TV REVIEW : Ninja Turtles’ Namesakes Battle in ‘Giants’

Movies and miniseries about artists’ lives are a special breed. Almost never do you discover anything authentic about art, but generally you’re guaranteed a crisp profile of reigning popular cliches. With luck, the resulting cognitive dissonance can be superficially amusing.

Alas, the laughs are few and far between in “A Season of Giants,” even though it’s a fiesta of cliches.

Ostensibly the drama is about real artists: Michelangelo Buonarroti (Mark Frankel) and his tussles with the megalomaniacal patron Pope Julius II (F. Murray Abraham), and the mad cleric Savonarola (Steven Berkoff), as well as his rivalries with the younger painter Raphael Sanzio (Andrea Prodan) and--the dramatic focal point--with the elder Leonardo da Vinci (John Glover). Yet the two-part, four-hour production, which airs Sunday and Monday at 5 and 7 p.m. on the TNT cable channel, plays fast and loose with the facts. Some examples:

* As 26-year-old Michelangelo ponders the huge block of marble he’s about to chip away into the famous “David,” a friend ignites his competitive fires by reporting that the eminent Leonardo is hard at work on a miraculous portrait of a young lady named Mona Lisa. In actuality, Leonardo started “Mona” some two years after Michelangelo began “David.”

* In Rome, the young upstart Raphael unveils drawings for a papal fresco he is sure will be his crowning achievement. He proudly calls it “The School of Athens”--even though that’s an apocryphal title, and one not even acquired by the masterpiece until some 200 years after Raphael’s death.

* Michelangelo and Leonardo feverishly work on frescoes on opposing walls of a room in the Palazzo Vecchio, skeptically eyeing one another and trading barbs--although, in truth, it’s unlikely they were ever in the room at the same time.

Because a miniseries needs great conflict, preferably among the famous, such dramatic license is of course meant to pump up this lavish Renaissance cavalcade into a heroic Battle of the Art Stars. Trivializing, but harmless.

A miniseries also needs steamy sex, however, and here the producers faced a higher hurdle since both Michelangelo and Leonardo were homosexual. Their solution? Michelangelo has a dream-- a dream! --in which he and a Bolognese noblewoman thrash about feverishly in the sheets, while Leonardo is portrayed as a sexless buffoon.

Now that hurts. Imagine a movie about Picasso that camouflages--or never mentions--his art’s erotic fixation on women, and you’ll have some idea how disfiguring is this cowardly subterfuge.