Tag: contexts

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season three

Episode 40: New World Order

We look at Pope Leo X’s reign, from how he got an edition of a pivotal Jewish text dedicated to him to the elaborate practical joke he engineered involving his pet elephant and an old-fashioned Roman triumph. But Leo also has to face the fact that  the fate of Europe now lays in the hands of three young, ambitious, and powerful monarchs. 

A portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici, duc de Nemours, who was Lorenzo the Magnificent’s youngest son (c. 1515) by Raphael’s workshop. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
King Henry VIII as a young man. Date and artist unknown. Source: National Portrait Gallery, London.
King François I of France (c. 1530) from the workshop of Joos van Cleve. Source: Private collection.
Portrait of Emperor Charles V as a young man by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (1535). Source: Private collection.

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season three

Episode 38: Mother Church

The Catholic Church was once the most important, omnipresent institution in Europe. Before we meet the Medici Popes, we’ll delve into what exactly the Church did for the people, from providing early nursing homes to giving people one of the few shots at social mobility, and how powerful the Popes really were.

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season two

Episode 29: After Me, The Deluge

We step back from the Medici to look at Europe as a whole circa 1492. The balance of power is shifting and that means, for the Medici and Italy as a whole, the flood is coming. 

A map of Europe circa 1500 (although it should be noted modern Spain was still administratively divided between the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile). Source: The University of Oregon.

A map of Italy in 1494. Source: Shadowxfox.

A medal depicting the future King Alfonso II of Naples by Andrea Guazzalotti. Date: 1481. Source: Sailko.
A 19th century painting depicting the surrender of Emir Muhammad XII of Granada to Queen Isabel I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon, by Francisco Pradillo y Ortiz. Date: 1882. Source: Senate of Spain Collection, Madrid.
An anonymous portrait of Mary of Burgundy, painted sometime during her life. Her decision to marry Maximilian von Hapsburg would change the course of European history and arguably set the stage for a long series of conflicts up to World War II. Artist and exact date unknown. Source: Private collection.
A portrait of King Louis XI of France, nicknamed “The Universal Spider” because his cunning and ruthless foreign policy helped make France a great power again, free of the threats once posed by the English and the Burgundians. The artist is Jacob de Littemont. Date: 1469. Source: Private collection.
A portrait of Maximilian von Hapsburg, Holy Roman Emperor, Duke of Austria, and co-duke of Burgundy through his wife Mary of Burgundy. The artist is Bernhard Strigel. Date: ca. 1500. Source: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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season two

Episode 14: Renaissance, The New

This first century BCE Roman fresco from the villa of Publius Fannius Synistor in Boscoreale in modern-day Naples, which demonstrates a partial use of vanishing point, a technique that would not be perfected until the Renaissance. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Giotto’s Crucifix (c. 1290-1300). Note the realistic details such as Jesus’ facial expression and the wound in his side. Source: The Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, Italy.
Masaccio, The Expulsion (c. 1426-1428). Note the fig leaves added to the version on the left, before they were removed with the 20th century restoration shown on the right. Source: Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.
Donatello’s David (c. 1440s?), the first freestanding nude sculpture made in Europe since antiquity. Source: Patrick A. Rodgers, the Bargello, Florence.
The Monastery of Batalha in the Central Region of Portugal. Source: Waugsberg.
The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, erected by Filippo Brunelleschi. It remains the largest brick dome in the world.
An image from I Modi (1524).

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Transcript

Something about history that usually remains true is that very few people are ever aware of the significance of the times they live through. The Romans of their late fourth century CE didn’t know their children and grandchildren would be the last citizens of the empire nor did the Prophet Muhammad’s contemporaries realize their compatriots would crush the superpowers of their day, the Eastern Roman and Sassanid Empires, and start a religion that would change the world. And no one ever thought of themselves as living through the colonial era or the Enlightenment or whathaveyou. If any generations ever knew exactly what era they were living through, it was the people who lived to see the Renaissance. While it was a nineteenth century historian, Jules Michelet, who did first slap the label “Renaissance” on the whole period, it really was Giorgio Vasari, the humanist who wrote Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, who coined the metaphor of “rebirth” when referring to the accomplishments of the artists he described in his work.

