This is a tidy little exhibition bringing together works by the three giants of the High Renaissance, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael. First I’ll explain the layout and contents of the exhibition, then explain why I didn’t like it very much.
The exhibition is hosted in the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries, round the back of the Royal Academy (RA) building, on the first floor – the same space which until recently was hosting the surprisingly enjoyable exhibition of Ukrainian Modernism (which I much preferred).
Exhibition premise
The basic idea is that at the turn of the 16th century, the three titans of the Italian Renaissance – Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael – briefly crossed paths, competing for the attention of the most powerful patrons in Republican Florence.
To be more precise, on 25 January 1504 Florence’s most prominent artists gathered to advise on an appropriate location for Michelangelo’s nearly finished statue of David. Among them was Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) and Michelangelo di Buonarroti himself (1475 to 1564). Both had only recently returned to their native city of Florence. A little later that year there is some evidence that their younger contemporary, Raphael da Urbino (1483 to 1520) turned up in the city.
So by picking this date, the curators are able to cobble together a display of 40 or so paintings, pictures, sketches and drawings, books and notebooks made around the same time, in order to compare the work of the three Renaissance Big Cheeses at more or less the same moment in time (give or take a few years).
Room 1. The Taddei Tondo
The exhibition opens with Michelangelo’s only marble sculpture in the UK, his celebrated ‘Taddei Tondo’ from 1504 to 1505, which is owned by the RA. A tondo is a round painting or relief. By the end of the fifteenth century they had become extremely popular and were a common feature of many Florentine palazzos.
The ‘Taddei Tondo’ is one of the most important examples of its type. Michelangelo worked on around the time he was finished the David i.e. 1504 to 1505 and it is accompanied here by some of its related preparatory drawings. It was, characteristically, left unfinished, with the smooth bodies emerging from rough-hewn, pockmarked marble.
The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The ‘Taddei Tondo’) by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1504 to 1505) Royal Academy of Arts. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates
The Raphael connection comes in when the curators claim that the relief made a big impact on Raphael, as can be seen in his Bridgewater Madonna (1507 to 1508) and the Esterházy Madonna (around 1508; see below), both of which are displayed nearby. The room also contains a tondo painting by Piero di Cosimo, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist, completed a few years before Michelangelo’s, by 1500.
Room 2. The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist
The central gallery is devoted to Leonardo’s ‘Burlington House Cartoon’, made around 1506 to 1508. This is a silly name for one of the most sublime images in Western art, which is more accurately titled ‘The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist’. It is deservedly given a room to itself, darkened and with a bench in front so you can sit and gaze in awe.
The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’) by Leonardo da Vinci (1506 to 1508) The National Gallery, London
The only slight drawback to this setup is that you have been able to see the exact same picture any time for the last 60 years hanging at the National Gallery, half a mile down the road where it will doubtless be returned when this show closes in February next year.
All exhibitions have, to some extent, to justify themselves, to propose a particular theme, idea or interpretation. For this exhibition the curators claim to be putting forward an entirely new interpretation of this world-famous image, thus:
The purpose of the cartoon has puzzled scholars for generations. We propose here, for the first time, that Leonardo made it around 1506 to 1508 as a proposal for an altarpiece for the newly built Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, originally commissioned from Filippino Lippi (1457 to 1504). The altarpiece’s commission had not been reassigned following Filippino’s death in 1504. Having been summoned to Milan in 1506, Leonardo may have presented the ‘Burlington House Cartoon’ to the wondering gaze of the curious public upon his return to Florence in 1507. He eventually settled in Milan more permanently in 1508, after which the Signoria turned to Fra Bartolommeo (1472 to 1517). The latter began work on the panel but, following the return from exile of the Medici, formerly the most powerful family in Florence, never finished it; by 1513, he had completed only the monochrome underpainting.
Obviously none of us ordinary gallery goers has a clue whether is true or not but it’s symptomatic of the detailed academic minutiae which every scrap of Renaissance art is usually accompanied and stifled by.
Room 3. Battle murals
The two older Titans, Michelangelo and Leonardo, are most directly compared in the third and final room. In 1503 the Republican government of Florence had commissioned Leonardo to paint a monumental mural, ‘The Battle of Anghiari’ (fought between Florence and Milan in 1440), in the city’s newly constructed council hall, the Palazzo della Signoria (nowadays known as the Old Palace or Palazzo Vecchio).
In late August or early September 1504, around the time Michelangelo’s ‘David’ was being installed on the ringhiera in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine authorities also asked Michelangelo to paint a battle scene, not just in the same building, but in the same room as the Leonardo one (the Salone dei Cinquecento), on the opposite wall. Michelangelo was to paint The Battle of Cascina (fought in July 1364 between troops of Florence and Pisa). Key fact: neither of the murals was ever finished.
An the end wall of this, the biggest of the three rooms, the curators have created a life-size outline of a central composition of the Michelangelo work, namely a group of soldiers who’d been swimming and bathing in a nearby river when the enemy forces attacked, and are now seen scrambling out of the river and donning their armour in a panic. Nearby there’s a painting by Bastiano da Sangallo which shows what Michaelangelo’s composition was aiming towards. Here’s the Sangallo:
The Battle of Cascina (‘The Bathers’) by Bastiano da Sangallo, after Michelangelo Buonarroti (1542) By kind permission of the Earl of Leicester and the Trustees of Holkham Estate
And here’s the curators’ wall-sized outline of it:
Diagram of The Battle of Cascina (‘The Bathers’) by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1504 to 1506) after the copy by Bastiano da Sangallo, reproduced to the wall-sized scale of the original cartoon (photo by the author)
Alas there doesn’t seem to be the same documentation for the Leonardo composition. If there had been, then a moment’s reflection suggests the curators missed a trick by not recreating the intended effect of the Salone dei Cinquecento and having white-lined schematic drawings of each of the compositions on facing walls, as the Florentine authorities intended.
What the room very much does have is more preparatory sketches and drawings by both masters, for their respective murals.
In fact this is very much the point or content of the exhibition: there may well be six or seven paintings (2 by Raphael, 1 by Piero di Cosimo, 1 by Bastiano da Sangallo), the massive marble Tondo and the huge Leonardo cartoon – but numerically, the majority of the exhibits are sketches and drawings. I counted 36 in total, 16 by Michelangelo, 11 by Leonardo and 9 by Raphael.
To put it another way, given that the Tondo is owned and displayed by the RA fairly often, given that the Leonardo cartoon is usually on display at the National Gallery anyway, then the really distinctive thing about this exhibition is the sketches and drawings many of which, was are told, were loaned by His Majesty The King from the Royal Collection.
They are all good, some of them are breath-taking, and yet… and yet… Well, I’ll explain below. Here’s an example from each of the tre formaggi:
Drawings
Raphael
According to the curators:
Raphael had come to Florence to learn. His copy of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ is remarkable not only for its unusual perspective – showing the sculpture from behind – but also its high degree of finish. To achieve a greater sense of natural proportion, Raphael slightly adjusted the size of David’s hands and feet, making them ever so slightly smaller than in Michelangelo’s sculpture.
‘David’ by Raphael, after Michelangelo Buonarroti (1505 to 1508) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Michelangelo
‘Male Nude’ by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1505 to 1506) Teylers Museum, Haarlem
Leonardo
According to the curators:
Leonardo made several drawings to develop the motif of the rearing horse of the captain of the Florentine forces, Piergiampaolo Orsini, seen on the right of the central scene of the ‘Battle of Anghiari’. While the horse’s pose echoes that of the horse seen on the left, Leonardo continued to experiment with the position of the horse’s head and legs.
‘A Rearing Horse’ by Leonardo da Vinci (1503 to 1505) © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 / Royal Collection Trust
Why I don’t like the Italian Renaissance
1. Bleak and arid The backgrounds of classic Italian renaissance paintings are more often than not rocky and arid, stony, hot and bleak (see ‘The Battle of Cascina’ or Raphael’s ‘Virgin and Child’, below). All this contrasts with the tenderness and charm of medieval or Northern Renaissance art which abounds with flowers, bushes, trees, wheatfields and verdure of all kinds. Late medieval and northern art is softer, gentler and contains sweet and charming natural elements. To put it simply, there is grass in northern landscapes, there are daisies and recognisable flowers, bunny rabbits and deer.
2. Nature The Italian Renaissance saw a great flowering of interest in the human mind and body. Fair enough, but this focus on people tended to come at the expense of their natural backgrounds and landscape. In Italian Renaissance art the background is often a very standardised backdrop to the human figures, which is where the interest lies. By contrast, in the Northern Renaissance Man is integrated into the natural world. Medieval and Northern Renaissance art teems with details and decoration, overflows with life, which humans are a part of. For some reason Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow pops into my mind, where the dogs and the birds and the leafless bush in the foreground are just as important as the people. Italian Renaissance art radiates a sterile perfection.
3. Human Northern Renaissance art depicts people in all their human ugliness. Italian Renaissance art tends to deal in idealised human forms and faces. I know that Michelangelo and Leonardo did whole sketchbooks of gargoyles and grotesques (and some vivid human faces are on display here) but when it came to their finished paintings or sculptures they tended to depict ideals. The soldiers in ‘The Battle of Cascina’ (‘The Bathers’) aren’t individuals with individual quirkinesses, but depictions of types of emotion – fear, panic etc. Mary and Anne in Leonard’s huge cartoon have a seraphic, other-worldly beauty which is awe-inspiring and transcendental but not really human. The Virgin in the Raphael below is as empty and vapid as a portrait could possibly be. Compare and contrast, I don’t know, A Man and A Woman by the Early Netherlandish painter Robert Campin. The Campin is head and shoulders (pun intended) the more interesting work to look at.
4. Lols Which is why there is no humour in Italian Renaissance art. Everything is too perfect. Compare the humanity and humour in Breughel or Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling or Jan van Eyck.
