Andrew GRAHAM DIXON RENAISSANCE Ep 2 of 6 The Pure Radiance of the Past

The Renaissance was always bigger than any one place, but for a short and crucial period, the city of Florence became its capital. During the early years of the 15th century, men first consciously set out to revive the classical past, to bring it back to life, not just to borrow its forms, as earlier artists had done. The great Florentine masters broke the mould. Inspired by a dream of antiquity, they created new forms of painting, sculpture and architecture. In doing so, they changed their world and shaped ours. Michelangelo's Statue of David, the single most celebrated sculpture in the world, has become the emblem of the Renaissance in Florence. To Florentines, David, the resolute, determined slayer of a tyrant, symbolised the liberty and the long and proud republican tradition of their city. Michelangelo carved his stone giant from a single block of Carrara marble in the early 1500s. But the seismic shift in Florentine life and art that he has come to stand for had its first stirrings a full century earlier, in what Florentines themselves called a great reawakening. In the Italian peninsula, physical reminders of a once great civilisation are everywhere. The man who first dreamed of crossing the divide that separated his world from that of the ancients was the son of an exiled Florentine notary, the 14th century scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch. As an exile himself, Petrarch adopted antiquity as a homeland of the mind. Petrarch argued that time was not a continuous, undifferentiated flow, but could be divided up into distinct periods, shaped by human will. He believed that the classical civilisations of the ancient world had been the first age, a golden age, a pinnacle of human achievement, and that since the crumbling of the Roman Empire, the world had fallen into a second age, a dark age of barbarism and ignorance. If that barbarism and ignorance could be cast aside, then the intellectual and political life of his own time would be reawakened to bring about a third age. It was to prove an extraordinarily potent idea. Petrarch wrote, After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past. Although Petrarch didn't actually use the word itself, what he was proposing was nothing less than a rebirth, a renaissance. He died in 1374, and he's been remembered as one of the great thinkers, a man who changed the course of Western civilisation. But his ideas would never have had the impact that they did if it hadn't been for the enthusiasm with which they were taken up in Florence. In Florence, Petrarch became a cult. In the church of Santa Croce is the tomb of Petrarch's most influential Florentine disciple, the man who turned the pure radiance of the past into a political manifesto for Florence, Leonardo Bruni. Bruni had been Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, and his tomb was, in its time, the grandest memorial ever built to a single individual in the city. He rests for eternity in the guise of a Roman senator, clad in a flowing toga and wreathed with laurel. He has the face of a tired old man with slightly sagging jowls. Like a 15th-century Winston Churchill, Bruni had spent a long life rallying the Florentines against repeated attempts by their enemies, particularly the adventurous Milanese, to conquer their wealthy and prosperous city. Inspired by the writers of the ancient world, the key to his strategy lay in words. Tucked away in the heart of Florence is one of its centres of learning, the Laurentian Library, a repository for thousands of manuscripts. The newfound passion for antiquity had led to a great boom in the rediscovery and copying of Greek and Roman texts. To men like Leonardo Bruni, classical writers became heroes and role models. Such was the interest in all things classical that the Florentines even adopted the ancient Roman course of studies, the studia humanitatis, the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. It became the standard curriculum for the elite of Florentine society, and the students nicknamed their teachers humanisti or humanists. Florence was one of the largest cities in Europe. Earth, air, fire and water, said the Pope. To the four elements, we have to add a fifth, the Florentines. They're everywhere. Its riches were founded on banking, trade and a thriving textile industry. The city was one of the few surviving republics on the Italian peninsula and a humanist education was tailor-made for its politicians, its merchants and bankers, men who needed to draw up documents in Latin and to write and speak persuasively. Leonardo Bruni's great achievement was to harness the passion for antiquity to his city's particular political needs. In his writings, he painted a picture of republican Florence as a second Rome, resisting its enemies just as the Roman Republic had stood firm against its enemies. It was out of Bruni's words and the ideology that he so stirringly encapsulated that a new art and a new architecture would arise. The very heart of the city is the building where the new, classically inspired image of Florence first showed itself, Orsanmichele. Orsanmichele was the church of the powerful Florentine trade guilds. And in times of political crisis, it was used as an emergency grain store. Here, in the early 1400s, a small group of friends