Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic By chance of politics and personal ambition, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael all worked at the turn of the 16th century in Florence, where rivalry and influence fuelled the heroic classical style of what came to be known as the High Renaissance. It’s one of art’s core, captivating moments: individual genius formed and shaped by a new epoch, its values and opportunities.The Royal Academy’s lean but lively Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, Florence c1504 skims the surface of this story with a focused group of sketches and just one major work per artist — a cartoon drawing, a sculptural relief and a single finished painting, all three usually free to see in UK permanent displays. Across St James’s Park, it is well-complemented by the King’s Gallery’s engrossing if baggy Drawing the Italian Renaissance, London’s largest ever exhibition of works on paper from the period. Both plunge us into artists’ minds, the exhilaration of innovative thinking and freshly acquired mastery.The RA opens with Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo. Carved in white marble within a protective circle, Mary, Jesus and John the Baptist glow in the dimly lit first gallery. This tondo, marvel of the RA’s collection, is Britain’s only Michelangelo sculpture and, as Constable exclaimed when it arrived here in 1822, “one of the most beautiful works of art in existence”. The attraction is partly the unfinished state, contrasting rough and smooth surfaces amid overall unity. Each form, Christ’s rippling baby flesh and chubby legs, Mary’s serene profile, seem to emerge, then grow into life, assume shape, from the marble mass — a dynamic charge.The relief was commissioned by Taddeo Taddei, a friend of Raphael. The younger artist, newly arrived in Florence, was learning by copying: his drawings of Leonardo’s “Leda and the Swan” and Michelangelo’s statue “David” push the originals towards idealisation, striving for grace and equilibrium. The RA’s star pairing is the Taddei Tondo with Raphael’s “Bridgewater Madonna”, from Edinburgh; accompanying sketches show Raphael absorbing Michelangelo’s complex figural interactions. In the painting, he adopts the tondo’s entwined figures, the serpentine movement of Jesus across his mother’s lap, and brings vibrant colour and tender elegance — Mary’s enclosing clasp, the baby tugging her veil.Leonardo’s earlier “Madonna of the Yarnwinder”, also in Edinburgh, would have completed this illustration of influence: a missed opportunity. Instead, the show’s major Leonardo, hanging alone in the second room, is the National Gallery’s grand, beloved charcoal and chalk “The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist”, the artist’s largest known drawing, on many sheets of paper joined together.Probably a patron’s presentation piece, it is extremely refined. Blurred, softened “sfumato” outlines, mysterious otherworldly gazes, a sense of the divine in the human, intimacy between figures, flesh against flesh, are all achieved at monumental sculptural scale, evoking not marble but, historian Carlo Pedretti suggests, “the warm feeling of terracotta with the silvery dust of age”.Leonardo the poet of atmospheric naturalism, his faces conveying moti mentali, “motions of the mind”, versus Michelangelo’s muscular expressive bodies, is the drama of the third, final room: competing commissions for frescoes documenting Florentine military victories. Leonardo’s “Battle of Anghiari” is a flurry of rearing horses, thrashing soldiers, agonised, brutalised grimaces. Michelangelo’s more stylised “Battle of Cascina” is a frieze of naked soldiers clambering out of water, rushing armour on to damp bodies, as the alarm sounds for the enemy’s approach, interrupting their dip in the Arno.These paintings were never made; surviving full compositional studies, while fine things in themselves, are mid-16th century copies. But the autograph drawings are stunning. Pioneering the use of red chalk, Leonardo works out controlled descriptions of war’s chaos, balancing frightened, aggressive horses with stable riders. Rapid-fire pen and ink studies dart across subjects: one sheet has horses, soldiers, distorted faces, diagrams for a wheel and, watching over them, a black chalk “Angel of the Annunciation”. Michelangelo’s drawings of the vigorous male nude pulse with violent movement: tense anatomies of raised arm, muscles of the back, athletic bodies depicted in numerous angles. Some are exquisitely finished: for “Seated Male Nude”, intended as a central “Cascina” figure, ink and delicate lead white touches suggest glistening sweaty skin, and also polished translucent marble.What is heralded here, the body’s physical glory as a transcendent force, reaches fulfilment in a high point at the King’s Gallery: Michelangelo’s late “Risen Christ”, a virile Olympian meticulously modelled in tiny black chalk strokes, leaps with youthful energy but also surges as a shaft of pure light.So too in Drawing the Italian Renaissance we see Raphael perfecting the harmonious eloquence initiated in Florence: the limpid, rapturous red chalk “Three Graces”, and delicate tonal charcoal and pen studies for the Vatican’s “Disputa” fresco.The show’s main argument is that as paper became cheaper, artists experimented with drawing for its own sake rather than merely making preparatory studies. The show is alive with such freewheeling curiosities as Leonardo’s “Anatomy of a Bear’s Foot” and Parmigianino’s dog depicted with the gravitas of antique sculpture. Who knew that sober, classicising Annibale Carracci drew an eccentric sea creature with a nutcracker? — “Landscape with a Lobster”, never shown before. Or that Titian made a large, wonderful chalk sketch “An Ostrich”?At the same time, weighty, detailed drawings had increasingly varied uses. Leonardo’s sumptuous coloured “Map of southern Tuscany” delineates a marshy lake which he hoped to drain. Marco Marchetti’s elaborate asymmetrical candelabrum design offered different motifs — patrons could choose favourites. Paolo Farinati sketched classical heroines to decorate a Veronese villa, adding a note to his assistants: “do it as you fancy when you are on the scaffolding”.Bernardino Campi’s large, emotive black chalk “Virgin and Child”, restored and shown for the first time, is the final draft for a significant altarpiece. Federico Barocci, too ill to paint much, drew extravagantly lovely blushing heads in blended coloured chalks.Across this vast showcase, arranged thematically — figures, nature, devotion, design — bursts an overarching optimism about change and possibility, each innovative era spurring the next. Florentine portraits in tight, precise metalpoint, psychologically astute, sympathetic — Ghirlandaio’s “Head of an Old Woman”, Fra Angelico’s “Bust of a Cleric” (1447-50, the show’s earliest work) — are foundational; Ghirlandaio was Michelangelo’s teacher. More than a century later, around 1590, Pietro Faccini, an obscure young Bolognese, drew a densely oiled charcoal “Head of a Youth”. His assertive realism is indebted to Michelangelo; the exaggerated linearity and tilted angle are baroque. The distinctive subject — heavy jaw, fleshy lips, strongly worked features — is caught in profile, as if glimpsed in passing. He is anonymous, could be anyone we might meet today: a celebration of drawing’s immediacy, humanity, endurance.To February 16, royalacademy.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