5. Religiose Obviously medieval and northern Renaissance art is just as religious and as Catholic as Italian Renaissance art, but it manages to lend that belief a humanity. I find Italian Renaissance art too slick and perfect. You can see in it the beginning of hundreds of years and tens of thousands of religiose, sentimental Italian paintings, all fluttering angels and tearful saints.
6. Bambini and putti Nowhere is this more obvious than in the depictions of the pudgy baby Jesus. This exhibition includes a good example of the kind of thing I dislike, by that master of the vapid and empty, Raphael. The background is characteristically sterile. OK there are rows of trees but no flowers or signs of wildlife. It looks like a golf course with some purely decorative ruins thrown in for decorative effect. Mary’s face is a perfectly expressionless blank. And the baby Jesus is just one of the thousands and thousands of podgy infants which would, over the following centuries, come to infest so many Italian religious paintings and make them so intolerable.
‘The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist’ (‘The Esterhazy Madonna’) by Raphael (1508) Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
7. Snobbery For centuries a show-off knowledge of Renaissance art has been associated with upper-middle class pretentiousness. I’ve just read ‘A Room With A View’ by E.M. Forster which skewers the desperate snobbishness of a group of ghastly English tourists in Florence, competing like ferrets in a sack to demonstrate the fineness of their responses to Italian art, to name drop obscure Tuscan chapels which contain little-known but oh so influential masterpieces by Piero dell Something. Back to this exhibition, there is a strong vibe of one-up-manship and connoisseurship. It reminds me of wine tasting. You are just expected to know that this or that vineyard and this or that vintage are the right one, the approved one, the only one a gentleman would consider. I felt oppressed by the social pressure to rejoice in these Masterpieces of the Great Ones, whether or not I actually like them. Looking round it felt like the Sunday Times Rich List of exhibitions.
8. Reputations This is partly because it’s almost impossible to approach these works innocently. The reputations of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael overshadow them. You know these guys are really Big Players and so feel intimidated into having The Correct Response to Great Art, and feel a failure if you don’t have some life-changing experience. But it’s precisely this weight of expectation which prevents you from being taken by surprise, gripped and thrilled in the way the best art can.
9. Academic This isn’t helped by the very art history and scholarly tone of the commentary on the works. This comes over at points as pretty pedantic, dwelling on minute and academic aspects of the characters’ poses or the history of the tondo which feels like it’s missing the whole point of a work of art. Take the wall label about the Bridgewater Madonna. It tells us that:
Raphael copied the motif of the twisting Christ Child from Michelangelo’s ‘Taddei Tondo’
and used it as a model for his ‘Bridgewater Madonna’. While slightly changing the poses of both the Virgin and Child, creating a cautious tenderness between them as they are now looking at each other, he preserved the sense of movement so crucial to Michelangelo’s composition.
This is the purest form of academic art criticism, concerned with the minutiae of specific poses. I suppose this is enlightening for those who really care about minute differences between all these treatments of basically the same subject, but doesn’t really help you understand or enjoy the picture as a work of art.
I kept comparing this arid display with the astonishing Van Gogh exhibition currently on at the National Gallery down the road. You may or may not read the curator labels at the Van Gogh, but the paintings themselves grip you by the throat with the extraordinary exuberance of their artistry and technique, in a way which nothing here does.
Two conclusions
1. On its own terms, I didn’t find the show persuasive. The curators’ stated aim is to show us how Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael influenced each other. But somehow the two main displays – of the tondo and the battle murals – completely failed to do that. Was the influence on Raphael just to change the position of the Virgin’s arms? And I didn’t at all understand how the sketches by Michelangelo and Leonardo, despite being placed next to each other, demonstrated an actual influence, in either direction. They just looked like really good drawings done by two guys in two different styles.
Maybe it works better in the catalogue. The basic thesis of the show is very bookish and in a catalogue the curators can refer to numerous other works which they couldn’t get hold of for the physical exhibition.
To repeat myself, if the curators had selected a room with two big walls, and drawn life-sized diagrams of the two battle murals planned by Michelangelo and Leonardo on them, and then done a detailed comparison between them at all points – the different ways each artist chose their subject, set about the composition, depicted human faces and bodies and horses etc – I think I would have found that fascinating.
But, as I’ve mentioned, the Leonardo battle scene was conspicuous by its absence and I found all we did have – half a dozen Leonardo sketches for a composition I couldn’t see, mixed in with Michelangelo sketches for a composition which I could see – dissatisfying and even a bit confusing.
2. I dare say all the art on show here is, from an art scholarly point of view, top-of-the-range, Mayfair prices, Rich List masterpieces, but only the Leonardo cartoon and a handful of the drawings really cut through to me as works of art. Otherwise, objects like the paintings which are only included because Raphael had very subtly altered the angle of the arm of the Virgin compared to the Michelangelo original, or a tiny notebook in which Leonardo appears to have drawn a miniature copy of Michelangelo’s bathers, or a random tondo painting included simply to illuminate the influence of Michelangelo’s tondo sculpture – I can see how these would enthrall the scholars and, maybe, the really knowledgeable visitor – but I’m afraid it all left me cold.
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