and rivals, among them Donatello, Nanni di Banco and Lorenzo Ghiberti, created a race of heroes, an unchanging guard of saints and martyrs, protecting the city's spiritual and material well-being. A perfect sculpture and embodiment of Florentine civic idealism in its new classical guise is the Four Crowned Saints by Nanni di Banco. It was commissioned by the Guild of Stone Carvers and Woodworkers. The four men, early Christians executed by the Emperor Diocletian, are the very image of Roman Republican fortitude which Leonardo Bruni translated to Florence. They stand in a semicircle to show their communal resolve, a constant reminder to Florentines that they too must stick together in adversity. Blackened as it is by pollution, this is still one of the masterpieces of the Florentine Renaissance. Nanni di Banco, who died as young as his masters of the plague, seems to have shared their idealism. The sculptures on Orsanmichele announced a new relationship between art and the people. Never before had statues been placed in such an intimate relationship with the citizens. It was as if they spoke to the people. That dialogue is muted now because so many of the original sculptures have been brought indoors for their own preservation. But even inside, they still draw you towards them. The figure of St Mark by Donatello was the most accomplished piece of naturalistic carving created for more than 1,000 years. St Mark looks like a real man in the real world. The sculpture has a compelling physical and psychological presence. The profound nature of St Mark's gaze made a deep impression on contemporary spectators. A large part of the miracle of Donatello's work, for those who came after him, was that he'd seemed to carve thought itself. Michelangelo, who loved this sculpture, said that if St Mark really did look like this, we'd have to believe every single word that he said. Donatello has created a completely coherent image of the human body, classical in form and Christian in spirit. St Mark seems motivated from within, weight momentarily balanced on his right foot but capable of further movement. He looks as though he's about to step forward from his plinth to proclaim his gospel. The different Florentine trade guilds and the artists themselves vied with one another to create the most impressive statues for the niches on Orsanmichele. The larger-than-life-size bronze sculpture of St John the Baptist was created by Lorenzo Ghiberti. St John may not quite have St Mark's sense of impending movement, but this towering figure in a hair shirt has, in its own way, a severe and forbidding presence. And in those vivid, living eyes, we can perhaps catch a glimpse of Ghiberti's own fiercely competitive spirit. Competition was the lifeblood of Renaissance Florence. John the Baptist is the city's patron saint, and each year on his feast day, the 24th of June, Florentines gather to celebrate their distinguished past. The parade into the piazza in front of the Church of Santa Croce may appear to be no more than a piece of Renaissance heritage, but it's just the prelude to a startlingly savage contest. Two teams representing different districts of the city have reached the final of a football game, first played in the 15th century, in which all the competitiveness and much of the violence of Renaissance Florence has been kept alive. The game originally provided an outlet for factional rivalry, which might otherwise have threatened the integrity of the state. It still seems to perform something like that function today. It is not so much a sporting contest as a pitched battle staged under controlled conditions. A game similar to this was played by Roman legionaries as a sort of training exercise, and in Florence it was also used as a way of hardening bodies for battle, and at the same time promoting a sense of solidarity among the citizenry. The St John's Day game is a continuing reminder that Renaissance Florence was always a place threatened by rivalry from within and violence from without. The city's proud sense of itself as a second Rome was sharpened by its vulnerability. Of all the sculptures created for Orsanmichele, Donatello's St George expresses most acutely the Florentine Republic's mixed spirit of defiance and vulnerability. Half man, half boy, his brow seems furrowed with anxiety. The ideal Florentine, eternally vigilant, is still not immune to worries. He can never be sure what the world is about to throw at him. Florence's political propaganda needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. The Florentine Republic never was a democracy in the modern sense, and in any case, there was something faintly hypocritical about its cult of liberty. The freedom-loving people of Florence were themselves perfectly happy to annex neighbouring towns, such as Pisa and Arezzo. I think what was most remarkable about the Florentines during the years when their city was under threat was their constant willingness to spend enormous sums of money on images, set up like totems to ward off danger. It's as if they had more faith in art than armies. The niches of the cathedral bell tower, designed by Giotto in the 14th century, which had remained empty for 50 years or more, were filled one by one. Across the city, a great stone chorus went up, proclaiming the indomitability of the Florentine Republic. The new sculpture was intimate