If already had to design the machines of war and defensive embankments it’s, as he wrote alone – only in order to defend endangered freedom. For sake of the same principles, he apparently never went indifferently by farmer’s market cages with birds – bought out all, returning to birds their freedom. 

In a row, when in 1503 competing with Michelangelo accepts Signoria instructions in order to depict the battle glorifying the Florentine weapon, he is choosing as theme the one from Anghiari with Milan, magnificently showing riders in battle turmoil, where even horses are biting themselves with Milanese ones but, in which none of fighting sides does bear losses in men… – supposedly nobody didn’t get lost if to believe Machiavelli’s words. 

Incredible and with no measure not fitting the image, final of the battle from year 1440, would have to concern very winners perhaps, however some victims probably were over there, since words were said about burying dead bodies with the dusk settled over. Anyway both – this one as well as neighboring “The battle of Cascina” of Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini called then “School of the world”. Such praise would be supposed to mean anything, but it’s possible here to assume (at least at Buonarroti’s) of conscious mockery about expectations of Florentine Signoria and of senses of very war as well. There is no track of glorifying or praising of the weapons in both competing paintings at all. Instead of it in “The Battle of Cascina” a spectre of bloody slaughter hanged over. Fate of the group of soldiers seems to be sealed.
Confounded in the bath, naked and in panic they are jumping out of water directly to the attacking enemy. About the same slaughter, but concerning different battle, more than evocatively was telling Leonardo’s mural. Given directly and without of oblique statements, such a reliable dose of the cruelty and of fighting doggedness, with right effect smelt with danger from opposite wall. The meaning of it would be obvious, if not the choice of the artist (intentional perhaps?)
of just a battle where heroes were missing, what essential, also the dead ones of whom for example would be glad Machiavelli to see on walls of the room of Ground Council in Palazzo Vecchio, holding at the Republic’s government military matters. From the text of Leonardo notes equally well is resulting, that if not the clergyman’s pattern – a patriarch, who “with the word and the act” supported commanders – Florentines (several times escaping from the battlefield) would be routed.

Thanks to already earlier quoted Vasari nothing of those murals was left c. half a century later (except of some copied fragments and of notes Leonardo made alone).
Together with his pupils during the Medici governments (reconstituted in 1513) he scrupulously painted over both unfinished works with scenes from other of Florentines battles. Whereas Leonardo, abandoned by mighty (to recent) patrons, saw himself in the Francis’s I proposal above all the calmness and the guarantee of the stabilization in non distant (in time) perspective. France protected with natural borders of the Alps and the river Rhine on one site, with the Pyrenees and seas on the other, made for its enemies powerful and difficult to conquer fortress how at one time wrote about it mentioned already earlier here, late-Roman historian and soldier Ammianus Marcellinus. It is possible to assume, that then, on this important decision of Leonardo had influenced above all next three political successes of king of France. Peace treaty with the Pope Leon The 10th, signed in Bologna (1516 with the presence of Leonardo da Vinci) and second one – to date exceptional – eternal peace treaty signed in Fryburg with Switzerland (allied with the Empire and Milan). 

After Francis’s third success – alliance with the Habsburg empire in Cambrai signed in 1517 he really could have a feeling, that France instead of in the age of religious wars, is becoming involved in the period of peace and auspiciousness and king alone – the master educated, with a proper class of artistic sensitivity, will show him more understanding than current ones in the country. For his new home and workshop he receives the castle Cloux (today’s Clos Luce) near Amboise, close by royal castle with annual salary in the alt. of two thousands ecu and additionally, separate pays for his co-partners.

The artist getting old more and more lacked of such kind of stabilization, and together with it, also of time for more possibilities to arrange his conclusions of researching, of studies whether even if tidying up this huge material (manuscripts of scientific dissertations, treaties, codes, and the like) into a very inventive way written with his secret writing which still in the 20th century created problems at reading it out. His caution, not exaggerated at all, as today we know, extorted troubled times, in which it came to live Leonardo and which were supposed still to come.

Characteristic, that in the year of Leonardo’s death (1519) a whole West European power system has changed – the emperor Maximilian dies and soon a new warfare will start, but the point of it won’t be already a rate of influences in Italy, rather the hegemony in whole Western Europe instead. So while he wrote about painting a role he entrusted with, was at the same time precise and a long-distance medium, which how aptly he predicted, could survive supposed soon to come far more difficult times for the contemporary thought together with a bad fame covered – the Ecumenical Council in Trent (1545, 1563), and after it the rest of the century disgracefully crowned with the burning stack of Giordano Bruno (1600).

It’s there, we could find among conciliar decisions “Index librorum prohibitorum” with Boccaccio’s “Dekameron” opening the gallery of forbidden works of Italian literature. But also would be proper here to mention obstacles with the edition of “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium “of Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 (indexed since 1616), tied with the more late process of Galileo and his famous “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems… ” (1632) gracing the teaching of Copernicus. Blade of the Inquisition (read: Dominican friars, them after all knew well Leonardo ) was directed mainly against the written, more often printed word, however if to consider contemporary painting even the “Last Judgement” of Michelangelo was censured, that is ordered to obscure all inappropriate (according to the Inquisitor) parts of human body there. 

The author of other “Last Supper” Paolo Veronese, presented against Venetian Inquisition, had to explain why he put in his work, quoting after Peter Burke: “…that, what Inquisitors determined with name of clowns, drunks, Germans, dwarfs and the like coarsenesses “.