Dan Snow's History Hit - The Renaissance

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

Today on the podcast we're going to talk all about the Renaissance. We have all heard of it as a reawakening, a rebirth of European culture but what truly was it and why was it so important and are we going through our own renaissance now? I wanted to really get under the skin of the Renaissance and find out what exactly happened in Italy in the 15th and 16th century. Joining me to do just that is Mary Hollingsworth who has written a book called Princes of the Renaissance about the people who became the artistic patrons in that period.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth, now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm Dan Snow. Today we're going to talk about the Renaissance. You've heard of it, an awakening, a rebirth. Did it exist? What was it? Why does everyone get so excited about the

Renaissance? Aren't we living through a Renaissance now? Isn't there an explosion of learning, culture, art? Well, maybe not right now with COVID, but generally in this kind of period in which we're living. So I kind of wanted to get under the skin of Renaissance. What exactly happened in the 15th and early 16th century in Italy? And the person I want to talk to is Mary Hollingsworth. She has written a book called Princes of the Renaissance about the people that became the artistic patrons in that period. It was a really fun chat. We jump around a lot, a lot of bringing in different periods and ideas here. So I had a great time. I learned a lot. I hope you do too. If you want to come and listen

to people like Mary Hollingsworth, wonderful historians who are at the top of their game and can tell us all about some of the most fascinating periods in history, please come along to our live tour, historyhit.com slash tour. You'll be hearing from many of the wonderful voices you hear on this podcast. And of course, as ever, go and check out History Hit TV. It's a new history channel. All the plans we got this year. Guys, I can't wait to show you these plans. They're going to be so exciting. It's bigger and better than ever.

Subscribe now while you have the chance. Go to historyhit.tv, check out the new history channel, and you can also listen to all these podcasts way back into the past with no ads, because some of you tell me you find the ads very annoying, which I apologise. In the meantime, everyone, here is Mary Hollingsworth. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Who are the princes of the Renaissance? They are the people who are basically responsible for the Renaissance. And they are the people who commissioned all the buildings and all the art that we think of as the real Renaissance art. And they are the ones that are not the Medici, because the Medici at this stage were not princes. Well, that's what I'm very interested in. Because from your book, I get the impression that the use of the word prince is quite interesting, isn't it here? Was this a time of power lying in the hands of the hereditaries of dynastic families? But some of them are kind of self-made, aren't they?

Well, yes, but they were self-made with the intention of becoming dynasties. So the Swartzes are the ones that come from nowhere, if you like, but beat up to become princes, become dukes in 1450. But the Medici don't become dukes until 1537 or 1532. It's a slightly dodgy, but they actually get the title 1532, 37? So anyway, so they're not 15th century dynasties. They're just rich bankers, enablers. Quite useful. Very useful indeed. Everyone needs a rich banker. Exactly. You just talked to the British kings and politicians in the 18th century. So Mary,

what comes first with Renaissance? What do we need to talk about first? Was this a time when traditional elites were being replaced by rich bankers and merchants, or is there something going on here? No, no, it's definitely different. Rich bankers are just enablers. It's a time when all the princes of Italy, so these are all dynastic, they're marquises, dukes, cardinals count as princes because they have the same social status as princes. And they are reinventing themselves as the heirs to the Italy of ancient Rome. So not as a united empire, but I don't think any of them, possibly Alfonso of Aragon had ambitions to rule the world. But most of them were just using the Roman heritage that they all have to promote themselves as emperors. And that's a bit simplistic,

but that's why they had began to adopt the language, the artistic language of ancient Rome to display their power, which is at this point is completely different from what's going on north of the Alps outside Italy. So this is, you know, the equivalent of perpendicular and the various decorated forms of Gothic are what is a normal north of the Alps. Whenever I talk to other medieval, early medieval historians, they find the Renaissance quite troubling because they talk about the Carolingian Renaissance. They talk about the Renaissance that went on in Paris a couple of hundred years before. What's going on that's different here, south of the Alps in this period? And why does it happen? I would say the interesting point you bring up is the

