Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure

by Michael W. Cole

Overview

In late 1504 and early 1505, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) were both at work on commissions they had received to paint murals in Florence’s City Hall.  Leonardo was to depict a historic battle between Florence and Milan, Michelangelo one between Florence and Pisa.  Though neither project was ever completed, the painters’ mythic encounter shaped art and its history in the decades and centuries that followed.  

This concise, lucid, and thought-provoking book looks again at the one moment when Leonardo and Michelangelo worked side by side, seeking to identify the roots of their differing ideas of the figure in 15th-century pictorial practices and to understand what this contrast meant to the artists and writers who followed them. Through close investigation of these two artists, Michael W. Cole provides a new account of critical developments in Italian Renaissance painting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300208207
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	01/06/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Michael W. Cole is professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University. 

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 The Force of Art 1

2 Circumscription 31

3 Flexion 83

4 Motivation 135

Notes 152

Acknowledgments 182

Index 184

Photograph Credits 192