This is the best of our knowledge, a presentation of national productions.
If someone is going to make a joke about a college major, art history is usually the first
target, but art history can be an important look at the social and political history of
an era, and that was never more evident than the Renaissance.
I mean, Michelangelo believes in the Republic and you know, identifies with Lawrence, but
Leonardo really preferred court.
He was wonderful in a court, he was great wit and racon-tur.
Today on the best of our knowledge, we'll take a look at the history of that historically
creative time through the lens of two of its giants, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
And we'll spend an academic minute with another cultural giant, Dr. Who?
I'm Bob Barrett, and this is the best of our knowledge.
The new book, The Lost Battles, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the artistic duel that defined
the Renaissance tells the story of the competition between two of the greatest minds of the Renaissance.
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, as each are commissioned to paint frescoes in the
Great Council Hall.
Renowned art critic Jonathan Jones brings Renaissance Florence to life in a portrait of the artists
in their work.
We learned the background behind the creation of Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's
David.
It was a time when art and politics went hand in hand.
Jones shows us how Leonardo and Michelangelo each used their art to advocate their beliefs
on the nature of war and their vision for the city of Florence.
The best of our knowledge is Joe Donohue spoke with Jonathan Jones about why he chose to
explore these two men and this competition.
Well, to the two men, now the greatest artist in history, I think I defer to the common
opinion on that.
I know passionate belief as well.
I mean, Leonardo da Vinci has been my favourite artist since I was a child really, first sort
of encountered his work and Michelangelo very close in my heart.
The story, and then I work at an art critic and I use paper to garden and at some point
I came across this story as writing features and things and some of which are about art
history.
And I came across this story in the Sari's lives of the artist, which is a wonderful book
written in the 16th century which is full of incident and brings out to life, you know,
written 500 years ago.
And I came across this, I did a story that Leonardo da Vinci in Michelangelo actually had
a competition that they were put in competition to paint a room of Florence and you know that
they went head to head.
And I'd never even, for some reason, although I loved these artists for my life, I'd never
really quite realised even how contemporary they were to each other.
I mean Leonardo was 25 years older than Michelangelo but nevertheless they were both
Florentine citizens, they were both educated in the workshops of Florence, apprentice to
great Florentine artists of the previous generation and you know had the same kind of, really
had the same very similar education and everything.
Both of them also went away from Florence, Michelangelo, even when he was quite young, went
to Rome, Leonardo spent a lot of his working life in Milan.
And for that reason, they never bumped into each other.
You know, they were both, they never, they passed, never crossed until the start of the
16th century.
They'd been a revolution in Florence, the Medici family who, you know, we all think of Florence
and the Medici, but the Medici had actually been thrown out of Florence by a revolution.
There was a republic in which, you know, Nicola Machiavelli of all people, and you went
wrote the prints, the most, you know, controversial political thinking of all time.
Nicola Machiavelli was actually a prominent figure in the republican government.
And at that time Leonardo and Michelangelo both come back to Florence and they're both
working in the early 1500s on extraordinary things.
Leonardo da Vinci in order to, I think in order to, as a kind of calling card, to sort
of impress, to remind Florence who he was after he'd been away for a long time, to absolutely
win the city's heart, actually started painting a portrait of a citizen's wife and merchant's
wife, which is the Mona Lisa.
And it was begun, we know, it's now known, you know, there was documentary proof that
it was begun in Florence in 1503.
And at that same time Michelangelo was at work in the cathedral workshops, carving a huge
damaged block of marble into David.
So the Mona Lisa and David were both produced in this small city, about 60,000 people in
it at the same time by these two artists who knew each other.
And actually they seem to have come to hate each other.
Because of that, because you have Leonardo's there, he's working in the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's
working in David, they're all explosive thing.
And it occurs to the government of Florence, so public and government of Florence in which
Nicola Machiavelli is a very important civil servant.
It occurs to them to put the two artists into an actual head-to-head competition to both
paint battle paintings, huge wall paintings, frescoes in the Great Council Hall, which
had recently been built, which was specially created as the meeting place of this republic.
So I mean, I was just at the entrance and fascinated by the story and I wanted to bring it to life
and not just to rely on Vassari or something, but to actually go to the contemporary documents
and really see what it was really like.
You point out in the book that the battle paintings of both Michelangelo and Leonardo were
commissioned for political reasons and as the title suggests, were lost for political
reasons.
That's right, yes.
I mean, of course Leonardo's picture was called the Battle of Angiari.
