A History of the Renaissance with Jonathan Jones | Authors in Conversation | HENI Talks

They create the idea of genius by being geniuses. It's a chicken and egg situation. I think if there's one thing that survives from the Renaissance in art, it's just the idea of the artist, and the idea that artists are special, that artists are cool, that being an artist is a great thing to be. That idea definitely was invented in the Renaissance. Thanks for meeting up to discuss your book. It's thought it was a fantastically well-researched and written book, and it was so beautifully illustrated. Thanks for that. Cheers. Just a few questions about it, really. What made you want to write it? I've always loved Renaissance art. It was the first art I fell in love with. It's the kind of question that if I talk too much about my early life, just stop me. It's the kind of question that invites... You know what I mean? You've got these stories. But basically, I grew up in North Wales. My parents were schoolteachers. There were no art galleries, really, or museums where we lived. I had a very good education, but art was not really a big part of it. Except, I think when I was 11, my dad decided to drive to Italy in the summer holidays. Teachers have decent summer holidays. They're not that well-paid, but they do have decent summer holidays. And he liked driving. So, basically, he drove to Italy. And so, the first places that I saw art were Florence and Rome. So, as a child, my introduction to art was Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo. And then I saw an exhibition. The first exhibition I went to was in Florence as well. There was an exhibition at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, and we happened to be there on holiday. And it was Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings from the Royal Collection, actually from Britain, from Windsor. It belonged to the Queen at that time. And it still got the battered catalogue with an introduction by Anthony Blunt, who was, you know, keeper of the Queen's pictures and a spy. And this is, I think, just before he was exposed as a spy. Anyway, but Leonardo, it's unbelievable. I mean, my whole idea of art was formed by this kind of thing. And I've never seen, some people see the Renaissance as sort of conservative and, you know, authoritarian, traditional and classical, and they oppose it to contemporary art and to modern art. And I've never seen it that way because my introduction to it was Leonardo's anatomical drawings, you know, I think are a big inspiration to Damien Hirst. You know, these are extraordinary. I mean, Leonardo was dissecting human bodies in the hospital in Florence, Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, which is still a functioning hospital. He was dissecting bodies. He was studying anatomy. He was seeing things in them that no scientist had ever seen before. He was, you know, centuries ahead scientifically, but also he was producing these unbelievably beautiful sensitive drawings, which somehow, even though you know the horror in which they're made, they're never horrific because they're about, they're actually about the beauty of our inner landscape. When you say you started it in 1434, the beginning of the book, you say this is the beginning of the Renaissance. And it's that fantastic portrait of the Arnolfini family by Van Eyck, a beautiful painting, obviously. And, but is that, is that really, why is that the beginning of the Renaissance? For a start, it's not in Florence. It's not in Italy. It's from northern... I decided after a lot of thought, there are other ways of doing, there are other ways to define it and other stories you could tell. But I very much wanted to tell a story. The pitch that the editor and I sort of decided on together, in a sort of very sort of interesting lunch, to be honest. We wanted to do a narrative history of the Renaissance. And that was the idea, to tell a story, to tell, to write a narrative history book, which would tell this as a story that you can, and you read it and, you know, it's a gripping story. Because I don't think that's been done before like this, in this way, which is quite a bold thing to say, given that people have been writing about the Renaissance since the 16th century. And, okay, it has been done before. It was done by Giorgio Vasari in 1550, actually. But anyway, this is, so, so 1434 is the year that Van Eyck, Jan van Eyck, completed the Arnolfini portrait and dated it. The date is on the painting. He says, you know, Jan van Eyck, on the back wall of the Arnolfini portrait, the back wall of the room, there's this graffiti that Jan van Eyck was here, 1434. And he's literally there because there's also a mirror, a convex mirror on the back wall of the room in which you can see two little figures who are at the door of the room. They're standing where we are. And one of them, to judge from that inscription, is actually Van Eyck. So his self-portrait is hidden inside the painting. And so why, why? Well, in a way, by explaining that, I've explained why that's the beginning of the Renaissance, because the idea that you could