Carolingian Renaissance, because of course, it's doing exactly the same. The Carolingians were reviving the concept of empire. They did have much more political aims and grandeur, if you like, in terms of scale. But Charlemagne was the first Holy Roman, key word, emperor. So that was reviving the older pattern of imperial Rome right then. 12th century Renaissance is something that happens in large parts right across Europe. I mean, the difference with this is that it's Italian. And in a sense, the Italians had a much easier claim. They could see ancient Rome in all their cities. I mean, apart from the ruins of ancient Rome, there's an amphitheater in Verona that was there. There are arches and bridges and

things right across northern Italy. There were coins in the fields. Farmers would be digging up, ploughing up coins with their oxen every year. It was part of their heritage, and that is the difference. And is it caused, if that's the right word? I mean, is it the interplay of global politics, if you like, with people talk about the Greek scholars coming over from Constantinople after the fall of that city in the early 1450s, but just the political, the cultural soil was ready to receive that crop, that seed, was it? I think that's a very good way of putting it. I really do. I like that analogy, the idea that it was something in the right place at the right time. I think the other point you've got to remember is not only did that mean an awful lot

more scholars, Greek Orthodox scholars, but also Latinists as well as Greek specialists, moving to Italy just to leave the conquered Constantinople, if you like. But also the popes come back from Avignon, come back to Italy in 1415, 1417. I mean, they don't really settle in Rome until the 1420s. But that's the point at which the papacy becomes Italian. And the focus of the popes is Italy. And then the focus of all their foreign rulers, we're talking Francis I and Charles V, their focus is on getting Italy for themselves. And that's a slightly different issue. But it's quite a key point that the return of the papacy to Rome marks a very significant piece of the jigsaw that's just one of the little extra bits of detail that all happen to be in the right place at the right time.

I was very struck in the book that you talk about war, which so many of us think is a kind of antithesis of Botticelli and Michelangelo's art. But war is clearly hugely important. And is it war that's changing these power structures and then these new people in power are desperate to surround themselves with the trappings of civilisation to enhance the legitimacy following the luck or fate they've had on the battlefield. Well, the people who start off the Renaissance, the sort of two earliest patrons that are quite significant patrons, they are both established. And that's chapter two, which I deal with Leonello d'Este and Sigismondo Malatesta. Those two are both mercenaries by job, if you like, but they control their own

states. But it's the people who come up after them, like the Sforzas, who are imitating what princely behaviour was that gives a bit of impetus to the whole movement. There's that long, oft-lamented way in which dynasties, the first one is the kind of hard-bitten soldier. Is it Ibn Khaldun in the Middle East talks about this, and then the ones that follow become interested in culture and art? Absolutely. No, it's really fascinating. And you just watch them. And then the really interesting thing is watching how the ones who are really the hardworking soldiers, how they adapt to becoming politicians, because not all of them do. And it is quite interesting. It's two completely different skills. A skill on

the battlefield is not the same skill in a council chamber or diplomats and that kind of thing. But that's another thing that comes out of the Renaissance is diplomacy, which is something that people don't often think about, but it's effectively Francesco Sforza wanted to know what was going on in each court in Italy. He established full-time ambassadors at the court in Rome and in Florence and in particularly in Venice. Milan versus Venice was an important part of the power struggle in northern Italy. That's the other thing is, of course, there's the power struggle within Italy for control of different smaller states, bigger states. Everybody wanted to be bigger, obviously. And the popes wanted to be dynasties.

That's another important point. So the popes set themselves up as dynasties and some of them failed and some of them worked. It was proliferation and competition. The more you could, the better you were, the grander you were. Why is art important? Because that sounds familiar, you know, perhaps within the Greek city-state system of the ancient world, people are competing. Why didn't they just invest all their money in spears and breastplates and artillery pieces? Why does art and architecture become important in this Game of Thrones? I ought to have called the book Game of Thrones. I think it might have been trademarked. I'm just slightly nervous about that.

I think it might have been. Princes of the Renaissance is also a board game, apparently. But anyway, let's not worry about that. It's very difficult to say why they didn't just buy more breastplates. I suppose in one sense, there is the classical world that is what they're trying to revive. It's not just the fighting, but also the culture. You could read Pliny's letters and you know that you could be in Rome and be in the middle of the politics. So you could be fighting people and people's soldiers who could be fighting.

