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爭風為創作之本。
How rivalry created the Renaissance
The secret ingredient of art history’s greatest masterpieces? Bitter, petty feuding
Alastair Sooke, Chief Art Critic, 11/03/24
In Disney’s adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, the romance novelist Lizzie Vereker sits at her typewriter, and imagines a “world of unbridled passion” stalked by “untameable beasts”, hungry for status and sex. “One should always beware,” she warns, “of being eaten.”
Vereker is describing the desire to be top dog that shapes her upper-class country set, but she might as well be describing the art world this autumn – as Tracey Emin reminded us recently, when she said that her one-time fellow Young British Artist, Damien Hirst, was no longer a “force”. (Male artists, she suggested, “sort of peak in their forties.”) Next week, a show at the Royal Academy of Arts will explore another rivalry, one that unfolded in Tuscany at the turn of the 16th century, when the three giants of the Italian Renaissance – Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael – locked horns.
These days, the art world plays down the importance of competition, and emphasises community. The notion of artistic genius has been out of favour for years; art historians now stress the familial and social relationships that contribute to success. The Turner Prize serves as a measure of this trend. In 2015, it went to Assemble, a sprawling group of architects and designers – not artists. The following year, Helen Marten, who condemned prizes as “flawed”, pledged to share the £25,000 winnings with her fellow nominees. In 2019, the award was split between all four shortlisted artists, who’d formed a new “collective”. Another “collective”, a group of Northern Irish artists and activists who go by the alias Array, bagged the prize in 2021.
Yet, as the Royal Academy’s exhibition, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c 1504, reminds us, rivalry is hardwired into art history. (The same jostling triumvirate will also be the subject of Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty, a forthcoming three-part docu-drama on the BBC – starring Charles Dance as Michelangelo.) The exhibition examines a famous episode in Western art, when Leonardo and Michelangelo found themselves in direct competition in Florence, after both were commissioned to create murals commemorating Florentine victories for the council hall in the Palazzo della Signoria (now known as the Palazzo Vecchio).
Leonardo was asked first, in 1503; a year later, shortly after his marble colossus David was erected outside the Palazzo Vecchio, Michelangelo was also invited to decorate the same grand chamber. For the first time, Italy’s two pre-eminent artists – separated in age by 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’d both grown up. And, according to their 16th-century biographer, the art historian Giorgio Vasari, they couldn’t stand each other.
What was the cause of their mutual great disdain (sdegno grandissimo)? Few primary sources illuminating their relationship have survived – but Vasari didn’t pluck this aversion from thin air. An earlier biography of the younger artist relates that while they were both in Florence, Michelangelo publicly mocked Leonardo for abandoning a massive bronze equestrian monument to a ruler of Milan. (Leonardo was already notorious in his lifetime for failing to finish projects.)
We also have the minutes of a meeting on January 25 1504, at which, alongside officials, 30 prominent architects and artists (including Botticelli, as well as Leonardo) debated where Michelangelo’s David – which he’d hewn from a single hunk of Carrara marble – should be placed.
Leonardo argued that the statue should not go in front of the palazzo (where it ended up), but in a less prominent, sheltered spot elsewhere in the Piazza della Signoria. The reason he gave was that, there, Michelangelo’s sculpture would be protected – but, since Florence’s climate is so clement, it’s hard not to assume that his real motivation was to minimise Michelangelo’s success. He also specified that the David should appear chon ornamento decente (“with appropriate decoration”) – an ambiguous phrase that, according to some art historians, referred to a fig leaf, and reflected Leonardo’s desire to emasculate, even metaphorically castrate, his younger rival.
Over-interpretation? Probably, says Per Rumberg, one of the curators of the Royal Academy’s exhibition. Still, the evidence suggests that the relationship between these two men was complex, at best, and, at worst, verged on a vendetta.
