Artistic rivalries The best, the worst and the most creative

"He has been here and fired a gun," John Constable said of JMW Turner. A shootout between these two titans would make a good scene in a film of their lives but in reality, all Turner had done at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition of 1832 was add a splash of red to a seascape, to distract from Constable's canvas beside it.

- Jonathan Jones

That was by far the most heated moment in what seems to us a struggle for supremacy in British art. It's impossible not to see Tate Britain's new double header of Constable and Turner's work this way. For it is a truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase their contemporary Jane Austen, that when two great artists live at the same time they must be bitter rivals. But is that really so and does it help or hinder creativity?

The Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini literally fired guns, blasting a man to death at close range with an arquebus. But when he contemplated murdering his rival Baccio Bandinelli, who he claimed was "full of badness" and whose statue of Hercules he said resembled "a sack of melons", it was with his trusty dagger.

Cellini spotted Bandinelli across a quiet piazza, according to his autobiography, and reached for his blade to end their competition for Medici patronage with a single knife wound - but spared him.

In fact the story of the Renaissance can be told as a series of rivalries: Cimabue versus Giotto, Bellini versus Giorgione, Michelangelo versus Raphael, Michelangelo versus Bramante, Michelangelo versus Titian and, of course, Michelangelo versus Leonardo da Vinci.