The borrowings would not immediately have been recognised and Titian’s main competitors were Venetian

The borrowings would not immediately have been recognised, and Titian’s main competitors were Venetian.Goffen’s best writing occurs in the section on Michelangelo, when she concentrates on close analysis of the work. When young Titian borrows motifs from Michelangelo for a fresco in Padua and for a woodcut, Goffen is amazed at his audacity, “announcing his intention to rival” the Florentine This seems unlikely. Thus there is no mention of Michelangelo basing the biblical scenes for the medallions for the Sistine Ceiling (above) on cheap woodcut illustrations from a vernacular Bible. Vasari’s equal emphasis on gentlemanly behaviour, on virtuous rivalry and co-operation, is ignored. One wonders how any real work got done in this snake pit.Nowhere does Goffen suggest a motif may have been borrowed simply as a short-cut.

Whereas in previous centuries, artists borrowed from each other out of respect for tradition, now it was “dialogue or dialectic, sometimes combative (as when Titian revises Michelangelo), sometimes a pacific declaration of admiration (when Raphael emulates Leonardo), sometimes hostile (when Cellini confronts Bandinelli)”. Without offering evidence, she asserts that patrons had always had preferences, but only after the 14th century in Italy was one master no longer regarded as inter-changeable with another.This is patently untrue. The names of the architects of Pisa’s romanesque Cathedral, Baptistery and Bell Tower are recorded. She offers no substantial explanation of the social, economic or cultural changes that caused this supposed orgy of competitive self-fashioning She shrugs off the Middle Ages almost in passing. The opening gambit of the Renaissance is often said to be an Italy-wide competition for the Baptistery Doors in Florence in 1401, which was won by Lorenzo Ghiberti with Filippo Brunelleschi coming a sore-headed second.

Yet beyond noting such things as the burgeoning literature on the visual arts and the beginnings of both a theory and practice of self-portraiture, it is hard to pinpoint a moment when the so-called Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance began.Goffen solves these problems by all but ignoring them. This book should have been entitled The Agon and the Ecstasy.There is a serious point here, because the Renaissance has always been characterised as a period of heightened self-consciousness, in which rivalry among artists, and with antiquity, acted as a motor for innovation. Thus a stucco Hercules by arch-villain Baccio Bandinelli was a “gauntlet” signifying his “doubled agon” with Donatello and Michelangelo. Michelangelo only stops fighting in his last sculpture – “a prayer in stone that transcends agon”. It is not often you read a serious art history book that is nearly as violent and cynical as a spaghetti western. But, in Renaissance Rivals, every waking thought of every great Renaissance artist is given over to devising dastardly stratagems for shafting contemporaries and predecessors.
We learn that when Leonardo and Michelangelo painted battle scenes in the Florence Town Hall, they were also battling each other. Instead, it has moved confidently on.The sixth edition of Brian Morton and Richard Cook’s ‘Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD’ has just been published.

Even so, the book doesn’t quite dispel the shrug in its title. That album’s signature track “So What?” no longer seems the distillation of Miles’s idiosyncratic vision, but rather a collision of disparate influences.I met Miles twice, both times largely by chance. Szwed makes no substantial claims as a musicologist and on occasions his knowledge of the music seems a little forced. He delivers a portrait of an artistic life in which circumstance always outweighs vision. Miles’s health, the state of the music business, the vagaries and ambitions of his playing partners all the way from Charlie Parker and John Coltrane to Joe Zawinul and Marcus Miller: all are sensibly deployed in the story. The prevailing mythology casts Miles as an aery sprite, graceful, hypersensitive and only combative when at bay. Not so very many African-Americans enjoyed a Juilliard School education.It seems strange at this distance that of all the facets offered by the protean Davis, his previous biographers should have presented such a narrow range.