When it comes, though, to creativity, what’s wrong with a bit of competition? The annals of art history are filled with similar tales of prickly “frenemies”. One of Western art’s founding stories, related by Pliny the Elder, concerns a competition between two celebrated ancient Greek artists – Zeuxis and Parrhasius – to see who could create the most illusionistic painting. Zeuxis’s still life of grapes was so realistic that it fooled passing birds who swooped down to peck at it. Upon discovering, though, that a curtain which Parrhasius had invited him to pull apart was, in fact, his opponent’s entry to the contest, Zeuxis conceded defeat.
In 19th-century Britain, it was the turn of JMW Turner and John Constable to go head-to-head. While hanging one of his seascapes on the eve of the RA’s Summer Exhibition in 1832, Turner sensed that, rendered in cool tones, it risked being upstaged by Constable’s adjoining view of Waterloo Bridge, which was flecked with scarlet. With characteristic chutzpah, he added to his canvas a single blob of red, representing a buoy. “He has been here,” declared Constable, upon noticing Turner’s addition, “and fired a gun.”
Another fraught relationship – this time between two 19th-century French modernists – was the subject of a brilliant show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last year. In the late 1860s, a few years after they’d first bumped into one another at the Louvre, Edgar Degas painted his suave, bearded companion Edouard Manet slumped on a sofa while listening to his wife, Suzanne, as she played the piano.
A lovely scene, surely? When, though, Degas presented this double portrait to Manet as a gift, the latter – possibly irked by the depiction of his spouse’s features – slashed the canvas. “I left without saying goodbye,” Degas told the dealer Ambroise Vollard, “carrying my painting with me.”
At least Manet only lacerated a picture. When Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived together in the so-called “Yellow House” in Arles in the South of France, things became so heated that, shortly before Christmas in 1888, the Dutchman threatened the French former stockbroker, before mutilating his own ear with a razor.
Besides, Manet and Degas’s quarrel abated (“How can one remain on bad terms with Manet,” Degas asked) – unlike the feud between the 20th-century British painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, who’d been inseparable in post-war London. According to Freud’s second wife, Caroline Blackwood, Bacon used to visit them “nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucian. We also had lunch.” But, by the 1980s, Freud was deriding Bacon’s paintings as “ghastly” – and, to the other’s irritation, always refused to lend an important painting by Bacon that he owned. Nicknamed The Buggers, it depicted two men going at it on rumpled sheets, and used to hang on his bedroom wall.
Sometimes, such artistic rivalries are not merely a reflection of “toxic masculinity”. They can inspire first-rate creative results. Look at Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, who was more than a decade his junior. Their temperaments were very different (Matisse could be haughty, Picasso was magnetic), and there are many stories of one-upmanship. Early in their relationship, Picasso’s friends used to throw toy darts at a painting by Matisse that the latter had given to him.
Yet, throughout their lives, they paid close attention to one another’s work, which often stimulated breakthroughs in their own. After Matisse’s death in 1954, Picasso missed his erstwhile sparring partner. The art historian Jack Flam compares them to “top-level athletes who set the pace for each other”. Both conquered greater aesthetic heights than perhaps they would have scaled had they been, as it were, mountaineering alone. Is it too much to see rivalry as another form of collaboration?
Admittedly, in Florence in the early 1500s, Leonardo – already in his fifties when he began planning his Battle of Anghiari mural – didn’t alter much after encountering Michelangelo’s work. But it’s possible that Michelangelo adapted his approach after hearing what Leonardo was up to. Leonardo’s battle scene was a tumultuous affair, characterised by violence and extreme emotion. In contrast, Michelangelo chose to portray a moment before any fighting had begun, when bathing soldiers – a subject that allowed him to depict one of his favourite motifs: the idealised male nude – were called to arms.
Although both produced preparatory drawings, neither mural was completed, as these in-demand artists were summoned elsewhere. Eventually, it was the third character in the RA’s show – Raphael – who, having come to Florence to learn from his older peers, ended up, in Rome, as Michelangelo’s main antagonist. Il Divino (“the divine one”), as the saturnine Tuscan was called, even accused the upstart from Urbino of plagiarism. This is the thing with those “untameable beasts”: they never change their spots.
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c 1504, is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (royalacademy.org.uk), from November 9 to February 16
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