The fact that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s David, among the most beloved masterpieces in the world, were made in the same time and place has received scant if any attention in their voluminous bibliographies. At first, they seem to have little in common as a domestic painted female portrait by a mature artist and a colossal male nude sculpted in marble by a up and coming artist. But despite these disparities and their personal animosity, Leonardo and Michelangelo were essentially positing the same—and for the time radical—concept: that artistic creativity was the closest thing humans could achieve to divine creativity.
Drawing on both primary sources and contemporary scholarship, Divine Creations traces why Florence was the logical epicenter for this seminal moment in artistic identity, and why it happened in 1503. The book also analyzes what made both the Mona Lisa and the David groundbreaking creative achievements that have defined the legacy of their makers much more than of their subjects or patrons, which traditionally would have been the case.
Most literature on the convergence of Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence during the first five years of the sixteenth century focuses on what they did not do, which was paint competing epic frescoes of major historical Florentine battle scenes on the walls of the Florentine Palazzo della Signoria, or town hall. Divine Creations, however, examines on what they did do, which was to create the Mona Lisa and the David in 1503.
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