have a painting so precise and so real and so objective that you'd be able to say, Jan van Eyck was here 1434 on the back wall of the room and also shows reflection in the mirror. There'd never been the technology, there'd never been the skills and knowledge to produce a painting of a real room, real people in their real house, in a real room, meticulously, surrounded by meticulously convincing everyday objects, you know, fruits on the window ledge, the light streaming through the window in very subtle ways and, you know, reflecting in the mirror and catching the bedstead, the little dog, lovely little dog at their feet, slippers on the floor, everything done in, you know, accurate, in a very strong sense of three dimension, three dimensionality, everything real and everything, and most of all, everything in what appears to be a convincing and accurate modelling of actual space, i.e. we look at the picture, the picture is a flat surface, it's a piece of wood, at this time people didn't use canvas, they painted on wood, so the Arnolfini portrait, it's on wood, it's quite small, but you look at this flat piece of wood and you look through it into the illusion of a deep, three-dimensional, inhabitable space with people in it and living in it. That miracle is perspective, you know, and in Italy they called it perspective, they called it prospetiva and they theorised it in Renaissance Florence. The reason we associate it most of all with Florence and Italy is because in Florence they theorised this and they were really interested in the mathematics of it and discussing the mathematics of it and the geometry of perspective. Perspective, it's a kind of science, it's a scientific principle, they're saying, well, you're in a room or you're in a landscape, how do things reduce in size or distance? It's very simple and yet at the same time definitely a mathematical construct. So they actually would calculate how big that tree, which is half a mile away, how big should that be? Compared to the hut that's a mile away or whatever, you know, the mountains that are ten miles away. And this fascination, and it was a fascination, it really was to create the illusion of a deep, real living space behind the picture, within the picture, so that the flat surface becomes a window pane and you're looking through a window. I mean, I love that portrait, the Arnolfini portrait, and I also love the Earthly Delights, the Bosch painting, but that doesn't seem, obviously you've titled your book after it, but that painting doesn't seem, maybe I'm wrong, but it's almost surrealistic, that painting. It's quite a different type of painting to the realism of the Arnolfini. Ah, well, yeah. Right, yeah, I mean, it's sort of deliberately provocative that I put, you know, Bosch, because it's not what people, yeah, none of us, you don't tend to think of Bosch as a Renaissance artist, but he is. First of all, chronologically, he definitely is, because he's working, he's almost an exact contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, so, you know, and that is the time when, that is absolutely the time of the high, what people call the high Renaissance, it's the era of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael in Italy, so, and this is what, and Bosch is doing this stuff that looks to us like mad surrealist medieval craziness, but it's not just that, it's the thing about, and this is about how I want to sort of shake up how people see Renaissance art. It's not, you know, obviously you say perspective, okay, we'll agree on that, but what's amazing is the things they do with that, perspective, it's like a new technology. Once they work out how to do it, it's a new technology, and you can do all kinds of crazy stuff, so Bosch wouldn't be able to do what he does in his paintings. His paintings are these bonkers panoramas of ludicrous monsters and bizarre goings-on and fantastical, hellish torments, and also in the Garden of Earthly Lights, wonderful ecstatic liberation in the central panel, which is what fascinates me, and I think he, so we might see that just because we're used to this, we just see it as the content almost. What we don't notice, and they did notice in the Renaissance, is how the landscapes are beautiful. He's a beautiful painter, and he creates a real space. He couldn't do this. He couldn't have painted the Garden of Earthly Lights, for instance, without being able to do perspective. It's in perspective. It's a real space. He even does what Leonardo da Vinci called aerial perspective, which is to capture the mistiness of the sky to show how the horizon is misty. So he's completely on top of the Renaissance magic of perspective, in fact, and he's also a realist. You say realist, he is a realist because his fantasy works through acute realism. That's actually what I argue. What he does is to very accurately, just like Van Eyck, he very accurately portrays everyday things like clogs, the things around him. As somebody in the lowlands of what's today Southern Holland, Brabant, the clogs, the windmills, and then knives and pots and pans, he depicts all these things with a meticulous