The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Artistic Duel That Defined the Renaissance
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Artistic Duel That Defined the Renaissance Details
Amazon.com Review Q&A with Jonathan Jones Q. Leonardo and Michelangelo were both highly celebrated artists in Florence when they were commissioned to paint the two frescos you write about. How could their work become “lost”? A. In 1503 the city state of Florence commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint The Battle of Anghiari in its new Great Council Hall. He was in his early fifties and had already painted The Last Supper in Milan. This was to be his home city’s answer to The Last Supper—a permanent memorial to his genius. But in 1504, with Leonardo enjoying a state salary yet still nowhere near starting to paint in the Hall, his young rival Michelangelo was asked to paint The Battle of Cascina, another victory, in the same room. A competition was born. It was called by an eyewitness “the school of the world” but both the full-size drawings the artists finished have vanished. So has Leonardo’s unfinished wall painting. (Michelangelo never transferred his design to the wall.) Even allowing for the artists’ own egos and the demands on them—Michelangelo was called to serve the Pope—why have these works been so comprehensively effaced? To understand this story we need to get into the mind of Florence in the 1500s. This was a city that loved art but it was also a city obsessed with politics. The battle paintings of Michelangelo and Leonardo were commissioned for political reasons—and “lost” for political reasons. Everyone knows the Florentine Renaissance was bankrolled by the Medici family—but it was not that simple. Florence was a republic, a city governed by its own citizens. The Medici family dominated it unofficially in the fifteenth century, as “first among equals.” In 1492, that influence broke and a revolution kicked out the Medici. The new radical republic commissioned the pictures I call “the lost battles.” When the Medici reconquered the city and eventually anointed themselves Grand Dukes of Tuscany, everything that remained of these works of art vanished. This was no coincidence. The lost battles are lost because their republican associations did not fit the Medici legend of a Renaissance bankrolled by one family. Q. You write that competition was at the heart of Renaissance art. Have any modern periods of artistic achievement embodied that same spirit? A. Competition was set in the genes, so to speak, of western art by the great rivals of the Renaissance. At the birth of modernism a century ago, Picasso and Matisse constantly checked what the other was doing and tried to outdo it. Their relationship was quite similar to that of Leonardo and Michelangelo—Picasso and his friends threw darts at a painting by Matisse of his daughter that Matisse had given Picasso as a gift. Artistic competition is very much alive today. To speak from my own patch, British art revolves around the Turner Prize that pitches artists like Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor against one another. This controversial prize may not have spawned any new Leonardos but it has given British art a lot of ambition. I was a judge of the Turner Prize while I worked on The Lost Battles. I found it fascinating to compare the competitive spirit in different times and places. Q. The Lost Battles provides exquisite detail about the city of Florence. How much time did you spend in the city during your research? A. I first visited Florence as a child with my parents and it is the place where I fell in love with art. But after becoming an art critic for a newspaper and being lucky enough to travel around seeing art all over the world—including New York, where the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum have taught me so much—I had not been back to Florence for many years. Then I got interested in the story of how Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo once had a competition to decide who was the greatest artist of their day. I was commissioned to write a newspaper article on it. A flying visit my wife and I made to Florence to research this was so exhilarating that I fell in love a second time with my favorite city. Writing a book was the perfect chance to know it better. So I traveled to Florence as often as possible over a period of several years, ranging from long stays to day trips (you can just about do Florence as a day trip from London). It is a place of inexhaustible beauty and fascination. Q. You’ve crafted fascinating portraits of Leonardo and Michelangelo’s personalities (including descriptions of Leonardo’s colorful wardrobe). Did you find yourself “rooting” for one artist or the other? A. I started out rooting for Leonardo because he has always struck me as an enigmatic and dazzling thinker as well as artist. As I got deeper into the research—and, on one of my visits to Florence, explored its forgotten fortifications where Michelangelo held off a besieging army in 1529—I started to prefer Michelangelo. He leaps out of his poems, letters, and 16th-century biographies as a man of deep principle and great courage. I think it was his brave and daring personality that made his contemporaries prefer him to the mysterious Leonardo. But, when I finally started to believe I was getting “under the skin” of Leonardo, so to speak, my sympathies reversed again: I love his freedom of mind and determination to follow his creative impulses. What other famous artist tried to make a flying machine when he was meant to be finishing a great public commission? Q. What did Leonardo and Michelangelo’s works say about the nature of war? A. Leonardo and Michelangelo took opposite views of war in their battle pictures. Michelangelo, a young man who had never been near a battle, believed strongly in the Florentine Republic and thought citizens should fight for their city state. He created a homage to the heroism of volunteer militiamen. Like his statue of David, his picture The Battle of Cascina celebrated youth and courage and looking your enemy in the eye. By contrast Leonardo da Vinci had worked as a military engineer and knew mercenary soldiers up close. His work The Battle of Anghiari was a hellish vision of war as a savage, futile outburst of rage. Leonardo portrayed horses biting each other as their riders hacked with swords. In his notebooks he says the first weapons were “nails and teeth”. In this picture, he showed how the evolution of weapons enhances but cannot change the primitive nature of battle as an intimate, cannibalistic confrontation between frenzied warriors pumped full of adrenaline and testosterone. Meanwhile at the same time he was painting the Mona Lisa—the smiling face of maternal love. Leonardo saw war as a male pathology. Read more Review “A page turner . . . well-argued and well-informed . . . infinitely accessible for the general reader . . . bold, provocative.”—Los Angeles Review of Books“Perceptively renders the competition between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo . . . in this far-ranging account of their rivalry, Jones evokes also a period, a place and the ideas that shaped both men and their times . . . an informative celebration of two competing geniuses.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch“Vibrant . . . sparing neither the two artists, nor Florence, their quirks of character. They are flanked by a vivid parade of supporting characters . . . delightful.”—The American Scholar “Everyone loves an artist-rivalry . . . Jones adds recent research and an abundance of storytelling verve to his telling.”—ArtInfo, “Modern Art Notes’ best books of 2012” “Intricate . . . provocative.”—The Wall Street Journal“Fascinating, revelatory, often daring . . . a wonderful guide to this dramatic moment of history. The most rewarding parts of the book are [Jones’s] bold and often persuasive speculations about the ways in which the works of the two contentious heroes speak to each other.”—The Barnes and Noble Review“Recreates for us the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of 16th century Florence . . . engaging and informative . . . not just for historians or art aficionados . . . illuminated but not overwhelmed by accurate historical detail that compellingly creates the world the two antagonists inhabited, replete with a cast of interesting and colorful supporting characters . . . [and] that propels us as surely as any well written novel, straight through to the final page.”—New York Journal of Books “A portrait of two geniuses continually trying to outdo each other . . . a scholarly work . . . recommended for students of art history as well as the general reader interested in these two Renaissance masters.”—Library Journal“Energetic, fast-paced . . . dazzling . . .Jones’ study of this little discussed competition illustrates the ways that these two great artists competed to assert their imaginations and personalities, giving birth to the Renaissance idea of the artist as godlike creator rather than mere artisan reshaping existing materials.”—Publishers Weekly “There is a wealth of information about da Vinci and Michelangelo, and Jones skillfully harvests the best, amusing with his delightful asides and enlightening with his erudite opinions. . . . Art lovers, Renaissance junkies and even travelers will love this book, which brings these two geniuses to vivid life.”—Kirkus (starred review) Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
The title of this book may make the reader think that he is either going to get a blow by blow description of Da Vinci and Michelangelo engaging in an artistic pugilistic match or a journey for lost art works. He will be pleasantly surprised. The almost first 25% of the book discusses the arena of the main event, not just the Grand Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio, but the entire milieu of Italian Renaissance art.I have yet to read a book that on this level captures the spirit and attitudes of the age and contrasting views concerning art, by introducing such marvelous details as Da Vinci's love of pink clothes and gaudy dress, and Michelangelo's footwear, all to a purpose. Da vinci and Michelangelo are presented as two men with decidely different philosophies concerning life, art, war, etc. who have set standards at odds with each other and still are being discussed today, if only in an oblique way. Indeed Jacob Burkhardt did it well over 100 years ago with his work, "The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy" and in great depth, but that is not the point of this book.Mr. Jones aside from being an astute critic, is also a courageous one. I, along with Howard Hibbard or Rolf Schott, may disagree with his interpretation of Michelangelo's Bacchus, but it is well reasoned and provocative. David? well only a critic such as Mr. Jones would dare refute some of the criticism concerning this work or redirect the modern eye, or take his opinions of Renaissance art and apply them to the trends of modern and contemporary art. This in the last 10% of the book.(YBA's beware)Ok, there you have it. What do you get when you have finished the book? A wealth of amusing anecdotes, e.g. Da Vinci's love of color and drapery, the proposed sites for Michelangelo's David, why Da vinci's wanted to cover David's penis, Da Vinci's living and working conditions in Florence facts ad infinitum that will amuse you and delight your friends at cocktail parties.(How well read and clever he is!)But forgive me for not commenting the 65% of the book dealing with the two proposed paintings. Suffice it to say that Mr. Jones sees the originals in all their glory with his keen mind's eye and takes the reader beyond just viewing cartoons or copies. You will never be able to look at any work of art in the quite the same way again. Dare I say it? Mr. Jones has gone quite a long way to not only defining modern artistic duels but also reviving the match.P.S. If you are interested in another gem concerning Michelangelo, then I suggest you purchase John T Spikes biography "Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine Chapel" a unique take on the master by a unique writer.
