Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: three Renaissance geniuses in London

Two heroic characters, both of whom have achieved fame abroad, return to their hometown at the same time and immediately compete with each other. If a precocious newcomer comes along, he gives sweet compliments – and tries to inherit both of them. Sound like something you can watch on Netflix? Is something that should be seen in the exhibition rooms of the Royal Academy of Arts in London while you can.

Because Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael, the three most important artists of the Renaissance, in the same rooms, and with works that are rarely exhibited anyway: That won’t happen again anytime soon – if ever. It’s a summit of giants, and the curators at the Royal Academy actually managed to identify something like a superhero plot in art history, even before Florian Illies came up with it. The setting is Florence, where the paths of the three crossed in 1504.

The list of supporting figures is already impressive enough: In addition to Leonardo da Vinci, people like Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Piero di Cosimo also sat on the commission that advised where Michelangelo’s recently completed monumental sculpture should be David should be set up. At that time, the colossus already had status as a wonder of the world, also because it was carved out of a block of marble that a fellow sculptor had previously messed up. Michelangelo was already praised for the fact that he took the handicap sportily and showed what was still inside, namely the first free-standing, larger-than-life figure since antiquity, casually on both legs and legs. Monumentality, heroic nudity and a relaxed willingness to take action: the Florentines largely agreed that someone had even surpassed the art of antiquity.

Leonardo da Vinci immediately made a drawing of the celebrated sculpture. However, Michelangelo’s rather athletically shaped lanky man becomes a massive weight lifter, which was actually more in line with the classical proportions of antiquity. So was that another homage – or was it just a schooling by the older colleague? Michelangelo was 29 at the time and returned from Rome to his Tuscan homeland as a successful sculptor. Leonardo was 52 and was already considered a universal genius when he had recently returned home from Milan. He already had the famous “Last Supper” on the clock, the “Mona Lisa” was currently in progress, and although his artistic metier was painting, he obviously found that he knew some things even better in the area of ​​classical sculpture than the young sculptor who was now celebrating such successes.

A little later, when Raphael, who is only 21 years old and has just emigrated from Perugia, sketches David, it becomes primarily an adoration of the rear, as if that were the real essence of the whole thing. He also brought Michelangelo’s intentionally oversized hands and feet to normal human size. This, too, was ultimately a criticism wrapped in reverence for what Michelangelo had made the very core of his art, namely the rhetoric of stretching, compressing and twisting body shapes.

Michelangelo, for his part, had reservations about Leonardo and accused the elder of despondency when making professional decisions. In other words, the relationship between the two was obviously respectful but strained. And that probably didn’t change when Michelangelo was sent into direct competition with Leonardo by the Florentine authorities after his success with David. For a year he had been commissioned to create a large mural for the new large council hall, the Sala del Gran Consiglio, which was intended to celebrate the historic victory of the Florentines against the Milanese in the Battle of Anghiari. Michelangelo, who later became successful as a fresco painter in the Vatican, was now asked to glorify another Florentine victory on the opposite wall, the one against the Pisans at Cascina.

Maria, naked man and waiter: Such surrealistic chance encounters are only possible in drawings

In the end, it’s a battle between two fight scenes: How is Michelangelo supposed to keep up with Leonardo’s extreme action scene, with riders in the middle of the climax of the grim battle? His answer: not at all. Instead, he took the moment before the battle, when the alarm reached the naked warriors. Kinetic drama of horses, swords and grimaces of anger vs. rhetorical ballet of bodies. (Raphael was to diligently copy both and later synthesize them in his frescoes in the Vatican.)

Both pictures are now something like the Amber Rooms of the Renaissance, only preserved through preliminary studies and copies by others, because Leonardo’s battle picture was painted over, Michelangelo’s was never realized.

However, at that time it was also busy supplying wealthy private customers with depictions of the Madonna, which in turn was a business in which the young Raphael produced as if on an assembly line. He couldn’t even be blamed for the mass production of Madonnas as such, because he found one to be more beautiful than the other. And it didn’t do him any harm to take a cue from the older man, as the comparison of Michelangelo’s “Taddei Tondo” (owned by the Royal Academy) with Raphael’s so-called “Bridgewater Madonna” (guest from the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh) shows : the baby Jesus wriggling on his mother’s lap is a direct takeover.

That’s why London now has the remarkable situation that, alongside the most virile battle scenes in art history, there are some of the most tender mother-and-child constellations hanging. And often enough you have sketches of both on one page.

There is one by Michelangelo, for example, in which the Virgin, while breastfeeding the baby Jesus, seems to look dreamily over at a muscular, naked young man, who is also lying horizontally on the page, and in between there is a caricature of a head, type of eye-rolling waiter. Such almost surrealistic chance encounters are actually only possible in the medium of drawing. You can also see that the word study really comes from studying. What Michelangelo was actually doing on the page: learning something from Leonardo about the impossible relationship of “Anna herself”, this crazy type of image in which Mary and her child sit on the lap of her own mother Anna.

Shortly before, in his “Pietá”, Michelangelo had managed to place the dead Jesus on the lap of a Mary who does not seem to be a day older than her son. But if the mother and grandmother are obviously also the same age, the plausible sitting on the lap is a different matter. On his famous box with Mary, Anna, Jesus and little John the Baptist, Leonardo showed how it can be done without looking strange. This was the detailed charcoal study for an altarpiece that was also possibly intended to hang in the great council chamber, but was never painted.

Art historians today are putting into perspective what was once dramatized into epic conflicts between artists

The box, which is now kept in the National Gallery, is also known as the “Burlington House Cartoon” – i.e. the address of the Royal Academy. And that in turn may give a subtle hint as to why such an exhibition in London is even possible: because they have these things there. A significant portion of the drawings here bear the title “His Majesty King Charles III.” And those who have a lot will also borrow heavily from outside.

There are conservation reasons why the sensitive drawings should not be exposed to the public light too often or for too long. But when it happens as massively as here, hand drawings by these three are actually even more exciting than their executed works. The short circuit between brain and hand, the searching, the dynamic, the playful and the breathtaking form stability of these fingers: you can hardly get any closer to people who have been considered geniuses for half a millennium.

Just comparing the respective hatching techniques can make you ecstatic if you look closely. There’s something almost musical about it, the way the volumes of arms or legs are indicated by the routine sequence of short ups or downs – a bit like string players playing Vivaldi or guitarists playing hard rock.

Art historians today spend a lot of time trying to put into perspective what was once often dramatized into epic conflicts between artists. But a certain amount of confrontation is inevitable when three men like these meet. And there was a winner in the end: every single viewer.

„Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael – Florence, c. 1504“ in der Royal Academy London, bis 16.2., Katalog 40 GBP