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Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Artistic Duel That Defined the Renaissance
Knopf
November 2012
On Sale: October 23, 2012
368 pages
ISBN: 0307594750
EAN: 9780307594754
Kindle: B007WKFLO6
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography | Non-Fiction History
From one of Britain’s most respected and acclaimed art
historians, art critic of The Guardian—the
galvanizing story of a sixteenth-century clash of titans,
the two greatest minds of the Renaissance, working side by
side in the same room in a fierce competition: the master
Leonardo da Vinci, commissioned by the Florentine Republic
to paint a narrative fresco depicting a famous military
victory on a wall of the newly built Great Council Hall in
the Palazzo Vecchio, and his implacable young rival, the
thirty-year-old Michelangelo.
We see Leonardo,
having just completed The Last Supper, and being
celebrated by all of Florence for his miraculous portrait of
the wife of a textile manufacturer. That painting—the
Mona Lisa—being called the most lifelike anyone had
ever seen yet, more divine than human, was captivating the
entire Florentine Republic.
And Michelangelo,
completing a commissioned statue of David, the first
colossus of the Renaissance, the archetype hero for the
Republic epitomizing the triumph of the weak over the
strong, helping to reshape the public identity of the city
of Florence and conquer its heart.
In The Lost
Battles, published in England to great acclaim
(“Superb”—The Observer; “Beguilingly written”—The
Guardian), Jonathan Jones brilliantly sets the
scene of the time—the politics; the world of art and
artisans; and the shifting, agitated cultural landscape.
We see Florence, a city freed from the oppressive
reach of the Medicis, lurching from one crisis to another,
trying to protect its liberty in an Italy descending into
chaos, with the new head of the Republic in search of a
metaphor that will make clear the glory that is Florence,
and seeing in the commissioned paintings the expression of
his vision.
Jones reconstructs the paintings that
Leonardo and Michelangelo undertook—Leonardo’s Battle of
Anghiari, a nightmare seen in the eyes of the warrior
(it became the first modern depiction of the disenchantment
of war) and Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, a call
to arms and the first great transfiguration of the erotic
into art. Jones writes about the competition; how it
unfolded and became the defining moment in the
transformation of “craftsman” to “artist”; why the
Florentine government began to fall out of love with one
artist in favor of the other; and how—and why—in a
competition that had no formal prize to clearly resolve the
outcome, the battle became one for the hearts and minds of
the Florentine Republic, with Michelangelo setting out to
prove that his work, not Leonardo’s, embodied the future of
art. Finally, we see how the result of the competition went
on to shape a generation of narrative paintings, beginning
with those of Raphael.
A riveting exploration into
one of history’s most resonant exchanges of ideas, a rich,
fascinating book that gives us a whole new understanding of
an age and those at its center.
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