Giants of the Renaissance at the Royal Academy

Not many know that the Royal Academy has the only Michelangelo marble sculpture in Britain, the Taddei Tondo, bequeathed to the Academy in 1830. This masterpiece is a cornerstone of the Giants of the Renaissance, showcasing the brilliance of Michelangelo and his contemporaries. It has had a peripatetic life at the RA and hung unobtrusively on a stair wall in the Sackler Gallery for years until it was given a more prominent permanent place in the RA’s 2018 extension. Several times in the past, the Academy has been urged to solve one of its periodic financial crises by selling it but has resisted.

A couple of years ago, curators at the RA decided something needed to be done to give the Tondo (a round relief, popular in the early 16th century, commissioned by the Florentine wool magnate Taddeo Taddei) more of its due recognition. They embarked on serious research and emerged with something quite astounding: the RA’s curator, Julien Domercq, believes they have uncovered a defining moment in Renaissance art that had never been revealed before.

It’s strange how small history can be—how fleeting events converging at a single point can change the world. In Florence, on 25th January, during the fiercely cold winter of 1504, the most prominent artists of the day gathered to consider where to place the most exciting artwork of the time, Michelangelo’s David, as it neared completion. Present were Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Piero di Cosimo, and Giuliano da Sangallo. Michelangelo himself was there, back after five years in Rome. Leonardo da Vinci had returned from Milan for the occasion, having started work on the Mona Lisa the year before, and even the precocious 21-year-old Raphael was present, eager to learn from the masters. Raphael, coincidentally, had Taddei as a patron. The group eventually agreed to place the David in front of the new Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of the city-state’s government.

Meanwhile, Leonardo was working on his own masterpiece, a cartoon that has puzzled scholars for 500 years. That drawing, known as the Burlington Cartoon (more formally, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John), was once part of the Royal Academy collection. The RA, during straitened times, sold it to the National Gallery in 1962 after a successful public appeal for £800,000—equivalent to more than £21 million today. Burlington House, incidentally, is the name of the RA’s Piccadilly home.

The cartoon, with its squirming infant Christ, gets a room to itself in the exhibition. Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, wrote: “Men and women, young and old, continued for two days to flock for a sight of it to the room where it was, as if to a solemn festival, in order to gaze at the marvels of Leonardo, which caused all those people to be amazed.”

The new theory centres on the year 1504. An altarpiece for the new Palazzo della Signoria was commissioned from Lippo Lippi, but he died in April of that year before he could complete it. Exhibition curators suggest that Leonardo’s cartoon was his bid for the job. The drawing was displayed to the Florentine public in 1507, as described by Vasari. However, perhaps disappointed, Leonardo returned to Milan in 1508, and Fra Bartolommeo was commissioned instead—though his work was also never completed.

In 1504, Michelangelo was working on the Tondo, but it hadn’t gone well. It seems the marble split, and the relief was never finished. Yet it was available to view, possibly in Michelangelo’s studio, and was seen by Leonardo, Raphael, and countless others.

The impact of the Tondo, even in its unfinished state, was profound. Michelangelo broke conventions with his design: Jesus, in the arms of Mary, twists away from John the Baptist, who holds out a goldfinch—a symbol of the Passion—almost taunting him. Christ’s twisting motion, recoiling yet accepting his destiny, fascinated both Leonardo and Raphael, who incorporated it into their own work.

Nearby in the exhibition, Raphael’s famous Bridgewater Madonna is displayed—so valuable it cannot be photographed. In this piece, Jesus twists his infant body in the exact manner seen in the Tondo. Also featured is Raphael’s sketch of the David, a simply drawn homage.

The final room showcases the two giants of the High Renaissance—Michelangelo and Leonardo—through preparatory drawings for two monumental yet incomplete mural commissions. Both had been tasked with decorating the council chamber of the Palazzo della Signoria: Leonardo with the Battle of Anghiari (1440) and Michelangelo with the Battle of Cascina (1364). Neither work was completed.

Here, their contrasting approaches are evident. Leonardo portrays ferocious combat with grotesque grimaces, warriors in violent struggle. Michelangelo, by contrast, presents soldiers dressing for battle in a tranquil, almost pastoral scene.

1504 is a date history has just remembered—and perhaps, thanks to this exhibition centred on a long-overlooked unfinished masterpiece, it will never again be forgotten.

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