Comparison between da vinci and Michelangelo - Essay Example

He did not have the benefit of an early education and around 1483, he was sent to Milan to work as an apprentice of various artists. Leonardo showed mastery of so many fields including being a sculptor, an architect, painting and engineering. Even though Da Vinci is mainly considered an artist due to the popularity of his surviving masterpiece paintings, he was as well a pioneering scientist as evident in his numerous writings on various subjects including geology and anatomy. These writings that were done with brilliance reveal the genius of an eclectic and innovative mind that crossed so many disciplines.

The natural genius exemplified a true ‘Renaissance man’ due to the humanist prominence in his works. Leonardo observed the world from a scientific perspective and always endeavored to find reason in how the world worked and why things appeared as they did, observations that were manifest in his paintings. It would be wrong to define da Vinci as an idealist since most of his work depicted realism for instance he made his look as lifelike as possible. The subjects in his early paintings had personal attributes and facial characteristics that elevated him above all others.

Michelangelo on the other hand was born on 6 March 1975 in Florence, Italy to a magistrate Italy and just like Leonardo, he was apprenticed at an early age to various artists including painters and sculptors. Another similarity the two artists share in their childhood is the hard lives they lived and absence of motherly upbringing; Leonardo because of the illegitimacy of his birth while Michelangelo because of the death of his mother when he was still very young. Michelangelo, just like da Vinci, was equally exceptional in several subjects including sculptor, painting, poetry and poetry.

Artworks Both artists depicted exceptional brilliance in their works that were mainly drawn from religious history, for example, Leonardo’s painting ‘The Last Supper’ and Michelangelo’s ‘The Last Judgment’ which are depictions of events from passages of the bible. One the most distinctive features of Leonardo’s masterpiece are the portrayal of the subjects with distinct emotive facial expressions and body language, a clear indication of humanist character. Da Vinci portrayed a brilliant mastery of human anatomy when he painted his pictures realistically in terms of anatomy and posture, a subject of interest during the renaissance