Did you know Michelangelo and Leonardo couldn’t stand one another?
In the first decade of the sixteenth century, the arch rivals were asked to create murals on the same wall of the Council Hall of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. The same wall.
In one corner: Leonardo da Vinci, age 52, already famous for having painted the Last Supper and Mona Lisa.
In the other corner, the young Michelangelo Buonarotti, age 29, who had finished David (1503) but not yet begun the Sistene Chapel.
Leaders of the city of Florence had just dumped the Medici rulers and had also executed Savonarola (I blogged about him here). The newly installed leader of the city was Piero Soderini (and his counselor, Niccolo Machiavelli—you might have heard of him).
In 1503 Soderini gave Leonardo a commission to paint the 1440 Battle of Anghiari (a famous Florentine victory over Milan). Leonardo began sketching.
A year later, Soderini gave Michelangelo a commission to paint the Battle of Cascina (a war between Florence and rival Pisa from 1364).
Why would Soderini hire the two rivals to paint side-by-side patriotic masterpieces, vast battle scenes glorifying Florence’s victories, in the very same room? He knew they loathed one another. Was he messing with them?
The two artistic geniuses had very different styles. Leonardo was the realist, Michelangelo the idealist. Leonardo was the religious cynic, Michelangelo the champion of heroism.
Leonardo set about sketching a dusty, bloody, epic battle scene full of dead and dying men and horses. Meanwhile, Michelangelo began sketching a stylized scene with naked, muscled soldiers who’d been bathing in a river just at the moment they received a call to battle; they’re rushing to their battle posts. Both were masterpieces in the making.
I wish I could show you these scenes, but the murals were never finished. In 1512, the Spanish sacked the city and restored the Medicis to power. The designs for both murals were destroyed. I have nothing to show you re Michelangelo’s mural. As for Leonardo’s, what little he had actually started painting was later painted over. But a handful of preliminary sketches remain. And then we have Peter Paul Rubens’ copy of Leonardo’s sketch, which Rubens did in 1603. Called “The Fight for the Standard, after a Sketch by Leonardo,” it’s a copy of a copied sketch. It’s as close as we can get to what Leonardo’s original might have looked like. Here it is:
