Rivalry Created the Renaissance: Feuds of Great Artists

By: Alastair Sooke, art critic / The Daily Telegraph
Translation: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

In the "Disney" adaptation of the work Rivals [Rivals] by Jilly Cooper, romance writer Lizzie Vereker sits at her typewriter and imagines a "world of unbridled passion," haunted by "untamed beasts" who are hungry for status and sex. "You should always be careful", she warns, "that they don't eat you".

Vereker describes the desire to be the best that shapes her upper-class circle in the countryside, but she can just as well describe fading in the art world – as Tracey Emin recently reminded us when she said that her colleague her former peer in the Young British Artists movement, Damien Hirst, no longer represented "strength" (male artists, she suggested, "peak in their forties"). Next week, an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts will explore another rivalry, the one that took place in Tuscany in the early 16th century when the three giants of the Italian Renaissance - Leonardo [Leonardo da Vinci], Michelangelo [Michelangelo Buonarroti] and Raphael [Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino].

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Nowadays, the art world downplays the importance of competition and emphasizes community. The concept of artistic genius has been out of fashion for years; art historians now appreciate the family and social relationships that contribute to success. The Turner Prize is an example of this trend. In 2015, it was awarded to Assemble, a broad group of architects and designers, rather than artists. The following year, Helen Marten, who criticized the awards as "flawed", promised to share the £25 prize with the other candidates. In 2019, the award was shared between the four nominated artists, who had formed a new "collective". Another "collective", a group of artists and activists from Northern Ireland under the pseudonym "Array", won the prize in 2021.

However, as the Royal Academy exhibition recalls, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504 [Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504], the rivalry is rooted in art history. (The same competitive trio will also be the subject of a three-part BBC documentary, Rebirth: Blood and Beauty / Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty, where Charles Dance plays Michelangelo.) The exhibition examines a famous episode in Western art, when Leonardo and Michelangelo faced off in Florence, after both were commissioned to create the murals for the council chamber in the Palazzo della Signoria (now known as as the Vecchio Palace), to commemorate the victories of Florence.

Leonardo was invited first, in 1503; a year later, right after his marble colossus, David, appeared in front of the Vecchio Palace, Michelangelo was also invited to decorate the same magnificent room. For the first time, Italy's two greatest artists – with an age difference of almost a quarter of a century (Leonardo was born in 1452; Michelangelo in 1475) – were working (almost) side by side in the city where they both grew up. And, according to their XNUMXth-century biographer, the art historian Giorgio Vasari, they couldn't stand each other.

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What was the reason for the great mutual contempt (sdegno grandissimo)? Few primary sources have survived that shed light on their relationship – but Vasari did not conjure up this hatred out of thin air. An earlier biography of the younger artist relates that, while the two were in Florence, Michelangelo publicly mocked Leonardo for abandoning a large bronze monument to a ruler of Milan. (Leonardo was notorious for not completing projects during his lifetime.)

We also have the minutes of a meeting on January 25, 1504, in which, along with officials, 30 prominent architects and artists—including Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo—discussed where the statue of David, which Michelangelo carved from a single block of Carrara marble.

Leonardo argued that the statue should not be placed in front of the palace (where it was eventually placed), but in a more protected place in Piazza della Signoria. The reason he gave was that Michelangelo's sculpture would be protected there – but, since Florence's climate is so mild, it is hard not to think that his real motive was to downplay Michelangelo's success. He also specified that David had to appear con ornamento Decent (“with suitable ornamentation”) – an obscure phrase that, according to some art historians, referred to a fig leaf and reflected Leonardo's desire to eclipse, even metaphorically “castrate” his younger rival .

Over interpretation? Perhaps, says Per Rumberg, one of the curators of the Royal Academy exhibition. However, the evidence suggests that the relationship between these two men was complex at best and bordered on revenge at worst.

