In Our Time - Paganism in the Renaissance

Episode Date: June 16, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss paganism in the Renaissance. For hundreds of years in the Middle Ages, the only way to read Ovid was through the prism of a Christian moralising text. Ovid's sensual tales of metamorphosis and pagan gods were presented as veiled allegories, and the famous story of Zeus descending to Danae in a shower of gold was explained as the soul receiving divine illumination. But in 1478 Botticelli finished Primavera, the first major project on a mythological theme for a thousand years, and by 1554 Titian completed a very different version of Danae - commissioned by a Cardinal, no less - where she expectantly awaits her union with Zeus in what is a nakedly sexual pose. What happened to bring the myths and eroticism of antiquity back into the culture of Europe? And how was it possible for a Church that was prosecuting for heresy, to exalt in pagan imagery, even in the Vatican itself?With Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London; Charles Hope, Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition, University of London; Evelyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages, the only way to read Ovid was through the prism of a Christian moralising text. Ovid's sensual tales of metamorphoses and pagan gods were presented as veiled allegories. And the famous story of Zeus, descending to Dana in a shower of gold, was explained as the soul receiving divine luminous. But in 1478, Botticelli finished primavera, the first major project on a mythological theme for a thousand years. And by 1554, Titian completed a very different version of Dana, commissioned by a cardinal, no less, where she expectantly awaits her union with Zeus in what is a nakedly sexual pose.

What happened to bring the myths and eroticism of antiquity back into the culture of Europe? And how was it possible for a church that was prosecuting for heresy to exalt in pagan images? even in the Vatican itself. With me to discuss the return of the ancient gods in the Renaissance is Even in Welsh, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of Art in Renaissance Italy. Charles Hope, Director of the Warburg Institute, and Professor of the History of Classical Tradition at the University of London.

And Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Tom Healy, can we start by discussing the way in which ancient mythology was understood in the medieval period, just as the run-up to... the Renaissance? Well, the antique world really never disappeared in the Middle Ages entirely, but in the literary tradition, Ovid, particularly was seen as a representative of elegant style. So they admired him as a stylist. But they obviously found much of what he wrote about slightly difficult. And so they adopted a tradition which had begun actually in late antiquity itself in the Christian era of moralizing or creating ways of interpreting the stories that brought

them much more in line with type of Christian values or indeed medieval values. For those who haven't there have been Ovid at their fingertips at the moment, what did they find, can you give us a few instances of what they found difficult about Ovid and how they transformed them? Well, Ovid's view of the world that he presents in the metamorphosis is one that is fundamental capricious, really, in its nature. It's open to sudden, unexpected transformation. Both gods and humans, rather than being in control of their selves, are shown to be hugely responsible, largely the victims of their own lustful desires. And although Arvid presents a rather coherent

view of how the world came into being that is a synthesis of a lot of mythosal logical stories. He presents it in such a way that often the meanings of it are very, very unclear, very uncertain. There's a great deal of debate about this. And the Middle Ages in a sense tried to organize, not rationalize, but bring this into a much more virtuous, Christianized way of thinking. So they cleaned of it up for the Christian audience. That's right, indeed. And the Renaissance comes along, really beginning from the time of Petrarch, and to use a phrase, takes away the fig leaf, let's all of it spill out. And the way this happens is rather peculiar. This is in the mid-14th century, back to antiquity Petraarch said.

This is really the mid-14th century. What Petrarch is very interested in doing and is the beginning of a tradition of doing is going out and searching for classical literature that has been uncorrupted by the medieval old. overview of it, looking for, in a sense, the best texts of recovering classical culture in its own terms. And so in the creation of the best text, really jobs of

editing, the medieval tradition of commentary, which was often placed literally alongside and interwoven with the texts of the poems themselves, gets taken away so that the lines of poetry are there to speak much more for themselves.