in scale, but the new architecture of Renaissance Florence was monumental. And nowhere was the Florentines' pride in themselves and their republic more defiantly expressed than in the construction of a huge and beautiful dome for their cathedral. It was designed and engineered by Filippo Brunelleschi. The dome is so unavoidable a presence in the city that it's more like a fact of nature, a great rock or crag, than anything anyone actually built. It seems that Brunelleschi wasn't always the easiest man to work with, and he refused to show his plans to the committee in charge of appointing an architect to build the dome. He didn't want anyone stealing his ideas. The story goes that at one meeting, he finally overcame the committee's scepticism about his suitability for the job by producing an egg. Whoever can stand this egg on end, said Brunelleschi, should be given the commission. The challenge was accepted, and one by one, the other architects present tried and failed. Then Brunelleschi took the egg. But any one of us could have done that, said the other architects. Yes, and you'd be able to build the dome if you could see my plans, said Brunelleschi. The body of the cathedral had been completed up to the base of the drum by the end of the 14th century. The challenge for Brunelleschi was to find a way of crowning such an enormous structure with its dauntingly wide crossing without having to put up a vast forest of scaffolding. This conventional method would have used up all the trees in Tuscany. As you climb the 463 steps to its summit, you get a sense of how he solved the problem. He devised a method of construction which made the dome self-supporting, allowing the workforce to ascend securely within the dome as they built it. To keep the structure as light as possible, he designed a double shell, built from bricks laid herringbone fashion for maximum strength. The solution reached partly through ingenuity, partly borrowed from Islamic and Byzantine architecture. The dome stands over 300 feet high, and when it was built, it was the largest in the world. To those who lived in its shadow, it showed just how much one man could do and how far he could rise above the ordinary. While it signalled the city's self-confidence, it also symbolised something less tangible, if no less significant, an enhanced sense of human potential, a new and irrepressible spirit of active will. The building of the dome was itself a public performance, a heroic feat of engineering which lasted 16 years, from 1420 to 1436. It instantly became a symbol of Florence's almost fanatical determination to outdo the rest of the known world in art and architecture. In building his great creation, Brunelleschi set out not just to revive the glory of ancient Rome, but to surpass it. The Gothic character of the cathedral meant that it wouldn't have looked right or even been possible to build the new dome in a classical style. But Brunelleschi still managed to signal his classical taste. The tribunes, part of Brunelleschi's buttressing system, are versions of the circular temples of the Roman world, small, solid memories of antiquity, recreated to somewhat surreal effect high up in the air. Brunelleschi never quite finished his great work, leaving a ring of rough masonry at the base of the dome. After his death, a plan to add an arcaded gallery was stopped by Michelangelo. He understood that the grandeur of the dome was all-important, that it wasn't some bauble to be filigreed to a finish. And by making sure that it stayed as it was, he actually preserved part of what makes it so exhilarating. It's as if it's still under construction. During these years, the Florentines also began to reshape the open spaces of their city. These ceramic roundels of babes in swaddling clothes decorate Brunelleschi's foundling hospital, which he'd designed before starting work on the dome. The square of which it forms a side is one of the earliest examples of town planning in the modern sense. But it also has deep roots in the medieval past. It's as if the private world of the monastery cloister has been turned outwards to form a public space. The Florentines always looked to their own traditions. And for his foundling hospital, Brunelleschi's just as likely to have studied local Romanesque buildings of the 12th century as actual classical Roman architecture. What comes across in the piazza above all is a social ideal, rather than any doctrinaire notions of classical correctness. Brunelleschi turned an urban square into a space of perfect proportion, a place where men and women might move and speak more nobly. The architecture solemnly evokes the Florentine civic spirit itself. Austere, dignified, measured. Brunelleschi's dream of creating an architectural style all'antica, in the antique manner, was most fully realised in his design for the church of Santo Spirito. Petrarch had said that writers inspired by ancient literature shouldn't simply copy it to the letter, but seek to emulate its spirit. And Brunelleschi applied the same principle to building. What's most striking about Santo Spirito is the absolute clarity with which it has been planned. It's the opposite of a northern Gothic cathedral, where the spaces are irregular, mysterious even, and seem to go on forever. Here, space is measured out by the columns, unit by unit. Within this precisely mapped