Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There have been many fruitful collaborations in the history of art; some have yielded masterpieces, others have given rise to entire movements. The Renaissance, the apogee of artistic accomplishment, was arguably born of a constant, tacit competition between a trio of singular talents trying to out-do one another.So suggests Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty, a compelling new BBC documentary in which some of the era’s greatest works are considered both as feats of rare skill and as products of a multi-decade rivalry between Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael. The three-part series paints its portrait of these prodigious polymaths against a backdrop of a volatile sociopolitical landscape in which art became a tool for powerful men.Like the recent BBC programmes about Shakespeare and Mozart, this rich story is told through a combination of expert commentary and amateurish re-enactments, the latter only serving to render towering figures as flimsy caricatures. Stagy scenes (think Michelangelo caressing a monolith of Carrara marble) are accompanied by monologues performed by Charles Dance as an aged Michelangelo. The script, we’re told, is based on the artist’s own writings. But these first-person reflections feel less like an intimate encounter with a great man than a clumsy gimmick.The documentary part fares better. While there’s little that will be revelatory to seasoned art-lovers, many will doubtless relish being eruditely guided through some of the world’s most extraordinary paintings and sculptures by a line-up of art historians, biographers and artists, including Antony Gormley, Alison Lapper and David LaChapelle. Collectively they succeed in finding the right balance between engaging storytelling and analysis; cultural contexts and compositional details; the art and the artists. Occasional attempts to draw contemporary parallels by comparing 16th-century Florence and Silicon Valley, the Medici patrons and the mafia, iconoclasm and “cancel culture”, however, feel laboured.More rewarding are the moments that penetrate the aura of semi-divine genius that surrounds the artists and unpick their human emotions and motivations — the envy, the insecurity, the obsessiveness that drove them to greater triumphs yet yielded little satisfaction. “Tell me if anything was ever accomplished,” Leonardo wrote near his death. If the creator of “The Last Supper” and “The Mona Lisa” never felt adequate, then you wonder where that leaves the rest of us.★★★☆☆On BBC2 from December 2 at 9pm and airing weekly; streaming on BBC iPlayer
