Why Michelangelo Disliked Leonardo da Vinci

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.

..

First Great Equestrian Statues

Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Capitolina, Rome (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license photo by Rosemania)

The only original Roman bronze equestrian monument that has survived. Few must have been this good.

Marcus Aurelius rides with his feet hanging free because stirrups hadn’t yet been invented.
He looks large in relation to his horse. Perhaps horses were smaller in those days—they often look so in ancient Greek and Roman paintings and sculpture.
No one knows anymore what his gesture meant.

Some experts have speculated that under the horse’s lifted front leg there was a defeated enemy. But that would contradict Marcus Aurelius’ reputation as a philosopher and a man of peace. Also, he is not dressed as a soldier.  In any case, it is possible that there was a figure of some kind under that hoof. For casting requirements the legs of a statue were usually joined to the base; if one was raised, artists made a little figure or ornament out of the support piece for it.

Renaissance artists considered this statue and the lively REGISOLE in Pavia, also of Roman origin, models of excellence.

Regisole (a modern recreation) Piazza del Duomo, Pavia (public domain photo by Superzen)

When Leonardo da Vinci was working on his giant clay horse for the Duke of Milan, he went to Pavia to see this figure and jotted these observations in his notebook:

[Its] movement more than anything else is deserving of praise.
The trot has always been the quality of a free horse.
Where natural vivacity is lacking it is necessary to make accidental liveliness.
The imitation of antique works is better than that of modern. [He seems to have meant that the old Romans imitated Greek work better than his Renaissance contemporaries imitated Roman and Greek work.]

The original Roman figure was destroyed in the nineteenth century. Old engravings show the figure of a dog supporting the horse’s lifted leg.

Engraving of the Regisole by C, Ferreri, 1832 (public domain photo)

GATTAMELATTA by Donatello

This was the first bronze equestrian monument in a thousand years.

Condottiere Gattamelatta (Erasmo da Narni) by Donatello, 1453 (public domain photo by Lamré at the Swedish Wikipedia project)  Piazza del Santo, Padua, Italy

The Florentine sculptor Donatello got the commission from the city of Padua in 1445.  They wanted a monument to honor their Condottiere Gattamelata.

Erasmo da Narni (called “Honeycat”) was one of the despots of the time, someone who took power by force, and he seems to  ride as though in a slow, almost intimidating, victory procession. His horse is strong and heavy.    Donatello is more interested in the general shapes of the horse than in its movement, and in showing cold power than liveliness or individual personality. The horse is an obedient servant, like the state itself.

The Condottiere rides stiffly, looking straight ahead. He wields symbols of power: the baton in his hand, the giant sword at his side.

A ball supports the lifted leg—a pleasing device that was imitated many times in later statues of horses. It is an ingenious invention: better than a pointless figure or a box which might seem an obstacle, the ball adds to forward motion. Did its explanation as a globe, the one Gattamelatta rules, come as an afterthought?

COLLEONI by Verrocchio

Verrocchio was Donatello’s student. He got an order from the city of Venice to make a  monument to their Condottiere Colleoni.

Condottiere Colleoni by Andrea Verrocchio (cast in 1493) Campo di San Zanipolo, Venice (public domain photo)

Verrocchio gave more life to his statue.  Colleoni leans back haughtily and throws a mean look to the left as he rides. He doesn’t just sit on the horse, he controls it. The wrinkles in the horse’s skin, mere designs in Donatello’s horse, here show twisting and the contraction of muscles. Everywhere there is articulation.   It is the first Renaissance horse with a leg off the ground: no vanquished foe, no doggie to hold it in the air.

Such a huge bronze cast was a real achievement in those days before there was much experience.  The sculptor had to invent not only his clay figure but also a way to cast it.  This meant he had to design it with the casting in mind. Many postures that look good in a drawing are unrealizable in bronze. A sculptor, like an architect, must always deal with the limitations of his material—he can’t simply dream in stone or bronze.  So a great bronze figure was also an ingenious piece of engineering.  Verrocchio died before this one was cast. It was a man named Alessandro Leopardi who brought it off in 1493.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Failure

Leonardo began to make a colossal monument for the Duke of Milan.  He made sketch after sketch of a horse and rider and let his imagination fly. He counted on his powers of invention to solve any problems that might come up at bronze-casting time.  Liveliness was what he liked.  In some of his drawings, like this one for a later monument, the horse stood right up on its hind legs—the front legs were supported by a cowering enemy.

