Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael: Genius and Rivalry in Renaissance Rome

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael: Genius and Rivalry in Renaissance Rome

For roughly three years, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael were active in Renaissance Rome at the same time. They were not friends: admiration, influence, rivalry, and resentment shaped their relationships. Leonardo and Michelangelo had already crossed paths in Florence, and Raphael had studied both. Although no reliable source records all three gathering together, their artistic dialogue stretched from Florence to the Vatican.

More Popular Articles

Antigua Guatemala: The Baroque Capital That Was Ordered to Disappear

Antigua Guatemala: The Baroque Capital That Was Ordered to Disappear

For 230 years it was the capital of Spanish Central America and, by contemporary reckoning, second in splendour only to Mexico City. Then earthquakes gave the Crown the excuse it wanted. The capital was moved, the churches were left to fall, and the people who refused to leave saved the most beautiful ruins in the Americas.

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico: The Walled City That Spain Built and Twice Lost

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico: The Walled City That Spain Built and Twice Lost

Founded in 1521 on a rocky islet, Old San Juan is the oldest European-founded city in United States territory and one of the great fortified ports of the Atlantic world. Its walls held El Morro against every fleet that came. The city behind them fell twice. A guide to what to see, and to what the guidebooks get wrong.

Ultramarine: The Blue That Could Cost More Than Gold

Ultramarine: The Blue That Could Cost More Than Gold

For centuries, Europe’s most prized blue came chiefly from lapis lazuli mined in Badakhshan. At times, the finest ultramarine cost more than gold and was reserved for the most sacred figures in painting. Then nineteenth-century chemistry transformed it from a luxury into an everyday pigment.

Naours: The Underground City Where Great War Soldiers Signed the Walls

Naours: The Underground City Where Great War Soldiers Signed the Walls

Thirty-three metres beneath a hill in Picardy lies a city carved by hand: 28 galleries, hundreds of rooms, chimneys disguised to hide the smoke. Villagers dug in here to survive centuries of war. Then, in 1916, soldiers on leave came down as tourists and wrote their names on the chalk. Thousands are still legible.

Why Did the Founding Fathers Protect Slavery Without Naming It?

Why Did the Founding Fathers Protect Slavery Without Naming It?

The United States Constitution never uses the word "slave", yet it protected slavery in at least three places. Why did a generation that proclaimed all men equal write human bondage into its founding charter, who fought to stop them, and would the nation have split apart if they had chosen abolition instead?