The Battle of Anghiari

Size: Height X Length
Inches: 81 X 168
Cms: 206 X 427

Meduim: Oil Enamel on Canvas

Circa: 1982 – 1987

The Battle of Anghiari
The Individual Perspective
A painting full of sound, fury, and action. The struggle of the opposing forces, red and purple. Both are equally matched here. There will be no winners or losers in this battle because there will be no survivors. But one enlightened soul, tired of the bloodshed, The meaninglessness, and futility of it all is quietly moving out while the battle continues to rage around him.

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The Battle of Anghiari.
The Battle for Equanimity.
The Individual Perspective

Anghiari was a guise. It was the Eternal Battle between the Good and the Bad, the battle between the objects, Image, The battle between the passions & knowledge, The battle between the temptation and the detachment. The Battle going on for Day & Night, The shedding of the armors-which is glasslike and fragile in itself. The Patient waits after shedding the armored shell, The ferocity being replaced by tenderness and patience.

  • The human being stands in the Centre and does not take full responsibility for his actions.
  • The human being stands in the Centre and takes no responsibility for his actions, believing that everything is predestined.
  • The Human being stands in the center and believes that he can only take actions but is not responsible for its reactions (Consequences).
  • The Human being stands in the center and believes that he is the Creator.
  • The human being stands in the center and believes that his actions are a direct result of his thoughts.
  • The human being stands in the center and believes that whatever he sows, so he will reap.
  • The human being stands in the center and believes that there is no salvation.
  • The human being stands in the center and believes that there is salvation.
  • The human being stands in the center and believes that there are however no ways of attaining salvation.
  • The human being stands in the center and believes that there are definite ways of attaining salvation.

I am a Man With Four desires And Three Restraints
I am a Man With Three Revolts And Four Suppressions
I am a Man With Passionate Love And Dispassionate Ecstasy With either I can live forever.
And The Choice is mine
With the former, I have lived For the past Eternity.
With the latter, I wish to live For the future Eternity.

-Bharat Dalal

Description of the Painting :

The Painting “The Battle of Anghiari” by Bharat Dalal is one of his most ambitious works showing the historical battle and depicting the beginning, middle, and end of the battle. The Battle of Anghiari was a battle between the Milanese Force and the Florentine army. The outcome of the battle was a victory for the Florentine Army and the control over central Italy.
In this painting, Bharat Dalal had depicted four knights who are engaged in a battle and portrayed very successfully the intense emotions, the fury, and the sense of the power of the fighters. He had captured the movement and agility of the horses and horsemen in detail and created a magnificent work of art by giving a snippet of the battle that describes the full story behind it.
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The Battle of Anghiary by Leonardo Da Vinci :

The Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo Da Vinci is a lost fresco painting, and a few scholars assume it to be hidden in the Hall of Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. This painting by Leonardo is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the Art World. He depicted a scene from the Battle of Anghiari in 1440 and portrayed the central scene as four men riding the war horses engaged in a battle for the possession of a standard. Leonardo used a unique Encaustic technique (Fixing by Heat) to draw this painting, but he was not successful and left the work in between. He captured the crucial moment of the battle by showing the battle scene in a fiery and raging manner. However, the other artists had copied the original fresco and the drawing of the battle of Anghiari by Leonardo and created a new copy of the same painting. One of them was Peter Paul Rubens who made a very identical copy of the battle of the Anghiari in 1603 that is kept in the Louvre Museum, Paris.

The Background (Landscape) and the Superimposition of the Figures :

The background of the painting “The Battle of Anghiari” by Bharat Dalal is almost blank and not showing any kind of landscape. This gives priority and full emphasis on the center – the main point of this painting. The depiction of the battle is an Eternal battle between the Good and the Evil, the battle between passions and knowledge, and the battle between temptation and detachment. He had shown the center of this masterpiece as four riders of colliding horses and cavalry, the riders battling for the control of the standard (Anghiari), portraying a sense of power, emotion, and triumph over the sense of fury and violence. Bharat Dalal had shown uniformly the design of the swords, his skillset of drawing the soldiers with high accuracy, and the bold features of the horses perfectly.

The Superimposition of the figures in the Battle of Anghiari was used by Bharat Dalal to blur the lines between the Past and the Present, between authenticity and imitation, and between reality and fiction. It helped the artist to establish the distinction between the Transient nature and the Permanent nature of the matter and to express the correlation between the Empirical Nature (Body) and the Spiritual Nature (Soul) with his extraordinary depth of knowledge and perception.

