‘Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael’
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...
