PROM ONE OF BRITAIN'S MOST RESPECTED
and acclaimed art historians, art critic of The Guardian-the galvanizing story of a sixteenth-century clash of ti-tans, the two greatest minds of the Renaissance, working side by side in the same room in a fierce competition the master Leonardo da Vinci, commissioned by the Florentine Republic to paint a narrative fresco depicting a famous military victory on a wall of the newly built Great Council Hall in the Palazzo Vecchio, and his implacable young rival, the thirty-year-old Michelangelo.
We see Leonardo, having just completed The Last Supper, being celebrated by all of Florence for his miraculous portrait of the wife of a textile manufacturer. That painting the Mona Lisa- being called the most lifelike anyone had ever seen yet more divine than human, was captivating the entire Florentine Republic.
And Michelangelo, completing a commissioned statue of David, the first colossus of the Renaissance, the archetype hero for the Republic epitomizing the triumph of the weak over the strong, helping to reshape the public identity of the city of Florence and conquer
its heart.
In The Lost Battles, published in England to great acclaim ("Superb"— The Observer; "Beguilingly written"
-The Guardian), Jonathan Jones brilliantly sets the scene of the time-
the politics; the world of art and
artisans, and the shifting, agitated cultural landscape.
We see Florence, a city freed from the oppressive reach of the Medicis, lurching from one crisis to another, trying to protect its liberty in an Italy descending into chaos, with the new head of the Republic in search of a metaphor that will make clear the glory that is Florence, and seeing in the commissioned paintings the expression of his vision.