Two artists

Leonardo lived in style. “He owned, one might say, nothing and he worked very little,” says Vasari, “yet he always kept servants as well as horses”—the great artist. His patrons were forever after him to paint them a picture. He seems never to have said no. By the time he was fifty he had half a dozen great dukes and kings and ladies begging him to remember his promise to do a little something for them. But Leonardo was busy. Busy observing, doodling, dreaming. He planned a flying machine and pictured the glory it would bring him: “The first flight of the great bird from the summit of the Monte Ceceri will fill the universe with wonder,” he wrote in his notebook. 'All writing will be of its fame, bringing eternal glory to the place of its origin and a little to the creator maybe?' He got a commission from the City of Florence to paint a mural on the wall of the Council Hall. He finished the cartoon, the first big step—he got that far. But then he started to paint the wall, not in fresco but with oils—a novel thing to do (always the genius!). He tried a new way to make the colors stick by applying heat and it failed—the colors ran. Michelangelo, who was working on a mural in the same Council Hall, perhaps thought it served him right. So, dust-covered and sore as he was all the time from long hours of sculpting, he must not have enjoyed seeing Leonardo cologned and in fine clothes with a following of admirers and censer-swingers trailing. 'Michelangelo, come over and meet Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest artist in the world! He can do anything.' Michelangelo was someone who, besides coming up with brilliant designs, solved gigantic practical problems to realize them. He had to go and get his marble in the cold mountains. He had to find it, cut it out and put it on a cart, then on a barge, and bring it to his workshop a hundred miles away. Sometimes he had to build the very road through the mountains to transport it. 'We’re almost through,' he wrote from Serravezza. 'There’s just one more big boulder to chip away and then the cart can go forward another hundred feet.' It was dangerous: 'This morning one of the workmen fell and broke his neck. I myself was almost killed.' Another time a chain from which a big block was swinging broke. 'We were so lucky,' he wrote. 'Any of us could have been killed.' He was cruelly abused by his patrons. Pope Julius sent him to Carrara for eight months to get marbles for his tomb, then cancelled the project. Pope Leo, the next pope, sent him to the hills of Serravezza for three years and then cancelled his project. Altogether at least five or six of Michelangelo’s best years were wasted in quarries. Once he got the marble home, he had to carve it, which is slow, hard work. He worked all day swinging a hammer and coughing at the dust until exhaustion put him to sleep. If he still had a moment before dropping off he thought about the design for the building or tomb where the statue would go, or about something his patron had said. Thank God the statue was looking pretty.
There was luck so bad it was like a curse. Pope Julius ordered Michelangelo to make a colossal (three times life-size) portrait of himself in bronze and when Michelangelo had finished modelling it after fourteen months the bronze caster spoiled it and Michelangelo had to do part of it over again. He did finish it but four years later it was melted down and made into a cannon: a major work and two of his best years lost. While he worked in Bologna he had to live at a cheap hotel in a room with four other workmen and he suffered terribly from the discomfort and the lack of privacy. Nothing was easy for him: there was obstruction after obstruction, with things and with people. He taught himself to paint in fresco and he put three hundred figures on a three-thousand-square-foot ceiling. He didn’t crack. Probably no one who ever lived could have held up but him. He had superhuman stamina and a slave-driving sense of responsibility. He had a job to do and he would do it.
“Explain this passage from Dante for us, Michelangelo,” Leonardo calls over in his charming way. “They say you know so much.”