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The Renaissance: not such a golden age?
00:49:33
Ada Palmer argues that viewing the Renaissance as a 'golden age' obscures its messy and violent reality
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- [00:02]
Ellie Cautious
This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true.
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Ryan Reynolds
Crime or prefer a nail biting novel.
- [00:13]
Ada Palmer
From time to time, with services like.
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Ellie Cautious
Prime Video, Amazon Music and fast free.
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Ada Palmer
Delivery, prime makes it easy to get more out of whatever you're into or getting into. Visit Amazon.comprime to learn more.
- [00:29]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [01:01]
Ada Palmer
The new McCrispy strip is here.
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Ryan Reynolds
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Ada Palmer
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Ryan Reynolds
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- [01:50]
Ellie Cautious
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Michelangelo's David, Machiavelli's the Prince, the plays of Shakespeare the Renaissance produced some of history's most astounding works of art, culture and innovation. But can focusing on these glittering creations obscure the messy and often violent reality of actually living through the era? Well, in her new book, Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer highlights the complexities of this so called golden age. And I spoke to her about everything from corrupt popes and devastating plagues to why Michelangelo actually hated painting. I wonder if we could start our chat with an analogy that you present us with at the beginning of the book of a statue of David, Michelangelo's David, covered in glitter. It's an unexpected image. Can you tell us what that's all about.
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Ada Palmer
Yeah. Because all through the city of Florence, you can buy little statuette copies of this and you can get white ones, but you could also get the roalded glitter glue. And it's not only incredibly garish, but it also covers up all of the details. Right. Which is a perfect way to think about the way the Renaissance gets represented, because we see the glitter, the shiny parts, and the art and the music and the dramatic stories about princes and princesses in castles, but it covers up all of the details with this sort of garish, glittery surface. And so, as I present the goal of the book, as somebody who has lived in Florence for years and gotten to know the Renaissance facets of Italy inside out, wanting to scrape that coating of glitter glue off of the messy underneath and show what's really there.
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Ellie Cautious
Yeah. So what are some of the myths that have grown up around the Renaissance? Some of those globs of glitter glue that have got stuck to it, and how do you think that they need correcting?
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Ada Palmer
So the biggest one is this myth of the Renaissance as a Golden age, which corresponds to the matching myth of the Middle Ages as a Dark Age. And these two myths go together and get retold together, because it's very convenient to be able to say there are Dark Ages and then there are Golden Ages. And therefore, my political party or my corporation or my brilliant entrepreneurial idea or whatever it is, is going to bring about a Golden Age of blah, blah, and whatever my rivals are doing or predecessors did, that was equivalent to the Dark Age. This is a really useful propagandistic tool. So we find the idea of Dark Ages and Golden Ages really satisfying. And the Renaissance feels to us a lot of time like a Golden age because we see all these beautiful works of art. But the things that an era left to us that are in museums aren't necessarily a good indicator of what it was like to live in that era and how you felt. So I like to juxtapose your mental image of the Renaissance, whether it's from a piece of artwork in a gallery or whether it's from a gorgeous TV show filmed with beautiful costumes. With this amazing letter that Machiavelli received shortly after 1500, he'd been writing a history of that decade, the years that he and his contemporaries had just lived through. And a friend of his who was a mercenary commander had read this first half of an unfinished history and wrote to Machiavelli and said, machiavelli, you must finish your history of this time or future generations will never believe how bad it was, and they will never forgive us for losing and destroying so much so quickly. But he's talking about the decade in which Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, in which Michelangelo carved the David, in which all of these big names like Raphael were at work producing the masterpieces that we hold in awe. If people want to point at a peak of the golden age production of art, it's the very decade that Tumaciavelli and his friends felt like an apocalypse.
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Ellie Cautious
So you've already thrown out some names that people might recognize there. Leonardo, Machiavelli, Raphael, Michelangelo. But for anyone who, you know, isn't really sure what exactly we're talking about when we're talking about the Renaissance, how would you define it? What are the kind of boundaries of this era? And I mean that in itself, having read your book. I know is a bit of a trick question, right?
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Ada Palmer
Because the answer is that the boundaries of what we call Renaissance depend on your point of view. And if I go to my university and I walk down the hall to the English department and I knock and I ask my colleagues, when is Renaissance? I'll say, oh, the Renaissance is Shakespeare, and it sort of gets going in the 1550s, and it comes to its peak when hamlet debuts in 1600. But if I walk the opposite direction down the same hallway and knock on the door where my professors in the Italian Literature department and I ask them, when is Renaissance? I say, oh, the Renaissance is, you know, Dante or 1250 and 1300, and, you know, it's getting to its peak by 1400, and it's really starting to die off if you get past 1500. So that one version of the Renaissance is over before the other version of the Renaissance begins. And that's because the Renaissance is itself a really squishy idea. It's this idea that there was some good thing that happened after the Middle Ages that sparked the beginning of moving to the modern. And really, people's ideas about the Renaissance aren't about the Renaissance at all. They're about modernity. And what we want to claim makes us different from our predecessors. What we want to say the pre modern world was different and why it changed. And that's why you get different answers to when is the Renaissance? Depending on whether people value one particular culture. When did it hit England? When did it hit Italy? When did it hit France? When did it hit the Netherlands? And also, depending on whether what they care about is political thought or art or music or warfare, all of those will give you different dates that are 50 years apart. So really asking somebody, when is the Renaissance tells you more about the person you're asking, that it tells you about the Renaissance because it tells you what they think made the world become modern.
