Both Leonardo and Michelangelo are considered masters of their mediums. Although they are often grouped together in academic settings as masters of the renaissance, the two artists held some very different ideas in terms of portraying beauty, abstraction, and the supremacy of painting or sculpture.
While Michelangelo believed ideal physical beauty had the ability to elevate subject matter to an appropriate representation of ideas, Leonardo believed beauty is built in to nature and the further the artist gets from nature, the further the artist departs form true beauty. Michelangelo would study many models and composite their best features in order to portray a single figure, such as the virgin Mary. His figures are academic in their accuracy regarding muscular form, but there is no assumption that any of his figures are singular people, depicted as nature created them. In contrast, Leonardo went so far as to say re-creating nature in paint is to share in God's divine creation and the less realistic, the less Godly and beautiful the art was.
This departure from nature, condemned by Leonardo, is embraced by Michelangelo as the only way to portray idea. His figures are not meant to be representations of nature, but perfected versions of the natural world. These versions serve to portray creations of the mind rather than the products of a tangible world. This portrayal of idea is a Neoplatonic idea.
Leonardo prefers paint over sculpture because he feels it is the only way to realistically portray nature in all its atmosphere and detail. Michelangelo, on the other hand, was influenced strongly by the Neoplatonic notion of idea and preferred releasing these ideas from the stone with his chisel.
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