objectivity and realism, but then he fuses them, he melds them, sutures them with things that you don't expect to see them to be attached to. So a bird has a metal funnel on its head and wears ice skates and it's delivering a letter in its beak, all of which are real things, including the bird, but put them together and they become the surreal, which... He's a fantasist, but he depicts it very realistically. That's right, yeah. And that's actually how they made monsters in the Renaissance and in the late Middle Ages. Other artists like Martin Schongauer did an incredible print which had a huge influence on Renaissance art. So he's obviously a German artist and he did this print in the 15th century of the Temptations of St Anthony with all these monsters flying in the sky and all the demonic, monstrous demons that are menacing this poor saint. And that's a theme that recurs in lots of North European art. And you create the monsters by putting real things together, you know, a bird's wing with a snake's head, a chicken leg, which are rather horrible, put that together with bits of a bat, you know. That's how they did it. So from reality you produce fantasy. And that's what I love about Renaissance art. They invent this machine perspective for showing the world much more realistically than had ever been done before. Not even the ancient Greeks and Romans had got this. But they use it. That doesn't produce a sort of predictable drab reality at all because their mental universe is full of strange things. You know, people believe in heaven and hell, but then they also add in a different mythology, the mythology of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Part of what we all think of as the Renaissance, perhaps, is the revival of the classics, the rediscovery of ancient Rome and ancient Greece, which was even earlier than Rome, and the Romans were influenced by Greece. So, you know, all the great myths, like, you know, and the goddesses and gods, Venus and Mars, all that comes back. And that Italian art very much brings that in. But that's another kind of fantastic... So, on the one hand, you've got the late medieval landscape of Christian imagination, which an artist like Bosch in the north draws on, and he twists it into heretical, bizarre directions to say, I think, very new and extraordinary things. So, on the one hand, a northern artist like Bosch draws on the imagination of Christianity of heaven and hell to depict worlds of intense imagination and of heresy, actually, in Italy. And this is where Italy is. Italy, right? This is what they do first, before anyone else, is to look at these old manuscripts that were in monastery libraries and at all the fragments of Roman art, which actually are all over the place in Italy, which wasn't hard for them to find that stuff. It was all around them. So, they revived pagan, basically pagan, pre-Christian pagan thought and myth and art. And so, and then the realism, the power of perspective and the power of artistic discovery, you know, lets them bring the pagan gods back to life and pagan monsters. The way you said the Renaissance is the birth of the individual in our way. And there's two things in your book, and you describe them so well. Maybe three things I'd like to touch upon. One is the Reformation. We'll come back to that. But the other is how it changed sex or the portrayal of sex, because it seemed to be extraordinary that suddenly you could have sex being depicted and even put in churches and things. That's one thing. And the other, not necessarily a connected thing, but what was the importance of the Renaissance for women? So, those are the two questions. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, sex, yeah. I mean, I think they're pretty kind of sex mad in the Renaissance. Actually, the very first chapter of my book, yes, I talk about the Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck, but the chapter's actually called The Arnolfini Nude and what set it off. And this is something I learned, this is something I discovered. It actually set the whole book on a new direction, in fact, when I was researching it, when I started to think about the fact that Jan van Eyck was actually famous for painting nudes. None of his nudes today survive, but there are copies of one of them and it looks incredibly familiar because it seems to be in the same house or the same room even as the Arnolfini portrait. And so, I call it The Arnolfini Nude and I even speculate that the woman in it, the woman who's bathing with a servant attending her, that she actually could even be the woman in the Arnolfini portrait, which would imply that she's not perhaps the wife, that this is something more, it's very mysterious, the Arnolfini portrait. There were no documents about it to say who everyone is. Even the identification of Arnolfini is something that's been, it's agreed, but anyway. So, and I even started thinking and I tentatively suggested in the book that it could even be heretical, that there was a heresy or certainly the church believed there was a heresy called the Brethren of the Free Spirit who believed that they were