grid, you feel yourself fixed by its coordinates. In the buildings that he designed, Brunelleschi didn't just change the face of Florence. He put the language of classical architecture back at the very centre of Western civilisation. What's sometimes forgotten is that Brunelleschi may well have turned to architecture because he'd lost out as a sculptor. In 1401, when he was a young man, a competition had been held to decide who'd get the commission to create a set of bronze doors for the city's baptistry. Brunelleschi's main rival was Lorenzo Ghiberti. The octagonal baptistry of St John is one of the oldest and most revered buildings in Florence. Under the great 13th-century mosaic ceiling, a baby baptised into the city of God was at the same time baptised into the city of Florence. To decide who was to get the job, Brunelleschi and Ghiberti were each asked to make a sample panel, illustrating the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac. In his panel, Brunelleschi responded with an almost peremptory, inspired brusqueness. Abraham looks as though he is about to dismember his son, a skinny, crouching boy, not merely to kill him. Ghiberti's panel offered a more suave approach. His Isaac is a beautifully fashioned Greek nude, and he twists gracefully towards the knife. Abraham hesitates, as if transfixed by the boy's beauty. The jury gave the commission to Lorenzo Ghiberti. Perhaps it helped that he'd used less bronze than Brunelleschi by casting his panel in a single piece. The Florentines liked to save money. The 28 panels on the new doors depict stories from the Scriptures, and to stand before them is to be transfixed again and again by the flash of a sudden, memorable image. It's like reading the Bible by lightning. In the Annunciation, Archangel Gabriel confronts a sinuous, recoiling virgin who seems shocked to the core by his news. Christ drives the moneylenders from the temple with tremendous force. There's something wonderfully comical about the way they're all reeling backwards, falling over each other like 15th-century keystone cops. But for all his mastery, Ghiberti was still constraining himself within the conventions of the Gothic style, epitomised by the quatrefoils within which each of his scenes has been squeezed. When Ghiberti was commissioned to make a second set of doors for the baptistry, he knew a repeat performance wouldn't quite do. The language of Florentine sculpture had been constantly evolving, and the style in which he'd done the first set of doors was already old-fashioned. Of course, artists had always tried to improve on their own earlier efforts, but what marked out the Florentine artists of this particular period was the sheer intensity of their desire to keep up to the minute, to experiment and to innovate. Ghiberti had started out in competition with Brunelleschi. Now he was in competition with himself. Ghiberti laboured from middle age to old age on the second set of doors. Michelangelo thought them worthy enough to adorn the entrance to paradise. Ghiberti, a man never slow to promote himself, must have been rather pleased with his work as well. He included a self-portrait bust as a flourish. On the second set of doors, there are fewer panels. They're larger, and Ghiberti has done away with the Gothic framing device, enabling himself to unfold his narratives with greater freedom. When he transformed his style, I think Ghiberti underlined the fact that a great change was taking place in Western art. The notion was born that an artist could completely renew himself, could undergo a personal form of renaissance. This panel shows the creation and the fall of man. It's a brilliant hybrid art form which Ghiberti has brought into being. Part sculpture, part relief, part goldsmithing. In the panel of Jacob and Esau, Ghiberti places the story in a classical city. Jacob deprives his brother Esau of his birthright, and tricks his father Isaac into giving him the blessing proper to the firstborn son. This trio of women in windblown gowns is, for me, one of the most beautiful groups in all of art. They have been midas-touched by Ghiberti's hand. These panels also marked a significant development in ways of depicting the world, a new use of perspective. Ghiberti's rival Brunelleschi had established a mathematical formula for accurately reproducing, as an illusion on a flat surface, the way the eye receives images of reality. I think it's no coincidence that the mathematics of perspective should have been developed in a city whose very power and wealth had depended for so long on calculation. The Trinity, by the Florentine artist Masaccio, in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, was one of the very first paintings created using the new rules of perspective. It was painted in around 1426. According to those who have studied the mathematics, the viewer is to stand 6.12 metres from the image to appreciate the perspective effect fully. I happen to think it's also designed to be seen from a kneeling position. The skeleton at the base of the picture is a reminder of our own mortal condition. The inscription reads, With that truth in mind, the eye is led up to the couple who paid for the fresco and then up and in to John and Mary. The mother of Christ, her arm raised, directs us out of our world and into the theological space of the chapel beyond. We see Christ raised