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season two

Episode 13: Renaissance, The Old

Raphael, The School of Athens, ca. 1510. It is a fresco that lies in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
A representation of the standard medieval western European representation of Perseus, from an astrological and occult guidebook, the Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch (1491), currently kept in the rare books collection of the University of Heidelberg. Note how Perseus is wielding an Arabic-style scimitar.
Altichiero de Zevio’s sketch portrait of Petrarch, c. 1375.
Anonymous portrait of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
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Transcript

Let’s talk about the Renaissance. Because the Renaissance was a truly international movement, and not at all the exclusively Italian movement we tend to think of it as, to talk about it it’s almost impossible not to jump around in space and time. So, for the sake of trying (possibly in vain) to keep things tidy I split my discussion of the Renaissance in two. First, we’ll talk about the old, how the Renaissance looked back into the past. Second, we’ll get into the new, meaning how the Renaissance looked forward.

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Tangent Episodes

Tangent Episode #3: The Life and Times of Dante

Domenico Peterlini, Dante in Exile, ca. 1860, at the Gallery of Modern Arts in Florence.

He was a political exile who sided with the wrong people at the wrong time and lost the love of his life. Also he was one of the greatest writers in history and got to shape the modern Italian language. 

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season one

Episode 11: Sin and Profit

A portrait of bankers at a traditional banking table. Source unknown.

We take a step back from the life of Giovanni di Bicci dei Medici to look at banking, commerce, and religious and legal attitudes about usury and luxury in Renaissance Florence. How did the Medici and other Florentine dynasties prosper in banking when loans with interest were considered a grave sin and a form of theft? 

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I decided to take a brief break from telling the story of Giovanni di Bicci’s life to give a little context to exactly how the Medici made their money. Let’s talk capitalism. Or proto-capitalism.

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season zero

Episode 4: Republic of Guilds

With Florence free of foreign interference (for once), a medieval “class traitor” spearheaded reforms that severely weakened the nobility’s grip on the government and gave a lot of formal power to the city’s merchant and artisan guilds. In this episode, I delve into the nuts and bolts of how this guild regime operated. Also, I talk about whether or not we can talk about Florence as part of an “Italian nation”, even though a unified Italian nation state was still about 600 years from being born. 

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Transcript

So the last time we checked in on the Florentines, they were finally free of the foreign control of the Holy Roman Emperors and Charles of Anjou. The feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines was finally over by 1267, with the Ghibelline cause lost for good with the downfall of the Hohenstauffen dynasty of Holy Roman Emperors. Well, at least, lost for good in retrospect. Not surprisingly, by 1300, the Guelphs split into two brand-new factions, the White Guelphs, who opposed papal influence, and the Black Guelphs, who supported the Pope, which provided a new excuse for infighting among the nobility.

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season zero

Episode 3: Gang War

Starting out as an ill-advised prank at a party, the feud between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines in Florence forever changed the city’s history. It would wrap Florence up in the struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, eventually toppling the city’s aristocratic republic and creating something rather new in its place, the Primo Popolo.

A map of Italy around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Source: Muir’s Historical Atlas via Fordham University’s Medieval History Sourcebook.
The Florentine Guelf flag, which became the official flag of the City of Florence.
The Bargello, formerly the Palazzo del Popolo. Source: VisitFlorence.com.

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Transcript

let’s go back in time to a humble little village called Campi, which is today a municipality in the Florentine metro area but was in the twelfth century six miles outside Florence. There two of the most powerful noble families in Florence, the Uberti and the Buondelmonti, were present to celebrate the knighting of a young nobleman. The Buondelmonti and the Uberti were rivals with their own networks of allies among the various noble families, many of whom were present, so tensions were high.  During the banquet, a jester, either on his own initiative or at someone’s malicious suggestion, grabbed a plate of food that Uberto dell’Infangati was just about to dig into. This caused a fight to break out, during which Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, who wasn’t even involved in the original altercation, stabbed Oddo Arrighi.

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Tangent Episodes

Tangent Episode #1: The Further Adventures of Liutprand of Cremona

In our first tangent episode, we spend some time with Liutprand of Cremona, everyone’s favorite caustic bishop from the Early Middle Ages. Join us for his account of Queen Willa’s disastrous love affair with a well-endowed priest and his ill-fated visit to Constantinople in the time of the Macedonian dynasty. 

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