The Technique & the Colour :

Bharat Dalal’s technique was very unique. He used this technique to interplay the textures meaningfully, to express the three-dimensional images, and to substantiate the meaning of expressionism and realism in order to counterbalance the effect of abstractionism. The comprehensive technique was to commensurate the rendering of the nuances which facilitated his expression in the infinitely complex intent of Leonardo Da Vinci. He used the marbleized technique to smoothen the canvasses; he had a clear vision during the execution of this painting to correlate and to establish the intangibility of spiritual metamorphosis with the tangibility of empirical metamorphosis. The blank canvasses were hung from the ceiling with the help of pulleys and he precisely dropped the colors to acquire the desired shape and size under the law of gravity. This uniqueness is unparalleled and irreplaceable, giving a sense of the fossilized passions of the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci.

Bharat Dalal had used Red, Blue, and Yellow along with Mauve Blue, Violet-Orange, Violet, and Black &White to complete this painting. The representation of the colors in the perspective is affected by the intervening atmosphere; hence, the intensity of the colors varies according to the distance of the horses and horsemen from the center. The degree of abstraction due to the treatment of the colors is explained by the geometrical diagram and the actions of the human figures in the drawing of this painting. This painting is the result of the unlimited thought process, the composition of ideas, and a search for the expression of human bestiality in the war by the artist, Bharat Dalal. He states: “The birth and evolution of the individual perception of this painting is explained in this perspective analysis. The perspective that is presented in the painting is represented in bold yellow, and red lines are the completed perspective when the individual viewer steps into the center of the painting. This is a dynamic perspective and considers the viewer to complete itself.”

Perceptions to Pure Perceptions & the Evolution of Geometrical perspectives – V (five)

The maturing of the preceding perceptions culminates ivinto the second complete original perception, the individual perception. The individual perception translates into the prismatic geometric perspective. The dynamic perspective by its special virtue emerges out of the painting and considers the individual viewer to complete itself. The prism is complete only when the viewer steps into the center of the painting. The focus is shifted to the individual perception of the viewer. The individual perception/perspective is the prismatic geometry that draws itself out and the viewer is held accountable for his actions and decisions. The marbleized veins of the yellow background seem to rush out of the painting when the painting is mounted at a certain height on the wall and the viewer standing at the ground level steps into the center of the canvas to view the painting. The perspective that emerges from the painting is represented in bold red lines and the yellow lines are representative of the completed perspective when the individual viewer steps into the center of the canvas.

The Artist’s Perspective :

Bharat Dalal’s perspective of the painting “The Battle of Anghiari” shows the Past, the Present, and the Future converging to an interactive process between the painting and the conscience of the individual viewer. The battle of equanimity creates an inward journey for any individual to delve into the mysterious process of the Universal metamorphous to answer the pertinent and logical questions of one’s own existence. It is rational to doubt one’s own existence during the process of introspective evidence about the current mental status, which is sometimes the super skeptical scenario to ignoring the existence of one’s own identity. This super skeptical scenario is defined by the actions of the man in the center of the Battle of Anghiari, who does not take full responsibility for his actions. This painting includes the Individual’s perspective to complement the meaning of the Emotion, the Expression, and the Experience by unleashing the philosophical and scientific bend of the mind.

The Writer’s Perspective (Conclusion) :

“The Battle of Anghiari” by Bharat Dalal is one of the classical paintings that show his limitless invention of depicting together the traditions of realism and the tendencies of the Renaissance art. He is undoubtedly able to infuse his astounding vitality into a powerful and exuberant style through the vivid and dynamic compositions of the figures and the horses. The epic quality of Bharat Dalal’s art represents his profound learning and knowledge which enabled him to draw a painting with minute details. His philosophical writing – the vision and intent to depict the historical battle in an intriguing manner – clearly shows his extraordinary caliber and thinking process.

In this painting, he had shown the battle for survival and rejuvenation, demonstrated through a compositional balance between the movements of a fierce and a violent struggle. This balance of the art was shown through the superimposition of the fighting men and horses at the center. Bharat Dalal was technically superb in his artistic style, creating and giving expression to figures who lived, breathed, and moved in this painting. The marbleized technique used by Bharat Dalal in this painting offers the viewers a comprehensive and internal search to understand the emotional nuances, the classic Equilibrium between the Soul and the Creator, the emancipation through spiritualism, and the fossilized passions of Leonardo Da Vinci.

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