I mean, they both painted battles, battle scenes, that's why the book is called the Lost
Battles, because this is a patriotic thing that we used to do with the government, basically
the government hall.
So these were great Florentine victories, but Leonardo's battle of Angiari, there is
a lot of fascination in whether it might survive under the paint, under the later pictures
in that wall, but both works were lost.
They were never finished anyway and what was finished was the fourth set, a lot of it
was just destroyed and then there's an ambiguity about whether Leonardo's unfinished wall painting
may be hidden inside a wall.
The reason was because it wasn't absolutely, I mean, what I try to do in the book is to
really, I find Florence the most beautiful, captivating place on Earth, basically.
I mean, it's a place of great beauty and so much of it is well preserved.
You can stand on a hill above Florence and see the skyline and the twilight and it's
very much the skyline that it was then in the 50 and the 1500s.
Yet what we miss, what has been lost is the political violence, the violence of everyday
life, the intensity and the medieval quality of the world in which these artists actually
lived.
Florence was a very turbulent place.
That's really what Macchibelli's writings are about.
His writings are about a city, a republic which is always divided into factions and they're
always fighting one another.
The Medici are thrown out in 1494 and then they violently come back and take the city
back in 1512 which is the moment at which this competition becomes, you know, gets kind
of erased and this is why these battles are lost because they're caught up in political
commissions that are caught up in basically a series of revolutions and civil wars which
culminates in 1529.
Michelangelo was back in Florence, Leonardo was dead by that time but Michelangelo had
done this idealistic work in his youth for the Florentine Republic.
David was seen as a symbol of the Republic.
David standing up to Goliath.
Goliath for them represents tyranny and David is the little, the people standing up to
tyranny and then he did Michelangelo, his design for the Great Council hall competition
was the Battle of Castina which was again, in that he put all kinds of republican idealism
into it.
It's very like David.
It's a new army, actually an army of new to jumping out to a river but they're showing
their readiness, their young men who are ready to fight for their city.
So it was all very idealistic.
But in 1529 there was again the Medici had again been thrown out.
There was a siege, a huge army sent by the Habsburg Empire on behalf of the Medici family
came to Florence, surrounded Florence and Michelangelo was inside the city.
He was the commander of fortifications for the Republic.
So all his youthful idealism, he didn't lose it when he got older.
In fact, he was the bravest thing he ever did and he was a very brave man.
But the bravest thing he ever did was to be the commander of fortifications for the
Florence and Republic in its last stand in 1529.
What was actually a doomed struggle and Michelangelo was lucky to get away with his life
with lots of people, lost their lives.
It was a gory event.
And after that he excelled himself from Florence because after that the Medici really took over
Florence and became dukes.
And Michelangelo didn't want any part of it.
He left in 1534 to live in Rome and of course he worked on St. Peter's in Rome.
But he never returned to Florence.
He lived another 30 years and never returned.
He made himself a political exile.
So that's how sort of seriously he was about politics.
That's one of the things I found out in the book.
Michelangelo is a deeply political man.
And Leonardo da Vinci was very different.
Leonardo, I can't.
He never expressed a political view.
That's really the time that we would recognize as such.
And he liked courts.
I mean Michelangelo believes in the Republic and identifies with Florence.
But Leonardo really preferred courts.
He was wonderful in a court.
He was great wit and racon-tur.
A man of his inventions, of course all the science and inventions that fascinates us
today.
A lot of it was to entertain people at the courts.
There's a thing in his notebooks where he invents an armoured car or a tank actually made
a wood to one of his most famous inventions.
But what's less well known is that he on the note he says, well this would be good in battle.
It would be like the elephants at Hannibal used.
But also he says it's excellent for jousting.
So you have this image of knights jousting in armoured cars in tank.
It wouldn't tank, such as a science fiction image.
But that's the kind of thing he was doing a lot of the time, was entertaining people at courts.
But he was also a military engineer.
As I say, he designed a tank.
He worked in real battle situations, war situations as a military engineer.
And he'd done that for a long time by the time he painted the battle anguari.
And the battle anguari sort of, he put that experience, what he'd learned of war,
into this very disillusioned, actually horrific painting, which I see as the first anti-war painting.
It anticipates Picasso's Gernica.
It's a savage, vicious, visceral image of the irrationality of conflict.
The primitive passions at the heart of battle, the images of cannibalism in it.
The horses are biting one another and the men have these kind of frenzied masks of faces
as they hack at each other with their swords.
It was a terrifying picture and it was a denunciation really of the barbarity of war.
