Art historian Nea Tandini returns to Destil on September 5 at 19:30 to tell the stories of artistic rivalries that have shaped the most famous masterpieces of world art history.
At the funeral of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the entire city of Florence gathered in the church of Santa Croce to bid a final farewell to the greatest artist of the Republic, through poems and flowers. During the ceremony, the consul of the Academy of Florence declared that Raphael of Urbino would be the greatest artist in the world if Michelangelo had not existed. Surely, if the two above-mentioned artists were present at this funeral ceremony, they would have considered this earnest speech rather distasteful. But this statement - which revived in the collective memory the rivalry between the two artistic geniuses - did not fail to excite the audience present.
Although rivalries between artists are common in art history, the public never ceases to nurture an enthusiastic curiosity about them. Perhaps, because in the collective imagination, the accomplished artist is a genius, necessarily stripped of the petty feelings, such as jealousy or malice, that would transform him into a completely ordinary being. And yet, just as talent and genius are an integral part of a masterpiece that has marked history, human trifles are also fully present in them.