Leonardo
By Charles Nicholl, biographer of Leonardo da Vinci
The Royal Academy’s new show brings together three Renaissance masters whose paths first crossed in Florence in 1504, their physical proximity causing a force-field of mutual influences and bitter rivalries. Leonardo da Vinci was in his early 50s, celebrated as a painter, engineer and multidisciplinary explorer in the realms of science and philosophy. Michelangelo Buonarroti was half his age, a rising star, brash, truculent and already sporting the famous boxer’s nose, smashed in a fight with a rival sculptor. Raffaello Sanzio, better known in English as Raphael, was a talented young unknown scouting for new inspiration and patronage.
Leonardo was the central figure of this redoubtable trio, his eminence eliciting very different responses from the other two. It is abundantly clear that he and Michelangelo disliked one another. There is an eyewitness account of a public spat between them, somewhere near the Ponte Santa Trinità: Michelangelo hurled insults before stalking off to leave Leonardo with “his face red because of these words”. Michelangelo wanted to tear him down; the more peaceable Raphael just wanted to learn from him.
In 1504 Michelangelo completed his David, while Leonardo was painting the Mona Lisa. Even just as objects, these creations epitomise the distance between them – a monumental six-tonne statue of a biblical warrior king, and a lightweight rectangle of poplar wood bearing the shadowy image of a well-to-do Florentine housewife. They are both “great” works, but Michelangelo’s is literally huge, a statement of power and prowess, while Leonardo’s is great by virtue of its reticence, its oddity, its elusiveness.
These secretive qualities are the magic that sets Leonardo apart: the way his most characteristic paintings float like chimeras beyond the edge of interpretation. This was the Romantic, femme fatale perception of the Mona Lisa – “this sphinx of beauty” posing a “yet unsolved riddle” in the words of the writer Théophile Gautier – but it was already hinted at in the painting’s original title, La Gioconda, which means The Joking Lady, perhaps even The Tease, though it is also a pun on the name of her husband, Francesco del Giocondo, who was footing the bill for the maestro’s services.
This edgy levity is a quality Leonardo had from the beginning. His earliest surviving brush-strokes are some additions to Andrea del Verrocchio’s Tobias and the Angel, now in London’s the National Gallery. It is dated 1469; he was a 17-year-old-apprentice in Verrocchio’s studio. One of his contributions is a little dog, a bolognese terrier. It skips along beside the angel, alert and alive, but its silky white fur is painted with such finesse that the dog is diaphanous: you can see the line of the previously painted landscape behind it. It hovers like a hologram just above the picture surface: a fairytale dog.
His trademark sfumato technique, in which (by his own definition) “shadows and highlights fuse without hatching or strokes, as does smoke”, is already evident in his portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (1476) and the mesmerising Virgin of the Rocks (1483), and reaches its apotheosis in the Mona Lisa, where it becomes something more than a rendering of light and shade; more an atmosphere, a mood of transience and regret. The gradations of sfumatura are also a way of depicting distance. Faraway objects, he writes, have “smoky, blurred boundaries”, while those closer have “evident and sharp boundaries”. He calls this the “perspective of loss”.
This points up a paradox in Leonardo. His paintings are full of these poetic blurrings, but much of his intellectual life was devoted to the “evident and sharp” requirements of scientific research. He was a hard-nosed empiricist who described himself as a “discepolo di sperientia”, a “disciple of experience” (or “of experiment”); a sceptic who believed that received ideas should be rigorously tested before they are accounted truths.
His autodidact’s haul of knowledge is logged in his voluminous notebooks and manuscripts, but is also there in his art. The dream world of his paintings is filled with precise and learned details, and is shaped by what art historian Giorgio Nicodemi called “his serene and accurate habits of thought”. The wild flowers in the grotto of The Virgin of the Rocks are botanically exact. Lisa’s smile can be found in a sheet of studies of the musculature of mouths and lips. His depictions of the human figure draw on data collected arduously, indeed nauseously, from the more than 30 postmortem dissections he performed, and are therefore – he claimed – much better than Michelangelo’s figures, whose extravagantly muscled torsos Leonardo said look like “sacks full of walnuts”.
Charles Nicholl’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind is published by Penguin.
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Raphael
By Caroline Campbell, director of the National Gallery of Ireland
Until the 19th century, Raffaello Sanzio, better known in English as Raphael, was the undisputed exemplar for every artist trained in the western academic tradition. His name is inscribed on the walls of most public art galleries erected before 1900. In the mid-16th century, when the pioneering art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote his influential Lives of the Artists, he singled out Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael as the gods of the artistic pantheon. But it was Raphael whom Vasari urged aspiring artists to take as their model.
This was not simply because of his exceptional achievements as a painter, designer and architect in a short life that ended at just 37. For Vasari, Raphael’s personal qualities gave him the edge. He was endowed with exceptional tenacity as well as talent, and possessed legendary charm. Raphael was remarkably able to deal with notoriously demanding patrons who were often far above him in social status.
Unlike Leonardo and Michelangelo, Raphael did not claim Florentine citizenship. He was born and brought up in the city of Urbino, among the vertiginous hills of the Marche. His father Giovanni, who died when Raphael was a boy (by which time he had already lost his mother) was court artist to the ruling Montefeltro family. For all Urbino’s sophistication, it was a small place for one of the most precocious talents of all western art. It was soon evident to Giovanni that his son’s abilities were in another league to his own. From a very early age, the young artist played an important role in his father’s workshop. He later became a close associate of the Umbrian artist Pietro Perugino, the most celebrated painter in central Italy.
The stimuli that Raphael encountered later in Florence enabled him to take his art to another level. When the artist first visited the city in late 1504, it was one of Europe’s richest and most innovative centres, home to many celebrated artists, including the Dominican Fra Bartolommeo, Michelangelo and Leonardo. Raphael observed and was inspired by their ideas.
And we can almost immediately see the impact on his art. Take the Madonna of the Pinks, a tiny devotional picture painted on yew for a private patron. It seems to be based on a work by Leonardo, the Benois Madonna, painted almost 30 years before in the late 1470s. Similarly, in the remarkable Saint Catherine, painted just before Raphael left Florence, you admire the complexity of her pose. Catherine’s left leg is pushed before her right, a detail copied from Leonardo’s drawing of Leda, so that your eye moves in a diagonal from the bottom right to her upturned eyes in the top left of the image. This, and the turn of her body, was taken from Michelangelo’s unfinished statue of St Michael. Raphael assimilates what he’s learnt from both artists so brilliantly that this unnatural contortion seems effortless.
In 1508, Raphael’s ambition took him from Florence to Rome. This was an even more energetic city, home to the papacy, which wielded power in central Italy and spiritual authority over Europe and increasing parts of the world. Raphael’s first project propelled him into the very seat of power. He was commissioned to decorate semi-private spaces for the Pope and his court: the so-called Stanze, or rooms.
The Stanze are near Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, but it’s hard to think of two great works of art that are more different in feeling. Michelangelo’s paintings are dramatic and surprising, while Raphael’s delight and beguile because he uses his close observation of people and society – he was a wonderful portraitist – to make the unbelievable and imaginary tangible and real. In the so-called School of Athens, Raphael collects together many of the greatest non-Christian philosophers (of whom two-thirds are not Athenian), with Plato and Socrates at the centre, debating whether wisdom is achieved through understanding. Their different philosophies appear united by the harmonious Roman architecture in which they stand. This is a dry, intellectual debate, but Raphael brings it alive, movement and facial expressions to show the philosophers’ distinct points of view.
The same is true of the remarkable tapestries he designed for Pope Leo X, to hang underneath the Sistine ceiling. They depict episodes from the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, as they travelled the Mediterranean coast, preaching, administering and converting. In the Gospel narrative, the saints sometimes question Jesus. They are bewildered, and don’t always understand what’s going on. But, looking at Raphael can give you the feeling that there is no doubt, that everything is right with the world. Even if there is a problem, a happy resolution is never far away. We want to follow the narrative to its neat conclusion because, in Raphael’s mind, there always is one. You can see why Michelangelo both disliked and was jealous of him.
Raphael also increasingly worked as an architect. In 1514 he was appointed chief architect of St Peter’s Basilica, and although much of his work was destroyed after his death, drawings give a sense of what he wanted to achieve. As the prefect of antiquities, he argued for a visual survey of all monuments within Rome, and against the destruction of ancient monuments. He collaborated with leading printmakers so that his designs could be diffused throughout Europe – and soon they were. Rubens, Rembrandt, the Carracci brothers, Poussin, Ingres and so many more knew and were inspired by his work.
Raphael’s legacy persists down to this day, his place in the artistic canon hard won. Although it is impossible not to wonder: what could he have achieved if he’d had another 37 years?
Caroline Campbell’s first book, The Power of Art, was published in 2023.
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Michelangelo
By Eliza Goodpasture, art historian
There is no other name so associated with titanic artistic genius than Michelangelo, so much so that it has become divorced from the vast reality of his work. Space, and how we move through it, was Michelangelo’s defining concern. He was the original Renaissance man, working as a sculptor, painter, architect and poet, but all his work circles the same questions about how it looks and feels to move our heavy human forms through this mortal life (and beyond). No one has so defined the pinnacle of visual culture in the west since antiquity, for better or worse.
Michelangelo was a person of intense paradox. Although he always called himself a sculptor, his paintings and buildings have equalled or surpassed the fame of his sculptures. Born in Florence and a proud Florentine throughout his life, his work came to define another city: Rome. The key works that epitomise his legacy there – including the Sistine Chapel frescos, the Pietà, the dome of St Peter’s Basilica, the Piazza di Campidoglio – were made across the end of the 15th century and the first half of the 16th and, together, represent not only a redefinition of the city of Rome, but also a redefinition of the way space itself should function.
Michelangelo’s early works of sculpture depict bodies occupying space: his Pietà, finished when he was just 24, tenderly imagines a timeless moment of sorrow, impossibly bringing together a youthful Mary and her adult son, as if in acknowledgment of the eternity of their divine relationship. Christ seems to melt into his mother’s arms in death, emerging from the stone with breathtaking grace.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling, completed 14 years later, seems to create space in its use of trompe l’oeil architectural details and seemingly sculpted bodies that appear to lift off the plaster into the cavernous heavens of the ceiling. It is not a static thing, despite being two-dimensional. For the viewer on the ground, there is no one place from which to see it all: one must move through the chapel and look from various angles to appreciate the totality of the creation. By the age of 4o, not even halfway through his long life, Michelangelo had become a legend.
The invitation to move through space is expanded in his later architectural creations. The Piazza di Campidoglio was not completed until after his death, supervised by his great love, Tommaso dei Cavalieri. But the plans were completed by the artist, and they represent a sort of pinnacle of the artistic questions that governed his life.
The piazza is located on the Capitoline Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome, and overlooks the Roman Forum. It has been the seat of civil government of the city since antiquity, through ever-changing cycles of leadership and systems of governance. Michelangelo’s plan for the piazza reoriented it towards the Vatican, rather than the Forum, reflecting the shift in Rome’s purpose from the ancient to the papal. He redesigned the square itself and the three buildings that surround it in an architectural system of symmetry and High Renaissance perfection.
Two buildings already existed, and were given new facades, and a third, the Palazzo Nuovo, was built to complete the trio that surrounds the 12-pointed star on the pavement of the piazza itself, with an antique bronze statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius at the centre. They all stand atop ancient Roman buildings, layering the stones of previous eras, like most of Rome. The proportions are flawless, the balance superb, and the ideal of government is given a space that is both reverential and open.
Architecture is about enclosing space, sculpture is about excavating it, and painting, at least for Michelangelo, is about creating the illusion of it. In all three arts, he transcended the limits of what had been imagined by those before him. It is always tempting to elevate him above mere mortality, but what makes his work truly breathtaking is that it is the product of one man, burdened by the joys and torments of real life. His work continues to be a beacon of the paradoxes of the Renaissance: driving humanism butting heads with the fraught power dynamics of the papacy, the imperfect beauty of human physicality against the inevitability and incomprehensibility of the divine, and the weighty legacy of history meeting the alluring novelty of the present.
Eliza Goodpasture is an art historian and commissioning editor at Art UK; Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 9 November to 16 February.
