Around 1500, three artists of extraordinary talent worked at the same time, sometimes in the same cities, often in rivalry. Historians call the period from about 1490 to 1527 the High Renaissance. Its center moved from Florence to Rome, where ambitious popes commissioned works meant to rival ancient glory.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 in or near the town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a notary. He trained in Florence in the workshop of the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio. In the 1480s he moved to Milan to work for its ruler, Ludovico Sforza, as an engineer, designer of festivals and painter. There he painted The Last Supper, around 1495 to 1498, on a wall of a monastery dining hall. He experimented with a new technique of painting on dry plaster, which allowed more detail but soon began to flake, and the work has needed restoration ever since.

Back in Florence, around 1503, he began the portrait now known as the Mona Lisa, probably of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant. He worked on it for years and never delivered it. Its subtle blending of light and shadow, a technique called sfumato, “smoky,” and the subject's ambiguous smile made it, eventually, the most famous painting in the world.

Leonardo was also a tireless investigator. His notebooks, several thousand pages of which survive, written in mirror-image script from right to left, contain studies of anatomy, based on his own dissections of human bodies, water, flight, geology, machines and weapons. He designed flying machines and other devices, few of which were ever built. He finished relatively few paintings, distracted by endless curiosity. He spent his last years in France as a guest of King Francis I and died there in 1519.

Michelangelo

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 to 1564) saw himself above all as a sculptor. As a teenager he lived in Lorenzo de' Medici's household. In Rome, at about twenty-four, he carved the Pietà, showing the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ. Back in Florence, between 1501 and 1504, he carved the marble David, over five meters tall, from a huge block that another sculptor had abandoned decades earlier. Placed in front of the government palace, it became a symbol of the Florentine republic.

In 1508 Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo, who protested that he was a sculptor, not a painter, to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Working on scaffolding from 1508 to 1512, he covered the ceiling with scenes from Genesis, including the Creation of Adam, and hundreds of figures. Decades later he returned to paint the Last Judgment on the chapel's altar wall, from 1536 to 1541. He also designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. He wrote poetry and lived to nearly eighty-nine.

Raphael

Raphael (1483 to 1520), from Urbino, was younger than the others and known for grace and harmony. Julius II brought him to Rome to decorate rooms in the Vatican palace. In one, he painted The School of Athens (around 1509 to 1511), showing the great philosophers of antiquity gathered in a vast classical building, with Plato and Aristotle at the center. Art historians widely believe that Plato's face is a portrait of Leonardo, and that the brooding figure of the philosopher Heraclitus resembles Michelangelo. Raphael ran a large, efficient workshop and died at only thirty-seven.

Rome and the popes

The High Renaissance in Rome depended on papal patronage. Julius II, pope from 1503 to 1513, known as the warrior pope because he led armies in person, wanted to restore Rome's grandeur. In 1506 he laid the foundation stone of a new St. Peter's Basilica, designed by Donato Bramante. The cost of rebuilding was enormous, and the sale of indulgences to fund it would help provoke the Reformation.

The Sack of Rome

In 1527, mutinous troops of the emperor Charles V, unpaid and out of control, sacked Rome. They looted, killed and destroyed for months, and the pope, Clement VII, a Medici, was besieged. Many historians take 1527 as the end of the High Renaissance in Rome.

Worked example: the idea of genius

Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael are often presented as lone geniuses. Test that picture.

• Training. Each trained for years in workshops, learning from masters and working alongside assistants.
• Patrons. Their greatest works were commissioned and paid for by rulers and popes, who set subjects and deadlines.
• Collaboration. Raphael's workshop produced much of the work under his name. Michelangelo had assistants on the Sistine ceiling, though he did most of the painting himself.
• Rivalry. Competition among them, encouraged by patrons, pushed each to greater achievement.
• Talent. Their individual abilities were nonetheless extraordinary.

The Renaissance invented much of our modern idea of the artist as genius, partly through Vasari's biographies. The truth is richer: great achievement grows from talent within a community of teachers, rivals, assistants and patrons. That is worth remembering in any field today.