Leonardo vs Michelangelo

Who were Leonardo and Michelangelo?

Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 near Vinci, outside Florence, the son of a notary. He trained in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then worked for Ludovico Sforza in Milan from about 1482 to 1499, where he painted the Last Supper. Back in Florence around 1500 he began the Mona Lisa. He spent his last years in France as a guest of King Francis I and died at Amboise on 2 May 1519. His notebooks, thousands of pages in mirror writing, cover anatomy, water, flight, optics and machines.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on 6 March 1475 at Caprese and grew up in Florence, where Lorenzo de' Medici took him into his household as a teenager. He carved the Pietà in Rome (1498 to 1499) and the David in Florence (1501 to 1504), painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508 to 1512) and the Last Judgement (1536 to 1541), and from 1546 directed the building of St Peter's. He died in Rome on 18 February 1564, nearly 89. He also wrote about 300 poems.

Leonardo vs Michelangelo: comparison table

The 1504 contest: Battle of Anghiari and Battle of Cascina

The two men's careers crossed in one room. After the Medici were expelled in 1494, the Florentine Republic built a vast Hall of the Great Council in the Palazzo Vecchio. Its leader, Piero Soderini, wanted the walls to celebrate Florentine victories.

• October 1503: Leonardo was commissioned to paint the Battle of Anghiari, a Florentine victory over Milanese forces in 1440. A revised contract followed in May 1504.
• 1504: Michelangelo, aged 29 and fresh from the David, was commissioned to paint the Battle of Cascina in the same hall. He chose the moment in 1364 when Florentine soldiers bathing in the Arno were surprised by the Pisans, a subject that let him draw dozens of nude men twisting to grab their armour.
• 1505: Leonardo began painting on the wall. He used an experimental oil-based method, and the paint did not dry properly; the colours ran. Only the central scene, the fight for a standard, was completed.
• March 1505: Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II to design his tomb. He had finished only the full-size drawing (the cartoon) for Cascina.
• 1506: Leonardo left for Milan. The hall was left with half a mural and a cartoon.

Neither original survives. Leonardo's fragment stayed visible until the hall was remodelled by Giorgio Vasari from the 1560s; we know it from copies, the most famous a drawing by Rubens in the Louvre. Michelangelo's cartoon was studied so intensely by young artists that it was cut into pieces and lost; a painted copy attributed to Aristotile da Sangallo is at Holkham Hall in England. The sculptor Benvenuto Cellini later wrote that the two cartoons were the school of the world for artists.

Did Leonardo and Michelangelo meet, and did they dislike each other?

They certainly met. On 25 January 1504 Leonardo sat on the committee of artists that the city called to decide where Michelangelo's David should stand. A small sketch of the David survives among Leonardo's drawings at Windsor.

Their dislike comes from stories, some reliable, some not. The Anonimo Gaddiano, an anonymous Florentine writing around 1540, tells how Leonardo, asked to explain a passage of Dante, said Michelangelo would explain it, and Michelangelo answered angrily, mocking Leonardo for failing to cast his giant bronze horse in Milan. It is a good story written decades later; treat it as anecdote.

The difference of opinion about the arts is documented in their own words. Leonardo's notes, collected after his death as the Treatise on Painting, rank painting above sculpture because it serves the eye and needs more knowledge, while the sculptor ends up covered in marble dust. In 1547 the scholar Benedetto Varchi asked artists which art was nobler, and Michelangelo replied that painting is better the closer it comes to relief, and that sculpture is the lantern of painting.

Their greatest influence was on others. The young Raphael, in Florence from 1504, studied both: Leonardo's soft modelling and pyramid compositions, and Michelangelo's muscular figures.

Where they agreed and where they differed

Agreed: both studied anatomy by dissecting bodies, Leonardo in Florence, Milan and Rome, Michelangelo as a young man at the hospital of Santo Spirito, according to Condivi. Both wanted art to show the inner life of a person through the body. Both were frustrated by patrons who changed their minds, and both left major works unfinished.

Differed: Leonardo worked through sfumato, soft transitions of light and shadow, and observation of nature in all its variety. Michelangelo built everything from the heroic male body. Leonardo was curious about everything and finished little; Michelangelo concentrated on figures and finished on a scale few others have matched. Leonardo described himself in his notebooks as a disciple of experience; Michelangelo's poems turn late in life to religious doubt, saying art had been an idol and could not quiet his soul.

Questions to ask Leonardo and Michelangelo

1. Leonardo: what went wrong with the paint on the Anghiari wall?
2. Leonardo: why do you rank painting above sculpture?
3. Leonardo: why did you keep the Mona Lisa with you for so many years?
4. Leonardo: what did dissecting bodies teach you that you could not see from outside?
5. Michelangelo: why did you choose soldiers bathing for the Battle of Cascina?
6. Michelangelo: did you really believe others hoped you would fail on the Sistine ceiling?
7. Michelangelo: what was it like to have Leonardo judge where your David should go?
8. Both: what do you honestly think of each other's work?

You can ask these by voice on Yuga, where Leonardo and Michelangelo are AI recreations built from their notebooks, letters, poems and early biographies. A recreation can be wrong, and the most quotable stories about these two come from Vasari and the Anonimo Gaddiano, not from the artists. Cite the notebooks, letters and biographers by name.

Which one for your project?

Pick Leonardo for a project that crosses art and science: flight, anatomy, inventions, or how to observe the world. His notebooks give you endless primary material. See questions to ask Leonardo da Vinci.

Pick Michelangelo for a project on sculpture, the Sistine Chapel, the papacy as patron, or an artist's struggle told in his own letters and poems. See questions to ask Michelangelo.

Pick both, with the 1504 hall as your centre, for a debate or a museum display about rivalry and the Renaissance. Our guide to Renaissance key figures gives you the wider cast.