which was never finished and is now in the Accademia delle Belle Arti. His vacillating, uncertain genius, wherein discouragement succeeded to enthusiasm, drove him into planning works with fierce energy and then almost immediately so diverted his attention that he could not force himself to finish them.

DAVID
Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence.

In 1504 the Florentine Signory brought him into competition with another great irresolute, Lionardo da Vinci, whose universal intellectual curiosity was,{19} no less than the temperament of Michelangelo, an eternal obstacle to the achievement of his great undertakings. The two men seem to have met about 1495. They could not have understood each other very well, for they both stood alone, each in his own way. Lionardo was now fifty-two years old. When he was thirty he had left Florence, where the bitterness of the political and religious passions was unbearable to his delicate and slightly timid nature and to his serene and sceptical intelligence which was interested in everything but refused to take sides. Driven back to Florence by the death or ruin of his protectors, the Duke of Milan and Cæsar Borgia, he came into contact there from the very first with Michelangelo entirely absorbed in his own faith and passions, however changing they might be, and who, while he hated the enemies of his party and of his faith, hated still more those who had neither party nor faith. Brutally and publicly, on many occasions, Michelangelo made Lionardo feel his aversion for him.

When the Gonfalonier Soderini put the two in direct competition in a common work, the decoration of the Council Hall in the Palace of the Signory, the rivalry was intense. In May, 1504, Lionardo began the cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari. In August, 1504, Michelangelo received the order for{20} the cartoon for the Battle of Cascine. Florence was divided into two camps keenly enthusiastic for one or the other of the rivals. Time has made them equal, for both pictures have disappeared. Michelangelo's cartoon, finished in March, 1505, was apparently destroyed about 1512, during the disturbances in Florence which resulted from the return of the Medici, and even the fragments which in 1575 were still preserved by the Strozzi in Mantua have been lost.[18]

As for Lionardo's fresco, he succeeded in destroying it himself. He took it into his head to try to perfect the technique of fresco and he gave himself up once more to his evil spirit of invention and once more everything was lost. He tried a glaze of oil which did not hold, and the painting which he{21} abandoned in 1506 in discouragement by 1550 no longer existed.

The two cartoons of Lionardo and Michelangelo had time, nevertheless, to exert a blinding fascination over all Italian painting. They formed the style and influenced the thought of artists from 1506 on but without being able to transmit their own grandeur. Lionardo, who had a cavalry combat to represent, reasoned out coldly, as nearly as we can tell,[19] all the circumstances of a battle and then reproduced them with his marvellous lucidity which was perhaps a little too analytic to interpret the excitement of passion.

Michelangelo, who was given an episode of the war of 1364 against the Pisans under the leadership of the condottiere John Hawkwood (Giovanni Acuto) had intentionally turned his back on history and the real subject and painted naked men bathing, noble in form and free in movement, in the classic manner.[20]{22}

The two masterpieces contained each of them the germ of a different danger; in Lionardo's the excess of analysis, in Michelangelo's the excess of abstraction. This last was the most dangerous of the two but both were of the intellect and agreed in substituting for the charm of life and of real and spontaneous movement the formula of types and of logical action.

THE HOLY FAMILY
Painted for Agnolo Doni (between 1501-1505)
National Gallery, London.

The influence of this work became at once universal and tyrannical. Benvenuto Cellini says in 1559: "The cartoon of Michelangelo was placed in the palace of the Medici, that of Lionardo in the Hall of the Pope. As long as they remained there they were the school of the world." Raphael copied them many times from October, 1504, until July, 1505. Fra Bartolommeo was inspired by them and Andrea del Sarto, when he was very young, spent whole days in studying them. Among the artists who taught themselves in that school are Perino del Vaga, Rosso, Battista Franco, Salviati, Vasari, Bronzino, Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Cellini, Pontormo, Jacopo Sansovino, Franciabigio, Aristotele da San Gallo, F. Granacci, Bandinelli, Morto da Feltro, Lorenzetto—almost all the famous men of the period. This influence was certainly more dangerous than useful. The first fruits of it were the sudden unpopularity—almost like a decree of exile of all the charming primitive{23} painters, like Pinturicchio[21] and Signorelli[22] at Rome (1508) just after their masterpieces at Sienna and Orvieto and Perugino at Florence (1504) four years after the exquisite decoration of the Cambio of Perugia—and the loss of so much grace, elegance and vigour sacrificed to a form of beauty undoubtedly superior, but to which everyone can not attain. Instead of giving them a broader point of view, the admiration for Lionardo and Michelangelo narrowed and limited their followers. During 1508-1509 Pope Julius II had the frescoes of Sodoma, Perugino, Signorelli and Piero della Francesca put aside to leave space for Raphael. Thenceforth everyone was governed by the same ideal, and whoever felt in himself fancy, imagination and youth gave them up in favour of an attempt at breadth and power which were not for him. Filippino Lippi renounced his serious simplicity for pedantic dilettanteism and affected gestures. Instead of being the first in the second rank Lorenzo di Credi, Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Raffaellino del Garbo and Piero di Cosimo preferred to be the last of the first rank.

The same rivalry which had brought about the{24} competition between Michelangelo and Lionardo in the Council Hall appears again in a series of works which belong to