‘Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael’: Studies of the High Renaissance Masters
A review of ‘Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael’ at the Royal Academy of Arts; 2024.
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci did not like each other. But then, they were very different men. Leonardo was curious, elusive, well-dressed, urbane. Michelangelo was intense, brooding and deeply religious. Once, Michelangelo insulted Leonardo for failing to complete a statue of a horse in Milan. ‘And to think,’ he added, ‘you were believed by those castrated Milanese roosters!’ Leonardo waited to respond. Asked to suggest the best placement of Michelangelo’s ‘David’, he calmly suggested it would look best covered up.
The temperaments of these men come across in their work: in Leonardo’s fondness for balance and subtle beauty; in Michelangelo’s depictions of raw power and emotion. Raphael admired both men, and made his way to Florence to learn from them. He refused to be drawn into their squabbles or to raise one artist above the other. Instead, he synthesised their work, taking psychological and philosophical depth and subtlety from paintings like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and dramatic physicality and scale from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. (The face of Heraclitus in Raphael’s The School of Athens is also Michelangelo’s.)
Raphael admired both men, and made his way to Florence to learn from them.
All of this absorbing background (absorbing to me, at any rate) is, a bit puzzlingly, left out of the new display at the Royal Academy of Arts. So is almost anything else about that giddy half-century spell between the late 15th and early 16th century in Florence, when three men quite arguably produced the best paintings that the Western tradition of visual art has ever managed to produce. Consequently, some of the work that the R.A. exhibits is hard to understand: first among these are the copies of paintings showing the battles of Cascina (Michelangelo) and Anghiari (Leonardo), the preparatory cartoons of which were called the scuola del mondo (‘school for the world’) by Benvenuto Cellini. Michelangelo and Leonardo were commissioned to paint these, histories of Florentine battles, in the city’s Great Council Hall.
Also on display are various études — studies of horses’ heads, nude male bodies, soldiers’ helmets—which gives the exhibition a somewhat academic flavour. Indeed the vast bulk of the exhibition is given over to these. There are, I think regrettably, none of the great bold, vivid paintings and sculptures that we associate the Florentine golden age artists here: instead there are sketches, drawings, spread across just two unremarkable rooms, as well as artistic knick-knacks and curios, like a copy of Cicero’s letters that was owned by a Florentine contemporary of Michelangelo’s and Leonardo’s.
Also on display are various études — studies of horses’ heads, nude male bodies, soldiers’ helmets.
That doesn’t make visiting the display a waste of time, of course. What chiefly comes across, along with their talent, is the extraordinary dedication and study these artists showed to their craft. They entered into a tradition of art, as one had to (and, for T.S. Eliot, any artist ought to) and produced work thanks to the generosity of wealthy patrons. There was nothing remotely frivolous about the approach of these artists, who, as in Leonardo’s case, might spent a full year mastering the art of drawing a horse’s head or, as in Michelangelo’s, working for months on the forearm that became the hand of God in The Creation of Adam. And yet the artistic constraints—social, cultural, political, economic—within which they had to work shaped and directed a supreme originality which bursts forth from their drawings, paintings and sculpture, showing us that creativity is not merely about expressing something new—anyone can do something random—but knowing the rules well enough to break them well, and expressing something in a different way, or building on what came before.
It is worth seeing this exhibition to affirm the truth that creativity requires hard work and discipline. There is a persistent myth that the ‘genius’ creative waits around for an idea to hit her; but history, psychology and artistic practice itself says otherwise. Mozart was relentless. Beethoven sketched hundreds of musical ideas before finalising a symphony. Joyce was an obsessive rewriter. And Leonardo, often viewed as a ‘natural genius’ filled thousands of notebook pages with his sketches. Michelangelo described himself as ‘always learning’. Raphael, who was composed, diplomatic and seemingly successful without effort, was ‘tireless’, according to his biographer Vasari, working day and night to meet the demands of powerful patrons while constantly innovating. The dedication alone on display at this exhibition is breathtaking.
