London’s Royal Academy salutes the brief encounter in Florence of super-talents Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael
By James Brewer
Prepare for battle, as three Renaissance rivals – Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael – go head-to-head for the first and only time.
We are in Republican Florence in the early 16th century, and the encounter is played out on the canvas and on paper with pen, charcoal, chalk, tempera and oil paint. It is a momentous clash in the combative atmosphere of the city state, when the three maestros were all there, vying for the attention of powerful patrons. Among other commitments, two of the three artists of peerless genius are called on to illustrate warring Florentine glory, although the required showpieces never get done. Ever-in-demand but ever-distracted Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) even gets involved in an engineering project to give Florence much longed for access to the sea, but that too is ditched.
In a magnificent spectacle dedicated to these three giants at or close to the height of their capacity, the Royal Academy shows us close-up how the masters practised, prepared and occasionally finished their commissions. They did produce some of the finest drawings of that illustrious age. The remarkable setting for the exhibition Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c 1504 is the polity in its artistic, literary, and scientific pomp (ahead of its decline a few decades later). Its prosperity had stemmed from trade (including imports of silk, slaves and spices, and exports of cloth), banking, and scientific innovation, chiefly under the mighty Medici family.
In deft strokes, the exhibition delineates what is in effect an uneasy three-way relationship and with a lasting influence the big three exerted through some of their finest drawings, sculpture and paintings, and into new directions of art that were to be adopted over the centuries by others.
The crucial arena is the brush – if you will forgive the pun – between Leonardo and Michelangelo, who both worked incessantly, in sharply contrasting in styles, and from which Raphael learned eagerly.
The grand flourish was to be paintings on a grand scale ordered by the city fathers for the interior of the prestigious new Great Council Hall of the Palazzo della Signoria (Palazzo Vecchio).
Commissions awarded to Leonardo and to Michelangelo who was half his age were intended to spur the highest level of endeavour towards the production of symbols of civic pride. This was in late August or early September 1504, as Michelangelo’s David was installed in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. David, a gigantic statue of heroic youth, carved from a marble block that was cast aside by another sculptor, symbolised the Florentine Republic’s stand against foreign intervention, and marked out Michelangelo as a colossus in artistic terms.
Michelangelo was asked to depict the Battle of Cascina, which had been fought in 1364, when the Florentines defeated their rival, Pisa. Florence and Pisa remained at each other’s throats long after that date.
Leonardo was tasked with producing a monumental mural of the Battle of Anghiari, which commemorated victory over Milan in 1440.
Unforeseen events were to prevent completion of both artists’ undertakings. Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II to paint the ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel, and Leonardo was frustrated by technical difficulties – he experimented with a molten beeswax treatment which ruined either the surface of the wall or the painting. Leonardo and Michelangelo did get on enough (although apparently not with each other) for their two full-scale preparatory cartoons to be exhibited to acclamation from contemporary artists, including Raphael who copied the central scene of Leonardo’s work.
So, much of this story is about two major artworks that we shall never see as intended (pace Artificial Intelligence), as the cartoons were lost. We do get to know how they would have looked thanks to copyists in the same century. We see how faithfully Michelangelo’s pupil Sangallo in around 1542 drew a copy of the central section of his master’s design. How fortunate we are too that Leonardo made lots of surviving sketches for the big composition. A strength of the RA exhibition is in bringing to lyrical life many of the initial drawings of both Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Prominent among such drawings loaned from collections across Europe (including an important group from the Royal Collection by King Charles) are studies by Michelangelo in pen and brown ink and black chalk on paper, of male heads, soldiers’ helmets and facial features.
For Michelangelo the body – foreshortened and in action — was the primary vehicle of expression; for Leonardo, it was the face, whether of man or beast, contorted by extreme emotion, say the curators.
Michelangelo in alluding to the 1364 battle passed up illustrating the physical hostilities. He chose to show a company of soldiers, who had rested from the heat of battle by bathing naked in the River Arno, called on by their commander to dress hurriedly and pick up their weapons to get back to the fight. It is clear from the copy by Sangallo that, from early in his career, Michelangelo was fascinated by the male nude, and here he edges sharply the inelegant figures of the disconcerted soldiers.
Leonardo’s Battle of Anghhiari has been called “the lost Leonardo” given controversy over whether the full work ever existed. The scale of the intended mural was impressive, at 16.7 m by 6 m covering three stages of the battle. In preparation, Leonardo painstakingly sketched men and horses in various poses and completed at least the central scene known as The Battle of the Standard which shows riders savagely tussling for the banner. Subsequently, several artists made copies: Peter Paul Rubens was involved in one from around 1604. The Rubens work is in black chalk, pen and ink, with highlights in grey and white.
The exhibition opens with Michelangelo’s only marble sculpture in the UK, his celebrated Taddei Tondo which is a prized possession of the Royal Academy and is displayed brightly illuminated alongside its related preliminary drawings. The relief left an indelible impact on Raphael, as can be seen nearby in the Bridgewater Madonna, c 1507-08 (thus known because it is in the Bridgewater Collection Loan of the National Galleries of Scotland), and the colourful and sharply focused Esterházy Madonna, c 1508 (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), in other words The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist, tempera and oil on panel.