Still to come, Joe Donohue continues his conversation with art critic Jonathan Jones
about his book, The Lost Battles, Leonardo Nicolangelo, and the artistic duel that defined the Renaissance.
That's next on The Best of Our Knowledge.
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This is The Best of Our Knowledge.
I'm Bob Barrett.
Our guest today is Jonathan Jones, a renowned art critic and the author of the new book, The Lost Battles,
Leonardo Nicolangelo, and the artistic duel that defined the Renaissance.
He's speaking with The Best of Our Knowledge's Joe Donohue.
You write in the book that competition was at the heart of the Renaissance art.
But you go on and look at this idea of competition and how from Picasso and Matisse and how it is evolved through time of how this artistic competition is very much alive today.
Well, yes, of course.
I mean, always.
When I was writing the book, I was actually on the jury of the Turner Prize in Britain, which is very sort of a, you know, what the word is.
But controversial sometimes, but it's a competition for contemporary artists, people like Damien Hurst, to won it.
And it was funny in the way, because I was kind of going between very late, very newer start and the very old start.
And yes, obviously in the 20th century, had Picasso and Matisse very much preoccupied with rivalry with one another.
You can go through it.
Although the book, I mean, the book isn't so, the book is very much about these two artists and their world.
And I think competition in the Renaissance was, it was so specific.
The Renaissance was about, they had a sense of evolving, of progressing.
Leonardo da Vinci says a very revealing thing.
He says that in his notebook, he says it's a sad people who does not outstrip his master, that in the apprentice, you know, you're apprentice to an artist, but the idea is not to be like them.
The idea is to be better than them.
And this was very real in Renaissance Florence.
Every generation at that time was better than the last, because they were discovering fundamental things, you know, how to draw in perspective, how to give depth to figures.
And you know, it got better and better and better.
And you can see it that they're mastery of technical skills, with actually improving all of it every decade.
So, at the time you get to Leonardo Michelangelo, this is a disc culture of always trying to be better than the last person.
I had gone on for a long time, really.
And there, there's any of it.
The problem for the Italian Renaissance, actually, was what happened was about to begin in a way in this competition.
I mean, the lost battles, if there's a sort of a, almost a melancholy in that title, it's partly because this competition is almost the zenith of the Renaissance.
I mean, it was meant to put Leonardo Michelangelo in competition, which there wasn't any way to evolve beyond them in terms of technical ability.
So, with the Renaissance, it was about learning, you know, becoming more and more skilled.
These guys were just, and I know, let's face it, who was artist since.
I mean, you know, we're talking about 500 years ago, but you can put other artists in the same league as the other eventually in my country.
But I don't think you can ever say any artist has ever been better than them.
Or, you know, probably ever will be.
I mean, it was sort of perfect.
And that was a terrible problem for Italian art afterwards.
You know, it was shattered by, after this period, you know, of course you get my country, goes on from this to the Sistine Chapel.
And as young Raphael, who was actually a witness to this competition, was deeply influenced by it.
So he was there watching them doing their competitive works, learning from both of them.
So Michelangelo and Raphael then go on to decorate Rome and create, you know, the higher in Aseont's Rome.
But after that, there's a sort of a hiatus in the art of Italy because it's almost like, you know, you can't, how can you get better than this, you know.
Whereas Leonardo lost the competition with Michelangelo. You know, it really was a competition in which there was a winner.
And the winner was Michelangelo.
Today we might actually find that hard to understand because Michelangelo is still very much revered, of course.
But Leonardo Da Vinci is surely the world's most famous best loved artist.
You know, people don't write books called the Michelangelo Code, the right book is called The Da Vinci Code.
And Leonardo is, there are lots of reasons for that.
We, Michelangelo, to appreciate Michelangelo fully, you have to go to Italy for a start.
You have to see a sculpture and, you know, he doesn't work.
He's not the same in reproduction as Leonardo because he's in all these notebooks.
They can be reproduced quite easily.
And even his painting style is better at being reproduced in some other people.
But basically, Leonardo is an artist of incredible brilliance and not just an artist but a scientist as well.
I think, and a philosopher.
And the battle in the Battle of Anguari, you know, I think that this moment,
he was actually achieving his perfect blend of science and art that he was able to put so many of his ideas and thoughts into this work.
It was a more personal philosophical and strange work than, you know, say the Mona Lisa or his famous religious paintings.
This was Leonardo's most personal painting, you know, the chance when he got a shot.
