The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Artistic Duel That Defined the Renaissance - Rilegato

Jones, Jonathan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0743285395 ISBN 13: 9780743285391

Casa editrice: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2010

Riassunto

Michelangelo and Leonardo lived five centuries ago, but their works still obsess our culture, with a popular and universal quality that nothing else matches. They have been equally revered and famous since their lifetimes, but our admiration for them exists mostly in isolation of each other. But in 1504 they competed with each other directly, to paint the walls of a room in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. It is remarkable enough that the same city had produced two such geniuses in the same century -- let alone that they met and exhibited together. But this competition, perhaps the most important event in the history of Renaissance art, the moment at which individual style came to command its own value, has been largely forgotten because the rival works did not survive. This great artistic clash, Jonathan Jones argues in this riveting account, marks the true beginning of the High Renaissance. Re-creating sixteenth-century Florence with astonishing verve and aplomb, THE LOST BATTLES not only sheds new light on the making of the modern world but, in its portrait of two cultural titans going toe to toe, rewires our understanding of the personalities of the Renaissance's greatest icons.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Jonathan Jones is the art critic of the Guardian. He appears in the BBC television series Private Life of a Masterpiece and gives talks at the Tate and other galleries. In 2009 he was a judge for the Turner Prize. Jonathan lives in London with his wife and daughter.

Dalla seconda/terza di copertina:

Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti found it painful to live in the same country, let alone in the same city, let alone work in the same room. When, at the start of the sixteenth century, they were both employed to create wall paintings of battles in the Great Council Hall in Florence, all hell broke loose. Their lives would never be the same again, and neither would the story of art.
'You who tried to make a bronze horse in Milan and gave up in shame' . . . 'Be careful you do not make your nudes look wooden' . . . 'Bastard' . . . The insults flew thick and fast when the two greatest artists of the Renaissance were thrown into competition. Stories of their mutual hatred circulated in sixteenth century Italy and here, for the first time, these tales are tested against the evidence to create a startling flesh-and-blood portrait of genius.
In 1503 Leonardo da Vinci started to paint the Mona Lisa. It so delighted his fellow citizens that the fifty-one-year-old was asked to paint a mural in the government palace of the Florentine Republic. It was his finest hour. But in the nearby cathedral workshop a young sculptor named Michelangelo was finishing a statue of David.
Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince, helped to set up a formal competition between the two. It was a defining moment, the mirror of an entire age. This book is a rediscovery, not only of two lost masterpieces of Leonardo and Michelangelo, and of the Renaissance world that inspired them, but of their emotional lives.
£20

onathan Jones is the art critic of the Guardian. He appears in the BBC television series Private Life of a Masterpiece and gives talks at the Tate and other galleries. In 2009 he was a judge for the Turner Prize. Jonathan lives in London with his wife and daughter.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0743285395
• ISBN 13: 9780743285391
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 320