Sponsored by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Feeling the lust for travel? We are. Explore Isabella Gardner’s global adventures at Third Thursdays: Wanderlust on Thursday, Feb. 19.Rivalries aren’t just for siblings and sports teams. Throughout history, rivalries and competition have driven advancements and innovations in countless fields and industries, from art to medicine to technology. These rivalries not only force competitors to try to one-up each other, they also result in some useful, albeit scathing, critiques of their products and procedures.Take, for example, Benvenuto Cellini — a sculptor and goldsmith active in Renaissance Florence, whose rivalry with sculptor Baccio Bandinelli was notorious. At the unveiling of Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus statues in 1534, Cellini gleefully offered his own review. The sculpture, he said, evoked “a sack of melons leaning against a wall, with scarcely enough room for a tiny brain under his hair.”Cellini’s scathing prose aside, the culture of one-upmanship didn’t end with the Renaissance. To this day, technological advancements and innovations are prompted by the desire to outdo the competition — check out six of history’s most defining tech rivalries.Images via Shutterstock; Wikipedia
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