Leonardo and Michelangelo – rivals with different views of art

The difference between Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) is that Leonardo was a painter, scientist and inventor who sought light, air and softness in the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, while Michelangelo saw himself first of all as a sculptor and built everything around the powerful human body, in David and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They were active in Florence at the same time around 1504, were commissioned to paint a battle scene each in the same hall, and disliked one another.

Facts

Two generations in the same city

Leonardo was born in 1452 in Vinci outside Florence and trained in Verrocchio's workshop. He was a generation older than Michelangelo, who was born in 1475 and grew up in Florence close to the Medici family. When Leonardo came back to Florence around 1500, after almost twenty years in Milan, he was already famous for The Last Supper. Michelangelo had recently become known in Rome for his Pietà and was about to carve David.

In the app's network and on the artists' pages you can see where they were active, year by year. They were in Florence at the same time from 1501 to 1505 and then in Rome for a few years around 1513–1516, before Leonardo moved to France, where he died in 1519. Michelangelo lived another 45 years.

The rivalry

When David was finished in 1504, a committee of artists was appointed to decide where the statue should stand, and Leonardo was one of them. The same year both were commissioned to paint a large battle scene each on the walls of the council hall in the Palazzo Vecchio: Leonardo the Battle of Anghiari, Michelangelo the Battle of Cascina. It was a contest between the city's two most famous artists, and all Florence followed it.

Neither painting was completed. Leonardo experimented with a new technique that did not hold, and Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by the pope before he had got further than a cartoon. Both were lost, and we know them today through copies and sketches. According to a contemporary anecdote, Michelangelo openly mocked Leonardo for never having completed his great equestrian statue in Milan. The competition was real.

Leonardo: light, air and the unfinished

Leonardo considered painting the highest art, because it could show everything the eye sees: light, shadow, air and distance. He studied anatomy, plants, water and the flight of birds and filled thousands of pages with notes in mirror writing. In painting he developed sfumato, the soft transitions without sharp contours, which make the smile of the Mona Lisa impossible to pin down. See the guides Sfumato and chiaroscuro and the guide to the Mona Lisa.

He worked slowly and left much unfinished. Only about fifteen to twenty paintings are regarded today as wholly or partly his. He painted The Last Supper in a technique of his own on dry plaster so that he could work at a calm pace, and it began to flake during his lifetime; read more in the guide to The Last Supper.

Michelangelo: the body and the marble

Michelangelo saw himself as a sculptor. He held that the figure already existed in the stone and that his task was to set it free. David, 517 centimetres high and carved from a block that others had given up on, shows what he wanted: an ideal, tensed body at rest before the battle. He maintained, contrary to Leonardo, that sculpture was superior to painting.

Even so he was forced to paint. He made the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, 1508–1512, reluctantly, on the commission of Pope Julius II; in a poem he complained about the work and wrote that he was no painter. But even there it is the body that carries everything. In The Creation of Adam the figures are sculpted with colour, with clear contours and muscles, and the sky is almost empty. Later he became an architect, with the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence and the dome of St Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Two ways of seeing

In Leonardo the boundary between figure and surroundings is soft. The light flows, the background vanishes in blue haze, and the people seem to think. In Michelangelo the contour is sharp and the body fills the picture. The movement lies in the muscles, in the turn of a shoulder, and his contemporaries spoke of his terribilità, the overwhelming and almost frightening quality of his work.

The one who learned from both was Raphael, who came to Florence in 1504. In The School of Athens Plato is said to have been given Leonardo's features, and the brooding Heraclitus in the foreground is usually interpreted as a portrait of Michelangelo. See the guides The School of Athens – who is who and What is the Renaissance?

Where to see them

Leonardo's works are scattered: the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, The Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi in Florence. Michelangelo is easier to gather: David in the Accademia and the Medici Chapels in Florence, the Pietà, the Sistine Chapel and St Peter's in Rome.

In Florence you can see the places where they competed in a single day; the guide Art to see in Florence shows the way. The period is found in the Italian thread under the Renaissance.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

What commission did Leonardo and Michelangelo receive at the same time in Florence?