He actually had the chance to do something on a large scale as a public work, which really revealed the strange psychological concerns that you see in his notebooks.
You know, the nightmares and bizarre imaginative fancies that he liked, that he ate that are very much in his notebooks and his drawings.
But this is the one chance he got to create in a painting.
Of course, people don't seem to have liked it very much. I think they were shocked and disturbed by this dark surrealist, the Battle of Anguari anticipates surrealist art.
You know, if you want to compare it with 20th century art, I would compare it with surrealism.
If I'd Salvador Dali actually copied it, a copy of it, incorporated a copy of it in his painting, Spain, which is about the Spanish Civil War.
And Picasso already mentioned Gernica, I think, you know, there's an echoes of it in Gernica.
And so basically Leonardo was doing really experimental strange stuff.
And he lost the competition because of that. He was seen as weird.
Michelangelo was seen as great and as expressing people's beliefs really and how they saw the world, how they wanted to see the world, the optimism.
It's like the two sides of the Renaissance. I mean, in England, we don't have any, we don't have any great Renaissance painters, but we had Shakespeare, you know, who we are supposed to be one of these.
So the people who are equal to these titans. And Shakespeare, you know, in Hamlet, Hamlet says, what a piece of work is a man, you know.
So that that Renaissance idea of the wonder of humanity, the discovery of humanity, that's what the Renaissance is about.
And Michelangelo expresses that perfectly, explicitly in David and expressed it as well in this Battle of Castina that he designed.
Whereas Leonardo da Vinci in the Battle of Angiari, he really expresses the other side of Hamlet speech.
And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? A kind of an underlying fear that perhaps the wonder of humanity is not so wonderful after all.
And so you have these two sides are really arguing about the nature of humanity, is humanity wonderful, or is humanity evil?
You know, that's kind of argument going on in their debate in their conflict.
Again, the name of Jonathan Jones' new book is The Lost Battles, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the artistic duel that defined the Renaissance.
He spoke with the best of our knowledge is Joe Donney.
I've learned to appreciate you the way I love us do. And I only want to look at you.
Well, since we're talking about important cultural icons, it's only natural that we move on to one who spend decades of modern culture.
Doctor Who, that's the topic of today's academic minute.
Welcome to the Academic Minute. I'm Lynn Pascarella, President of Mount Holyoke College.
Debuting in 1963, the iconic science fiction series Doctor Who will turn 50 later this year.
Paul Booth, Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at DePaul University, explains why the show and the Doctor just keep coming back.
What does it mean to be a fan of something? How is this identity-owned, explored and performed by fans themselves?
In my research, I've shown how fans are the future of media audiences, more and more media texts are being created to appeal to fans.
At the same time, the devotion that fans feel towards their love text is one of the oldest, most universal feelings.
We see it in religious rituals, in imaginative play, in the earliest forms of literature.
Phantom unites us and shows us what it means to be human.
In particular, I've looked at fans of the BBC television series Doctor Who, which tells the story of an alien who can travel through time and space, bringing with him various earthly assistance as they investigate historical events, as well as future societies.
The Doctor sees beauty in the foreign and unknown, humor in the face of danger and truth in the darkest of places, just like fans.
The Doctor Who fans that I've talked with and written about are not the mindless consumers that popular culture might portray them as.
Instead, they use Doctor Who as a way to become better people, to communicate and learn from one another.
Doctor Who fans write original stories, create clever and powerful videos, and even learn to make clothing in order to share their emotional connection with others.
I've used Doctor Who in the classroom as a way to discuss changing cultural norms of morality and ethics, from a fictional program comes immense, real world meaning.
Studying fans tells us about human desire and motivation, but it also tells us about the power of emotion and attachment, and the joys we all feel when faced with something we love.
That was Paul Booth of DuPaul University. You can find this, other segments, and more information about the professors on our website, academicminute.org.
Production support for the Academic Minute comes from Newman's Own Foundation in partnership with Mount Holyoke College.
That's all the time we have for this week's program. If you'd like to listen again, join us online at our flagship stations website.
Go to www.wamc.org and click on the programs link. And if you have any questions or comments about the program, send them in.
Our email address is knowledge at www.wamc.org. I'm Bob Barrett. Be sure to join us next time for another edition of The Best of Our Knowledge.
Bob Barrett is producer of The Best of Our Knowledge. Dr. Alan Shartock is executive producer. The Best of Our Knowledge is a production of WAMC Radio's National Productions, which is solely responsible for its content.
Hear more at www.wamc.org.
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