The Greater Artist - Michelangelo or da Vinci?

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni and Leonardo da Vinci brought forth an unparalleled shift in the development of Western art.

They are two artists who irrefutably produced two Renaissance wonders: Michelangelo's David and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Centuries later, they remain as the two most renowned artistic creations in the world. 

Seeming to be as though reflected opposites of one another – the woman who sits smiling and the man who stands grimacing. Said to be no coincidence, as they were created around the same time (between 1501-1506), in the same city of Florence, by artists who were each other's direct rivals.

Michelangelo

Famous work: David 

Over time, it became the artist's habit to leave behind on his work marks of the chisel; straining actions that were fossilized in the chipped, unpolished surface of the marble; while his other works boast smooth, lifelike limbs or anguished faces envisioned from pillars of stone.

No chisel marks sully the masterpiece that cemented Michelangelo's name in the world of art – the statue of David.

The ridges and indents of the torso stand high above us; and at 5.17 metres the statue is more than twice the height of a living person. David's gargantuan right hand radically hangs from his side – a great weight to balance to the sculpture. Out-of-proportion with mesmerizing and exaggerated attention to detail the sculptor embellished on it: the throbbing veins protruding from the marble, bony knuckles and wrinkled skin on the expanse of the thumb.

Where David displays every muscle, his rival is respectably covered. The most bold of her actions being to smile – using what the polymath Leonardo described as "the muscles called lips". This is where she mirrors the verisimilitude of David who was so closely observed in his anatomy that he seems able to move.

Leonardo da Vinci 

Famous work: The Mona Lisa 

What started as a portrait of a Florentine woman, amazed the first people who saw the painting in its brilliant realism. The power behind this painting owes a lot to the counterbalance of the vastness and ubiquity of its landscape, balancing the lack of shadow on the woman's strong features giving her delicate feminine beauty a more masculine overtone.

The shadows featured in the portrait have the effect of closing the distance between foreground and background; the colours of the landscape bringing the background forward as the shadows draw her back.

It is known that Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for years – perhaps until close to the end of his life – never letting the painting go. 

Leonardo's new portrait garnered attention when it was still just a sketch. The establishment of Michelangelo's David in front of the city's government palace in 1504 sparked a new idol in art. Nearly a quarter-century younger than da Vinci himself, Michelangelo rests in the same revered category of human ingenuity. Opposites in many respects, both of their works were also similar not just in unparalleled quality, but in underlying theme.