Can you give us one specific instance of a poem or a passage from Ovid, or one of Ovid's tales from the classical past, which was turned into a Christian, sorry, and then turned back, as it were, into its original in the 14th century. Well, you've given an example at the beginning of Dane and the way that this was seen as an equivalent of instance of the song of songs, of the soul receiving divine illumination. But often a story, say, such as Diana and Actian, where Actian outhunting suddenly sees the goddess Diana bathing naked and is transformed into a stag and then eaten and pursued and killed and eaten by his own hounds, which is seen in of it as an act of extreme cruelty. This was often presented in a moralized way as the way that people should not.

not inquire too deeply into areas of knowledge that was forbidden to them. When in fact, David presents it as really a very disturbing and cruel action on the part of the goddess. Charles Hope, Marsilio Focino, again in the 15th century, translated some of Plato's texts in Florence, and neoplatonism took a hold of Italy. How did that affect the attitude towards classical art? How did the fuller discovery of Plato? It used to be said that Ficino made popular or made respectable Platonic love. The theory being that if you were philosophically trained,

and since all love is inspired by beauty, if you've got the correct frame of mind, you're not aroused to physical love or physical passion, but to a union of two minds that you feel uplifted and eventually to a kind of mystical contemplation. of the beauty of God. So that platonic love is a good kind of thing. They're both good, both the earthly kind

and the more intellectual kind. And that was his take on Plato. However, and then everybody said that this is a fine justification when we applied to Renaissance paintings, which have got beautiful naked female figures in, which happened to be produced in Florence, which was the city in which he lived.

I think that people think it's a little bit less simple now for two reasons. One was that Ficino, like all good Platonists, had a very negative view about art at all. He thought that, as Plato did, that art was a shadow of a shadow. And also, he was perfectly well aware that platonic love, as Plato had described it,

was the love of older men for handsome young adolescents. It was homosexual love and not heterosexual love, and that really doesn't fit the picture at all well. That all changes in the early sense. 16th century with Pietro Bembo, the Venetian poet and Baldessari Castiglione, who writes this famous dialogue, the courtier in which Bembo is the chief speaker, which is set at the court of Orbino. And there, towards the end of the book, Bembo produces a heterosexual form of platonic love,

which in fact is not terribly different in certain respects from the kind of attitude, the idea that women are for men somehow can set your mind to think of higher things, which in fact had already been there in Petrarch. But at that point, one can educated people, can talk about women and, you know, how wonderful they are and so on and so forth, and as it were, make love to them in words, while at the same time saying, well, of course, there's nothing physical about this. This is perfectly respectable. This becomes socially acceptable. Would it be too, and you're going to say yes to this question, so it's an easy one for you, really.

Would it be too crude to say that with Petrarch bring back the ancients and Vichino translating Plato and classical texts coming in and statues being discovered? The idea, because you brought up the idea of sexuality there and love at the century, the Christian idea of the body, which was one of shame or pain, shame for women and pain for Jesus Christ, and the classical idea of the body, which was a sort of beauty and strength and sexuality, these two came for a while together and the classical, in a sense, overlay the Christian. No, I don't think it would be too crude, but I think one could say a little bit more at this point. I was hoping you would. And what I think the crudity comes in assuming that somehow all these events that are taking place, these different intellectual movements, are rather closely related.

But this is not at all clear. To read Marciillo-Fichino is not for most people an unalloyed pleasure. It's all in Latin for a start. It's in quite difficult Latin. It's extremely long, if you ever look to the collected works of Ficino, the most daunting kind of book. And it's fairly technical. No artist in the Renaissance that I'm aware of would ever have read it.

And I can only think of one Renaissance artist, whoever was able to read Latin at all, who was Andrea Mantania. I'm not at all sure that the people who were rich enough to spend money on the kind of paintings by Botticelli or Mantine or anything else would actually have read Ficino. So you're saying there isn't really a connection

between the intellectual course that's going on and the artefacts that are being made. I would say not a direct connection. Yes, not a direct connection. Well, not much of it actually, if only one person can read it. Well, we can all pick up ideas without having read the actual books.

that's true. Even in Welsh, as well as the unearthing of ancient texts, there was the more literal unerthing of ancient statutory. Most famously, the Belvedere Apollah that was discovered in Rome. Can you describe the Belvedere Apollah and why that was important? This again was towards the end of the 15th century. We're basically ranging over the period from about 1,400 to about 1550. Rather than mining it, perhaps, on radio, with what I could do is just talk about this unearthing bit to begin with, because of course, Italy, the peninsula is littered with bits of its classical paths. You don't actually have to dig very deep. You can be digging a well, you can be planting a vineyard, and you will uncover these things. And in fact, a lot of the stuff is literally

just above ground and already present. So when the Apollo Belvedere is uncovered, as it were, in the late 15th century, it's not so much that this is the first time this has ever happened, or the first major statue that has ever been uncovered, but it's large, it's more or less intact. Large, when you say large, what, life-sized? Yes, life-sized there. More or less intact. And it's identifiable.

