Why Leonardo Hated Botticelli and Vice-versa

 

I’ve been researching about the Florentine Renaissance for the past weeks for a comparative lecture on classical and modern movements in western art history. While studying, I remembered writing a paper on the parallelisms and differences between Romanesque and Baroque sculptures for a theory class in art school. For some reason, I’ve always been enamored by Romanesque art and the function that it served in ecclesiastical architecture during the Middle Ages. I found the schematized and fantastical depiction of the human figure to be enigmatic and interesting. The artworks were fitting relics to the zeitgeist of their time. The pursuit for answers to the universal questions of life during the medieval times was a severe shift in focus from the expansionist battle cry of the Roman Empire.

Human representation during the Middle Ages

I developed a curiosity over the Renaissance primarily because of the way the artists of the quattrocento contradicted medieval ways of painting and seeing. If Medieval sculptures which depicted nature and humanity without individuality and personality were subordinate to architecture, human representation and spatial depiction during the Renaissance saw a rebirth of naturalistic representation. This stark contrast shows of a kind of movement throughout Europe during those times. Southern Europe, on one hand, reveled in the invention of linear perspective and the emergence of mathematics as a tool to understand nature. Popular examples of which are Paolo Uccello’s Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano, a work which depicts, with subtle humor, horses dying in perspective; and Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of the Christ. On the other hand, Northern Europe saw the development of a technique that unified mathematical observation and human experience – fine examples of which can be seen in the works of Jan van Eyck.

Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello

In the south, particularly in Florence, humanism took center stage as the common battle cry of artists. Even those who adhered to irreconcilably divergent persuasions, particularly Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, produced works that celebrated the humanistic ethos of their era.

Speaking of Leonardo and Botticelli, these two masters simply couldn’t get enough of disparaging one another.

Alleged self-portrait of Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli did not quite share the aesthetic preferences of Leonardo as he chose to conspicuously delineate the outlines and elongate the proportions of his human figures. Adhering to Marsilio Ficino’s neo-Platonist philosophic view about the importance of beauty as an aesthetic objective, he opted to prettify the facial attributes of his mythological subjects. In fact, manifestations of his philosophic and stylistic inclinations can be seen in his seminal works The Birth of Venus and La Primavera. Botticelli’s partiality to the beautiful explains the highly ornate and colorful character of his frescos. His body of work expressed the humanistic chest-thumping pride of Florentine Renaissance by divorcing itself from the art espoused by the established church. Botticelli departed from the aesthetic norm on two levels: first, he portrayed mythological themes from classical antiquity, and second, he veered away from strict naturalistic representation advocated by painter Cennino Cennini.

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci

Since Leonardo considered painting to be the ‘daughter of nature’, there was no way that he would acknowledge Botticelli’s assertions. For him, artists must not idealize nature nor depart from it given that the world can be scientifically measured and recorded in precise terms. In an obvious attempt to glorify the use of value (light and shade) over line and color, Leonardo slammed Botticelli by saying that the neo-Platonist artist painted ‘very sorry landscapes’. He even cleverly went around Ficino’s emphasis on the beautiful and the ideal by using his famed sfumato technique in painting the ‘soul’ of his subjects. For him, artists who ought to paint the beautiful may do so in accordance to the laws set by nature. The Mona Lisa, his most famous painting, masterfully illustrates the genius of Leonardo in capturing the enigma and transience of human expression.

The golden regalia (detail on upper left portion of image), a four-kilogram halter made of intricately woven gold strands, is the only one of its kind in the world.

Being an Asian audience of western art, I always ask myself about the happenings in the Orient during the quattrocento. Southern Europe may boast of a Florentine Renaissance that saw the emergence of the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael and Masaccio among others, but Asia, particularly the Philippines, may boast of a rich cultural heritage that produced the finest golden treasures that predated the quattrocento by at least 400 years. The four-kilogram golden halter made from intricately woven golden strands featured in the Crossroads of Civilizations exhibition at the Ayala Museum among hundreds of other golden objects gave me a glimpse of a sophisticated society that produced exquisite works of art that could possibly rival the masterpieces of Europe in terms of craftsmanship and sheer beauty. I may never know the names of the goldsmiths who had woven in their masterpieces a clue about the identity of my precolonial forefathers nor know of the intense rivalries among the master artists and craftsmen of our precolonial history; I am nevertheless immensely proud of our priceless precolonial jewelry that could possibly give the Mona Lisa a run for her money.

~Speck Tackle

Not about the Babuyan Islands

I recently had a chat with a friend of mine who is both a painter and a photographer. We met in a well known coffee shop somewhere in Glorietta, Ayala area. He just got home from a photo shoot in the Babuyan Islands. He went island hoping in that group of islands in the northern part of Luzon. He told me that all the islands were extremely beautiful, but there is a catch, the price tag for that is a five hour boat ride under the sun, in a small boat, with gigantic waves. That boat ride was so memorable not just because it changed his color from brown to browner (or should I say brownest because any additional shade of brown would make him black already), but because he was holding to his dear camera as well as his dear life during the wavy and rocky boat ride. One of his colleagues even fell from the boat and got his camera soaked in water.

But let’s not talk about the Babuyan trip because as the title suggest, this isn’t about the Babuyan islands. When the waiter finally served the food we ordered, it lead me to a question “Why doesn’t my food look like the one in the picture?”. My friend told me, “You don’t know what you are asking for”. I asked why? “You will die if you eat that” he said. I thought it was a joke so I rode with it, I said “of course I won’t eat that, that’s a picture, I know that.. ”. “No, no, no, I’m not talking about the picture. I’m talking about the actual thing that was photographed” he said. “What do you mean? It looks so delicious and mouth watering” I said. He told me that some things doesn’t appear as they are. He told me that the foam on top of the picture of the cappuccino, in the real life, is really soap mixed in coffee and was meticulously fashioned to look like that. He also told me that the picture of the ice cream I was looking at isn’t ice cream. Ice cream doesn’t roll when you scoop it with spoon. In reality, it’s mashed potatoes with food coloring. The delicious syrup on pancakes, isn’t really a syrup, its varnish.

It shed light to my question ever since I was a child, “Mommy, how come every time I try to roll the ice cream I often ended up chipping just a piece of it?”. Guess what? She also doesn’t know.

I know what your thinking and I agree. I wouldn’t want soap or vanish anywhere inside my mouth, its just so amazing how the food designer in cahoots with the photographer were able to convince my eyes to perceive it to be delicious. It’s called the Art of Food designing.

~ Nobody