Born just a year apart (Turner in sooty London in 1775, Constable in a serene Suffolk village in 1776), the two were, from the first, “fire and water” opposites, as another reviewer in 1831 would describe them. Turner, whose father was a barber, was just 14 when he began studying art, while Constable, born into an affluent family of corn merchants, didn’t commit to painting until he was in his 20s. Their profoundly divergent temperaments and perspectives on life would not only inflect their respective styles, but would become a source of constant fascination for critics, who never tired of pitting them against each other. To one anonymous reviewer in the London Magazine in 1829, Constable was “all truth” while Turner was “all poetry”. “The one is silver”, he concluded, “the other gold”.
No competitor, needless to say, dreams of taking home the silver. But what does it take to come out on top? A glance back at some of the greatest rivalries in art history – from a titanic tussle between Leonardo and Michelangelo in the early 16th Century to a famous fray between Van Gogh and Gauguin near the end of the 19th – provides helpful clues about how to handle oneself when squaring off with a gifted competitor. What follows are five maxims for mastering the art of rivalry.
1. Da Vinci v Michelangelo: Feud is fuel
According to legend, one of the sharpest episodes of trash talk between artistic rivals occurred on the streets of Florence around 1503, when Leonardo overheard a group of men discussing some elusive lines by Dante. Hailing the famous painter and polymath, the men implored Leonardo to explain the difficult passage. Noticing that Michelangelo too was passing by just then, Leonardo pivoted and said to the group “he will explain it to you”. Feeling mocked, Michelangelo fired back, taunting Leonardo for his infamous failure to finish a bronze statue of a horse years earlier: “explain it yourself, you horse-modeller who abandons his work in disgrace!”.
Getty ImagesAs fate would have it, the two antagonistic artists would soon find themselves commissioned to create competing battle scenes on opposite walls of the same room in the Palazzo Vecchio – a face-off that would remain forever unresolved as the frescoes were never completed. There is little doubting, though, from copies of the fragmentary studies of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina that have survived, that the feud focused and fuelled the two men’s muscles and minds.
