Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci are two of the world's all-time champions of Art. We are all underwhelmed by dogfights... state-of-origin football... Android v Apple... Coke v Pepsi. But this artistic dogfight is serious... it's getting up there with the Holden v Ford fracas.
The queues of people crowding around the Mona Lisa in Le Louvre turns art appreciation into a joke. The amount charged for a glimpse of the Sistine Chapel in Rome makes financial planning a nightmare. The people have spoken... the best two artists are Michelangelo and Leonardo. But who is best? Read on to find out.
Today, we visited Amboise... another beautiful French village... on the Loire River... to see where Leonardo spent the last 3 years of his life... he died at age 67. Michelangelo died at the at age 90 years in Rome... and spent most of his declining years in Florence... his place of birth.
Neither artist ever married... Michelangelo had one torrid love affair and one platonic attachment... Leonardo at age 24 was charged... but not convicted... with sodomy... this was a convenient bit of treachery used frequently in politics in the 16th century. Perhaps there was no conviction because a co-defendant was related to the powerful Medici family.
Michelangelo had a passion for sculpture... with marble... and only painted or mucked around with military commissions when those in power forced him. Leonardo suffered attention deficit... and looked for excuses to change his commissions before they were completed. Michelangelo was the crusty old codger... usually fighting with someone over something. Leonardo was urbane... the life of any party... always willing to show some of the interesting things he was thinking about... up to a point... he wrote his notes in code... mirror reverse ... just in case someone was looking over his shoulder.... or perhaps because he was left handed and that was easier.
Both men worked alone... nearly all the time... and didn't build the art factories that other leading artists of the day employed to churn out works under their brand. There are marvellous stories of Michelangelo inventing a hat that held a candle so that he could paint the Sistine Chapel roof through the darkness of night.
Leonardo tended to encourage his patrons to specify projects that extended engineering and metallurgical limits of the day... brass castings bigger than ever before... competing frescos in oils... he was an inventor first and foremost... and an artist as his second love. Michelangelo was an artist... full stop. If his patron started to specify how the work of art was to look... or the materials from which it was built... he would walk out of the room... often leaving Popes and Princes nonplussed... they had no experience of their wishes being ignored... but his rudeness only seemed to increase the demand for his services.
Michelangelo and Leonardo were not good friends. In Michelangelo's mind, Leonardo did not honour his promises to patrons... didn't produce enough good work to be taken seriously... was a bit of a 'smarty'. Leonardo had plenty of admirers and didn't work at forming a relationship with the 'workaholic' Michelangelo.
In my humble opinion, Michelangelo won the artistic dogfight... but history has treated Leonardo with more reverence... because he advanced the 'scientific method' with living examples. Unlike many scholars of his time, he did not accept conventional wisdom... he questioned it... criticised it... extended technical and philosophical skills beyond those existing. While Michelangelo had competing artists, Leonardo had no contemporary who churned out new ideas... improved current machinery... questioned so many underlying values in his society.
In his declining years, Leonardo was given an estate to use as his own... on condition that the property owner was allowed to sit and talk to him. This is the property we visited today and the owner was the King of France.
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