How a single year in Florence changed art forever

The story goes that one day early in the 16th century Leonardo da Vinci was strolling through Florence with a friend. Near the Ponte Santa Trinita they came across a group of gentlemen disputing a point in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Seeing Leonardo, they asked him to explain the passage. At that same moment, Michelangelo Buonarroti also happened to hurry by, and Leonardo beckoned the sculptor over to interpret it for them. But Michelangelo, feeling he was being mocked, rounded on Leonardo: ‘Explain it yourself, you who tried to cast a horse in bronze, and couldn’t do it, and had to abandon the project in shame!’ With that he turned on his heels and stalked off, leaving Leonardo standing in the street embarrassed and furious.

Leonardo advised ‘David’ should be displayed with ‘decent ornaments’ (gilded leaves over his private parts)

The conflict between these two geniuses was real. Giorgio Vasari wrote that there was ‘the greatest disdain’ between them. They differed in every way: temperamentally, intellectually; in the media they favoured and the clothes they wore. But this tension was productive; out of it developed new ways of making art.

There was a third great artist present in Florence around that time, and from their examples he developed his own hugely influential style. Altogether the Royal Academy has extraordinarily rich material for the forthcoming exhibition, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c.1504. That year was the epicentre of what came to be called the High Renaissance, and the eye of the creative storm was Florence.

Several of the most celebrated works ever created date from around that time. In October 1503, a Florentine civil servant named Agostino Vespucci made a note in the margin of a book by Cicero. In this he mentioned two paintings on which Leonardo was at work: the head of Lisa del Giocondo (that is the ‘Mona Lisa’), and another containing the head of ‘Anne, the mother of the Virgin’ (presumably this was ‘The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’ that now hangs in the Louvre).