Michelangelo and Leonardo felt “an intense dislike for each other,” says their biographer Vasari. He doesn’t say why.
There is only this story from an anonymous manuscript called the Codice Magliabecchiano:
“As Leonardo, accompanied by [his friend] Giovanni di Gavina, was passing the Spini Bank, near the church of Santa Trinità, several notables were assembled who were discussing a passage in Dante and seeing Leonardo, they asked him to come and explain it to them.
Santa Trinità Church, Florence ( Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license photo)
At the same moment Michelangelo passed and, one of the crowd calling to him, Leonardo said: ‘Michelangelo will be able to tell you what it means.’ To which Michelangelo, thinking this had been said to entrap him, replied: ‘No, explain it yourself, horse-modeller that you are, who, unable to cast a statue in bronze, were forced to give up the attempt in shame.’ So saying, he turned his back on them and left. Leonardo remained silent and blushed at these words.” (quoted in The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Oxford University Press, 1952, trans. Irma A. Richter, p.356 )
This makes Michelangelo look like a jealous ass. Perhaps he was. He was quick to take offense. But the story doesn’t say why Leonardo asked him to explain the text or in what tone. Maybe it was provocative, maybe it sounded like ridicule. It may be the reason Leonardo disliked Michelangelo but Michelangelo’s aversion for Leonardo was already there.
Why would he hate such a genius if not out of jealousy?
Leonardo da Vinci (a statue outside the Uffizi, Florence, by Luigi Pampaloni)
He had heard of Leonardo da Vinci all his life. How could he not? Leonardo was revered as the world’s greatest genius.What was his reputation as an artist based on? What was his great work, his Sistine, his David, his Moses, his Pietà?
That’s easy, you may say: the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.
The Mona Lisa is about the size of a small bedroom mirror. Leonardo worked four years on it and still didn’t finish it. Ah, but the size of a work of art shouldn’t matter, you say: many of the greatest paintings are small. True.
The Last Supper is big—460×880 cm. (181×346 in.). Leonardo spent six years on it before giving up because he couldn’t find the right head for Christ. He drew sketch after sketch and spent whole days staring at the wall.
The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
He finally spoiled it with some experimental medium mixture. It began to disintegrate almost as soon as he painted it.
His Sistine Chapel should have been the Great Equestrian Monument for the Duke of Milan. On it he horsed around for sixteen years until the Duke finally made a cannon with the bronze he had saved for the statue. Leonardo’s clay model stood around for years until it was destroyed. That’s the horse Michelangelo was talking about in the Codice Magliabecchiano story.
But it was an incredibly beautiful clay horse, you may say. Everyone praised it.
Ask a sculptor if a clay model is to be taken as anything more than a first step. A work of art has to be permanent. Clay dries and cracks and disintegrates—it is only a model or guide for the next two or three (or ten!) steps before the sculptor’s idea becomes a statue.
Now, Michelangelo never saw either of those. They were in Milan. What might he have heard about the Master? What was Leonardo’s actual record of achievement? What was he employed to do?
He was good at decoration for pageants and weddings and stuff. He could make big toy lions that ran and growled. He played the lyre and sang like an angel (and dressed like one).
Yes, but wasn’t he inventing airplanes and tanks and bombs and things?
On paper. He did a lot of reading too and devoured books on math and engineering and botany. He was a brilliant conversationalist. Everyone loved to have him at their party.
He went from prince to prince on the strength of a reputation and he was often given room and board as a distinguished guest—for months. He wowed them with his brilliant talk and the originality of his ideas on everything under the sun. But few or none of his fantastic projects were ever brought off.
Except for Cesar Borgia’s map, what else did he actually do for him, which ingenious project was carried out? And the great bridge over the Bosphorus for the Great Turk—it was only a little sketch. The monument for the Duke of Trifulzi—it was a wonderful sketch. So light, so artistic. The St. Anne and the Virgin with Christ and St. John—it is a cartoon, not a painting.
He lived in style. “He owned, one might say, nothing and he worked very little,” says Vasari, “yet he always kept servants as well as horses”—the great artist. His patrons were forever after him to paint them a picture. He seems never to have said no. By the time he was fifty he had half a dozen great dukes and kings and ladies begging him to remember his promise to do a little something for them. But Leonardo was busy. Busy observing, doodling, dreaming.
He planned a flying machine and pictured the glory it would bring him: “The first flight of the great bird from the summit of the Monte Ceceri will fill the universe with wonder,” he wrote in his notebook. “All writing will be of its fame, bringing eternal glory to the place of its origin [and a little to the creator maybe?].”
