second time in a few years, the exhibition that brings back to Japan the famous painting known as the Tavola Doria. The Tavola Doria is a 16th-century oil on wood panel depicting the central scene of Leonardo da Vinci's lost Battle of Anghiari, commissioned in 1503 and never completed in the Salone dei Cinquecento in Florence. The artist is unknown and it is widely believed to be a copy of a 16th-century Tuscan artist, perhaps Poppi. The painting comes from the Doria d'Angri Collection, where it was documented as early as 1621, and had a turbulent life: sold at auction in 1939, it left Italy clandestinely in 1940 and surfaced in Munich, Germany, in the 1960s, before being acquired in 1992 by the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum. In 2012, after a complex investigation by the Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Unit, the Japanese museum officially donated the work to Italy, under a four-year agreement for alternating exhibitions between Italy and Japan. The exhibition at the Fuji Art Museum traces these events through documents, archival images, and materials related to the Battle of Anghiari, offering the Japanese public a rare opportunity to engage with an iconic masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance. The display also includes preparatory studies and medieval reproductions, contextualizing the work within the broader phenomenon of Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari.