Climbing Over the Fence on Each Other's Shoulders

Guess I'd never thought of this particular example:

Many times in history two artists have provided their contemporaries with alternative and complementry visions: Masaccio and Fra Angelico, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, Raphael and Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Annibale Csrracci, Rembrandt and Rubens, Ingres and Delacroix, Picasso and Matisse.

That's from Keith "Duccio and the Origins of Western Painting," Metropolitan Museum of Arts Bulletin, 7-55 at 29-40 (Summer 2008). May be old stuff to art historians but new to me. And it fits: we have lots of examples of virtuous circles in the arts: talent responding to talent and rising to heights they wouldn't have achieved otherwise--climbing, as it were, on each other's shoulders. The instances are perhaps so frequent that it isn't even worth catalogueing examples, although it is the kind of thing that gets hidden in plain sight, so obvious that you don't know it. It recalls the observation of Herman Melville in an essay on Hawthorne:

…genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

For some interesting background and context on the Melville quote, go here.