The Battle of Cascina: when Michelangelo competed with Leonardo da Vinci.

According to a famous anecdote reported by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives, today we no longer have the cartoon of the Battle of Cascina by Michelangelo Buonarroti (Caprese, 1475 - Rome, 1564) because it was allegedly destroyed by Baccio Bandinelli (Bartolomeo Brandini; Florence, 1488 - 1560), his rival, who hated him but tried throughout his life to imitate his art, without succeeding, and who preferred Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452 - Amboise, 1519) to him. According to the account Vasari provides in the Torrentine edition of the Lives (withdrawn, however, in the Giuntina edition), Bandinelli, in 1512 during the events that led to the fall of the Florentine Republic and the restoration of the Medici family, allegedly sneaked into the Sala del Consiglio Grande (i.e., the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, where the cartoon was located) with the deliberate intent of tearing the work to pieces, succeeding. About the reasons, Vasari also wondered: “Frequenting more than all others the place Baccio et having the key forged, it happened at this time that Piero Soderini was deposed from the government lanno 1512 and put back in state the house of Medici. In the tumult addunque of the palace for the renewal of the state, Baccio by himself secretly tore the cardboard into many pieces; of which the cause was not known, some said that Baccio had torn it in order to have some pieces of the cardboard in his own way behind him: some judged that he wanted to give young people that commodity so that they would not have to profit and make themselves known in art; some said[...]