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But when it comes to creativity, what's wrong with competition? The annals of art history are filled with similar stories of "enemy friends". One of the basic stories of Western art, recounted by Pliny the Elder, involves a competition between two famous ancient Greek artists, Zeuxis and Parasius, to see who could create the most illusionistic painting. Zeuxis' placid natures with grapes were so lifelike that they fooled passing birds, who swooped down to eat them. However, when he discovered that a curtain, which Parasius invited him to draw, was, in fact, the work of his opponent in the contest, Zeuxis conceded defeat.

In 1832th century Britain, it was the turn of JMW Turner and John Constable to face each other. While setting up one of his seascapes on the eve of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in XNUMX, Turner felt that his landscape – done in light tones – was in danger of being eclipsed by Constable's adjacent view of Waterloo Bridge, which was shades of red. With characteristic boldness, he added to his canvas a single red spot representing a buoy. "He was here," declared the Constable, when he noticed Turner's addition, "and fired his gun."

Another strained relationship – this time between two 60th-century French modernists – was the subject of a brilliant exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last year. In the late XNUMXs, a few years after they had first met in the Louvre, Edgar Degas painted his kindly, bearded friend, Edouard Manet, reclining on a sofa as he listened to his wife, Suzanne, who played the piano.

A nice scene, isn't it? But when Degas presented this double portrait to Manet, the latter – perhaps unnerved by the depiction of his wife's features – tore up the canvas. "I left without saying goodbye," Degas told the dealer Ambroise Vollard, "taking my painting with me."

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At least, Manet only tore up a painting. When Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived together in what is known as the "Yellow House" in Arles, in the south of France, things became so tense that, just before Christmas 1888, the Dutchman threatened the former French merchant with stock market, before he cut off his own ear with a razor.

However, the quarrel between Manet and Degas was softened ("How can one remain on bad terms with Manet", said Degas), unlike the enmity between the 80th century British painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, who were inseparable in London after World War II. According to Freud's second wife, Caroline Blackwood, Bacon visited them “almost every night throughout my marriage to Lucian. We also had lunch together." However, in the XNUMXs, Freud despised Bacon's paintings as "terrible" and, to his annoyance, always refused to lend any important Bacon paintings in his possession. Called Two figures [The Buggers], it featured two men in a fight over wrinkled sheets and standing in his bedroom.

Sometimes, artistic rivalries are not simply a reflection of "toxic masculinity." They can inspire great creative results. Look at Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, who was more than a decade younger. Their characters were very different (Matisse was calm, Picasso was magnetic) and there are many stories of their clashes. Early in their relationship, Picasso's friends used darts to shoot a painting by Matisse that the latter had given him.

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However, during their lives, they paid close attention to each other's work, which often spurred breakthroughs in their creativity. After Matisse died in 1954, Picasso felt the absence of his former partner with whom he had clashed. Art historian Jack Flam compares them to "high-level athletes pacing each other." Both reached greater aesthetic heights than they would have achieved had they been, so to speak, climbing the mountain alone. Is it too much to see rivalry as another form of cooperation?

Of course, in early 16th-century Florence, Leonardo—already in his fifties when he began planning his mural, Battle of Angiar – did not change much after contact with Michelangelo's work. But it is possible that Michelangelo adapted his approach after learning of Leonardo's work. Leonardo's battle scene was a riotous depiction, filled with extreme violence and emotion. In contrast, Michelangelo chose to present a moment before the start of the battle, where the soldiers bathing – a subject that allowed him to display one of his favorite motifs: the idealized male nude – are called to take up arms.

Although both produced preparatory drawings, neither mural was completed, as these sought-after artists were called elsewhere. In the end, there was the third character in the Royal Academy show – Raphael – who, after coming to Florence to learn from his older peers, ended up in Rome as Michelangelo's main antagonist. Il divine ("the divine"), as the silent Tuscan was called, even accused the novice from Urbino of plagiarism. That's the thing about those "untamed beasts": they never change their spots. /Telegraph/