Did Michelangelo and Leonardo Hate Each Other?
Yes, by most accounts Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci disliked each other. They were the two greatest artists in Florence at the same moment, separated by twenty three years and by almost opposite temperaments, and the sources record real friction between them.
Imagine the two biggest names in art history, in one city, unable to stand each other.
That is roughly what happened in Florence around 1504.
Two giants, one city
Leonardo, born in 1452, was the elder: elegant, charming, endlessly curious, slow to finish anything. Michelangelo, born in 1475, was younger, intense, devout and famously prickly.
By 1504 both were back in Florence at the height of their fame, and the city could not resist putting them in direct competition.
The duel of the battle paintings
Florence commissioned both men to paint enormous battle scenes on facing walls of the great council hall. Leonardo began the Battle of Anghiari, Michelangelo the Battle of Cascina.
Leonardo poured the same restless genius into his own quiet finest work, The Last Supper.
It was the ultimate contest of the age. Neither finished. Leonardo's experimental technique failed and ran, and Michelangelo was called away to Rome. Both works survive only in copies and sketches.
The insults on the street
The sources record sharp words. In one well known account Michelangelo taunted Leonardo in public over the giant bronze horse he had designed in Milan but never managed to cast.
Leonardo, for his part, wrote coolly about sculptors covered in marble dust, a thinly veiled dig at the younger man's trade. You can read each side in the complete Leonardo story and the complete Michelangelo story.
Questions about the rivalry
Did Michelangelo and Leonardo hate each other? They strongly disliked each other, by most accounts.
Why? Rivalry, a big age gap and opposite personalities.
Did they ever compete directly? Yes, on battle murals in Florence around 1504.
Who won? Neither finished. Both works are lost.
Who was older? Leonardo, by twenty three years.
The greatest rivalry in art
For a few years Florence held the two most gifted artists who ever lived, and instead of friendship it got a cold war of insults and unfinished finest works. The contest that might have produced two of the greatest murals in history left only legend, which somehow feels right for both men.