chosen by God and that they were so full of the Holy Spirit that they could not sin and they would go around deliberately having orgies and making free love and having sex, as much sex as they liked because they couldn't sin, they were beyond sin. So, I even suggest quite tentatively that there could be a heresy going on, that Arnolfini and Van Eyck might be heretics who actually believe in free love or in very odd, not odd, but quite liberating and radical things. And the funny thing is that that was, I mean, I thought pretty quite carefully, but when I talked to a Renaissance, you know, we started giving talks about the book and sharing the book, I found that Renaissance scholars were not anything like a shock because I thought they would be by that. People seem to think that's actually quite a reasonable idea. So, and, but that is, you know, and it's obviously partly my own, I personally find, you know, I love looking at Titian's nudes and I think, again, it's one of the things that makes Renaissance contemporary and modern and shocking and provocative. In fact, people can still, obviously some people can still be unsettled by how much nudity there is in Renaissance, maybe more now than sort of 10 years ago because we're in an age when, you know, feminist critiques of nudity are quite, you know, familiar to us. And so, you know, seeing a massive incredible painting like the Venus of Urbino by Titian can be problematic or something. To me, what that means is that it's alive. If Renaissance art can still be provocative and something you want to argue with and debate, that's extraordinary. So, but their drive, they have a drive to depict the naked human body, female and male. And, you know, just recently I saw Michelangelo's David again. I mean, it's incredible. I mean, this is like a giant, colossal naked male body. What's going on? Done with incredible sensuality and love and Michelangelo, this is the thing, the Renaissance, this is why, I mean, it was a liberation. Michelangelo didn't deny that he loved the male form. You know, he said he'd been accused of loving the male form in a carnal way. And he said, well, you know, yes, he does love the male form, but he loves it in the same way as Socrates who, and he makes reference to Plato's philosophy. Michelangelo was very clever. He was very learned. He was very learned in ancient thought and poetry, you know, he wrote poetry. So basically Michelangelo was not only what we would call gay, but he found a way to make that public because he used the idea of platonic love in order to say, well, yes, but it's platonic. But, you know, you can sort of, some people think that's just totally untrue. I think there is, I think his life, he went through different phases. I think at the time when he created David, he was quite young. And I think he might've been chased and he's putting it all in his art. He's putting all this passion, all this quite turbulent passion, perhaps confused passion and guilt-striking passion into a massive male nude work of art. And I come up with ideas about Renaissance art that sometimes I'm actually embarrassed to even say, okay. There's some stuff, but the other day, in Florence, looking at Michelangelo, he's got a huge, his right hand is huge. It's out of proportion. And it's, you know, and it's, why is that? And he's got the stone, you know, he's got the stone in his hand that he's going to put into his sling and fire at Goliath. But it's also quite near to his, to his testicles. It's quite near to his, to his groin and this huge hand. And at first I think, is it about, is there also, is it masturbation? Is it about masturbation? So, you see what I mean? I have these, you never, but I think, you know, I genuinely think there's genuinely a lot going on in Michelangelo's David that's dangerous and wondrous. It's why it's so alive. Think about the danger. One of the, I think, yeah, one of the reasons they embrace sexuality in art in a way that had never been done before and arguably hasn't even been done since in some ways. Because they're so uninhibited about it and so non-judgmental about it. But, you know, to do with making art alive. The thing about David is it's a statue that seems alive. You can't ever, you can, it's hard to, it's almost hard to, in the end all you come away with, you come away with this awe and also this sense that you've somehow encountered a living being rather than just seen a lumpen statue. And sexuality is, the sexuality is part of that. It's electrifying, you know, it's an electrifying, life-giving force. But also with Michelangelo's David, he's also, I think, dealing with something which, an earlier work. So one of the first, the nude in the Renaissance, the first kind of electrifying nude in Renaissance art is Donatello's Statue of David, which was done in 15th century Florence for the Medici. And it's, I saw that again. I mean, that's a major thing in my book. And in my book I argue that Donatello, well Donatello, there are contemporary sources that say, that describe Donatello as being gay, as having relationships with his apprentices. There's a particular story that was