In an extraordinary feat of curatorial alchemy, a new exhibition at London’s Royal Academy brings together the towering talents of the Italian Renaissance – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael – transporting viewers back to the feverish creativity of early 16th century Florence. “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c.1504” offers an unprecedented window into a pivotal moment when these brilliant artists briefly overlapped in the same city, spurring each other to new heights of innovation and virtuosity.
A Moment in Time: Florence 1504
The year is 1504, a date that resounds like a thunderclap in art history. In a frigid January, the 30-year-old Michelangelo unveils his colossal marble David in Florence’s political heart, a potent symbol of the city-state’s defiant independence. Months later, an ambitious young painter named Raphael arrives from Urbino, eager to make his mark. And Leonardo da Vinci, at 52 already renowned but still restlessly experimenting, is absorbed in his haunting portrait of a silk merchant’s wife – the Mona Lisa.
For a tantalizing interlude, these three luminaries of the Renaissance inhabit the same small patch of Europe, acutely aware of each other’s genius and competing to outdo themselves and their rivals. The exhibition immerses us in this electric moment through a bravura gathering of 40 key works – paintings, sculptures, drawings – that let us experience the stunning breakthroughs of 1504 through the eyes of the artists themselves.
Michelangelo’s Torsion and Tondos
At the exhibition’s core are the three giants’ reactions to Michelangelo’s David and to his innovative circular compositions or tondos, unprecedented explorations of coiled, spiraling energy. From Raphael’s swift pen-and-ink sketch of David’s muscled back to his luminous Terranuova Madonna seemingly spun out of Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, we see the younger artist eagerly absorbing and transmuting the Florentine master’s revolutionary ideas.
By putting Leonardo’s huge, spectral drawing of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in dialogue with Michelangelo’s unfinished Taddei Tondo, centerpiece of the stone relief, the curators tease out the older artist’s fascination with Michelangelo’s swirling figures and baby Jesus’ twisting pose.
The Buonarroti’s ricocheting influence travels in many directions, illuminating how even a genius learns from his peers. It’s an intricate dance of cross-pollination and one-upmanship that the exhibition charts with concision and brio.
The Marvels of Renaissance Draftsmanship
An essential complement to “Florence, c.1504” is an equally prodigious exhibition, “Drawing the Italian Renaissance,” running concurrently across St James’s Park. Culled from the Royal Collection’s miraculous trove of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael sketches, it schools the eye in the astounding originality and pinpoint delicacy of Italian Renaissance draftsmanship.
This is art in action – vigorous black chalk nudes, impossibly refined silver-point portraits, muscular red-chalk torsos. Techniques leap forward in real time, whether it’s the atmospheric sfumato of Leonardo’s landscapes or Michelangelo’s forceful male nudes, seemingly carved in light and shade. The drawings’ concentrated power and economy remind us that these artists were inventing the language of Western figurative art from the ground up.
In one corner, Leonardo turns a bear’s paw into an imaginary machine, while Annibale Carracci doodles an indignant lobster grappling with a nutcracker. These flashes of wit and vision carry us into the artists’ private workshops, and the curators’ shrewd, intimate labels make us feel as if we’re eavesdropping on the birth of the modern hand and mind.
A Triumph of Curatorial Imagination
Together, these two exhibitions amount to a thrilling master class in looking, an invitation to enter imaginatively into the lives of these peerless artists and track the flow of images and ideas that ricocheted between them. They mark a triumph of curatorial intelligence and tact – celebration of the happy accident that briefly brought Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael together in one small city and a rumination on the alchemy of rivalry and inspiration.
For lovers of Renaissance art, this is a once-in-a-lifetime convergence, an opportunity to immerse oneself in the headwaters of Western painting, drawing and sculpture. But even for the uninitiated, the sheer pyrotechnics of Leonardo’s coiling compositions, Michelangelo’s pneumatic figures and Raphael’s limpid grace are enough to leave one reeling. We emerge dazzled by the infinite possibilities of chalk, ink and oil, and by the prodigious minds behind them.
In the end, what these exhibitions capture so beautifully is the living, breathing, jostling energy of Renaissance Florence, the sense of a city and a time when virtuosity was in the very air and stone or paper could come so sublimely, shockingly alive. Wandering out of the Royal Academy, we may feel that we too have been, for an incandescent moment, citizens of that charmed time, privy to the glorious clamor of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo spurring each other on to the heights of genius.
