ABSTRACT
The contemporaneity of the three greatest visual artists of all times, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael can partly be solved by the analysis of their formative experiences and interrelatedness; but only partly, as a simple comparison of their basic identifying features, like the dates of their birth and death, and their names, also contain a series of further, genuine mysteries. Concerning Raphael, it was reported by contemporaries and accepted by modern scholarship that he died on his birthday; furthermore, at the exact hour of his birth, on Good Friday, the ninth hour of the day, 6 p.m. in modern times, or the exact moment in which Jesus had died. Leonardo died just a year before, in 1519, while Michelangelo survived until 1564; which not only marked with particular force the end of the High Renaissance, especially if we add 1517, the year of Luther’s famous act, but also brings out a play of coincidences with the founding figures of sociology, as Durkheim, Simmel and Weber each died in-between 1917 and 1920, similarly together and exactly 400 years later, and marking just as clear a caesura. Michelangelo’s year of death not only coincides with the birth of Shakespeare and Marlowe, but also took place just 300 years before the birth of Max Weber, while he was born 400 years before Thomas Mann, a coincidence underlined by the parallels and similarities in the work and importance of Weber and Mann (see Goldman 1988, 1992). Furthermore, while Weber was the great theorist of modernity as the disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world, Mann was called the ‘enchanter/magician’ (Zauberer) by his children, and had the term ‘magic’ in the title of two of his most important works (The Magic Mountain and Mario and the Magician). Even further, one could argue that if, following Weber, the ‘great process’ of disenchantment should be traced through the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism to Luther, it was paralleled by a ‘magic spell’ put on the modern world that was much crafted by Michelangelo. Finally, the years in which Leonardo and Raphael were born, 1452 and 1483 respectively, also mark almost perfectly two events to which the epochal changes of the period can be most clearly traced: the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the birth of Luther in 1483.
