Lecture 2 - The Birth of the High Renaissance

The Birth of the High Renaissance, Wednesday, 5 February will continue with an exploration of the often-tense relationship between Leonardo and Michelangelo as both men worked on a series of remarkable projects. First, there was Michelangelo’s innovative sculpture of David which became the symbol of a resurgent city, one which had cast off the power of the Medici. About the time Michelangelo first started work on this masterpiece c.1501 - 02, Leonardo may have either just completed or was in course of creating a large ‘cartoon’ of a Holy Family, which may or may be the now famous depiction in this exhibition, the ‘Burlington House Cartoon’. He was recorded still at work on such an image just as Michelangelo finished his David in 1503 - 04 - though recent opinion suggests that Leonardo’s masterpiece may date from even later that decade. In any case, by 1503 Leonardo had been commissioned by the commune to begin work on a fresco in the just built, new and very large Sala del Gran Consiglio in the city’s town hall (now known as the Palazzo Vecchio), the theme to be The Battle of Anghiari, a Florentine victory over Milan fought in 1440. Fresh from the installation of David outside the town hall, Michelangelo was also commissioned to paint a Battle scene for the same great chamber as Leonardo’s work, this time The Battle of Cascina, fought against Pisa in 1364. Leonardo at least began to paint his fresco, but he abandoned the work and left the city, his work later obscured by frescoes installed by Vasari, while Michelangelo never began to paint his fresco. What we do have are two records of the intended frescoes which give us a sense of their overall design, but more importantly we have large numbers of drawings produced by both artists which allows us to see them literally ‘at work’ as the imaginative mind’s eye translates via the hand the genius of both men.