told, you know, in the 15th century about that Donatello's apprentice, he was in love with his apprentice, basically his boyfriend, but his boyfriend runs away to another city and he goes to Cosimo de' Medici, the richest man in Europe. And he says, you know, I want you to write me a kind of a letter because I've got to go to this place, I'm going to kill him. So I want you to give me a kind of cover letter so that they'll, you know, I'll be able to do this. And instead Cosimo says, all right, but he gives him, actually he gives a letter that's for the Prince of, Duke of Ferrara. And he says, look after this artist, he's very sensitive. He's angry with his lover. And so what happens is that he does go and he meets the apprentice, Donatello meets the apprentice and instead of killing him, they fall into each other's arms laughing. So, but the story, obviously the story implies not only doesn't, not only implies, you know, says clearly that Donatello is in love with his male apprentice, but that everyone tolerates this and accepts this, that no one has a problem with this. And I think that's partly to do with the idea of this, this was worth to be, this is why I say it's the Renaissance is subverting their discovering of the delights and subverting and rejecting Christian tradition. Because obviously, obviously this, this was a society that the crime of sodomy, which is why it was called, it was not, it was a mortal sin. You know, it's a mortal sin in Christianity. Christianity is still confused by these issues and you could be burned at the stake for it. So Donatello and Michelangelo dealing, putting stuff into a public space, which was very dangerous. And yet, and yet, and yet they didn't have, people didn't have a problem. So partly because it all gets tied up with the cult of the artist. So artists can do, can get away with things that other people can't get away with. I think Burkhardt said that women were liberated in the Renaissance. And what does that mean? If you agree with that. Well, obviously Burkhardt was writing in the 19th century and their idea of women being liberated was, I mean, it was before women had the vote, you know. However, I'm a lot more, yeah, I do feel more positive about the lives of women in the Renaissance than some people are. One thing I definitely argue for in this book is that women were certainly viewers of Renaissance art. I mean, I think it's a cliche to think that Renaissance paintings were all made for a male viewer and incorporate a kind of male gaze. Because in early Renaissance Florence, one of the first genres of art in which the classical gods and goddesses start coming back, and nudity, were things called, they're called birth trays. In English, they're called birth trays. We call them birth trays. And these trays were made for, to bring food, to bring restorative foods, sweetmeats to women who just had a baby. Obviously, we're talking about, here about the elite, obviously we're talking about wealthy households. But you would commission a special tray. It's like a commemorative, it became like a commemorative tray because it'd be kept in the family. So you'd actually commission an artist to paint something on the tray. But the first audience for that painting would be the group of women. Childbirth was an all-female ritual. So there would be, you know, the mother and her friends and midwives, but they would all be women. And there's paintings, there are some wonderful paintings of childbirth scenes, you know, sort of the birth of the Virgin, the birth of St. John the Baptist. And so in Florence, this was the ritualized thing of childbirth. Obviously, it was a massively, there was no medicine, there was no, you know, this was a very dangerous moment for mother and child. And often ended in, you know, tragedy, tragically. However, if it went well, and if, you know, if mother and child survived, then you'd get the image of them sitting around eating the fruit. And as they ate the fruit, the painting would be revealed. And these paintings are fascinating. And one of them I have, that I've illustrated is, it was only about 1400, and it's like one of the very first depictions of the goddess Venus. And she's floating in the air. And then she's surrounded by men who were kind of, you know, they're kind of struck down, they're kind of magically in awe in the power of Venus. Venus is up there and the men are all down below. Not only that, but there were rays of, gold rays shooting out of her vagina. So the men are like straight into the men's eyes. And so it's like, you know, it's an image of, so that's an image of female sexuality as something powerful and, you know, very powerful, in fact. And it's not only that, but it was clearly made for the eyes of women, that the women were the audience for that painting, the first audience. And there's also, you know, in fact, there are women, women could be patrons in other ways. Isabella d'Este, who was the Marchioness of Mantua. She was one of the great art patrons of the Renaissance. She worked with, she created her own kind of collection of, she commissioned paintings of mythology in Mantua, but she