Art review Leonardo's warriors win battle with gnarly nudes

Art is a serious subject," say posters put up by the Royal Academy in London to champion art in schools. But is the Royal Academy itself serious? Its main galleries are now full of vacant paintings by Michael Craig-Martin, RA, while three of the greatest artists who ever lived are crammed into a couple of rooms round the back.

- Jonathan Jones

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c 1504 is based on the rivalrous encounter between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo when both were commissioned to paint battle scenes by the Florentine republic. First, Leonardo was tasked to paint a mural of The Battle of Anghiari, in which Florence had defeated Milanese mercenaries. As Leonardo planned it, Michelangelo was commissioned to paint another battle on the same wall.

This exhibition could have been, should have been, a mighty epic. In the golden age of Lorenzo de' Medici's Florence these two geniuses emerged. They were different ages and had opportunities beyond Florence, so they didn't meet until "c 1504", as the exhibition subtitle has it, when both were back in town.

It was a changed place. A revolution inspired by the preacher Savonarola chucked out the Medici and established a popular republic. Savonarola supported a new democratic assembly and spurred the building of the Great Council Hall. Then he was executed. One of his critics, Niccolò Machiavelli, became a powerful political figure.