The central gallery of the exhibition is devoted to Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist. This is knownas the Burlington House Cartoon for having been once part of the collection in the RA building. Remarkably well preserved, it is in charcoal with white chalk on paper, and looking closely, you can see how its eight sheets of paper are joined. Held by the National Gallery, London, the work returns to the Royal Academy for the first time in over 60 years.
After seeing Leonardo’s Virgin and Child, Raphael might well have been saying: “I can do that!” and might have uttered the same exclamation when he came face to face with Michelangelo’s David. Raphael’s pen and ink drawing on paper of the sculpture surprisingly views it from behind. Raphael made his David more ‘realistic’ than the sculpture by reducing the size of David’s hands and feet.
One of the most dazzling examples of artistry was almost certainly never intended to be shown: A Rearing Horse by Leonardo. The sketch in red chalk and pen and brown ink on paper, from the Royal Collection Trust spotlights his lifelong fascination with the anatomy and movement of horses. Leonardo made several drawings as he developed the concept of the zestful horse ridden by the captain of the Florentine forces, Piergiampaulo Orsini, who is seen on the right of the central scene of the Battle of Anghiari.
Leonardo repeatedly varies the position of the horse’s head and legs to give the impression of the flailing animal. The artist seems to do this so easily, creating a living, snorting horse full of character caught in the throes of agitation. Below the main drawing is a small pen sketch of a horse with its body twisted backwards. A jumble of lines indicates a rider, perhaps raising his arm to control the steed.
Leonardo’s links with the Florentine Republic dated from 1481 when he was commissioned to paint a large Adoration of the Magi for the monastery of San Donato – yet another piece that was left unfinished
While in Florence, Leonardo had talks with the authoritarian powerbroker Niccolò Macchiavelli on a scheme to change the course of the River Arno which would have cut off supplies to Pisa and opened Florence to maritime trade in addition to being a land-based entrepôt between Europe and the east – Leonardo went so far as to make drawings for the project.
Before leaving for Milan in 1508, Leonardo started what was to be his most acclaimed work, Mona Lisa (in the Louvre, Paris), said to be a portrait of Lisa, the wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and… yes, left unfinished, with some foundation layers missing for the landscape, according to one theory because he had injured his arm when in a faint.
The lives of Michelangelo and Raphael were touched spiritually by the fanatical preaching of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) whose anti-corruption campaign had forced the Medici to flee the city. Savonarola condemned the Medici’ abuse of power and the immorality of the clergy, including the Pope, convincing crowds on February 7, 1497, to burn books, paintings and jewels deemed profane in a ‘bonfire of the vanities.’ Eventually the Borgia Pope Alexander VI had the priest arrested and tortured, and he was hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria, paving the way for the return of the Medici. Savonarola’s many followers included the painters Fra Bartolommeo, who was to become a friend of Raphael, and Botticelli.
Raphael, born in Urbino in 1483, packed a transformation in classical painting into his short life – he died at the age of only 37 – taking in much of the best of Leonardo and Michelangelo, whose technical prowess and innovations had an enormous influence on him.
An appealing glimpse of what Florence looked like at the time has been added by the curators to the exhibition walls. Attributed to Francesco Rosselli and his workshop, painted in tempera on oil panel around 1495, is a crisply cartographic view of Florence from the southwest. The artwork is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy in partnership with Royal Collection Trust and the National Gallery, London. It is curated by Scott Nethersole, Professor for History of Art and Architecture at Radboud University, and Per Rumberg, the Jacob Rothschild head of the curatorial department at the National Gallery, with Julien Domercq, curator at the Royal Academy, and Natasha Fyffe, Genesis Future curator at the Royal Academy.
Captions in detail:
The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’), c1506-08. Charcoal with white chalk on paper, mounted on canvas. By Leonardo da Vinci. The National Gallery, London. Purchased with a special grant and contributions from the Art Fund, The Pilgrim Trust, and through a public appeal organised by the Art Fund, 1962.
A visitor admires The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The ‘Taddei Tondo’), c 1504-05. Marble. By Michelangelo. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Bequeathed by Sir George Beaumont, 1830.
The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (‘The Esterhazy Madonna’), c 1508. Tempera and oil on panel. ByRaphael. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
David, c 1505-08. Pen and brown ink on paper. By Raphael, after Michelangelo Buonarroti. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
A Rearing Horse, c 1503-05. Red chalk on paper. By Leonardo da Vinci, © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024. Royal Collection Trust.
The Battle of Cascina (‘The Bathers’). By Bastiano da Sangallo, after Michelangelo Buonarroti, c 1542. Oil on panel. Holkham Hall, Norfolk, Collection of the Earl of Leicester. By kind permission of the Earl of Leicester and the Trustees of Holkham Estate.
View of Florence from the southwest c 1495. Francesco Rosselli and workshop. Tempera on oil panel. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c 1504. At the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries of the Royal Academy, until February 16, 2025.