also got Leonardo da Vinci and Bellini and Giorgio Arrone, or she tried to get to work for her. And a less likely, a more unlikely, a less well-known, a less respectable form of artistic patronage, in which I think women were central, was in Venice. That in Venice, there are these paintings, portraits of courtesans, prostitutes, high, you know, expensive, you know, sort of, which Venice was famous for its sex trade. And so anyway, there are paintings by Titian and Giorgio Arrone, fantastic paintings, and also by sort of lesser Venetian artists of women. They're often portrayed as flora. You see a woman portrayed as flora in Venetian art. It's a kind of, I mean, you know, in the Victorian age, or even probably in the 19, quite recently, people would have put that very respectably and said, oh, flora is an image of spring. But flora was also associated with the Floralia, which was an ancient Roman festival in which sex workers, it was the festival of sex workers in ancient Rome. So flora is like the goddess of sex workers. So if a woman is holding a flower, and she's, you know, and she's sort of, you know, and also, especially as she's kind of flaunting sexuality, as it were, chances are, this actually is a painting of a courtesan. And in fact, there was an English traveller who went to Venice at the time of Shakespeare, and he raves about it. He gets very, very steamed up about all this. Venice was famous for, you know, having sort of, he says you go and visit a courtesan and have her room is, you know, kitted out in beautiful velvets and it's going to be plush and rich. So it looks like the setting of a Titian painting, you know, and this is obviously, so that's cultural history. What people find, what people found erotic in, in the 16th century, obviously your lovely velvet bedspreads, but also there'll be a painting of her on the wall. So in other words, that these paintings could have been, looks like they're actually part of, that they were commissioned by the women, that the women commissioned the paintings, or maybe their mothers commissioned the paintings, but that, you know, but, but arguably they commissioned the paintings and they use the paintings as like for advertisement. It's like, you know, they glow and they're glamorizing themselves as part of the, that, that trade. And that, that, and not only that, but these, there's an amazing painting. There's one of these paintings by Palma Vecchio that's in the National Gallery. And there's another painting by Palma Vecchio of a nude Venus, which is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. They're the same woman. It's the same woman. And I think that is a clue to what, what's happening in Venetian paintings by Giorgio Arrhenitian, that obviously they're, they paint the nude, you know, the female nude, they take the female nude to incredible, you know, artistic heights and, you know, but these, these, these real women, the courtesans, are probably their models. Who else would be? In your book, you start with the Renaissance in 1434 with the Arnolfini portrait. And you also end with the Caravaggio of 1608, I think, but the Cupid painting, which is an amazing painting too. And why is that the ending of it in your eyes? Okay. So I see the Renaissance as a, you know, essentially as, as an explosion of curiosity and free thought and free, free lifestyles as well to something, you know, in certain circles, a liberation, a mental, a cultural liberation, precociously modern, we might say. But was it the beginning of the modern world? Was it, now that this is where I would differ from Burckhardt or the 19th century liberal historians. He saw the Renaissance as the beginning of a secular modern world. So for Burckhardt, you have the Renaissance and then it's a linear rise from that to liberal, 19th century liberal society. But that's not what happened because it ended. It was, it was like this great liberating period, but it ended and it ended because it all got, because of religion. I mean, they couldn't buck religion because yet this was still, most people, you know, very, well, you know, it was a Christian world. So even though they're, even though they're complicating that by bringing in pagan gods and they're finding ways to get away from them all, this kind of repressive medieval Christendom and they can't change the fact that, you know, religion is still, and there's a good reason why religion dominates because people's lives are, really are miserable and short. Life expectancies are very low. This was still, technologically, this still was the medieval world. Absolutely. The medieval world. And it's just as medieval in 1608 as it had been in 1434. They didn't have industry, of course, they didn't have medicine, anything like modern medicine. In the world that they inhabited, Christianity was still a very helpful thing to everyone because, you know, in the end, their lives were short. They might, you might be killed by plague any minute. Plague was always recurring everywhere. So child mortality was incredible, you know, so, so in the end, you know, Christianity basically makes a big comeback in the 16th century. And, and, and you have the reformation, the reformation, revolution, the reformation is partly caused by the Renaissance because new ways of thinking, new ways of thinking about texts leads to a total rethink of what Christianity is in Northern Europe. Catholicism then has to respond with what's called the Council Reformation. And that includes saying, well, actually, we shouldn't have nudes in churches. It's outrageous. We should, religious, no, religious art has to be properly religious art. And, you know, so, so in Southern Europe, that turns the clock backwards in many ways. and so by 1600, artists started to, Italian artists, it's almost becoming quite boring, but there's an exception to that, Caravaggio, who turns up in Rome in the 1590s, painting, painting his, his lovers and male sex workers, prostitutes, with flowers in their hair, like flora, you know, outrageous, actually, completely outrageous. He gets a, but that gets him a reputation, but he doesn't get in trouble for it. Instead he gets, what he ends up doing is getting religious commissions and becoming the most popular religious painter in Rome, until he kills a man, and has to flee the city because he's just not, he's not a good man. He's living a wild life. So he kills a man, has to leave the city, and he becomes a Knight of Malta, which was, I think, an attempt to reconcile his violent tendencies with, with Christianity, I suppose, you know, he's the, the Knights of Malta are crusading knights. So he's, he's there on Malta, soon gets into trouble again, gets thrown into, gets thrown into prison in Malta. But before that, he paints, he paints this, yeah, the painting, The Sleeping Cupid, and it's a very strange, disturbing little painting, where the Cupid is in shadow in the night, and he's got black wings, and he's, his body, he looks more dead than asleep, and his body is strangely shaped, and misshapen, and old, and unhealthy. So it seems to be like, sort of, it was like the death of desire, I suppose. I often think, how many great artists, how many genius artists can there be? And I often think, oh, there's probably one every 50 years, or every 100 years, you know, we can debate who they are, but there's really one great artist every generation or two. But in the Renaissance, there seems to be a hell of a lot of geniuses there. Is that, would you agree with that? Oh, yeah, yeah. And that would be another way of defining the Renaissance, that somehow in this very short, I treat it as a comparatively short space of time, yeah, from basically the 15th to 16th centuries, yeah, the proliferation of genius is just bizarre. There's at least 10, there's like at least 10 or 15 that you could name. Well, yeah, I mean, the first book I wrote about the Renaissance, actually, was called The Lost Battles, and it was when I discovered that, just reading Vasari, I'd never thought of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo as being people who knew each other. So Leonardo and Michelangelo, yeah, they lived at the same time. How does that happen? How do you get, you know, two geniuses of that order? And also Raphael, at that same period in Florence, around about 1504, Raphael is in Florence as well. He doesn't come from Florence, but he's, I mean, they both come from Florence, Leonardo and Michelangelo, same city. And Raphael from Umbria, he's there learning from them, observing them. Botticelli is still alive at that moment. So, yeah, how do you get such a concentration of genius? I mean, what? It's another way of defining what the Renaissance was, which was this period that produced, you know, not only the idea of genius, but the reality of it. Well, I mean, what would trigger that cluster of geniuses to sprout out? What triggers that? Okay. I do have the theory. I sort of, I think I say it in the book. I certainly, I hope it emerges. I think, yeah, I mean, it's a period, it's between two worlds. Well, actually, it's between two worlds, many worlds. But this thing about the Middle Ages and then the modern world, what happens? In the 17th century, you get Isaac Newton, you get Galileo, you get the scientific revolution, you get the emergence of a modern rationalist mindset in which people start to see the difference between the supernatural and the natural. And so that, like, in the early 17th century, witches are being burned and hanged regularly. By the end of the 17th century, hardly any witches are killed because people have stopped believing in witches and they stopped believing in, you know, that the supernatural is all around. They don't believe in the supernatural in the same way. It's by 1700. Now, during the Renaissance, that hasn't happened yet. So, you've, but you've got these extraordinary leaps forward in terms of artistic ability and representation. In visual art perspective, as I said, you know, you've got perspective. Perspective sort of influences, that has, comes into drama as well into the world of Shakespeare because, you know, the stage, the stage itself becomes a kind of, it's a sort of perspective space. but also the revival of the classic, this revival of classical learning is, you