He got a commission from the City of Florence to paint a mural on the wall of the Council Hall. He finished the cartoon, the first big step—he got that far. But then he started to paint the wall, not in fresco but with oils—a novel thing to do (always the genius!). He tried a new way to make the colors stick by applying heat and it failed—the colors ran. Michelangelo, who was working on a mural in the same Council Hall, perhaps thought it served him right.
So, dust-covered and sore as he was all the time from long hours of sculpting, he must not have enjoyed seeing Leonardo cologned and in fine clothes with a following of admirers and censer-swingers trailing.
“Michelangelo, come over and meet Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest artist in the world! He can do anything.”
Michelangelo, old at sixty by Jacopino del Conte
Michelangelo was someone who, besides coming up with brilliant designs, solved gigantic practical problems to realize them. He had to go and get his marble in the cold mountains. He had to find it, cut it out and put it on a cart, then on a barge, and bring it to his workshop a hundred miles away. Sometimes he had to build the very road through the mountains to transport it. “We’re almost through,” he wrote from Serravezza. “There’s just one more big boulder to chip away and then the cart can go forward another hundred feet.” It was dangerous: “This morning one of the workmen fell and broke his neck. I myself was almost killed.” Another time a chain from which a big block was swinging broke. “We were so lucky,” he wrote. “Any of us could have been killed.”
He was cruelly abused by his patrons. Pope Julius sent him to Carrara for eight months to get marbles for his tomb, then cancelled the project. Pope Leo, the next pope, sent him to the hills of Serravezza for three years and then cancelled his project. Altogether at least five or six of Michelangelo’s best years were wasted in quarries.
Once he got the marble home, he had to carve it, which is slow, hard work. He worked all day swinging a hammer and coughing at the dust until exhaustion put him to sleep. If he still had a moment before dropping off he thought about the design for the building or tomb where the statue would go, or about something his patron had said. Thank God the statue was looking pretty.
There was luck so bad it was like a curse. Pope Julius ordered Michelangelo to make a colossal (three times life-size) portrait of himself in bronze and when Michelangelo had finished modelling it after fourteen months the bronze caster spoiled it and Michelangelo had to do part of it over again. He did finish it but four years later it was melted down and made into a cannon: a major work and two of his best years lost. While he worked in Bologna he had to live at a cheap hotel in a room with four other workmen and he suffered terribly from the discomfort and the lack of privacy.
Nothing was easy for him: there was obstruction after obstruction, with things and with people. Try to actually DO anything in this world.
And you should have seen him at work in the Sistine Chapel.
A fragment of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license photo by Aaron Logan)
He taught himself to paint in fresco and he put three hundred figures on a three-thousand-square-foot ceiling. He didn’t crack. Probably no one who ever lived could have held up but him. He had superhuman stamina and a slave-driving sense of responsibility. He had a job to do and he would do it.
“Explain this passage from Dante for us, Michelangelo,” Leonardo calls over in his charming way. “They say you know so much.”
Note: This portrayal of Leonardo does not do him justice. It is a caricature used here to justify Michelangelo’s contempt.
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There is another explanation (or a complementary one) for Leonardo asking Michelangelo to interpret a verse from Dante. Leonardo knew (it was common knowledge, I think) that Michelangelo was one of the best scholars in Dante’s work, a fanatical admirer of Dante… Of course, all you said, so well, could be true, too… Myself, I believe it was a big misunderstanding, Michelangelo being so ill-tempered, generally…
Danu: That’s right too. Maybe there was something ironical in Leonardo’s way of asking. He couldn’t have been immune to jealousy. Lately in Florence Michelangelo was getting all the praise, even for his knowledge of Dante! As if to tickle Leonardo a little more, the town had asked him to help decide where to place Michelangelo’s divine David. Vasari says it all was too much for him and Leonardo left Florence. Too much Michelangelo.
Yeap…too much Michelangelo would have done the trick… or viceverse… Some big, big ego-s come with geniuses…
As a historian of art I can say that this essay is really nice and good one, yet I like to add something that Leonardo hadn’t cast his Horse because the Bronze which were kept away for casting this horse were used for making cannons in the war between Milano and France, not because Leonardo’s ignorance about how to cast the clay Horse model with bronze. Thanks for the Writer of this essay. (this information I wrote is found in Emily Han’s book about the life of Leonardo da vinci)
Saso: Thank you very much. You sent me to the sources again. I had remembered this in Vasari:
“…Leonardo proposed to the Duke that he should make a huge equestrian statue in bronze as a memorial to his father; then he started and carried the work forward on such a scale that it was impossible to finish it. There have even been some to say (men’s opinions are so various and, often enough, so envious and spiteful) that Leonardo had no intention of finishing it when he started. This was because it was so large that it proved an insoluble problem to cast it in one piece; and one can realize why, the outcome being what it was, many came to the conclusion they did, seeing that so many of his works remained unfinished.” Life of Leonardo, Penguin Classics,1965, (trans. George Bull)
But I see that the bronze for Leonardo’s horse was used for a cannon only a year or two after he had completed the model: “In 1493 Leonardo had completed the clay model of the horse…This model was exhibited on the Piazza del Castello at Milan…on the occasion of the marriage of Bianca Maria Sforza, niece of Ludovico il Moro, to the Emperor Maximilian…which took place at Innsbruck on March 16, 1494.”
