Leonardo da Vinci vs. Michelangelo
Sometimes our perspective of time can be puzzling. Did you know that two of history’s most famous men, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti Simoni, overlapped and actually painted in the same room?
Despite both being immensely talented and influential on art history, the two men were stark contrasts of one another.
Around 1500, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo both returned to Florence.
Leonardo, 48 years old, was established and well known as a painter, engineer, scientist and pageant producer. Michelangelo, Florence’s hot new artist at 25 years old, recently completed the Pieta.
Both men were commissioned (rather, competitioned) to paint opposite walls in the Palazzo Vecchio for the Great Hall, housing five hundred members of the Grand Council. The decision was a conscious effort to stage a rivalry between the era’s two greatest artists.
Personally what I found most interesting was how different the two men were in: repose and painting style.
Despite being thought of as a bearded mysterious man pictured in his late sixties above, Leonardo was actually a very handsome, muscular, stylish, tall, gay vegetarian that often dressed in pink tunics and fur-lined shawls. He was charming, social, genial and generous with a following of friends and students.
Michelangelo, in contrast, was disheveled, irritable, and intense. He had a slightly hunched back, unwashed appearance, and a disfigured nose from being punched in the face after insulting a fellow painter. He rarely bathed or removed his dog-skin shoes, dined on bread crusts, and slept in his dusty studio.
Both men were gay. Leonardo was comfortable and open about his homosexuality; Michelangelo, a devoted Christian, was “tormented and apparently imposed celibacy on himself’.
The Rivalry
Michelangelo did not hide his disdain towards Leonardo. One day, Leonardo, walking with a friend through one of the central piazzas of Florence, was asked his opinion on the meaning of a passage from Dante. Michelangelo came by, and Leonardo suggested he may be able to explain it. Michelangelo took offence, as if mocked. “No, explain it yourself”, he shot back. “You are the one who modelled a horse to be cast in bronze, was unable to do it, and was forced to give up the attempt in shame”, referring to an abandoned commission by Leonardo. He then turned and walked away. On another occasion, he again referred to the horse fiasco, saying, “So those idiot Milanese actually believed in you?”
Painting
Painting-wise, they were also very different. Rather than following Leonardo’s practice of using shadows, Michelangelo had sharp, delineated outlines that provided none of the understanding of distance perspective that Leonardo had. A lover of sfumato*, shadings, refracted light, soft visuals, and changing colour perspectives, Leonardo dissected hundreds of human bodies (and animals) to understand how to design a body from the inside out, mastering the anatomy of nerves, sinew, muscles, bones, teeth. Michelangelo painted like a sculptor.
Leonardo rarely criticized other painters, but after seeing of Michelangelo’s paintings, mocked his figures drawn “looking like wood, devoid of grace, so that you would think you were looking at a sack of walnuts rather than a human form, or a bundle of radishes rather than the muscles of figures”. When I looked up at his Sistine Chapel ceiling, radishes and walnuts did not come to mind.
Michelangelo, however, did freely admitted he preferred the chisel to the brush. As he painted the Sistine Chapel several years later, he confessed in a poem: “I am not in the right place, and I am not a painter”. You will likely recognize his famous statues below. Can you believe these are carved from a single block of marble?
None of the paintings in the Great Hall were ever finished. Destroyed by a storm, Leonardo da Vinci abandoned his work. Michelangelo left to Rome to begin the Sistine Chapel. In the end, neither man was remembered as merely a reliable painter – Leonardo went down in history as an obsessed genius and Michelangelo as one of the (if not the) finest sculptors.
Now you know more about Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo! Will be sharing another post on Leonardo da Vinci’s achievements in anatomy and engineering, Michelangelo’s works, and Bernini.
*Sfumato: the technique of allowing tones and colours to shade gradually into one another, producing softened outlines or hazy forms (Wikipedia).
Katya
Source & text excerpts: Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson