Reviews #15
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504 (Nov. 9, 2024 – Feb. 16, 2025)
The Royal Academy of Arts, London
Reviewed by Nigel Ip (Print Quarterly)
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The 'Taddei Tondo'), Royal Academy of Arts, London. Bequeathed by Sir George Beaumont, 1830. Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London, Photographer: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with Royal Collection Trust and the National Gallery, London
Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’), The National Gallery, London. Purchased with a special grant and contributions from the Art Fund, The Pilgrim Trust, and through a public appeal organised by the Art Fund, 1962. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with Royal Collection Trust and the National Gallery, London
Bastiano da Sangallo, after Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Battle of Cascina (‘The Bathers’), c. 1542. Holkham Hall, Norfolk, Collection of the Earl of Leicester. By kind permission of the Earl of Leicester and the Trustees of Holkham Estate. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with Royal Collection Trust and the National Gallery, London
At the age of 21, a young Raphael left Perugia for the city of Florence, arriving sometime around October 1504. Michelangelo's David had only just been installed in front of the Palazzo della Signoria (present-day Palazzo Vecchio), while the Mona Lisa remained a work in progress in Leonardo da Vinci's workshop. Yet something compelled Raphael to stay for the next four years before ultimately residing in Rome.
Featuring 45 objects across three rooms, the Royal Academy of Arts’ exhibition recounts the artistic events that serendipitously brought all three artists into contact with each other for a period of about two years. The first room places Michelangelo’s unfinished Taddei Tondo - owned by the Royal Academy - in the context of Raphael’s experiments with Madonna and Child compositions. The second is a solo display highlighting Leonardo’s so-called Burlington House Cartoon, the first time it has returned home since 1962, when it was put up for sale and acquired by the National Gallery. Meanwhile, the third room examines the two monumental fresco commissions intended to decorate the newly-built Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, assembling a wealth of drawings related to Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, neither of which ever saw painted completion.
Raphael’s memory of the Taddei Tondo was surprisingly long-lasting. He would have seen it in the house of his Florentine patron Taddeo Taddei and a double-sided sheet from Chatsworth features his outline drawing of the tondo on its recto. He was especially taken by the Christ Child’s twisting posture, adapting it for his painting of the Bridgewater Madonna (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh). One related sheet of exploratory compositional studies shows the influence of Leonardo’s sketches, in which he devises various forms of interaction between the Madonna and Child, some of which emerge as completed paintings well into his late career. In contrast to the Michelangelo drawings on display, which consist of three very early copies after Giotto and two others connected to the Taddei Tondo, drawn with precise, layered cross-hatching, Raphael’s Madonna and Child studies reveal his more carefree approach to pen and ink.
Returning to Leonardo, the Burlington House Cartoon is a large-scale example of his Marian subjects at play. There is no evidence of having been pricked or incised for transfer, leading some to believe it may have functioned as a presentation drawing instead of a working cartoon. Following this line of inquiry, the curators have boldly proposed that the Burlington House Cartoon could be the very same cartoon described by Giorgio Vasari as having been exhibited in Santissima Annunziata, where ‘men and women, young and old, continued for two days to flock for a sight of it… in order to gaze at the marvels of Leonardo’, traditionally believed to have occurred in 1501 with a similar cartoon that featured the infant St John playing with a lamb. This significant event demonstrated how the public attitude towards drawings as potentially self-sufficient works of art, not just expendable preparatory media, was starting to change, thus contributing to a rise in collectors of artists’ drawings.
The general theory being proposed is that Vasari’s reliance on second-hand sources may have confused two of Filippino Lippi’s commissions, one of which is traditionally believed (without documentary proof) to have been reassigned to Leonardo. As a result, they believe the cartoon was made around 1506-08 as a proposal for an altarpiece intended for the Sala del Gran Consiglio, which was eventually reassigned to Fra Bartolomeo in November 1510. Unfortunately, no surviving documents suggest Leonardo was ever hired by the Signoria to work on such an altarpiece.
Leonardo’s employment to paint the Battle of Anghiari is well established, however, having been commissioned by the Signoria on 3 October 1503. Michelangelo was approached a year later to work on the Battle of Cascina. Popular discourse tends to sensationalise this art-historical episode as a ‘competition’ between the two artists, which is incredibly misleading. Rather than fighting for the same wall space, their respective commissions were planned for different parts of the wall, probably side-by-side.
This ‘competition’ reveals their diverging visions of art, rather than their supposed personal slights. As the exhibited drawings reveal, Leonardo devoted his attention to studying expressive emotion in living creatures and their physiognomy, while Michelangelo championed the beauty of the male nude. For Leonardo most of the drawings are studies of horses in movement using everything from chalks and charcoal to pen and ink. For Michelangelo, his highly developed nude studies show an interest in the internal workings of the human body.
Although the frescoes never fully manifested in paint, their monumental cartoons had an almost immediate impact on the artists who came to see them and inspired an array of copies and derivatives. To give visitors some idea of their scale, the curators have reproduced at full size the outlines of the Bathers scene at one end of the room. We are also treated to a reunion of two famous copies of Leonardo and Michelangelo’s compositions from Holkham Hall and the Louvre, allowing us to speculate on their visual impact and probable placement as a pair.
Raphael certainly saw both cartoons in situ. In a sheet of metalpoint studies (Ashmolean, Oxford), he copied the Fight for the Standard in one corner and the heads of two of the horses in another. What is most revealing, however, is an additional sketch of the back end of a horse, which can be traced to Leonardo’s black-chalk drawing of a cavalcade in the exhibition. This proves that Raphael had direct access to Leonardo’s drawings. He also did a free interpretation of the Bathers theme.
This is a stupendous exhibition for Renaissance aficionados and drawings enthusiasts. The visitor experience is surprisingly light, given how much context surrounds the changing artistic tastes of the Florentine public, the new claims about the Burlington House Cartoon, and the political events that birthed the two fresco commissions. In fact, the visual links being made within carefully curated groups of works render those facts and figures almost subsidiary to the learning experience of the viewer. There can be no doubt that this is one of most accessible and informative exhibitions on Renaissance art in recent years.
