Leonardo Da Vinci Vs. Michelangelo

Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo were two of the greatest minds in history. Both of these incredible artists left the world with celebrated works such as Michelangelo’s statue of David, and Da Vinci's painting of the Mona Lisa. Da Vinci and Michelangelo influenced a wide variety of topics ranging from sculpting and painting to architecture to human anatomy. The two artists had a very different approach to art however. Michelangelo favors “contours that are crisp and set off against a contrasting background, whereas Da Vinci´s blend and avoid silhouette” (Livingstone n.pg). This prominent difference in artistic approach is easily identified when comparing Da Vinci's works such as the Mona Lisa, where the background seems to blend together

Da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in Vinci, Italy. Michelangelo was born later, on March 6th 1475 in Caprese, Italy in the midst of the High Renaissance. Both Da Vinci´s father and Michelangelo´s father held prominent positions in their society. Da Vinci´s father was a high ranking notary, and Michelangelo´s father was a government agent. These positions that both artists fathers held allowed for Da Vinci and Michelangelo to be apprenticed to some of the very best artists of the time. When Da Vinci was fifteen years old, he was an apprentice to Andre Del Verrocchio. Verrocchio was the leading artist in Florence, and one of the highest regarded artists of the High Renaissance. Verrocchio´s style of art was focused on capturing the vitality of the human figure, and this style played a large role in Da Vinci's focus on anatomy and human figures. Michelangelo was interested in art at an extremely young age like Da Vinci, but his father thought art was below their families social status. Even with his father´s disapproval, Michelangelo was an apprentice to Domenico Ghirlandaio at the age of thirteen. Ghirlandaio was considered one of the most fashionable painters in Florence at the time. After this apprenticeship, Michelangelo was given access to a collection of ancient Roman sculptures owned by Lorenzo De Medici. The access to this collection of sculptures ignited

Anatomy was arguably Da Vinci's greatest interest, and it is a subject he relentlessly refers to in his notes. Whilst at the University of Pavia, Da Vinci collaborated with an early professor of anatomy named Marcantonio della Torre. Della Torre and Da Vinci worked tirelessly on discovering the secrets of the human body, and filled eighteen double sized sheets of paper with more than 240 sketches and drawings and over 13,000 words of notes. This collection of information is known as Anatomical Manuscript A (shown below), and is one of the most famous collections of anatomical information to date (Abrahams