You can actually try to work out who it is and what it means. And it becomes a product of a culture where uncovering a statue is a bit like, you know, digging for oil, digging for gold. This is really now worth something. And that wasn't true 100 years ago. So what's changed is not so much the fact that there's classical antiquity that's being uncovered or on the ground or available

is that there's a market, quite a small select market, but a very valuable market for these objects. And the artists of the time, are they looking at the polyvelet area and now they're saying this is as good as it gets, I want to imitate that, this is a wonderful piece of sculpture. We ought to try to be like that. Well, for about 50 years, artists have been travelling down to, to Rome or looking around their own their own hometowns in Florence or Venice or Padula

and doing drawings of bits and pieces of sarcophagia and things like that. And they're interested in a range of things. One is the actual statue itself, but above all, it's the bits, if you like. It's how the arm moves. It's how the legs move. It's the notion of being a body in motion there. And what you could say is that if you're trying to construct a pose, rather than have your young apprentice hold that interesting pose for weeks on end.

Well, here you've got a perfectly motion, this bit of marble, which will allow you to copy it. So we're discussing the influence of classicism as it comes into a Renaissance culture, which we must remind ourselves is almost overwhelmingly Christian. And although we're talking about these, beginning to talk about these sort of paintings and artifacts, in one of the notes I read 98% of what was being produced of still Christian theme by artists who were serving Christian purposes. and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, this is the track we've set ourselves. And although we've been told that the intellectual connection is not direct,

it would seem to me that this is a more direct connection. Can you go to Michelangelo after the Apollo and say he looked at that and then he proceeded on his course partly because of that? You can do more than that, in fact. You can say that there is, if you like, a competitive nature that starts even before Michelangelo. And Michelangelo, if you like, is born into that. He's studying not just classical antiquity, but also artists like Donatello, who themselves set themselves up against the great sculptures of the antique. So there are stories for it, potentially apocryphal, but well,

you know, well-told stories of Michelangelo faking antiques and being very proud of the fact that the bacchus that he constructs is actually purchased by a cardinal as a genuine antiquity. and actually then got rid of when he realizes it's by a kind of young upstart called Michael Angela. But when we come to Adam, the depiction of Adam on the Sistine ceiling, sealing of Sistine job, it seems to me to bring in a great deal in that worn figure. You have a Christian moment, or an Old Testament moment, Christian moment, Old Testament, Christian Jewish moment. You have a classical figure, and you have what was being referred to previously as the homoerotic naked young man. all present in one representation?

There I think you may be taking it a little too far. The issue is that when some... It's a group of cardinals looking up, it's a group of men, and the notion that they're sitting around sort of thinking about the homoeroticism that was generated by Neoplatonic thought. I think we need to be a bit careful here.

But what you certainly can say is that Michelangelo is very interested in the dichotomies and tensions between painting and sculptors. So to be able to create in paint in a very difficult space, something that is as astonishing as the sculpture that you would see in the collection down below, would be certainly an argument you could make. So Tom, do you want to respond to that. I do think that this, because everybody knows that to see. Everybody knows when we say, Adam, the whole listener, they can see him, this magnificent young man,

and God reaching out of him, him reaching out to God, and so on on this ceiling. Is that the moment when we say, yes, classicism has arrived in Renaissance art? Can you develop that? I think it's so much arrived as a type of pinnacle of it. I mean, I think it's been building for some time. I meant it arrived as really arrived. Yes, really arrived. What I think it does is, as you've said earlier, the Middle Ages tends to be far more interested in the human body as tortured in pain, particularly the male body of the crucified Christ.

