More often than not, it is small accidents and coincidences that end up yielding exceptional literary fruits. This is how the story that has led to the first Catalan translation of The Lives by Giorgio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511 - Florence, 1574) begins: every summer, the Valencian lawyer Martí Domínguez Pérez would take his family to Italy, where they would combine leisure with visits to museums and churches. "It was in 1979, while we were in Arezzo, that my father, a great lover of Italian culture, stopped at the window of a small bookstore where they had the nine volumes of the Sansoni edition of The Lives, where Vasari was written in huge letters, as if he were a rock star. My father hesitated whether or not to buy that edition, which cost 20,000 pesetas. It was a significant amount of money at the time," recalls his son, the writer and biologist Martí Domínguez i Romero, author of novels such as Mater (Proa, 2022) and essays such as The Dream of Lucretius (Pòrtic, 2013).

"It's the biggest battle in the history of art!" exclaims Jordi Sellas with his usual enthusiasm. The director of Ideal, Barcelona's Digital Arts Center, is here for business. He wants journalists to immediately immerse themselves in the immersive experience. Leonardo versus Michelangelo, which opens this Wednesday and will be open until Easter (tickets are €9.50, €14.50, and €18.50). "It's a real confrontation that took place 500 years ago in Florence, an artistic duel that remained unfinished," says Sellas, looking at two images of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), reminiscent of two soap opera heroes.