In late 1504 and early 1505, Leonardo da Vinci (1452?1519)Âand MichelangeloÂBuonarroti (1475?1564)Âwere both at work on commissions they had received to paint murals in Florence's City Hall.ÂÂLeonardo was to depict a historic battle between Florence and Milan, Michelangelo one between Florence and Pisa.ÂÂThough neither project was ever completed,Âthe painters' mythic encounterÂshaped art and its history in the decades and centuries that followed.ÂÂ This concise, lucid, and thought-provoking book looks again at the one moment when Leonardo and Michelangelo worked side by side, seeking to identify the roots of their differing ideas of the figure in 15th-century pictorial practices and to understand what this contrast meant to the artists and writers who followed them.ÂThrough close investigation of these two artists, Michael W. Cole provides a new account of critical developments in Italian Renaissance painting.