This essay explores how great works of art may be judged by examining two Renaissance masterpieces: Michelangelo's David and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Drawing on David Summers's scholarship, the paper contrasts Michelangelo's expansive, spiritually charged heroism — visible in David's animated yet restrained pose — with Leonardo's precise observational genius, exemplified by the Mona Lisa's ambiguous smile and subtle use of light and shadow. Together, the two works illustrate that artistic mastery can take fundamentally different forms: one reaching toward the heroic and transcendent, the other capturing the quiet complexity of ordinary human nature.
How does one judge a work of art? One could come to blows over this question regarding modern art, yet the reputations of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as masters of their respective crafts seem secure. Their most celebrated works offer a compelling starting point for exploring what artistic greatness actually means.
Michelangelo's David is an almost perfect specimen of humanity. Yet beneath the rippling muscle, the uncertainty of pose and poise of the young man also communicates the artist's core message: the callowness and fear of the young warrior — not yet a king — who is about to slay Goliath with his small slingshot. This is why "Michelangelo's figures are both animated and restrained, and seem to possess great spiritual energy. His work presses toward the extremes of heroism and tragedy but is never false or artificial." (Summers, "Michelangelo," 2004)
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is not as overtly beautiful as David, yet it stands as a towering work of portraiture. The Mona Lisa's smile captivates because its ambiguity of expression seems so real. "Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is probably the most famous portrait ever painted," yet the woman herself remains inscrutable and private to the viewer in terms of her true nature — even in an era when painting was the primary visual record-keeping art, before the invention of photography.
This conveyance of human nature is part of the work's genius, and what the artist apparently intended to convey: not greatness, but ordinariness, in contrast to Michelangelo. It is still a masterwork of craft, but of a subtler craft of character, as the Mona Lisa's "blurred outlines, graceful figure, dramatic contrasts of dark and light, and overall feeling of calm are characteristic of Leonardo's style." (Summers, "Mona Lisa," 2004)
"Heroic imagination versus precise observation compared"
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