Exhibition of the week Bill Viola/michelangelo: Life Death Rebirth

Royal Academy, London W1 (020-7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk). Until 31 March

On the face of it, the American video artist Bill Viola and the Renaissance master Michelangelo make an “improbable double act”, said Martin Gayford in The Spectator. Viola is a star of contemporary art: a maker of slow-motion films featuring beautifully shot, quasi-religious images that have won him huge acclaim and worldwide popularity. Michelangelo, meanwhile, “needs no introduction”: he is one of the greatest artists of all time. Yet as the Royal Academy’s new exhibition pairing the two sets out to demonstrate, there are many “affinities” and “analogies” between them. The show pits a dozen of Viola’s immersive films against 16 of Michelangelo’s “supreme” drawings, and their artistic aims are certainly “comparable”. Despite the centuries separating them, both artists seek to “express spiritual matters in visual terms”, finding transcendent meaning in the form of the human body. On paper, then, the pairing makes sense. But can this modern master hold his own when exhibited next to his 16th century predecessor?

Demonstrably not, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Viola may believe he is posing big questions about “the fundamentals of human existence”, but his “earnest, self-important” videos provide only “fortune cookie spirituality”. In one film, a submerged nude man floats towards us, breaking through the surface, before “descending back into the depths”. Like most of Viola’s work, it strives to say something profound, but produces the opposite effect: I found myself “unhelpfully distracted” by the actor’s “buoyant genitals”. Another film shows footage of two naked actors slowly approaching us as they scrutinise their skin with torches. It aims for the sublime, but ends up looking “irredeemably silly”.

Thank goodness for Michelangelo, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. The Renaissance master’s 16 drawings effortlessly “steal the show” from Viola’s “monotonous” room-sized installations. His work A Children’s Bacchanal (1533) is “full of humorous details and wriggly human activity”; another “beautiful” image, drawn in only a few strokes, depicts the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus as he twists around in her lap to look at her. These images are “born of sensitivity and watchfulness”, alive with perfectly observed detail. The curators say that they don’t want to compare Viola directly with Michelangelo. “But they have made such comparisons inevitable. And sunk their guy in the process.”