Ancient Greece to Turner v Constable: Seven of the greatest rivalries in art history

There is an art to rivalry. Mastering its rules has, since ancient times, shaped cultural history over millennia.

Around 400 BC, two legendary painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, went head-to-head in a contest to decide once and for all which was the greater craftsman. For his entry, Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes. So convincing was the glistening cluster, according to the Roman author Pliny the Elder, birds swooped down and tried to peck at the beautifully bedewed portrayal of fruit. But when Zeuxis himself attempted to pull open an illusion of a curtain that Parrhasius had depicted with even greater finesse, it was clear who had prevailed. The lesson learned? If you want to win, you must deceive the deceiver.

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More than two millennia later, in 1832, the British Romantic painter JMW Turner found himself locked in a similarly intense duel with his contemporary, John Constable, when paintings by both men were hung side by side at an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. Constable's vast and ornate painting, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (Waterloo Bridge, from Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817) – which captures with astonishing precision the pomp and pageantry of the Prince Regent's procession as it winds its way to a royal barge – was placed beside a relatively small seascape view of the Dutch port of Helvoetsluys by Turner. Constable had worked on his complex and sprawling canvas for more than a decade. Turner's effort, roughly a third the size of Constable's, seemed barely a sketch by comparison.

Fearing he would be upstaged by Constable's more polished work, which made his own look slapdash and slight, Turner whipped out a brush and jabbed in a single daub of bright red paint to a cresting wave in the forefront of his painting – a strangely transfixing splash of vibrant colour (later worked into a buoy) that added mystery and drama to the seemingly understated scene. With a flick of his wrist, Turner had tipped the balance of the paired paintings in his favour. When Constable clocked Turner's fierce flourish, he famously exclaimed: "he has been here and fired a gun". The lesson learned? In a shootout, the fastest draw wins.

The invigorating artistic tension between the two British Romantic painters is now the focus of a major exhibition at Tate Britain: Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals. Featuring more than 170 paintings and works on paper, including canvases not seen in Britain in over a century, the show explores how a pressurised atmosphere of competition shaped their art, imaginations, and legacies.

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Though Turner's view of Helvoetsluys has not made the journey from the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum in Japan, where it now resides, to enable a restaging of the famous face-off with The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, the organisers of the exhibition have summoned instead a pair of works that Constable himself, as a member of the hanging committee a year earlier at the Royal Academy, placed side by side in 1831. That curated showdown, between Turner's Caligula's Palace and Bridge and Constable's own Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, itself constituted a key moment in the artists' decades-long joust, and provoked one critic to muse on the elemental difference between the two: "Turner's fire and Constable's rain".

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Born just a year apart (Turner in sooty London in 1775, Constable in a serene Suffolk village in 1776), the two were, from the first, "fire and water" opposites, as another reviewer in 1831 would describe them. Turner, whose father was a barber, was just 14 when he began studying art, while Constable, born into an affluent family of corn merchants, didn't commit to painting until he was in his 20s. Their profoundly divergent temperaments and perspectives on life would not only inflect their respective styles, but would become a source of constant fascination for critics, who never tired of pitting them against each other. To one anonymous reviewer in the London Magazine in 1829, Constable was "all truth" while Turner was "all poetry". "The one is silver", he concluded, "the other gold".

No competitor, needless to say, dreams of taking home the silver. But what does it take to come out on top? A glance back at some of the greatest rivalries in art history – from a titanic tussle between Leonardo and Michelangelo in the early 16th Century to a famous fray between Van Gogh and Gauguin near the end of the 19th – provides helpful clues about how to handle oneself when squaring off with a gifted competitor. What follows are five maxims for mastering the art of rivalry.

1. Da Vinci v Michelangelo: Feud is fuel

According to the Italian writer Giorgio Vasari, one of the sharpest episodes of trash talk between artistic rivals occurred on the streets of Florence around 1503, when Leonardo overheard a group of men discussing some elusive lines by Dante. Hailing the famous painter and polymath, the men implored Leonardo to explain the difficult passage. Noticing that Michelangelo too was passing by just then, Leonardo pivoted and said to the group "he will explain it to you". Feeling mocked, Michelangelo fired back, taunting Leonardo for his infamous failure to finish a bronze statue of a horse years earlier: "explain it yourself, you horse-modeller who abandons his work in disgrace!".