Study for the Trifulzio monument Royal Library, Windsor

But finally he decided that so much liveliness couldn’t be—or was inappropriate for such a monument. And he brought his horse down, though he did still lift a leg or two.

Study of a horse by Leonardo, c. 1490 Royal Library, Windsor (public domain photo)

After a long, long time he finished the clay horse—only the horse, which was 23 feet tall—and started figuring out how he was going to cast it. He sketched and sketched and invented armatures and frames and fire pits and channels for the bronze to flow through.  And when he was finished he sketched some more. But he couldn’t figure out how to do it. He spent, according to one report, sixteen years horsing around.  Schadenfreude got the better of Michelangelo, who seems to have ridiculed him for being stuck like that.   The great inventor and Merlin Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t able to cast his own statue!

The clay horse stood around until some French soldiers destroyed it. Now no one knows exactly what it looked like and it is a shame that someone’s homage to him, though well-shaped and just as large, should be considered Leonardo’s Horse.

Only Leonardo could show us a horse by Leonardo.

Tacca Did the Trick

The two Renaissance statues by Donatello and Verrocchio were the models for a hundred and fifty years. What could be better?  They seemed to have done everything that could be done in bronze.  Then, in 1660, Pietro Tacca surprised everyone with this spectacular figure of the Spanish King Philip IV.

Philip IV of Spain by Pietro Tacca (1634 -1640) Palacio Real, Madrid, Spain (public domain photo by Luis García (Zaqarbal)

Tacca found a way to make the king’s bronze horse stand up on its hind legs.  There is nothing at all holding up the front part of the figure.  Tacca got his idea from this painting by Velasquez, where the horse and rider seem to almost float.

King Philip IV of Spain by Diego Velasquez, c. 1634-1635 Prado Museum, Madrid (photo ceded to the public domain by The Yorck Project)

But how do you make a heavy chunk of bronze do the same?  What keeps it from falling?
Tacca, like Leonardo with his horse, thought and thought about it. He finally asked his friend, the great Galileo, for advice.  “Easy,” said the genius. “Make the front part hollow and the back solid bronze.”  In fact, as the British sculptor Robert Mileham wrote, statues are everywhere more or less hollow. But Tacca must have profitted from Galileo’s advice.  The horse’s tail, which drops to the ground, serves as a counterweight.   In any case, the statue surprises and delights, even if you think you know how it was brought off.

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license photo by Balbo

..

Slander by Botticelli

Consider this picture of Calumny (Slander) by Botticelli:

Calumny of Apelles by Sandro Botticelli (1494) Tempera on panel   62 cm × 91 cm (24 in × 36 in); in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy ( public domain photo)

A judge is hearing a case. Two advisors, Ignorance and Suspicion, fondle his donkey ears.

Detail 1  of Calumny of Apelles

Envy steps forth to make his case, leading the beautiful Calumny (Slander).

Detail 2 of Calumny of Apelles

Intrigue and Fraud retouch her exquisite coiffure.

She drags in the naked Victim (the Slandered Man) by his hair.  Frowning in misery and incomprehension, he turns to heaven for consolation.

Grim Penitence stalks before him and turns to give an annoyed look at Truth, who  stands at the end of the queue, hidden from the judge.

Detail 3 of Calumny of Apelles

You don’t need to be a Renaissance artist to commiserate with this victim. Everyone knows about these characters and has seen them perform.

Botticelli, the artist, was slandered. Perhaps he was a slanderer too. His biographer, Vasari, says he accused a friend of heresy “for a joke”. Vasari tells the mean story also just for fun—the fun of printing the friend’s reply to the tribunal. Botticelli had told people he believed the soul died with the body. “Oh, I can believe that as far as HE is concerned,” said the friend. “Because he’s not a human—he’s a brute.” And for further kicks, Vasari throws in the friend’s next dart: “And anyway, Botticelli barely knows how to read or write and he goes and does a commentary on Dante, which is taking [the great man's] name in vain.”

Too little is known about Botticelli, which is a shame because he was one of the greatest artists.  Most of what we do know comes from Giorgio Vasari, who didn’t like him. He tells cattish stories like the one above and gives the impression when he does praise Botticelli’s work that he is struggling to be fair, no more.

