The Da Vinci feud: A great artistic rivalry remembered
Experts chart the head-to-head clash of art superstars as exhibition arrives
Today, it would have been packaged for television and billed as The Great Italian Paint Off.
In 1504, Florence found its two greatest artists, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, in the city at the same time.
Not wanting to waste a rare opportunity for an artistic showdown, government officials commissioned both men to create huge battle scenes in the same council chamber.
The Italians of the 15th and 16th Century obviously loved a public feud as much as we do today and they flocked to watch the artists work face to face for the first time.
It was the culmination of a rivalry that some say lasted throughout their lives but ultimately inspired both to reach even greater heights. It also perfectly illustrates their opposing approaches to art.
As a touring exhibition of Michelangelo’s most famous work, the Sistine Chapel, arrives in Scotland, Martin Gayford, art critic and author of Michelangelo: His Epic Life, told The Sunday Post: “For various reasons on each side, neither of these paintings were ever completed.
“It would have been a very interesting exercise in compare and contrast between them. Leonardo seems to have been all about the fury of battle, the melee of the movements, with lots of dust and confusion. While Michelangelo had a lot of nude men getting out of a river, because there was a myth that the soldiers in the battle had been taken by surprise while cooling off and swimming in open water.”
The passing of four centuries has done nothing to dim our fascination for the artists. Later this month an interactive exhibition, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition, arrives in Glasgow and Poldark’s Aidan Turner is playing da Vinci in glossy historical drama series Leonardo, now showing on Drama.
We often think of the men as peers but their relationship was complicated
by professional jealousy and differing approaches to art and life.
Da Vinci’s paintings were rooted in his love for science and nature while Michelangelo was more interested in the perfect beauty of the human body.
Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of art history at the University of Oxford, has written several books on Leonardo da Vinci. He said: “People today ask, was Leonardo da Vinci a scientist or an artist, or both? The words mean very different things these days but he would have not seen a division between them. He would say his job was to understand how nature works. He would look at nature incredibly hard whether it’s a human figure, a plant, or the effects of light on the moon, and he would say that it was rational knowledge of nature. To da Vinci, the artist’s job was
to use that knowledge of nature to make pictures.
“The Mona Lisa, for example, is not a straight mugshot of Lisa Gherardini. It’s a statement about the body of the woman, about drapery, light, the body of the earth, with the mountains and the lakes in the background. He is using his understanding of nature to reconstruct it.
“He would say that in painting The Last Supper, and the terrible pronouncement of Christ that ‘one of you will betray me’,
he is trying to understand how the brain works, how the nerves work, how we respond to something that we hear, how the anatomy of action works, how the perspective of the room works. It’s an almost impossible agenda.
“For Michelangelo though, art was about the soul, and the way you expressed the soul was through the human body. Not through landscape, or drapery, or light and shade. He looked for ideal figures and perfect beauty all of the time.
“His statue of David is ambiguous – where is Goliath in the story? Is David triumphant, or is he gearing up for the battle? By leaving Goliath out, he is inviting us to speculate about what David is thinking. It’s an evocative image.”
The great artists’ personalities were as different from one another as were their styles. Da Vinci was courtly, amiable, well-dressed and popular. When he died, he left behind hundreds of notebooks and papers but hardly anything at all about his inner or private life.
Michelangelo was scruffy, rude and temperamental and often fought and argued with his patrons. Yet he left behind numerous poems, letters and sonnets, full of passion and love for the people he was close to.
Gayford is sympathetic to Michelangelo’s often very difficult ways. He said: “He had tremendously high standards and was a perfectionist. I think if people accepted that and how he wanted to do things, he would be fine. But if he felt you were trying to make him do something that was beneath his standard, there would be fireworks.”
The Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, is considered a cornerstone work of High Renaissance art. But the commission, which took five years to complete, tested the artist’s faith in his own talents.
Gayford explained: “According to Michelangelo’s testament and letters, the only thing he considered to be his profession was being a sculptor, particularly a sculptor of stone.
“That was probably why there was a dispute about painting the Sistine Chapel. He didn’t really accept that he was a painter. When he painted the Sistine Chapel he hadn’t really done any other paintings that had been shown in public before. He probably wasn’t tremendously confident about his abilities as a painter at that stage. There was a suggestion that he felt he was being set up to fail by rivals because the ceiling was such an enormous area and it was a difficult surface with a complicated, curving geometry. It is obvious now that he was always going to do a good job but at the time it possibly wasn’t to everyone.”
Despite the two artists’ differences, and their intense personal dislike of one another, each begrudgingly respected the other, and were influenced by their works. Kemp explained: “They clearly respected each other as artists, although they didn’t admit that.
“Leonardo was on the committee to discuss the placement of David, and he made a little sketch of the David as a homage to it. Michelangelo was clearly affected by Leonardo’s Madonna And Child compositions, and his battle scenes, and so on.
“They were chalk and cheese in almost all respects, but they always knew that the other was a formidable artist. That almost made their rivalry worse, in a way.”