Genius prefers and perhaps deserves a monopoly: Shakespeare had no competitors among his contemporaries. But what if the geniuses or genii — the plurality is such an embarrassment that I’m not even sure what to call them — come in pairs, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Verdi and Wagner, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Picasso and Bacon? Great artists are unique and therefore incomparable, but that doesn’t prevent them from resenting the incursion of rivals or snidely critiquing one another’s work.
The duel Jonathan Jones writes about began with an exchange of words, when the young, bumptious and priggish Michelangelo insulted Leonardo da Vinci in a Florentine street, perhaps accusing him of bastardy and sexual bestiality, as well as of ineffectually designing a gigantic horse that he lacked the technical skill to cast in bronze. Leonardo, so far as Jones can tell from his reconstruction of the spat, didn’t reply, but waited to take his revenge on Michelangelo’s most strenuously heroic image. During a debate about Michelangelo’s David, that proud icon of republican virtue, Leonardo sketched a parody of the figure, reducing the liberator to a muscled thug. He then suggested that when the statue was placed on display, its genitalia should be decently covered. The proposal, as Jones argues, was an act of emasculation, laughably hypocritical because it came from an artist whose anatomical drawings made detailed studies of the vulva and the elastic sphincter of the male anus. But when David was trundled out into the Piazza della Signoria, it did wear metal underpants — a thong of brass that supported a dainty, decent fringe of copper leaves.
It’s revealing that the dispute focused on David’s virility, since Jones believes that Michelangelo despised Leonardo’s filmy, dandified dress and his habit of androgynously blending male and female beauty.
When the two artists imagined the infancy of Christ, they produced very different versions of the family romance. Leonardo’s Jesus is petted by two maternal figures, and celebrated by a fetchingly effeminate Baptist; Michelangelo’s version restores the missing figure of Joseph and gives him paternal priority in the household.
The same innuendos pass back and forth between the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s stridently energetic male nudes. Jones calls Leonardo’s sly, witchy portrait the “hidden enemy” from whose seduction Michelangelo’s gyrating, immobilized statues try to flee. Yet she has the last laugh: “Without stirring from her chair, Lisa del Giocondo banishes Michelangelo’s men with a mocking smile.”
The imaginative battle culminated with two battle scenes, epic designs that commemorated Florentine victories over nearby city states. Leonardo was commissioned to decorate the council hall with a massive account of the combat at Anghiari, while Michelangelo, allocated another section of the same room, worked on a mural about the engagement with Pisan forces at Cascina. Both works have vanished, but Jones makes it clear that the real clash was between the two artists and their contending visions of the world. Michelangelo idealized and pacified the scene, concentrating on the limbering up of naked soldiers: war for him was a gymnasium, a training ground for body and mind. Leonardo’s battle was an obscene defamation of humanity, with scarred warriors rearing on horses that are as wild-eyed and eager for blood as their riders. The brown ink of the preparatory drawings makes the battlefield look like a “fecal pool.” The result, Jones imagines, must have been as shocking as Picasso’s Guernica — a conscious attack on the civic self-righteousness that Michelangelo sought to uphold.
The feud intuited by Jones enables him to show familiar works in a new and startling way. Images here don’t just converse with each other, as they’re meant to do on the walls of galleries, but engage in barbed hostilities. This slanging match defines the Renaissance, as his book’s subtitle claims, because competitiveness is a by-product of originality, that new and disruptive artistic aim which goaded individuals “to excel, which meant, literally, outdoing others.”
Jones writes well about the period’s intellectual novelty, though he’s aware of its ambiguous nature: Botticelli’s paintings convey a sense of the “new joy in the world,” but the cynicism of Machiavelli and the rapacity of warlords like Francesco Sforza — who employed Leonardo to design military hardware and to fortify his castle — demonstrate the new violence of a world driven by the individual’s quest for dominance.
There is sensuous finesse in Jones’ descriptions of Michelangelo’s stone flesh or of Leonardo’s pictorial conundrums, like the “serious joke” of the “eye-fooling space” in the Last Supper. At times he hyperventilates. He gets a little swoony in the Milanese refectory when he’s studying Leonardo’s decomposing mural: “If pigment on plaster could flutter, it would be fluttering ever so gently in the motions of air that seem to emanate from its depths.” And he totters from the strain of leaning backwards to look at the Sistine Chapel ceiling: what does it mean to say, “the unendingness of Michelangelo’s art is that of the way we experience the world”?
But the only serious fault of his fine, daring book is that it’s miserably under-illustrated. True, the battle murals that its title refers to are unviewable because they are lost. Even so, it’s disappointing to have Jones expect us to think about them rather than looking at the sketches he analyses. The omission is nowhere more tantalizing than in his reference to Masaccio’s depiction of Adam and Eve leaving Eden, copied by Michelangelo in red chalk. Adam has forgotten his fig leaf, and his genitals, according to Jones, are “robustly and somehow tragically portrayed.” A robustly tragic or tragically robust penis? Now that I really want to see!
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