I'm sure the Royal Academy didn't intend their 1504 exhibition to coincide with the new BBC drama doc in which Charles Dance gently hams up his prosthetic broken nose as the old Michelangelo looking back on a great rivalry with Leonardo and Raphael. Having resorted to shouting at the TV screen in frustration at its inaccuracies and missed opportunities, I was looking forward to some serious curation. But RA shows are often frustrating half-successes. Three rooms, one of which is entirely devoted to a reverential display of the Burlington House Cartoon, was never really going to be enough. Like the languid historical recreations and repetitive talking heads of the screen version, this show constantly threatened to teeter over into a triumph of style over substance.
It all started promisingly with the Taddei Tondo, crisply lit and well explained. The image of the Pitti roundel alongside (and they were never going to get the original), Piero di Cosimo's iteration of a tondo and Raphael's Bridgewater Madonna - it all felt satisfying focused. But at the same time, there seemed to be so much more to investigate. The National Gallery's Raphael show of a couple of years ago, for instance, had a great exploration of how he developed his compositions to suit a roundel form. Exactly what Michelangelo was doing between is two relief attempts, yet ignored here. Equally, the similarity in pose between the Michelangelo's Christ and Leonardo's cartoon version, was pointed up, but it required strained vision across a crowded gallery to really appreciate it.
What you could not fault was the judicious choice of drawings which balanced a focus on process with a desire to just bask in the sheer beauty which these artists could conjure up on paper. A few examples here (some from the royal collection) had more impact than roomfuls at the Kings Picture Gallery. Michelangelo's stretching male nude from the Casa Buonarroti seems to encapsulate his whole artistic practise with its tense striving. Raphael's back view of David was similarly revelatory, yet seemed marooned on a wall: the curators had thought to include an image of Michelangelo's sculpture, despite its ubiquitous fame, but it was not displayed alongside the drawing.
Similarly, the Leonardo cartoon, was an underused resource. It is familiar to most London gallery-goers and so surely needs to justify its inclusion, despite the RA's new research which has suggested, for the first time, the purpose of the drawing. From memory, I believe the National Gallery hung it lower: certainly here it felt slightly diminished here, a little high and difficult to view without reflected light. It seemed significant that despite a bench in front of it, and a fairly busy exhibition, no one was really lingering as perhaps the curators intended. In a show whose dark walls and necessarily subdued lighting generates a sense of hushed awe, this feels too much as if we are expected to worship at the altar of Leonardo's genius.
The last room was devoted to the 'battle of the Battles', a bizarre non-event which has always captured more attention that it probably deserves. You can only ever get so far with 'what ifs' and one whole wall devoted to an outline silhouette of Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina seemed particularly indulgent. That said, the exhibition actually did a very good job of conjuring up both the essence and the imagined reality of the two compositions: Leonardo's swirling, character-driven emotion which seemed strangely old-fashioned with its contorted horses and precisely rendered armour, and Michelangelo's nude-fest that increasingly seemed like a dry run for the Last Judgment. Again, the drawings were the stars, so why they were not on the wall is a mystery.
Can you really go wrong with an exhibition entitled Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c.1504? It will get people through the doors with the names of probably the greatest triumvirate in the whole of art history. It brings with it a compelling in-built narrative of competition and rivalry. But it is also perhaps too easy to be complacent: you already have the only Michelangelo sculpture in the country, you know the National Gallery might be quite glad to get the Burlington Cartoon off its hands during the Sainsbury Wing revamp. Personally, I think the Royal Academy can do better. A three room exhibition needs to be tightly curated, with every choice justified and made to work. Ultimately, 1504 gets by on the beauty of the Renaissance drawings it displays. Is that enough?
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