PhotoDude.com

Wed. Oct 23, 2002

And the winner is...

And the winner is… – (via Dangerousmeta) It’s a fascinating story, one that oddly made me think of Photoshop Tennis, but with real talent, and real acrimony. There’s much much more detail, but the gist of it is: "At the beginning of the 16th century, in this same room, side by side on the same wall, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti were hired to paint vast battle scenes in direct competition with one another [...] Vasari is explicit that this was a contest. He emphatically says that Michelangelo was commissioned ’in competition with Leonardo’. With competition came paranoia, hatred."

"The city of Florence had every reason to expect that Leonardo and Michelangelo, as aware as everyone else of the vulnerability and preciousness of the city’s freedom, would create patriotic masterpieces, and that rivalry would spur them on. It spurred them all right – but in odd, hermetic,and pessimistic directions. The images of war they created were not bright and celebratory pageants of chivalry, but enigmatic, disturbing."

"Leonardo and Michelangelo, for all their different ages, different styles – Leonardo soft, shadowy, ambiguous; Michelangelo sublimely decisive – and their enmity, had one thing in common. Neither liked to finish anything [...] Leonardo, on this occasion, got a lot further than Michelangelo [...] Leonardo made a unique machine, a wooden elevator, so he could move up and down the wall in comfort. But, as with the Last Supper, technical ingenuity got the better of him. Leonardo used a method – apparently based on a recipe in the ancient Roman writer Pliny the Elder – to enable him to paint the wall in oils. The mixture didn’t work – he may have been cheated on materials; the upper part dried dark and the lower parts disintegrated. Michelangelo never got past the drawing stage. But what a drawing, everyone agreed [...] Everything about it was startling. Leonardo depicted the very heart of battle, an agonising, horrific entanglement of human and animal bodies, but Michelangelo drew war’s margins…"

"Michelangelo’s painting never reached the wall, but Leonardo’s did. It’s a mystery why it was painted over in 1565, by that same Vasari who wrote Leonardo’s life. It was a Leonardo, which meant as much then as now."