Jonathan Jones on Michaelangelo and Leonardo’s great rivalry
Michelangelo and Leonardo lived five centuries ago, but their works still obsess our culture, with a popular and universal quality that nothing else matches. Here, Jonathan Jones talks about their great, and barely documented, rivalry, which is addressed in his new book The Lost Battles.
I’ve been telling people for the last few weeks about my book The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Artistic Duel that Defined the Renaissance, speaking at literary festivals about it, telling journalists about it, writing about it… and it was only towards the end of a talk, well into the question and answer session, that I remembered the selling point I should have been mentioning first – which is that no-one has ever written a book about the competition between the two titans of the Renaissance that took place in Florence from 1503 to 1506.
This is amazing, when you consider how many books have been published on Leonardo da Vinci and his younger contemporary Michelangelo, in a torrent of biography and interpretation that began in the sixteenth century and has never stopped since. Michelangelo saw two biographies of himself appear in his lifetime, both by artists who knew him personally and who were undoubtedly influenced by his own, conversational accounts of his life and opinions. In every century since you will find them being written about. Notable publications in a very long list include Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, translated into many European languages in the sixteenth century, which praises their talents along with those of Raphael, Mantegna and Giorgione; Goethe’s early nineteenth century essay on The Last Supper and Sigmund Freud’s 1910 work Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood. There’s TS Eliot’s poem The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock with its refrain
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
- and then there are the many works by art historians and critics, of which my favourite is Kenneth Clark’s superb book Leonardo da Vinci. Clark is best-known today as author and presenter of the 1969 television series Civilisation – the first blockbuster art documentary to be made for British television. Yet that was just one of his achievements. He was Director of the National Gallery during the Second World War, responsible for saving our artistic heritage from the Blitz; he catalogued Leonardo’s drawings in the Royal Collection, lectured provocatively on The Nude, supported modern artists including Paul Nash and Henry Moore, and secured treasures like the British Museum’s Royal Head of Ife for our national collections. He was also a terrific writer, and his 1939 book about Leonardo is still the most accessible and stimulating introduction to the life and art of the Tuscan genius born in Vinci near Florence in 1452.
In this book, Clark describes how in 1503 Leonardo was commissioned to decorate the Great Council Hall in Florence with a wall painting of a Florentine victory, The Battle of Anghiari – and how he found himself competing with Michelangelo, born in 1475 and his junior by almost a quarter of a century, who was commissioned to paint a second fresco, The Battle of Cascina, in this same room. He only has a few pages to spare for this fascinating episode but comments that:
The battle cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo are the turning point of the Renaissance, and a whole book could be written about them…
I believe it was Clark’s suggestive remark that stayed in my mind and challenged me to go where no writer on Leonardo or Michelangelo has ever gone before.
There is a reason the challenge laid down by Lord Clark, to write an entire book about these two masterpieces, was left hanging there for seventy years. The standoff between Leonardo and Michelangelo produced sketches, essays, unfinished paintings – but no complete works and only fragmentary remains. Michelangelo drew a vast preparatory design, called a “cartoon”, for his historical picture The Battle of Cascina. Leonardo drew a cartoon for his subject, The Battle of Anghiari and then after nearly two years’ preparation started to paint it on the wall. Decades later the remains of his painting were covered up by new frescos. Is this, then, the story of dead end?
Not at all. It is an opportunity to meet these great artists at work. Sequences of sketches for their battle paintings survive, each little drawing a masterpiece in its own right: Leonardo’s notebooks survive with diary entries describing specific events in the competition and what else he was doing at this time; political writings and letters by Niccolò Machiavelli, whose signature is on Leonardo da Vinci’s contract for The Battle of Anghiari, reveal the political context of these public commissions; copies of the lost works by artists who include Raphael and Rubens not only help to reconstruct them but reveal their influence in European history.
For many people that is not enough. A few years after I first read Clark’s brief but brilliant account of the contest in the Great Council Hall, the story swam into my view in my other job, as a journalist. There is a mysterious possibility that Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari may in some shape survive under the later frescos that now decorate this huge hall in the Palazzo Vecchio at the heart of Florence. Reports that Maurizio Seracini, a pioneer of the use of scientific imaging in art history, was trying to rediscover the lost Leonardo became big news in the Noughties – including in a Channel 4 documentary – and it was this news development that originally gave me the chance to write about the contest.
The attempt to find The Battle of Anghiari is still going on, in fits and starts, and who knows if it will eventually find something? But for me, it is almost beside the point. What I want to do is tell the story behind this legendary painting, put it into history: my book is equally about Leonardo and his rival Michelangelo and it alternates between them, as well as between art and everyday life. I hope that by the end, you will feel you have “seen” these paintings – for they can be seen, they can be known. All it takes is a bit of imagination. In fact, a book about these works makes, to me, complete sense and I feel no longing to see them – it is the challenge of picturing them despite their absence that fascinates me.
That, and getting close to the personalities of two of the most spectacular human beings who ever lived.
I don’t know if this is the book Kenneth Clark hoped for. But I have tried to make it an accessible and exciting journey to the heart of the Renaissance for twenty-first century readers. Books about art should inspire, as he inspired me.