“He was one of the followers of Savonarola [the Dominican friar who preached hellfire and brimstone],” says Vasari, “…and he remained an obstinate member of the sect, becoming one of the snivellers, as they were called then, and abandoning his work.” See how unstable he was? Unstable and irresponsible. Who was going to take care of him once he stopped working? “As an old man he found himself so poor that if Lorenzo de’ Medici…and then his friends and other worthy men who loved him for his talent had not come to his assistance, he would almost have died of hunger.”

As an artist, Botticelli was on the wrong side of history. He painted in a style that Michelangelo made obsolete even before Botticelli was old. The frescoes by both in the Sistine Chapel are the most graphic example. Botticelli’s look as though he had painted them with one foot in the Middle Ages, though in fact he finished them only twenty-five years before Michelangelo set to work there.

Sandro Botticelli, The Temptation of Christ, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, Rome (public domain photo by Italiamoderna)

But he deserved better. When he was good he was very, very good.  His Birth of Venus is probably his best-known work.

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli (1483-1485) 278.5 cm (109.65 in) by 172.5 cm (67.91 in); in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy (Wikicommons photo)

Venus resembles Truth in the Calumny painting because they both are take-offs on the Medici Venus, which Botticelli studied at his patron’s palace.

Venus Medici. A Roman copy of a Greek original (c. 350 BC); a cast in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license photo by shakko)

Botticelli painted some of the most beautiful woman’s faces in painting history but their bodies look very odd.

Spring by Sandro Botticelli (c. 1482) Tempera on panel, 203 x 314 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (public domain photo)

Some people complain that Michelangelo made women look like men but most painters before his time studied only men’s bodies from live models. For women they relied on old paintings and statues. When they had to create a woman of their own they painted what they imagined was under those flowing dresses. Botticelli could never decide just where to place the breasts, and in his mind the concept of a woman’s womb seems to have made him see a permanently large chamber there.

He stuck to their dresses, of which he made beautiful graphic flourishes. His light, swirling,  three-segment gowns became standard angelwear for centuries.

The Mystical Nativity (detail) by Sandro Botticelli (1501) 108.5 cm × 74.9 cm (42.7 in × 29.5 in): in the National Gallery, London (public domain photo)

..

Michelangelo’s David in Danger

Michelangelo’s David has weak ankles.  They are full of micro-fissures.

David (1504)  5.17 meters (17 feet) ; in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence  (photo by Rico Heil, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

And now if they build a high-speed train nearby, he  might come crashing down like Goliath.  See this article just published in the Daily Telegraph.

The following is  a post on those weak ankles published here on August 187, 2007.

A figure with its legs apart may not seem too daring or revolutionary. But IN STONE it isn’t wise. How are those skinny legs going to support all the weight of the rock (torso and head) above them? In fact, there is too much weight on David’s ankles, in spite of the two tree trunks there to shore them up. There are cracks, especially in the right one.

See article

A block of stone isn’t a man, even if the great Michelangelo can make it look like one. Living things have learned to defy gravity with muscles (how do the plants grow UP?) but a stone just sits and obeys the law. Usually a figure like the David would have been conceived for bronze, which is stronger and can handle, i.e. give support to, representations of almost all human postures and pirouettes.

Here are some figures unsuitable for stone sculpture:

..

Michelangelo’s Only Easel Painting

Tondo Doni, 1504-1505, (diameter: 120 cm)  Uffizi, Florence  (Wikipedia public domain photo)

Tondo, short for rotondo, is a round painting or sculptural relief. Doni is the name of the man who ordered it.

It is the only easel painting by Michelangelo that has survived, one of his few tries with the brush before Pope Julius ordered him to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—all three thousand square feet of it.
At work on this “little” picture was “a Hercules at the spinning wheel”, as the French novelist Stendhal put it.

At first glance, you might think it is just another Holy Family picture, like this one, painted three years later by Raphael:

The Holy Family (1507) by Raphael (Wikipedia Public domain photo)

But glance again. The Virgin is reaching upwards and backwards to take hold of the Child that St. Joseph, kneeling behind her, is handing over her shoulder.  Why such a strange contortion?
And what are those naked youths doing in the background? What do they mean?

It’s an allegory, said some: the Virgin stands for the Church and the nudes in the background represent prophetic figures.