- [08:00]
Ellie Cautious
So any listeners will be able to tell their friends, I listened to a podcast about the Renaissance. I don't know when it is, but it happened. So something you say is that quote, for those living through it, this famous era felt desperate. Desperate's the word you use. What made it an era of desperation.
- [08:18]
Ada Palmer
So ironically, one of the big things that does so is progress. Or we would call it progress. The regeneration after The Black Death, 1348 and thereafter meant that over the course of the following century, there is acceleration, as trade networks refill, as cities that were depopulated, repopulated, as industries that shrank grew. As everything therefore gains momentum and more goods are traveling, more wealth is accruing, Banking fortunes are getting larger. The number of travelers coming in and out of ports is increasing. Therefore the diseases are moving faster. The states are getting wealthier, they can collect more taxes, they're more centralized, so their armies are bigger and their wars are larger scale and more violent. Better metallurgy and better mining means bigger cannons, which means knocking down more city walls, which means more civilian casualties whenever you get a battle. And so over and over for a 200 year period, every generation has the experience of, oh, war and disease are so much worse now than when was young. And they all sound like curbudgeon saying, kids these days don't understand that it used to be so much better. And now the wars are terrible, but they're all actually correct about that. The wars are getting larger and larger with every decade, and the diseases are moving faster, the life expectancy plummets. The medieval average life expectancy in Europe is around 35. And in Renaissance Florence, when Leonardo is there working on his portraiture, the average life expectancy has dropped to 1818, as when you average it out. And people always say, yeah, but a lot of that is child mortality. The child mortality is also in the medieval number of 35. So the change, the drop, is very real. And most of that change is two kinds of deaths. It's kids who have lived through infancy, but who die between ages 5 and 12 because the diseases are coming more often and they're dying of pox and they're dying of malaria and all of the other diseases that circulate and resurge frequently when trade routes are moving, all of those beautiful pigment chemicals that you need for the beautiful art and moving all of the fine grain woods that you need to make the instruments for the beautiful Renaissance acapella music. All of those travelers are also bringing the pox over and over that will kill a kid between the ages of 5 and 12. The other big drop in life expectancy is men of warfare age as more and more of them are getting killed in the violent tumults that have happened. So even though we're aware that pre modern women had a lot of deaths in childbirth, when you look at the people who live to be oldest, they're all women. The top 10 percentile is almost exclusively widows and nuns who have outlived their husbands who dwell in a more violent world.
- [11:11]
Ellie Cautious
Interesting. So how do we marry these two things? This world that is marred by violence and war and disease, with this era of incredible cultural flowering, beautiful art, and new ways of thinking, can we draw connections between the two either culturally or maybe economically?
- [11:34]
Ada Palmer
Definitely. Because desperate times drive people to desperate measures. And what we're looking at when we see people build an unprecedented cathedral or experiment with a new, unprecedented artistic technique, is people who are desperate trying moonshots, right? Saying none of the traditional solutions we have to this situation can save us or will save us. So we're gonna try something more extreme. And it's hard to think of art or liter as something that people reach for when they're dying in warfare. But culture is another form of political capital. And if you're a wealthy Italian city state like Florence, which means you have a huge amount of wealth, and yet your population is tiny, there is no way you can raise an army that can defend you against the scale of armies that a great big kingdom like France or Spain can raise. You can't defend yourself militarily. You have to defend yourself with a different form of competition. So let's imagine for a moment that you're the ambassador from France on the way to Rome to deliver an oration to the pope. And on your way, you're having to stop off at the different cities and spend the night as you ride down from Milan. So you're stopping off in Florence. And you know that Florence is a pit of merchant scum. This is a merchant republic. They don't even have any nobility. And if you're an ambassador, you're at least the son of a count, right? So there's nobody in this city who is actually a worthy rank to speak to you. And you also know that this city has a reputation for being a pit of villainy, and that the verb to Florentine means anal sex in a dozen different European languages. Because Florence was the sodomy capital, or at least had this reputation. And in the laws of France, you can actually be indicted for sodomy on the grounds of ever having visited Florence. So you're on your way to this pit of scabbard villainy, right? But when you get there, what do you see? You see this incredible dome of engineering complexity that is like nothing you've ever seen. And you ride into the city and you see these enormous bronze statues that look so lifelike that it's as if they're about to draw breath and start moving. You've never seen anything like them, except, like, the broken off, severed hand of an ancient Roman statue. Because no one knows how to do statues like that that anymore. There's no one here of worthy rank to host you. But you're going to stay with your dad's banker, because at least you have his address, right? And you knock on his door and he meets your Excellency humbly at the door, and then you go in. And as soon as you're inside the courtyard, it's like nothing you've ever seen. There's this array of rounded open arches that lets enormous amounts of light stream into the space. Wait, wait, no. You have seen something like this once before. It's like the Roman