And here we get a really perfect body. a body of unfallen humanity. And often depictions of Adam, indeed earlier, tended to concentrate on Adam after the fall, the moment of shame, the reaching for the fig leaf again. Intorment in some way. In torment in some way. And here we have an extraordinarily confident Adam,

almost an Adam who seems to be taking over or as a succession from God the Father who's depicted as a much older man, here is a really sblimely self-confident figure of human perfection. And I think that desire to return to some form of unfallen humanity, which this period believed

was much more attainable than the previous ages had been, was a key aspect of this, the way the classical could be utilized. Charles Hav. You used the word classicism, which I think is a rather retrospective way of looking at this. I don't think anybody quite at the time saw as we would automatically see a distinction between a classical style and a non-classical style. What they did think was the ancients were better at representing beautiful human figures. And what more beautiful human figure could you have than Adam created by God in his own image?

So I don't think that necessarily anybody looking at the ceiling would necessarily have said. It wouldn't immediately have been the first thing to say how classical. They would have said, this is as good as it gets because it's as good as the ancients got. And indeed, that's what people did say about Michelangelo, that he had surpassed the ancients in terms of the most difficult task that an artist can face, which is to represent a naked body. and the naked male body was a more difficult task for an artist than the naked female body merely because the muscles were thought to be nearer the surface

and so you needed a greater knowledge of anatomy you couldn't fudge. So the idea of talking about it in these terms is when it did come in that we began to talk about it as a classical interjection into the culture at the time? I mean, did they just say, oh, it's like they all. They must have in some sense. I mean, you're resisting this very properly. as a scholar, but there must have been some sense when Plato, as it were, is translated.

I know nobody read him by the course, because it's too difficult in the translation, and Ovid is reintroduced, and the Apollo is discovered, and the Greek scholars are coming from Byzantium, and they're going back to the ancients, there must have been some sense of something new happening. It wasn't only

in the 19th century that they said, oh, let's call it the Renaissance. You're absolutely right. There's undoubtedly some sense that They, I mean, even with Petrarch, you get the notion of dark ages, that we can forget about the dark ages and go back to the time when everything was, people understood much more about when they were wiser, when they understood philosophy, when they understood maths, what law, whatever it might be. But that's one thing. And another thing is to say that one will choose a particular artistic style and call it classicism, because that depends on the notion that artistic. style is something that you can choose, which is actually quite an abstract

and difficult idea, and I don't think that people articulated that until 50 or 100 years later. The idea that you could do it in a classical way or you could do it in a Venetian way or whatever it might be. That comes later. Let's talk about it for a second, turn to that, actually, starting with you, Charles.

The Bottice-Primavara, can we talk about the last quarter of the 15th century? Can you tell us briefly about describe that work and then why it was important or it is important for this discussion? The prima vera is, it seems, the largest mythological painting or the first monumentally sized mythological painting, painting with mythological figures since classical antiquity.

It seemed to be secular. It contained Venus, the Three Graces, Mercury, various other figures, Zephyr the West Wind and others which are, identification is a little bit controversial. But it seemed to be to summarize everybody's notions in the late 19th century of what the Renaissance was about, promoted by Lorenzo de Medici, pagan, sensual, so on. Then people started to try to explain it because there is no single classical story or legend or indeed Renaissance legend, which includes this particular combination.

of figures. So nobody really knew what it was about at all. And it's a great deal of confusion to this day as to what it might be about. And one of the things that people said, well, if we're trying to understand it, we must get ourselves back into the minds of 15th century people. What were they doing? They were reading Ficino. So it must be a philosophical

allegory. Simple as that. We know now they weren't. We know now they weren't. We could have tipped them off. There's been a little time warped though. He could have told Botticelli what to do. I don't think we quite, most people believe that anymore, but that was for a long time the view. Evelyn Welsh, when Venus came into

her own, again, a subject matter. Can you describe how important she was to some artists? Again, to keep the perspective, there were, they're just a few artists involved in this. They tend to be artists whose works are most expensive, and they're being gathered by private patrons. We have private

collections beginning, and what you have in public what you have in private is different, but But Venus, as it were, comes on the scene. Can you take us through the Venus effect really at this period? The Venus effect again starts earlier in that we have some apocryphal stories, potentially by Geberti, about a statue of Venus that's placed on a fountain in Sienna. And when the city of Sienna loses a battle, supposedly in the 14th century,

the citizens go out and break this statue and take all the pieces and put it on Florentine territory so that this pagan statue will give bad luck to the enemy and not to them. So at that point, what that statue had stood for originally in the positive sense was Siena as another Rome. Sienna as a place where you could find classical works, where you could find classical antiquities, which proved that it had Roman ancient origins. What changes in the late 15th and early 16th centuries

is this, as Tom was describing, this kind of reintegration of Ovidian mythologies there, which allows artists to have a certain licence. They can construct images, pictorial images, but also statues of the most erotic nature. Generally for men, generally for their private compartments, their private chambers, their private studies, often with curtains over them.

