Royal Academy of Arts 10:00
According to a bloke called Giorgio Vasari, sixteenth century art lovers queued for days just to catch a glimpse of the Leonardo da Vinci drawing that the RA’s got on show.
It was the Renaissance equivalent of a Yayoi Kusama infinity mirror room. Leonardo was a blockbuster renaissance artist, and so were Michelangelo and Raphael, two younger artists who were in the same city at the same time, competing for the same attention (and big money commissions). This show pits them against each other as rivals in the turbulent era of 1504 Florence, when Michelangelo’s ‘David’ was installed outside the Palazzo Vecchio, Leonardo was fighting for mural commissions and Raphael had shown up to crib from both of them.
There are three works at the heart of this show: the RA’s own Michelangelo tondo, the National Gallery’s Leonardo drawing and the National Galleries of Scotland’s Raphael painting of the Madonna and child.
The Taddei Tondo came first. The huge, circular marble composition is unfinished, only the Christ child and Virgin look complete, St John and the bird in his hand remain a mess of blurred, flurrying marks. The baby is twisted, turning away from his mother; he’s a long elongated presence in the centre of the image, giving the whole thing a swirling sense of movement and life.
It’s incredible to see them together, echoing each other, inverting and manipulating each other.
Raphael was obsessed with it, and he nicked the contorting baby for his painting of the Virgin and child. Raph’s wriggling tot faces the other way from Michelangelo’s, and stares up at his mother rather than recoiling from his cousin, but the influence and mimicry is obvious. The swirling movement remains, but this work is infinitely more tender and intimate.
And then Leonardo nicks that twisting baby too – or at least the RA implies as much – for his drawing of the virgin and child with St Anne and infant St John. It’s one of the most important, special, powerful works of art in the country. When I first saw it at the National Gallery I was awestruck, I stared at it for hours. It’s so mysterious and dark, so full of roughness and weirdness, but equally so full of precision and neatness. You could lose yourself in it for hours, obsessing over the details, the figures, the eyes. And right there in the middle is wriggly Christ, kicking out of his mum’s arms to bless his cousin. He gives the image movement, life, just like he does in the other two works. It’s incredible to see them together, echoing each other, inverting and manipulating each other.
The rest of the show is largely made up of drawings by Michelangelo and Leonardo for murals of battles, neither of which were completed. They’re intimate visions of masters figuring out their ideas, but they lack the wow power of the three main works. Instead, they’re here to back up an argument.
The thing is, you can normally see both the Leonardo drawing and the Michelangelo Tondo for free in London, and all the drawings loaned from the Royal Collection have been shown loads in recent years. Instead, the appeal here is in getting to watch an academic, art historical argument being played out on the walls of the RA, an exploration of the influences, relationships and rivalries of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael for a brief moment in time. It’s a great bit of art historical academia, but it’s loads better as an essay – with space for arguments, evidence, images – than as an exhibition.