aloft on the cross and above his head the white dove of the Holy Ghost. Further back, at the apex of the picture, we see the awesome face of God the Father. Masaccio's made the mystery of the Trinity disconcertingly real. Masaccio may well have used architectural plans supplied by his friend Brunelleschi to achieve the realism of his fresco. In a strange case of life imitating art, the same plan seemed to have been used by Brunelleschi's adopted son, Bugiano, when he built a chapel for the Cardini family in the church of San Francesco in Pesce, not far from Florence. The similarity to Masaccio's fresco is uncanny. What the geometric rules for perspective gave to artists and architects alike was the ability to conceive space with precision. This paralleled other developments. Maps were being drawn more accurately and man was acquiring a better understanding of the physical world. But it was the mystical dimension of perspective which held out the greatest appeal. Its mathematical harmony seemed to reflect the harmony of a universe in which man and God were inextricably linked. In the words of the Florentine humanist, Genozzo Manetti, The truths of Christianity are as clear and as indisputable as the axioms of mathematics. The use of perspective was to remain the dominant convention of Western painting until Picasso came along with his cubist hammer and smashed it to pieces. But there's one popular preconception about its early use which needs to be treated with special care. During the 19th century, the idea took hold that the introduction of perspective in art had announced a new age of scientific objectivity and had begun to spell out the death of religion. This has become one of the great myths about the Renaissance. These fiendishly precise drawings were made by Piero della Francesca who'd trained in Florence and would have been familiar with the work of both Masaccio and Brunelleschi. They show the artist's determination to explore every avenue of possibility opened up by perspective. But we shouldn't think of these diagrams as harbingers of a modern scientific outlook. They were very much the means to a religious painter's end. Piero della Francesca's fresco of the Resurrection is in his hometown of Sansepolcro. At first sight, it's a rather baffling picture. Piero plays a push-me-pull-you game with the viewer. It's hard to know exactly where to stand to look at it. Conventionally, you'd expect the perspective to take your eye to the horizon. But instead, it's led underground, as if to the place from which Christ has risen. The horizon itself is flat and unyielding. There's no vanishing point here. It's a kind of barrier to vision. Then you notice that the two lines of trees form an apex, leading your eye not up and into the picture, as in Masaccio's Trinity, but down and out, to the armour on the sleeping soldier's knee. Align yourself with his knee, and I think you find yourself standing where Piero wanted you to be, looking up in awe at the resurrected Christ. And then you realise that this sophisticated painting contains one more perspective, Christ's. It's the picture that's doing the seeing, looking out through the door it faces, and beyond. Piero's perspective has projected the mystery of the resurrection into the daily life of Sansepolcro. Christ is stepping from his tomb into the town called Sepulchre. You can't take religion out of the Renaissance. It's there, dead centre. Piero della Francesca was just one of a host of artists who took inspiration from Masaccio. The 16th-century chronicler of the Renaissance, Giorgio Vasari, tells how generations of artists, including Michelangelo and Raphael, would cross the River Arno to pay homage to his work. Masaccio was the shooting star of the Florentine firmament, just 27 years old when he died. And in the Brancacci Chapel, in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, is the most substantial legacy of his short life, a fresco cycle that he undertook with an older collaborator, Masolino. In the tribute money, Jesus and his disciples stand by the Sea of Galilee. They're confronted by a tax collector, and Jesus tells a slightly bemused Peter that if he catches a fish, he will find the money they need in its mouth. Peter catches a fish and removes the coin from its jaws. Masaccio has distilled three moments in time to a single frame. To the right, Peter pays the tax collector his tribute, thrusting the money into his hand with contempt. Jesus and his disciples are shown as noble men in togas, standing in a semicircle to symbolise their unity. They remind me of Nanni di Banco's classically inspired Four Crowned Saints. Masaccio was a self-consciously up-to-date artist, but he also looked back in time to his great Florentine predecessor, Giotto, whose work was the ultimate source for his heavy sculptural figures and his momentous sense of drama. The folds in the robes are subtly echoed in the folds of the landscape behind them, a comparison intended perhaps to indicate the rock-like solidity of the Christian church. And the standing of these men has been emphasised by Masaccio in a literal sense too. They have large, coarse feet, and their toes are splayed out on the dark red earth. They stand firm. Masaccio sets the story of St Peter healing with his shadow in a street in contemporary Florence. The saint walks past a gathering of the hopeless