“On November 17, 1494, under the pressure of political events, Duke Ludovico shipped the bronze intended for casting Leonardo’s model of the horse down the Po to Ferrara to be made into a cannon.” Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Oxford University Press, 1952 (notes by Irma Richter)
It’s true that the clay model stood around for a long time:
“On September 19, 1501, Ercole I of Ferrara, Isabella d’Este’s father, wrote to his agent to inquire whether the French governor at Milan would cede the colossal horse… which was standing neglected and exposed to wind and weather in the castle square. The French governor relpied that he could not cede the model without the consent of his king.”
But, as you say, the reason it was not cast was the political turmoil of Milan (no money for such things) and not Leonardo’s inability. Vasari (and Michelangelo) must have assumed that all those years that the clay horse stood around Leonardo was wracking his brains for a casting solution. In any case, Michelangelo would have said that it was silly of Leonardo to make the horse before he knew how he was going to cast it.
Modelling it really did take him “forever” (sixteen years according to Saba Castiglioni) and even the Duke lost faith in his ability to produce the monument. In July 1489 the Florentine ambassador to Milan wrote Lorenzo de’ Medici asking him to send a Florentine artist to make the statue: ‘Although the Duke has given the commission to Leonardo, it seems to me that he is not confident that he will succeed’” (Notebooks, op, cit.)
Thanks a lot for these rich information, I’m really happy that there are people as you who are attached to good sources to prove their points, I do really like this essay, and wish you good luck in your work.
Hello again Swallows,
Another nice piece! There is a great new play called Divine Rivalry that recently had its world premier on the Hartford Stage. It’s the story of Leonardo & Michelangelo enaging each other in the Great Hall with the third main character being Machiavelli who tries to keep the two working on their murals. I saw it and found it to be very well done.
My own take is a bit different. I have no doubt Michelangelo respected Leonardo’s talent and feared it, just as he did Raphael’s. But for Leonardo, the science was always more important than the art. He used his Battle of Anghiari to see if he could replicate the technique of oil painting on a wall that he found in Pliny.
The one artist Michelangelo really detested was Pietro Perugino who painted for the money more than the art: the Thomas Kinkade of his day. Perugino was a close friend of Leonardo’s; they apprenticed together under Verrocchio. And they both said they thought the David should be put against the back wall under the Loggia in Florence, which probably didn’t please Michelangelo.
And one of Pergino’s students was Raphael, who was painting the Pope’s apartments at the same time Michelangelo s painting the ceiling. I wonder how much of the rivaly Michelangelo had with Leonardo and Raphael had to do with their ties to Perugino.
Dave: I’m sure you are right that Michelangelo “feared” Leonardo’s talent. He surely recognized the quality. He must have hated reading in Vasari that Leonardo had never been surpassed for the beauty of his faces. In his heart he was glad Leonardo “wasted” so much time tinkering and drawing up impossible projects. Still, the face of the Pietà was right up there with the best even Leonardo could do and Michelangelo had faith in his own powers.
I remember reading that about imitating Pliny but I don’t know where.
Vasari (and Condivi too) say that Bramante was Michelangelo’s bête noire and Raphael was his protégé. They were both from Urbino. You had me go read up on Perugino. I have always liked the Virgin and Child with St. Raphael and St. Michael in the National Gallery of London. A guy who could paint that well was better than the K-man you compare him to. And I had forgotten that Perugino was on the commission that decided where to place the David. Thanks for the information.
Michaelangelo feared no one. He was always the superior of all and no one could come close to his genius.
While Leonardo’s fame as a ‘genius’ was undoubted, it was not because of his scientific work or drawings of helicopters and weird machines. He kept those notebooks private and they were, in fact, only published in the 19th C. So, strangely enough, he had exactly zero impact on the science of his day: See Pissing on a Holy Cow, over at the Renaissance Mathematicus.
Judith
No, I don’t think “fear” is the word…afterall it was Michelangelo who was dubbed “divine”… some jealousy, maybe, for Leonardo and Raphael getting along better in the politics of the “artworld”of the day. He was possessed by his work, not accepting anything less then perfect from himself and others, which many misinterpreted as misantrophy and distrust.