It's a bit like, let me take you back and show you my etchings there. But the label is Venus, or the label says we are now going to look at something that has, if you like, a classical tradition behind it. Can I come in and disagree to some extent with this? I don't in any way dispute what Evelyn has just been saying at all. There is an interest in the erotic. But I think it would be dangerous to see it simply as the prime. private gratifications of aristocratic patrons. If we go back to the prima vera, there is an interest in the way that Venus figures are both

have the potential to move us towards a higher or more divine, though still ecstatic love. And there's also an awareness of the potential that Venus can be, lead us towards lust in a degenerative type of love. And in certain respects, this period is very interested in the dynamic that is produced by both these features of Venus being present simultaneously. That is what's interesting. I agree. Indeed. If one looks at the primavera with this Venus figure in the centre, on one side you have what appears to be Zephyr and Chloris in a midst of some type of erotic generation. On the other side of the picture, you have a mercury who looks much more content. templative and leading up. And in certain respects, it seems to me at least,

that what painting is professing is that this is both are part of what spring and regeneration or of creation is about and that it is that simultaneity of presence. So while these figures, these erotic figures, are often fulfilling a very, very, very secular function. They're also hinting, often because of the Ovidian myths that they portray, at other aspects. But in the Titian's sacred and profane love, you have a cloth woman and a naked woman. And the naked woman is the sacred. The naked woman is Venus, who is holding a...

But she is sacred. The interesting thing is... She is presented as a type of truth. Charles is shaking his head here. It is a wedding portrait. We'll come to Charles at a second way. But... I mean, sacred and profane love is certainly the wrong title for the painting.

I mean, it isn't. Oh, that gets everybody up the hook. But nevertheless, the elements of the sacred and profane, I think, are still there. And in a way, it presents, I think, a question to the bride decked out in her finery. And that is what type of love is she going to pursue? And the Venus, who is there is clearly designed to suggest that, the love she should pursue should be sacred and idealized and the fruitful, but still generative procreation, of course, of children,

which the erotic has an important element in. Charles, Hope, can I turn you to, can we move to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese's commission from Tishan, the Nana? Can you tell us about that and why that's important in this conversation? Well, Cardinal Farnese was the grandson of the Pope, which puts him in a very very, very privileged position. He was also a very reluctant Cardinal, and he didn't take Holy Orders at all until he was much older. But Titian had painted a picture, we don't know for who, which is now called the Venus of Obino, which showed a naked woman lying on a bed in a 16th century room. And it seems that Cardinal Farnese saw this picture at some point, and then he commissioned

something similar from Tishen. And we have a very interesting letter about it written by Giovanni de la Casa who wrote a book about etiquette in the 16th century, which was widely read called the Galateo. He's a very sophisticated man. And he said that Titian had done this picture. De La Casa was in Venice. And he said, it makes the one which you saw in the collection of the Duke of Obino looked like a nun.

And if Cardinal So-and-So, who was the head of the Roman Inquisition, saw it, he would have an apoplexy. I know what you explained to Danny is a woman lying on the bedway. waiting for a lover to arrive. A shower of gold coming down. Yes. Of course. And she's physically expectant.

We have to say this for those who don't have it at the book in front of them. Very expectant, yes. Yes. Now, of course, the danae is the subject which many interpretations can be given. You mentioned one at the beginning of the soul waiting for God. But there is, of course, another one which was perfectly current. In fact, in editions of Ovid, it was usually included. And in other books, too, which is the story that,

the virtue of women can be overcome by gold. I think one of the things we haven't really considered here is we've been talking almost exclusively about male viewers and that these is very much a kind of viewing experience in a private environment there where the male patron and the male artist are constructing an image of a woman based around a mythological subject. But perhaps the more fascinating thing is how a figure like Danai

