LONDON—Renaissance Florence comes to London as the artworks of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael transport viewers back to around 1504, when all three painters were in the Italian city.
Both Leonardo (1452–1519) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) were born in Florence, but each established themselves elsewhere: Leonardo in Milan and Michelangelo in Rome. Raphael (1483–1520) was born in Urbino. He traveled to Florence in 1504 because Leonardo and Michelangelo were working in the city.
The year 1504 in Florence started strong: Michelangelo was finishing his monumental marble “David.” On Jan. 25, the city’s eminent artists met to decide where best to display it.
The “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c. 1504” exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London explores the flurry of artistic endeavors that Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael undertook around 1504. It also delves into the rivalry between Leonardo and Michelangelo, their influence on Raphael, and to a lesser extent on each other.
The exhibition drawings alone give a snapshot of how the three artists observed the natural world and expressed man’s higher purpose.
‘The Burlington House Cartoon’
Mystery abounds in Leonardo’s “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist,” commonly known as “The Burlington House Cartoon.” The British Museum in London holds preparatory drawings for the cartoon, including a template for it. Scholars believe the cartoon is a presentation drawing for an unknown altarpiece that was never made. Although it isn’t known who commissioned it, it’s one of the finest Renaissance drawings. Due to its fragility, it’s rarely loaned from The National Gallery, London’s collection.The Royal Academy of Arts once owned the cartoon, which is named after its main building. Now, “The Burlington House Cartoon” is back on display at Burlington House.
One can only truly appreciate the mastery and magnitude of fine artworks such as “The Burlington House Cartoon” in person. Spread across eight sheets of linen-rag paper, the near-life-size presentation drawing in charcoal and white chalk measures a staggering 55 inches tall and 40 inches wide.
Taking a Closer Look
Leonardo sublimed a tender moment between Christ, the Virgin, St. Anne, and St. John the Baptist. The Virgin sits side-saddle on her mother’s lap. She watches her son softly cup St. John the Baptist’s chin, while he blesses him with his other hand. An almost statuesque St. Anne recedes into the background. She addresses her daughter while pointing up to heaven, as if to say: He’s been sent from above.Leonardo placed the figures in a pyramid. “Within that enclosing [pyramid] shape the dynamic of the drawing is circular, spiralling. The eye is drawn into a vortex, the chief whorl of which is a line which begins with the face of the Christ-child, moves upwards in a flowing movement around the heads of the two adults, descends down the side of Mary’s head and along her arm, but then, instead of completing the circle, shoots off through the signpost finger of St. Anne pointing heavenward,” biographer Charles Nicholl wrote in “Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind.”
The women echo each other’s pose, with one foot on the earth and the other raised, a variant of the Hellenistic “Crouching Venus” statue that Leonardo often replicated when painting the Virgin.
Leonardo’s clever use of white-chalk highlights on the cloth turns it almost translucent and the effect lifts the heavily worked charcoal drawing into heavenly realms.
Leonardo’s naturalistic rendering appeals to our humanity. The Christ child writhes in his mother’s arms, stretching his body toward St. John, a full-body gesture that babies make to direct attention.
“The effects he achieved belong to another dimension, the tracery of ‘moti mentali’ across the paper,” Nicholl wrote.
The ‘Taddei Tondo’
Michelangelo’s unfinished “Taddei Tondo” of the Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist presents the process and power of sculpture. It’s an endearing scene, carved in marble and steeped in meaning.The infant St. John the Baptist gently offers Christ a goldfinch. Italians often kept pet goldfinches, so Michelangelo’s tondo (circular artwork) appears to be an everyday scene of a boy joyfully sharing his pet with a friend. Yet Christ recoils. He knows the golden bird represents his fate: The Passion—when he will endure immense persecution and suffering and ultimately sacrifice himself to save humanity.
Legend has it that a goldfinch plucked a thorn from Christ’s crown of thorns as he carried the cross to Calvary. A drop of Christ’s blood spilled on the goldfinch, giving the bird its distinctive red feathers.
In the “Taddei Tondo,” Christ squirms, wriggles, and contorts his body in his mother’s arms as he turns to her comfort—just as any baby would. Yet her somber gaze says she also knows his fate. While Christ’s body flinches and turns away, he faces the goldfinch and his fate.
As the figures emerge from the marble tondo, it’s clear what Michelangelo meant when he said: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
Unfinished artworks such as Michelangelo’s “Taddei Tondo” are the closest aspiring artists can get to an apprenticeship with the master himself. The Virgin and Child were finished to a fine degree. It’s the unfinished St. John the Baptist that can somewhat show viewers the underlying marks that Michelangelo made in this genius work.
Michelangelo used a mason’s axe to liberate the basic shape of his sculptures from their marble prison. Serrated marks show where he used a claw chisel to remove material. He would then use rough-edged metal tools such as rasps to smooth the surface.
Michelangelo applied a hammer to a point chisel, which he held at different angles to make an array of marks. Holding the point at 90 degrees created pockmarks; at 70 degrees, it created short grooves; and around 45 degrees, it created controlled parallel lines.
In between roughing out the work and finishing the piece, Michelangelo used a tooth chisel to remove the rough marks left by the point chisel. He used a channeling tool to access and refine the crevices, and a flat chisel for shaping, fine detailing, and smoothing the surface.
In the finished work, he would have used pumice to polish the marble surface or highlight certain areas of the sculpture.
Despite its unfinished state, Taddeo Taddei, who commissioned the work, displayed the “Taddei Tondo” in his home.
‘The Esterhazy Madonna’
Just as aspiring sculptors can learn from Michelangelo’s unfinished “Taddei Tondo,” aspiring painters can learn from Raphael’s unfinished “Esterhazy Madonna,” especially through its underpainting of the Virgin’s face and the infants’ figures.
In “The Esterhazy Madonna,” the Virgin and the Christ child look down toward St. John, who sits on the ground reading a scroll. According to curator Axel Vecsey at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, if the painting had been finished, the scroll would state: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
High Renaissance Greats
Seeing the three artists’ artworks of the same time period together is a treat. Exhibition visitors can see firsthand the style of each master juxtaposed against his contemporaries: “For Michelangelo, the body foreshortened and in action was the primary vehicle of expression, for Leonardo, it was the face, whether of man or beast contorted by extreme emotion,” an exhibition wall plaque notes. Raphael’s primary vehicle of expression was the beating heart: Artist and artist biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote in his 1568 “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects” that “while we may term other works paintings, those of Raphael are living things; the flesh palpitates, the breath comes and goes, every organ lives, life pulsates everywhere.”The “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c. 1504” exhibition shows how these masters applied their God-given artistic talents and elevated the everyday to the sublime.