and the crippled. His shadow falls across a man with withered legs. The picture has an almost unnerving documentary quality, the authenticity of a real scene remembered. Masaccio paints man as he is, with tremendous sympathy. The expulsion of Adam and Eve is the most vivid expression of Masaccio's uncomfortably powerful imagination. This is truly what it must have felt like to be thrust out of paradise. Eve is a woman in anguish. She contains all the agony and remorse in the world. There's no more direct image of human sorrow. When Masaccio died in 1428, Brunelleschi said simply, we have suffered a great loss. He was right, all the more so when you bear in mind that it was really just a handful of friends and rivals, no more than four or five people, who were responsible for changing the face of Florentine art. But for me, there's one artist above all, above Masaccio, above Ghiberti, above even Brunelleschi, whose work epitomises the energy and the genius of Renaissance Florence, and that's Donatello. According to legend, this is Donatello painted by Masaccio in one of his Brancacci chapel frescoes. Donatello's greatest gift was his profound understanding of humanity. In his wooden sculpture of Mary Magdalene, so appallingly raw in its realism, Donatello has managed to get thoroughly under the skin of the Christian ascetic mentality. The result is extremely disturbing. Mary Magdalene has been brought to life as a kind of sanctified bag lady. You can almost smell her thick, matted hair and her unwashed, starving body. Donatello's readiness to explore every extreme of human identity makes him a very difficult artist to pin down. He annihilates himself in his subject matter again and again, to such an extent that it's not possible to talk about Donatello's style because he has so many. The only other figure I can think of with his infinite variety, his ability to move so effortlessly from the heroic to the pathetic, from comedy to tragedy, and yet always to seem at home, is that rather later Renaissance dramatist, William Shakespeare. One of Donatello's most theatrical works is this delicate Annunciation, where he's staged the moment of Christ's conception as if it were a classical drama. The Virgin moves away from Gabriel involuntarily. At the same time, she turns her face towards Gabriel and their eyes meet. Donatello has suggested a mixture of feelings on her part. Surprise and reluctance, turning to acceptance and humility. Mary is a classical maiden who has been bent out of truth, stunned by the import of what she has just learned. Famous of Donatello's sculptures is a bronze statue of David. David the Giant Killer, like St George the Dragonslayer, carved by Donatello earlier in his career, was an alter ego of Florence. There used to be an inscription at the base of the statue, overtly proclaiming him as a symbol of Florentine liberty. But I think there's more to the sculpture than political symbolism. David is a cold but sexy boy with a strangely feminine body. We see him in a kinky state of undress, wearing only a helmet and a pair of very fine boots, which seem to make his nakedness all the more alluring. A plume of feathers on the dead Goliath's helmet strokes the boy's calf and inner thigh. David was made for a private patron, probably a member of the Medici family, who may well have had more than a merely aesthetic interest in the young nude male figure. This is one of the first erotic sculptures of the Renaissance, but it's also a brilliant psychological portrait, the very image of a knowing, self-absorbed flirt, a narcissistic smirk frozen forever on his bronze face. When he created his own David, over 50 years later, Michelangelo turned away from Donatello's troubling psychological realism. His David is idealised, an attempt to embody a dream of anatomical and spiritual perfection, which was to haunt Michelangelo all his life. This sculpture belongs squarely within the Florentine tradition of civic statues that have begun in the niches of Orsanmichaeli. But it expresses the values of a very different period of the Italian Renaissance, a time when the artist had started to think of himself as a god or colossus. But would Michelangelo have had the moral courage to carve this heroic figure if he had not grown up in Florence, surrounded by the extraordinary works of the early Florentine masters? I doubt it. After all, it was Michelangelo who'd called Ghiberti's doors the gates of paradise, who'd stopped them tampering with Brunelleschi's dome, who praised the vividness of Donatello's St Mark and paid homage to Masaccio's originality. I think David is a tribute, not just to Florence, but to the artists who'd done so much to shape the city, to their proud independence of vision and of spirit. Many winds of change blew into Florence during the 15th century, and the result was a whirlwind of energy and invention. There are times and places when mankind has, through some unforeseen conjunction of genius and circumstance, taken a great leap forward. Florence was one of those places. When they look back to antiquity, the great Florentine artists discovered more than new ways of making art. They found themselves. And that, I think, was their greatest legacy to the future, to us. A heightened sense of curiosity about character and motive. An immensely richer sense of what it might mean to be a human being.