or Venus or a number of these other classic classical gods and goddesses can appear in so many different guises so that they can actually be a symbol of civic duty in one public context. They can be, and they were in the early 16th century made up his little plaster of Paris maquettes and sold as tourist trinkets turned into prints, which could either be, again, made really very respectable, kind of collectibles, all of the great images. of classical antiquity to be put up in your public room, or really extraordinarily erotic, as they were. And I would suggest that it's when it goes into things like visual printing, as you get with Julia Romano, Zimodi, for example,

that's when concern begins. Because it's one thing for a distinguished cardinal to be taking other cardinals and courtesans into his bedroom. It's quite another for these to be sold out in the street. Can I just ask at this stage in the conversation, is there any way we can sort of bring together the... Is this in any sense? I mean, Charles has sort of put the kibosh on this really, which is absolutely fair enough. But is there are a group of people, a fairly small group of people, very rich patrons,

a few intellectuals and a number of artists who may not have read the books by intellectuals and maybe, in a sense, not copious, but imitators in a very grand set of... Is there any sense in which they felt like as if they were. were sharing something and they were at the fore. Can you just give us a sort of roundup of that? Because we seem to have lost sight of it. One of the things that I think starts developing is new senses of what constitutes civilized taste and particularly amongst an aristocratic culture whose traditional claims

land and wealth are being challenged by a new mercantile class. have in a way a means of reasserting their sense of stature by creating a sense of sophistication, which is not open to the general public, which in fact is rather different than general public. And this in many respects right across Europe and creates a culture of taste and how taste is defined. which increasingly people want to become part of. And also we're talking about the beginning of an art market, art connoisseurs, private collections, sales, experts, fakes, all that sort of thing is coming in that. And of course. That is one idea they did get from the ancient world.

The ancients had collected works of art just for the pleasure of it. People hadn't done that in the Middle Ages. They could see themselves going back to the ancients in that way. and in fact they're collecting the same kind of things. Non-Christian art, art without any particular moral content, which displays the artistry of the person who made it. This is the period where for the first time, it became a matter of kind of sophistication to know who the good artists were.

The church, generally in this period, 1400s, say, the church has been in this minor way. One has to keep stressing there's just a very few people, very rich people, generally initially at this stage, has taken that on board and indeed encouraged it and commissioned it and gone along with it. The church begins to turn, doesn't it? Can you tell us about where this turn happens, Charles Hill? It happens at the time of the Council of Trent, 1564, really. It's quite a gradual process and the objection mainly is to the display of lascivious art in churches.

By and large, the church doesn't at least publicly criticize the conduct of dukes and kings. It never has done. And they're the people who continue to own this art. But what they didn't like was nudity in public buildings. There's a story goes back a little bit further of Fraubo Tolomeo, Florentine artist who went down to work to Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were working, and they were tremendously interested in ancient statues and so forth.

And people criticized Frabo Telomero, because he couldn't show nudes as good as they did. So he went back to Florence and just as she proved that he did, he did a St. Sebastian, which was put up in church. And then it turned out that a number of women were confessing that this statue aroused lustful thoughts. So it was removed from the church and finally found its way into the collection of the King of France as well.

But it's that kind of thing that causes the problem, and you will find that in different diocese, in Italy and indeed in Western Europe, a complete ban on the display of nudity, even that Christchial's genitals are covered up in some diocese but not in others. There's a Jesuit called Otonelli in the

17th century eroded treatise in which he said Cardinal So and so did this wonderful thing, which he said there's no reason why anybody should have indecent art, but the Cardinal loved painting and he owned this painting by Titian which showed a Venus and a Cupid and he cut off the Cupid and destroyed the Venus, which is of course the right thing

that one should do with paintings of this kind. But all the church is turning against this, as we've described particular instances as the San Sebastian, and in rulings at councils. It nevertheless has bitten in. The classical world has come back. He's back in Europe. He's back in Rome and then goes up to Germany, comes across to west to France and to this country and so and so forth. It's never to be eradicated. It is to be checked, though.

There is no single classical world. And so because it has such a multiplicity of uses and can be so wide-rangingly deployed, so the figure of Hercules can be both very positive and very negative, it can be very erotic and very proud. It can be used to praise the King of France or for philosophical purposes. It's too useful to get rid of.

