Their relationship has been talked about ever since. How often did they meet? Were they so very different? But there is just one account of a meeting between the two. It shows them barely on speaking terms.
Things were certainly not going to go well after 1504, when they were put in direct competition with each other. In 1503, Leonardo had been commissioned to paint a battle scene - The Battle of Anghiari – in the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. He was immensely famous by this stage (the Mona Lisa was recently finished), and was the obvious choice for a project. But the young and rather dashing Michaelangelo began to muscle in. Leonardo had had to take part in a committee decision about where to place his famous sculpture, David, and it ended up in prime position on the square right outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Then the governing officials decided to invite Michaelangelo to paint another scene - The Battle of Cascina - for the very same room in the Palazzo.
The artist Giorgio Vasari gives us an insight into the relations between the men in his Life of Leonardo, written in around 1560. He tells us: “There was great dislike between Leonardo and Michelangelo, and the competition between the two was to blame for Michelangelo leaving Florence... When Leonardo heard this, he also left and went to France, where the king owned several works of his and was very fond of him.”
Vasari’s might seem to suggest that the artists fled from each other. In fact, Michaelangelo was invited by the Pope to work in Rome in 1505, and the next year Leonardo was summoned to return to Milan. But they may have jumped at the chances nonetheless. And their joint project remained unfinished.
It seems to have been before this time, however, in Florence, that our meeting took place, (according to Jonathan Jones in his book The Lost Battles). The single source for the story is an anecdote in a manuscript known as the Codice Magliabecchiano, apparently written in the 1540s and attributed to Bernardo Vecchietti, which contains surveys of the lives of famous artists, old and new.
We are in a public meeting place at the Palazzo Spini Feroni, near Santa Trinita. Leonardo and his friend Giovanni di Gavina arrive on the scene, encountering a gathering of men, who are discussing a passage in Dante. According to the account: They called Leonardo over and told him to explain it to them. And when Michelangelo happened to pass by and was called by one of them, Leonardo replied, "Michelangelo will declare it himself." Michelangelo, thinking that he had said this to mock him, replied angrily, "You too should be able to explain it, for you made a drawing of a model to cast it in bronze, and could not cast it, and out of shame left it alone." And having said this, he cut them off and left, whereupon Leonardo remained, blushing.
To understand the insult thrown by Michaelangelo, we need to go back to an incident by then a few years old, that was obviously still a talking point. Leonardo was known for numerous unfinished projects – as Vasari comments: “He would have achieved great things as a scholar in the sciences if he had been less fickle and changeable. But he undertook many things and very soon abandoned those he had begun” – but on this occasion, circumstances went beyond his control.
Leonardo was commissioned to provide a bronze equestrian monument for Ludovico Sforza in Milan in the 1480s, and he planned something grand – and huge. The finished piece would be 20 ft high and bigger than any bronze statue had ever been. Leonardo worked on different designs and models for years, and by 1493 had produced a full-size model. But he never had the chance to finish it, because with the French threatening invasion, the Sforzas used the bronze that Leonardo has stockpiled to make cannons for the defence of the city. In the event, the French did invade in 1499, and had fun using the model horse as target practice.
This very public failure must have become a touchy subject for Leonardo, so the insult was telling (if not very original). Vasari remarks: “as envy often causes people to judge maliciously, there were those who thought that Leonardo had begun it like other of his works so that it would not be completed.”
But that wasn’t quite the end of the encounter. The manuscript’s account then goes on to say that Michaelangelo threw one more insult as he left, along the lines of: “and to think you were believed by those castrated Milanese cockerels!”
So much can be, and has been, read into these few lines of manuscript. Jonathan Jones interprets this last insult as a reference to Leonardo’s ambiguous sexuality. And in order to explain Michaelangelo’s anger, novelist Stephanie Storey imagines an earlier encounter when she has Leonardo pointedly humiliate him in public, for no apparent reason other than that he dresses scruffily.
Anyway, after 1506 Leonardo returned to visit Florence at least once but he never lived there again. He and Michaelangelo couldn’t avoid each other for good, though. In 1513 Leonardo went to Rome to work for the Pope at a time when both Michelangelo and Raphael were there as well. There is no specific record of them meeting again, but presumably they remained well aware of each other’s work, and Leonardo will have had the opportunity to enter the Sistine Chapel and inspect – perhaps with grudging appreciation - its fresh new ceiling.
https://nicofranz.art/en/leonardo-da-vinci/anonimo-magliabechiano-the-life-of-leonardo-da-vinci-1545
See also:
When Mahler met Freud
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