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As fate would have it, the two antagonistic artists would soon find themselves commissioned to create competing battle scenes on opposite walls of the same room in the Palazzo Vecchio – a face-off that would remain forever unresolved as the frescoes were never completed. There is little doubting, though, from copies of the fragmentary studies of Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina that have survived, that the feud focused and fuelled the two men's muscles and minds.

2. Titian v Tintoretto: Bide your time

Some rivalries are slow burns. Take Titian's and Tintoretto's. The latter was probably still a teen when Titian, the undisputed king of Venetian art and master of sonorous colour, enviously evicted the precocious upstart from his studio after little more than a week. The slight, though not forgotten, didn't stop Tintoretto from following Titian's career closely or from studying every stroke of his would-be mentor's Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, c 1534-38, which he would visit often in the Gallerie dell'Accademia.

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Vowing to show Venice another way, Tintoretto eventually – 20 years after Titian had tackled the subject – created his own Presentation of the Virgin. Where Titian's take is careful and calibrated in its measured mount of stony steps, moving from left to right, Tintoretto's vision is dynamic and soaring, sweeping our eyes up a glittering set of stairs. Did the ex-pupil surpass the teacher? One is masterfully methodical. The other mirrors the miraculous.

3. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun v  Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Don't believe the snipe

Some rivalries aren't rivalries at all. They're invidious inventions. That was certainly the case in late 18th-Century Paris when two female artists, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Marie-Antoinette's preferred portraitist) and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (an advocate for women painters), secured two of the four places that the Academy had grudgingly allocated to female artists. Their success made them targets of ugly gossip that their real achievement was sleeping their way to prized commissions and enticing male artists to paint their works. Rather than turning on one another, however, the two challenged the era's determination to diminish women.

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A pair of stunning self-portraits painted just a few years apart – Le Brun's Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782, and Labille-Guiard's Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, 1785 – may, at first glance, appear quietly competitive in their diverging temperaments and tones. Look closer, however, and Le Brun's and Labille-Guiard's penetrating gazes are surprisingly in sync. They share an unflinching resolve. Their struggle wasn't with each other but with the chauvinism of their age. 

4. Orazio Gentileschi v Artemisia Gentileschi: Sever your shadows

According to etymology, the word "rivalry" is related to the Latin rivus (or "small river"), and implies a sharing of the same stream. Our next pair, Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, may have started out flowing from the same familial source, but excruciatingly troubled waters in their way made certain their paths diverged. After Artemisia, who had trained in her father's Roman studio, testified in 1612 that her father's colleague Agostino Tassi had raped her, much changed both emotionally and artistically between the two.

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A pair of paintings – Orazio's Lute Player, 1610, begun the year of the trial, and Artemisia's Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1612, thought to have been created soon after it – is indicative of the shift. While both paintings demonstrate a shared affinity for the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, there's an unflinching ferocity to Artemisia's visceral vision that feels freshly unleashed.

5. Van Gogh v Gauguin: If it's broke, don't fix it

Perhaps the worst way to resolve a clash of artistic temperaments or to tame a simmering rivalry is to pretend it doesn't exist. Art is the enemy of delusion. In 1888, Van Gogh and Gauguin, auditioning a shared studio in the famous Yellow House in Arles, failed spectacularly in their attempt to synchronise the frequencies of their singular spirits.

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The result was disaster. And violence. Van Gogh emerged with a mutilated ear and Gauguin fled to Paris. A pair of portraits undertaken during the abortive experiment – Van Gogh's Man in a Red Beret, 1888, and Gauguin's The Painter of Sunflowers – tell a chilly story of askance glances, awkward angles, and cold shoulders.

Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals is at Tate Britain in London until 12 April 2026.

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