Just read this quote from Leonardo, it would make any sculptor’s blood boil:
“the sculptor in creating his work does so by the strength of his arm by which he consumes the marble, or other obdurate material in which his subject is enclosed: and this is done by most mechanical exercise, often accompanied by great sweat which mixes with the marble dust and forms a kind of mud daubed all over his face. The marble dust flours him all over so that he looks like a baker; his back is covered with a snowstorm of chips, and his house is made filthy by the flakes and dust of stone. The exact reverse is true of the painter…[who] sits before his work, perfectly at his ease and well dressed, and moves a very light brush dipped in delicate color; and he adorns himself with whatever clothes he pleases. His house is clean and filled with charming pictures; and often he is accompanied by music or by the reading of various and beautiful works which, since they are not mixed with the sound of the hammer or other noises, are heard with the greatest pleasure.” Treatise on Painting by Leonardo
Also, Michelangelo was very spiritual, pious, while Leonardo was anything but.
Erika, you are right, “feared” is the wrong word. I imagined that David used it as some say “dread” (such as “he dreads another weekend with his mother-in-law”). But fear, he surely did not. I’m not sure when they started calling him divine, though. They must have called Leonardo divine long before.
Thanks for typing out that long quote from Leonardo’s notebooks. I actually had it in my post but decided it was too long and my point was already made.
Da Vinci had also famously criticized Michelangelo’s depiction of the human body. He pointed out that Michelangelo’s understanding of human anatomy was somewhat superficial in that he always over-emphasized human musculature as if every muscle in the body was contracting simultaneously. Due to his dissection and study of human cadavers da Vinci understood that when a given muscle contracts its opposing muscle always relaxes – thus his anatomical depictions were more realistic.
Anonymous: Thanks. I wish you had given your source for this.
Spot on! That’s exactly what I don’t like about some of Michelangelo’s over-muscled statues. Thanks for clarifying.
Judith: Really? That Michelangelo emphasized muscles is clear enough and one can dislike his style altogether. But saying that he didn’t understand such an obvious thing as their tightening and loosening, even coming from Leonardo da Vinci, is silly. Condivi says Michelangelo considered writing a book on what he had learned from the dissection of cadavers. “He has often had it in mind to write a treatise, as a service to those who want to work in sculpture and painting, on all manner of human movements and appearances and on the bone structure, with a brilliant theory which he arrived at through long experience.”
If Michelangelo chose to exaggerate a muscle, he did so because in that way it seemed to gain in power or suggestion. No artist, not even Leonardo, hesitated to contradict nature if that suited his work.
Anyway, it is unfair to compare Leonardo’s studies of the human body with Michelangelo’s sketches for his paintings and statues. One is science, the other art. They may be proof of Leonardo’s knowledge but they can’t be used to show Michelangelo’s ignorance.
I asked Anonymous to find me the source of this “famous” criticism. It is not in Vasari; it is not in any Da Vinci notebook excerpts that I’ve seen. But if Leonardo threw off this kind of criticism, he should have been challenged.
Condivi was in love with Michelangelo :-) and made up lots of things about him. Anyway, you are right that we should await Anonymous’ reference. Agreed, too, that most artists will contradict nature if it suits them but, still, there is something over-muscled in many of M’s statues; e.g. the Slaves. Perhaps deliberate but it’s overdone and looks wrong.
Judith: I do know what you mean. I wouldn’t have pointed to the Slaves but to some of the figures (sibyls, nudes, putti) on the Sistine ceiling. But every artist, while experimenting with a device of his own invention, must exaggerate it occasionally to find its limits, like someone adjusting his loudpeakers. (Yeah,” I hear you say, “he often has it turned up too loud.”)
1- Michelangelo of Julius II’s tomb was not cancelled but was put on hold as he reluctantly painted the ceiling. it was “finished” in the sense that he was paid for what he had completed and was forced to stop to do lack of funding by Julius’ family.
2- i would like to have proof that this was mentioned in Vasari’s notes, though Vasari has had many questionable statements.
3- i’ve never heard of Leonardo commenting of Michelangelo’s “poor” understanding of proper anatomy. they painted entirely different from each other and would have been a ridiculous statement from someone like Leonardo.
Anonymous: Thanks. That’s good–yes, the tomb was not cancelled, though the project under consideration was. As I told Anonymous, I have never read such a “famous” comment by Leonardo and can’t believe he made it. I don’t know which fact in Vasari’s notes you want proof for. Was it that comment of Leonardo’s?
IDK HELP ME ON THIS QUESTION …. NO GOOD SHORT ANSWERS