know, sparks all kinds of new ideas in literature and in thinking. The other thing, of course, which I haven't, which I talk about, in fact, is central to the book, but I haven't said much about it yet, is Christopher Columbus sailing to the new world in 1492. And then Amerigo Vespucci from Florence going, following after him and realizing that he's actually discovered a new continent, the new world, America, which is named after Amerigo Vespucci. So there's that. So there's all this, all this new stuff and radical new stuff happening in the Renaissance. and, and so artistically there, the tech, that's what I call the technology, the technologies of perspective and, and, and of new classically influenced forms of writing. These are all amazing. But at the same time, they still believe in a world of, they still believe that the world is very magical place. It's not been rationalized yet. So, you know, they do believe in magic. Magic actually has a golden age in the Renaissance. the, you know, the, they're really into magic. On the one hand, they're scared. There's the fear of witches. So that's actually really comes in as the Renaissance is dying, actually. It's really a phenomenon of the, the end of the Renaissance that, you know, the witch craze and the, the persecutions of witches, so-called witches. But they believe the world is full of demons, angels and demons and spirits and magical forces. So if you've got these, you know, very, you know, modern, as it were, powerful means of portraying and depicting, you know, thinking about the world. And at the same time, you believe in magic. I think that's a, that's a great combination for imaginative art. They create the idea of genius by being geniuses. It's a chicken and egg situation. Because obviously you could do a kind of postmodern thing about this. The Renaissance constructs the idea of the genius. You know what I mean? Make it sound very sort of, oh yes, you know, it's like this thing that they construct. They are geniuses. Leonardo da Vinci. Nobody, you know, if anybody deserves, you know, you can't really quarrel with the idea that Leonardo da Vinci was a genius. and Leonardo becomes crucial to that idea. I mean, it was Leonardo really, really takes the idea of genius to another level because he starts, well, first of all, he wasn't, wasn't just an artist. He was an inventor and a scientist. And he, you know, he does, produces notebooks full of, full of inventions and does anatomical research, you know, just does all of this. So it's, but not only that, but he did this thing of not finishing his works. So when he was, when he was in Milan, he was at the court of Milan, he spent years working on a great bronze statue of a horse. But he never finished it. He never cast it. It just, it became, and there are lots of drawings in which he just obsesses about the technology of casting and how he's going to make a great machinery in order to cast the horse. Beautiful, beautiful drawings where he, so instead of a finished work of art, the horse becomes a kind of great project. At the same time, he's also trying to fly and make flying machines at the same time as that. And, you know, even his paintings, very few are ever finished. But that becomes part of his, almost his, that becomes part of his fame at the time. There's this, when he, he went, he goes back to Florence then, beginning of the 16th century. And he's now famous. He's done The Last Supper. So he's very famous. And so the Florentines ask him to do a painting in, in, in one of the churches. He never finishes that, but he does do a drawing for it, a full-size drawing, a cartoon. And Massari says, you know, that hundreds of people queued to see the drawing, the cartoon. In other words, to see something from the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. So Leonardo is the first artist who is recognised for his mind. What people want to see is sort of Leonardo's concepts and his imagination. And then Michelangelo, sort of, who has a, you know, actually did have a competition with Leonardo, knew Leonardo. He learns, he sort of learns from that. And he started, and suddenly he starts leaving things unfinished. Although he was very capable of finishing things when he wanted to, but Michelangelo, Michelangelo becomes the, the self-conscious genius where he's a sculptor, a poet, painter, an architect. They're asking, what, what's the relevance to us now, or say, to contemporary, I mean, obviously, you know, I live my life in contemporary art in a way. So do you. What's the relevance of the Renaissance to contemporary art? Well, the first place would be what we've been talking about, the idea of the genius. I think if there's one thing that survives from the Renaissance in art, it's just the idea of the artists and the idea that artists are special, that artists are cool, that artists are, being an artist is a great thing to be. That, that idea definitely was invented in the Renaissance. Well, thanks very much for that. I loved reading your book and I loved meeting you and talking to you about it too. Thank you. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.