Becoming Michelangelo by Alan Pascuzzi

Author:Alan Pascuzzi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628729160
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2019-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 37: Aristotile da Sangallo, copy of Battle of Cascina, oil on wood, 76 x 130.2 cm (29.9 x 51.1 inches).

Sangallo’s copy of Michelangelo’s cartoon takes a scene not of the battle but of the moment when Manno Donati sounded the alarm and the nude soldiers scrambled out of the water. Why only nudes and not horses or armed soldiers? This and other extant copies of Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina take the opposite tack from typical battle scenes in town halls. The composition is more like a scene from a public pool than a battle. Why? I believe Michelangelo purposely eschewed a battle scene to avoid being shown up or outclassed by Leonardo. In my view, the Florentine government commissioned these two great artists to paint pendant battle scenes in the same hall in order to deliberately create a competition between the young, inexperienced Michelangelo and the older, experienced Leonardo, perhaps in the hope they would try to outdo each other artistically. Leonardo had studied horse anatomy and human anatomy, and his drawings for the battle scene show his mastery in creating a fluid composition of man and beast in brutal combat. Michelangelo chose to depict the one thing he was good at—the male nude—in the attempt to create a composition on the same level as Leonardo’s.

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