The Lost Battles: Jonathan Jones

[poliphilo]

Leonardo was a bit of a sissy, Michelangelo a tough; Leonardo was a gun for hire, Michelangelo a patriot; Leonardo was a freethinker, Michelangelo a true believer. They hated each another.

The decision to give them walls to decorate in Florence's Great Council Hall pitched them directly against one another. Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina was a call to arms, Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari a pacifist manifesto. Neither picture was completed- and neither survives except in preliminary sketches and copies. Jonathan Jones uses this story of competition and confrontation as the focus for a wide-ranging exploration of the Florentine High Renaissance.

Nothing I've read about Leonardo and Michelangelo has ever given me such a clear and convincing idea of what these two sacred monsters stood for- and what they were like as people.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

My sympathies would, of course, naturally fall much more in Leonardo's camp: I can never simply accept orthodoxy, but require proof, or at least, a logically sustainable argument. And similarly, I can't view war as anything but a most terrible failure, whomever may prevail - so many, many individual lives are snuffed out, and of those who survive, even more sustain terrible scars, whether visible or not.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Leonardo hated war but spent a lot of his time and energy designing weapons and fortifications. He also chose to work for the brutal warlord Ludovico Sforza.

No, I don't understand it either.