When David Met Lisa

Originally published in National Review.

Of the seminal years in the civilization of the West, 1503 rarely gets a mention, but in codifying and cementing the trajectory of the Renaissance artist it hardly has an equal. During the course of this year in the city-state of Florence, two extraordinary, canon-defining works were being created less than a mile from each other: Michelangelo’s David (1501–04) and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503). Michelangelo and Leonardo publicly and disdainfully loathed each other and so had no sense of collaboration. There may seem to be little common ground between the colossal public statue and the diminutive domestic portrait. But between them, they redefined the role of the artist in the West’s canon, and the ramifications of that are with us to this day. While endless ink has been spilled analyzing the undeniable artistic beauty of both masterpieces, less attention has been paid to the remarkable fact that they were created in the same place and in the same year.

Neither project seemed particular­ly promising on the surface. While Michelan­gelo would later claim that he had raced back to Florence from Rome when the fledgling Florentine republic announced that it would be commissioning a new work to be hewn from a giant block of marble in its possession, the fact of the matter was that the block, while indeed large, had defied several generations of sculptors who had chipped away at its base but never managed to execute a successful composition. The 28-year-old Michelangelo, despite his recent success in Rome with the Pietà, had certainly never attempted anything on this scale, and there was no particular reason to think he would succeed where others had failed.

Leonardo, who had also been in the running for the marble, was, at age 51, an established master who had worked for popes and heads of state for decades. But Leonardo’s challenge was the excruciatingly slow pace at which he worked and his tendency to abandon works after he had resolved the compositional intricacies he found fascinating (as he had done with the Adoration of the Magi, commissioned in 1481 by the monks of San Donato in Scopeto in Florence, and that still remained unfinished in 1503, a testimony to his dilatoriness). This unreliability was one reason he had not won the marble, and why he had perpetual trouble getting paid. He therefore accepted a portrait commission that must have seemed somewhat mundane for the self-styled genius whose previous subjects had included a royal mistress and a fa­mous poetess: Now his subject would be the merchant Francesco del Giocondo’s second wife, Lisa Gherardini, to celebrate the fact that Francesco had finally made enough money to move out of his mother’s house.

That Michelangelo and Leonardo, in a most unlikely coincidence, rose to these challenges to create the greatest sculpture and the greatest portrait in the history of the West, simultaneously and in close geographic proximity, suggests that something was at work to inspire them to such dizzying heights of excellence. With the benefit of considerable hindsight, one can see that the common factor between them, which is unique to the West, was the maturing appreciation for artistic creativity as the human analogue of divine creativity, and for the value of the individual artist as a unique genius. Since antiquity, artists had been considered manual laborers who functioned as physical tools that manifest­ed the vision of their patrons. That had started to change in the early Renaissance, famously with Dante’s assertion in the Inferno that art, which imitates nature, imitates the creation of God.

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