But also you have your luxury life of living in your villa surrounded by servants and your winter dining rooms and your summer breakfast rooms and all the rooms facing whichever the best way was for light and heat. And all these things mattered in an era where you didn't have central heating. You had to do the best you could. You wouldn't have a north-facing winter bedroom, would you? No, that's a terrible plan. Funnily enough, I am sleeping in a north-facing room at the moment because we're having some work done and it's absolutely freezing and it's unbelievable I'd be a very bad prince of the Renaissance If you built your own house from the ground up I think you would probably decide

maybe I won't have it on that side of the house maybe I'll have it on this side You're listening to Dan Snow's History We're talking about the Renaissance with Mary Hollingsworth More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man

who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. And art is central to politics, is it? It's a central visual adjunct, if you like, and it's a way of saying who you are. So, I mean, just at a very basic level, if you're receiving somebody, a foreign dignitary, just out of respect, you put his coats of arms up and you probably put yours up. And then you might want to show that you claim descent from so-and-so, so-and-so, Emperor Augustus or Troy. Quite a few people claim to be descended from Kipriam. But that's another thing.

It's not just artists and sculptors. It's also literary. It's also poets. So Ariosto writes endless poetry explaining why the Este family are descended from Troy. It's a broad cultural sweep. But the visual side of it was critical because, after all, it is all about display. The richer you are, the richer you look. You had to show. You did. You still do. I was just thinking of Tiger Woods in a custom-made SUV, the accident that he had. And

this is an incredibly expensive car with all the sort of possible extras. And I suddenly thought, you know, that is just exactly, if he was a Renaissance prince, he would have the most expensive horse with the most expensive comparisons. And you'd have details. You'd have your own coats of arms and your own little emblems and your own history, in inverted commas, that went back. Your descent to prove your antiquity and to prove your value, your power. It's a show-off world. Think of horses like sports cars or SUVs now. I ride a bicycle, so I need to really up my game on this one. Mary, what always fascinates me about Italy during the Renaissance is you think about other cultures enjoying extraordinary cultural

scientific flowerings. The Dutch in the 17th century, the Brits in the 18th, 19th, the Americans in the second half of the 20th century, or the Tang dynasty, the flowering that you see there in China, Mughal India, you assume that that goes hand in hand with hard imperial power. So you conquer everybody else, you enforce a kind of Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and then you have a lovely flowering because you can invest all your money in artists and people flock from all over the world to Lisbon or London or Amsterdam. But what's going on in Italy? It's incredibly violent. These states are actually quite transient. And yet you've got this going at the same time. So what's going on there? War wasn't 24-7 in Italy. It was seasonal. So you only fought during the summer. So you stopped fighting from October to March.

So you only fought during the summer. So you stopped fighting from October to March. And perhaps that's when you thought about designing your palaces. But I think, to be honest, the two went hand in hand in Italy, and that is quite significant. We don't pay enough attention to their interest in military culture. And when I was writing this book, I've been studying this period for decades, and even I didn't realise quite how much military material there was. And a lot of the princes themselves wrote treatises on how to fight wars. And they read everything that was going in the classical world, in the modern world. I don't think they got as far as the Chinese books of war, but war is part of their display. The whole thing about the warfare,

though, warfare changes around 1500, around 1494. There's suddenly artillery, means that the damage you can inflict on somebody suddenly changes. It's suddenly brutal in a way that shooting with crossbows and longbows isn't quite the same brutality. So you've got to rebuild all your fortresses. Once you've got artillery attacking your fortresses, it's no good having little battlements. You've got to have a whole new system of bastions, for example. A lot of the architects, and particularly a lot of them I mention in the book, for example, Leonardo, are employed to design angular bastions that will counter, that will protect ducal palaces and ducal castles from assault by the new weapons which are coming in from the north.

It's really the invasion of Charles VIII of France, which is 1494. Yes, with his huge artillery train. Exactly, exactly. Which must have been staggering. They looked at it and just went, oh my God. We've got a problem here. We've got a problem. We've got a real problem. I think I've probably misrepresented Dutch, British, American and Chinese power because, of course, those were also very violent cultures, but the violence was going away on the frontier. It was going on somewhere else. But actually you're right. If you look at someone like Brunel in ninth century Britain, he was building lots of amazing things, but he was also working for the government,

building military related things. So I guess there isn't as much difference as I thought. Yeah, exactly. And so it's seen as engineering, architecture, art, and then battlefield ornamentation. It's all closer than it might feel to us now. Yes. If you were a painter, you might well train as a painter and end up designing fortresses. Francesco Di Giorgio did exactly that. And he also became a hydraulics expert.

And he had to work out how to get a siege-proof water supply to Siena, which I don't know whether you've been to Siena, but it's on the top of a hill during siege conditions. You can't go out with your little bucket. But there's an internal system for getting the water into the city, which was decided around 1500 by this man who trained as a painter. If you train as a painter, you train as a draftsman. So you learn about drawing, you learn some old-fashioned skill painting, you learn to technique and you learned how to use colour and how to draw basically, and how to see. And you started out doing architectural backgrounds before you got on doing people's fingers and faces.