Others, just back from theology class, declared the nudes “symbols of mankind ante Legem [before the divine Law was given], Mary and Joseph, of mankind sub Lege, and Jesus, of mankind sub gratia [with God's grace after the Revelation].”   They might be angels too, or allusions to primordial life or to baptism.

To Walter Pater, the nineteenth-century English art critic, the nude youths were like “fauns of a Dionysian orgy” and symbols of paganism; they stood in contrast [some contrast!] to the figures in the foreground, which symbolize Christianity.

But no one knows for sure.

In any case, most people, starting with Angelo Doni who ordered the painting, didn’t like it much.

Portrait of Angelo Doni (1506) by Raphael (Wikipedia public domain photo)

That may have been why he was slow to pay Michelangelo (see that story here) and why he took the painting out of its ornate frame and put in another one by Lorenzo di Credi.

“The play of the arrangement of limbs ruins the impression; the idyll of parental felicity becomes a gymnastic exercise,”  complained one critic [Justi].

“The problem of the contorted position isn’t completely resolved…With sentiments of this kind, nobody ought to paint a Holy Family”, wrote Jakob Burckhardt, the Renaissance historian.

Victorian art critics were put off by the Virgin’s bare, masculine arms, too, as well as by the immodest view of the Baby.

The painting is odd in other ways. There’s something confusing about the perspective: the Holy Family is seen from one point of view and the nudes in the background from another. Michelangelo put a gray strip between the parts of the picture to hide the discrepancy. Why such a complication?
One theory is that this was done to accommodate the painting to the place at Doni’s where it was going to be hung.

But all these peculiarities are welcomed by art historians: “This odd articulation of the picture’s perspective—and even more, …the spiral disposition of the Virgin—ought to make us consider the Tondo Doni the starting point of Mannerism,” wrote Ettore Camesasca. “And the work contains the germ of everything that makes the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel unique…The Madonna is a sister of the Delphic Sibyl; the youth half-concealed by Joseph’s shoulder is a forerunner of one of the nudes of the Sistine ceiling.”

The Delphic Sibyl (1510)
Fresco, 350 x 380 cm., in the Cappella Sistina, Vatican (Wikipedia public domain photo)

The colors are particularly bright and must have been a surprise to the people who knew only Michelangelo’s sculpture. “[They] would have aroused the enthusiasm of Ingres”, says Camesesca.

It isn’t an oil painting.  It was made with “the usual Italian mixed technique of the period: drawing on a plaster ground, a thin layer of green earth, in covering resin, and a graduated heightening with white in tempera. The overpainting is done with transparent resin, except in the flesh parts, which are painted in pure tempera.”  (Ludwig Goldscheider)

Michelangelo never worked in oils. He must have envied Raphael and Titian for their great paintings in that medium. Remember: the famous Virgins of Leonardo and Raphael and Correggio were not yet painted in 1504, when Michelangelo did the Tondo Doni. Botticelli’s were the ones he might have studied. Actually, this tondo looks more like a painted version of his tondo reliefs of the same years:

The Tondo Taddei (1504) (Creative Commons license at Wikipedia)

The frame for the Tondo Doni was designed by Michelangelo too, or at least approved by him.

The Tondo Doni in its original frame (published at Wikipedia)

Besides some fully-sculptured heads in relief, a grotesque mask, vines and other ornamental features, it bears the arms (those making up the family coat-of-arms) of Angelo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi, his wife. The painting was probably commissioned on the occasion of their wedding in 1503 or 1504.

See the frame and some excellent photos showing how a reproduction was made.

My sources were: La obra pictórica completa de Miguel Angel in the Clásicos del arte series published by Noguer-Rizzoli Editores, Barcelona. Notes by Ettore Camesasca

Michelangelo: Paintings, Sculptures, Architecture by Ludwig Goldscheider, Phaidon,
1957

Lives of the Artists, by Giorgio Vasari, first published in 1555.

..

Michelangelo vs. Titian

Titian was the greatest painter of Venice and maybe the greatest of the whole Renaissance.

Titian ((1490–1576) by himself, in the  Prado Museum, Madrid (a Wikimedia Commons photo released by The Yorck Project)

He and Michelangelo met once. Giorgio Vasari arranged the meeting.

Titian showed them his latest picture—a nude Danaë—and “naturally, as one would do with the artist present, we praised it,” says Vasari.

