In the summer of 1504, one commission pitted two titans of the Italian Renaissance against each other. On a single wall of Florence’s Great Council Chamber, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were set to work cheek by jowl, both painting battle scenes nearly 60 feet wide. Leonardo had been working for months on the designs for his Battle of Anghiari, when Florence’s ruling gonfaloniere, Piero Soderini, decided to turn the assignment into a contest. Right next to Leonardo’s wall space, he tasked Michelangelo with the Battle of Cascina, a depiction of half-naked soldiers who are ambushed while bathing. But neither work was ever realized. Fortunately for the curators of “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael,” both murals can be imagined from surviving preparatory sketches and fragmentary copies of each artist’s full-size design. The works the Royal Academy has managed to assemble make one thing clear: had the artists finished, these would have been masterpieces. Additionally, the exhibition explores Raphael’s impressions of the elder artists’ work, including his Bridgewater Madonna (circa 1507–8), on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland, which is indebted to Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo. —Harry Seymour