And we think about even so many of today's quote unquote civilian, you know, the internet is absolutely a product of US military spending in the second half of the 20th century and buying up microprocessors and things. Coming out to these princes that you mentioned, it was quite a turbulent time. They were likely to be turfed off these thrones and their kids were as well. It doesn't strike me that this giant investment in art and things, it wasn't necessarily money well spent on one level, was it? Well, it was for some. For some, it was very well spent on one level, was it? Well, it was for some. For some, it was very well spent. So Federico Gonzaga, who built Palazzo Te in Mantua, and it's absolutely stunning. It is quite awesome. That was designed very much to host Charles V when he was travelling through Italy.

He was being crowned in Bologna, that's the emperor, but he spends a month at Mantua in this palace or in the hills around doing a lot of hunting and he gets a close ally he gets promoted from Marquess to Duke for a start and the other person who benefits of course is Titian because Titian then gets to meet Charles V and once Charles V had seen what Titian could do which he did in Mantua that was it Titian became Charles V and then Philip II's court painter. Well, I don't blame them. I wish he was my court painter. Exactly.

Oh my goodness. Does the Renaissance ever stop or does the Renaissance just sort of bleed straight into this kind of explosion of art, science, engineering, culture that goes into the 17th, 18th centuries? I think it did continue, but just not in the same lines as we would quite like to think because, of course, the Reformation totally changes everything. Europe becomes a very different place. And that's the point at which Italy, largely because of the Inquisition and the fact that the papacy was based in Rome, Italy's largely free of Protestantism. There are a lot of Protestants in Venice and in some of the northern Italian courts like Ferrara, but basically they didn't have a Protestant movement like they did in the Empire

or in France. And then the religious wars of the second half of the 16th century take place largely in Northern Europe. That is a very large generalisation, but the pressure comes off Italy. But then, of course, you have the Counter-Reformation. So then you have this huge flowering of ideas of a slightly different sort which takes place in italy and those beautiful baroque churches they're just like hold on these dour protestants let's just dial it up to 11 here exactly fill this church up i mean i just love those churches the interior of st peter's with the benigni tabernacles with the twisting columns covered with the barberini bees in I mean, the idea of that being in a Protestant

church, it just doesn't. So... Yeah. And we're much poorer for it here in this patch of Northern Europe that we're in. Is Renaissance kind of what happens to us humans in the absence of like giant total war or ecological or environmental disasters? So are they just doing what humans do when they've just got a bit of breathing space? Yes, that's what I was going to say. And the bigger the pressure has been, the bigger the reaction will be. So I suppose World War I had a massive impact

on intellectual life of Europe. World War II, big impact as well, I think. And I'm sure the pandemic's going to have... There must be a sense of release and relief that the danger is over. But I'm not sure that it's relief that is the basis of the Renaissance. But having said that, I suppose there's an element of suddenly, wow, we can do something. Yeah. It just strikes me that there's periods, even if you look on a very small scale in southern

England, Alfred the Great's court, he establishes, even though he's at war all the time, there is a place in which you can start creating. It's not also all hands to the your world in order. And I just wonder if these Italian, they managed to carve out space as we've done today and hopefully will continue doing despite the imminent environmental catastrophe where we just allow creativity to flourish because we're pretty creative people. And if you give us a bit of wriggle room, we're going to start creating stuff. I know, and we always have been as well.

We've been like this from the cavemen. I was reading just recently about the, I can't remember what the catastrophe was, some sun radiation bombardment. And the people that survived were the ones that went to live in caves. And that's why they started painting the walls with all the animals that they could remember. Really? It's an interesting idea. If you're suddenly locked up in a cave, you couldn't go outside, except very rarely, you probably would spend your time painting everything. Well, me and my family have been locked inside during this pandemic and during the winter months, and we've adorned our house with pictures of famous historical figures drawn by the kids.

So there you go. That's it. Proof. It's a long way from the cavemen and, in fact, Leonardo. Well, thank you. That conversation spiralled out of control brilliantly. Mary, your wonderful book is called? The Princes of the Renaissance. Prince of the Renaissance. Go and get it, everybody.

It's such an interesting book in such an interesting period. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. I've enjoyed it very much. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our podcast. Most of you are probably asleep,

so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity.

Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.