Those old-timers could be pretty eloquent. Michelangelo probably told Titian the Danaë was a magnificent painting and Titian scoffed and said he was much too kind, it was a mere trifle. Then Michelangelo, getting inspired, maybe called him the greatest painter in Italy and Titian replied that he was just a poor apprentice who tried his best but produced clumsy results; not like Michelangelo, who was a real painter. Whereupon Michelangelo in his best confession style would have retorted that he was no painter, just a bungling sculptor, God pity him–and so on.
The three said goodbye, no doubt with brotherly embraces and promises to repeat the honor and the enjoyment.

Then afterwards, on the way back to the hotel, Michelangelo and Vasari, with their masks off, shook their sour faces and said it was a pity Titian didn’t know how to paint. Or rather, didn’t know how to draw.

“I like the man’s style and his coloring,” Michelangelo told Vasari, “but it is a great pity that in Venice they don’t learn to draw well from the beginning and pursue their studies with more method. I tell you, if Titian had been helped by art and design as much as he was by nature—for the man has exceptional talent—no one would have been able to beat him, because he has a fine spirit and a captivating style. Really.”
And Vasari agreed. “If an artist has not drawn a great deal and studied carefully selected ancient and modern works, he can’t work from memory or enhance what he copies from life, and so give his work the grace and perfection of art which are beyond the reach of nature, some of whose aspects tend to be less than beautiful.”

Were they reworking their old prejudices about Venetian artists or did they really see faults ascribable to bad drawing in the Danaë? Here she is:

Danaë (128 × 178 cm) by Titian, now in the Prado Museum, Madrid (a Wikimedia Commons photo released by The Yorck Project)

See Titian at His Best

See Titian at His Best

..

The Queen of Sheba by Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain’s painting, The  Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, catches the feel of morning like few other paintings.

The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648, by Claude Gellée, called Le Lorrain (1600—1682)
canvas 148.6 x 193.7 The National Gallery of London (public domain photo)

See close-ups at the webpage of the National Gallery here.

He painted many harbors with the rising sun opening the morning mist and flashing on the waves.   He made them the backdrops of famous myths and Bible stories, which sometimes seem arbitrary additions.
But here the story and the setting serve each other perfectly. The picture combines the glory of morning and the excitement of a new day with the thrill of setting out on an adventure and the anticipation of happiness.

The Queen of Sheba is about to embark on a trip to Jerusalem, where she will meet the great Solomon, King of Israel. She had heard of his  wisdom and wanted to judge for herself.  Some lines of The Song of Songs seem to speak of a love between the two monarchs.

She descends the palace steps and receives the gallant goodbyes and well-wishes of her noble friends before stepping onto the royal rowboat, cushioned with colorful tapistries.  The rowers watch the great lady approach; their captain stands with outstretched hand to help her board.

Her handsome little ship waits at the entrance to the harbor, its sails soon to unfold and billow. The flags, which blow seaward, show that the wind is favorable.  In the foreground  two of the Queen’s servants load a pretty trunk onto another rowboat,  which others begin to free from its moorings.  The momentous voyage, like the new day of so much promise, is about to begin.

Of course the Queen of Sheba didn’t live in a seventeenth-century palace with Roman ruins lying around. And she didn’t sail out of a harbor with medieval towers for charm. It’s all make-believe, elaborated in the quiet of the painter’s studio with the memory of a  sunrise in his head and heart.

Though down at the dock Claude made sketches and took notes.  In his scenes with distant views he worked hard to get the tones of color and brightness just right, not only for the objects at different distances but for the very air.  The critic Lawrence Gowing says this:
“Claude developed the habit of drawing from nature in pen and wash…He went out to the countryside in the morning and evening and mixed a sequence of colors to correspond with the series of tones he observed from the middle ground to the greatest distance. He then took them home for use in the appropriate parts of the picture that was waiting on his easel. Both mixing opaque colors and matching them to nature were in his time most unconventional procedures.” Paintings in the Louvre,  Ed. Stuart, Tabori and Change, New york, 1987

The tones seem clearly differentiated in this view of an idyllic landscape with a morning mist.

Hagar and the Angel, 1646 (public domain photo)
52.7x 43.8
The National Gallery, London

Read more about Claude.

Engraving after a self portrait of Claude Lorrain (public domain photo)

..