The Lost Battles

From one of Britain's most acclaimed art historians, art critic of The Guardian—the galvanizing story of the defining moment of the Renaissance: the two greatest artists of their time, commissioned by different people, but working side by side in the same room, a competition out of which would arise the new idea of artistic "genius."

In this rich, fascinating book, published in England to great acclaim ("Superb," —The Observer), Jonathan Jones explores this fierce artistic duel between Leonardo and Michelangelo. Here is the master, Leonardo da Vinci, commissioned at age fifty-two by the Florentine Republic to paint a fresco depicting a famous military victory on a wall of the Great Council Hall in the Palazzo Vecchio. And, with an identical commission from Machiavelli, Leonardo's implacable young rival, the thirty-year-old Michelangelo, working on the same wall. Jones writes brilliantly of their "battle," in which Leonardo painted The Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo The Battle of Cascina—the legendary "lost" masterpieces—and which led to the recognition, for the first time, of artists as godlike creators of the "new," a notion that still holds true today. A riveting exploration into one of history's most resonant exchanges of ideas.