I mean that's a very important point to make that we haven't made so far. And there was many worlds. I've been talking about as if it were one world, just for the sake of convenience, and it is now inconvenient. I mean, for instance, Ovid and Virgil were presenting two different worlds. Yes, two different worlds that, again, were often simultaneously present. I mean, the Virgilian becomes the view of a humanity that is capable of ordering itself, of civic virtue, of proper government. And the Ovidian is there constantly saying this is not entirely true that we're,

much more fallible creatures and much more given over to lust. And the two actually sit often side by side. This is made visible with the Duke of Mancha, isn't it? Well, I think the Gonzaga's organization of their visual representations is fascinating. At the heart of Mantua you have the Palazzo Du Calais, which is a – whose general iconography gives over the sense of the Gonzaga family as being well-ordered and proper governance. I mean, they have an ideal form of civic government.

And then on the edge of Manchu, you have the Palazzo Te, created more or less by the same group of artists who created the Palazzo Du Calais or the same streams of artists, where you have these rather richly Ovidian, very eroticized depictions. And that view of the private world and the public world sitting both present, but having at least formally different constituencies, is something that the age accepts as two parts of a whole civilization. How far Charles, Hope, how far did these comparatively few persons involved? How far did they dig in to the consciousness at the time? If you were a man who painted things in churches in the south of Italy or in Britain or at that time, were you influenced by this to any extent?

Or did you go on painting your Madonna's and Charles and your miracles and your... I think you were probably unaware of it. There is only one area where, as it were, this sort of spills out into the public domain. And that is in various public buildings, as it were, what we might call figures from classical figures or figures from classical antiquity did actually serve a function, and that is the function of personifications. Usually female figures representing an abstract quality. Statue of Liberty is about the most familiar than anything. anybody has. But you get these already coming in in the 15th and 16th century in enormous numbers,

justice, peace, whatever it might be, the seven planetary gods, Venus and so forth representing the different planets, simply that, or in an astrological context. So you will get, as it were, classical non-religious imagery, which does appear in public spaces, which seems to be perfectly respectable. And that actually carries on right into the 19th century. And I think everybody was aware of that change. What about the legacy as far as Johanthwantzwan did it? What did it lead through to at this particular period? I think what it left was a wide continuum.

And then picking up on what Charles had just said, if you think about the sort of the astrology, the calendrical cycles there, so for many, Kastrian Pollux might have been Gemini. And remained Gemini from the Middle Ages up until the 19th century without ever passing through Ficino at all there. So there is a kind of continuity which we might be losing sight of by only focusing on this small scale elite. Did the reintroduction, Charles Eauvel,

almost finally, of the secular and sexual notion of the body continue? Was that something that planted itself and continued from then or uninterruptedly? Did the church start to fight that quite hard? I think the church always fights it. Whether it fights it hard, I'm not at all clear. and I think it had always been there but the artist says it were

gave visual expression or something I mean human feelings probably don't change very significantly I suspect and you know we're talking as I've tried to I think all of us said most of this stuff we're talking about an art which had a very tiny audience so I don't think that that probably

is that important it could be that the strictures of the church become less important for many people that the lessons of the classical world acquire a greater authority because after all the classical world is the source of moral examples too

it was thought to be the source of examples about justice and prudence and how to rule and so forth which you wouldn't get from Christianity you wouldn't get from the Bible you get that from the ancient historians And yet although we talked about a small number of people and a small audience, when we talk of the Renaissance, we do talk about neoplatonism, Michelangelo, Bodice. We do talk about those people.

We do, but to finish on a 19th century note, if you like, one of the problems that you've just brought up, which is about how you respond in a public context to these wonderful naked venuses, becomes acute in the 18th and 19th centuries, when large-scale archaeology, large-scale excavation takes place and plaster cast of these figures are put in public collections.

And then do you allow respectable women in to come and see them? You say it's all near-Blatonic. I think Milton's idea that the readers of Paradise Lost would be fit but few, I think that is a good way of thinking of this. There may not have been seen

and this culture may not have been participated in by dramatic numbers, but they were extremely influential. They were extremely serious about their endeavors. The view somehow of this period as artists of simply being, say, responsive just to what their patrons are commissioning, I think is somewhat inaccurate. I mean, they do invest both technically and intellectually, I think, their works with a great deal of vigor.

I mean, it's just one of the things why they're so captivating even to today. Well, thank you for a circumspect and qualified and fascinating tour. That's a particular little bit of Lourison. Thanks to William Ward. Tom Healy and Charles Hope. Next week...