ruins in the backyard of your father's castle. You used to play there when you grew up. But nobody knows how to build that anymore. Nobody has known how to build that for a thousand years. And off in the corner, there's guys in weird robes speaking a language that you've never heard before. And you're like, who are those guys? And he's like, oh, they're Platonists. They're speaking in ancient Greek. And you say, but ancient Greek is gone and Plato is gone. We don't have these things. And, oh, we have lots of ancient Greek. Here. Look, here's my grandson, Lorenzo. He's just written a poem in Ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul. Would you like to hear? There's a seven year old boy reciting a poem to you in Ancient Greek about what the soul is made of. And you're like, where am I? All of this is stuff that was lost a thousand years ago. And that is the moment that Cosimo de Medici turns to you and says, would you like to make an alliance with Florence? Would your king like to be our friend? And in that moment, in that pause, you could say, no. No, right? You could say, no, we're going to come here with the unstoppable Juggernaut of the French army, and we're going to take the city and we're going to sack it, and we're going to take all of the gold, we're going to burn all of this down, and all of this is going to be gone. Or you can say, yes, send me a bronze smith and an architect and a Platonist and a Greek teacher, and I'm going to bring them with me back to Paris, and we're going to redo the royal court like this. And then when the ambassador comes from Spain, he's going to feel like a country bumpkin, just like I feel right now. That's the survival mechanism, playing for the culture. Victory. I cannot win on war. I cannot beat you, but I can make you want to treasure what I have and be my friend instead of destroying what I have and being my foe. And one of the effects that that has is that a characteristic of Italy shared by basically nowhere else on Earth is that while, like most places in the world, it's been conquered several times, it's never been conquered by people who didn't respect Italian culture and hold it in awe. Every conqueror Italy has had has wanted Italy to stay. Italy wanted to possess and treasure and imitate the material there, which is why so much more cultural material survives. Because every phase of warfare and conquest has always been, let's treat this conquest with kid gloves. Because this is the Faberge egg that we want to place on the mantelpiece. That's the moonshot. That's the culture. Victory.
- [17:10]
Ellie Cautious
And the fact that the real kind of heart of the Renaissance is often cited as Italy isn't a coincidence. Is it? Something that you touched on a few times in that amazing little scene that you painted for us? There was this idea bringing back this classical splendor. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about that, about the revival of ancient ideas and ancient art.
- [17:33]
Ada Palmer
Right. Because if you're Italy, you know you were Rome. And when you look around in a world that feels apocalyptic, a world in which all of these city states are surrounded by enemies, they all hate their neighbors. They're all full of ambitious families that hate each other. All of these cities have rival factions that knife each other in the streets. Every Italian knows the sight of seeing the streets run with blood and no one will come help you. Your neighbor cities all hate you. You feel very alone and very fragile in the midst of this. And yet you have these stories of long ago. Italy was united under Rome, and Rome conquered the known world and created an era of Unmatched peace. And when we think about ancient Rome, we're often in it for the scandal dramas, right? And the orgies and the bad emperors. But they're thinking of the good emperors, they're thinking of the age of peace, of the Pax Romana, they're thinking of Augustus, they're thinking of Trajan, they're thinking of Hadrian, they're thinking of Marcus Aurelius, they're thinking of this legendary time when a young woman carrying a bag of gold could walk in peace and safety from the northern coast of France clear to Turkey on safe roads and not have to fear that there would be bandits. And when you're thinking of that, in the midst of having just lived through the Black Death, it feels like an impossible dream. Some people will know the name Petrarch. Francesco Petrarca, one of the figures often credited with inventing the Renaissance. One of the first people to talk about the Middle Ages is an age of ashes and shadow. He's talking about himself there. And after the Black Death, in which Petrarch lost friend after friend after friend, his letters are just heartbreaking. He had been about to go live in a cool academic commune with all of his scholar buddies, and then they all died, one by one by one. And at the end, having believed that all of his friends were dead, he learned the two of them lived. And he got these letters saying they were come to visit him. He was so excited. And on the way, they were attacked by bandits, and one of them was killed, and the other one was brutally wounded and injured for years and wasn't able to recover and see Petrarch until five years later. So when I say there were bandits on the roads, these are everyday lived experiences of terror that shatter this world. So they think of Rome and they say, well, what if we could be like Rome again? Can we figure out what the ancients did and imitate it? And half of that can be the propaganda. Can we get busts of all the emperors in order and hang portraits of our family next to them so that we can intimidate French ambassadors who are like, the Romans conquered us. I don't know if we want to fight these guys. But part of it, and a lot of the sort of idealist side of it, what they want more than the technology, right? They want the art, they want the linear perspective, they want to build the aqueducts. But what they most want is the libraries that educated the ancients. They want the books that raised Trajan and raised Hadrian and raised Augustus Caesar and raised Cicero and Seneca, who were willing to give their lives for the state. Because if you live in the plot of Romeo and Juliet where what you're used to is your ruling class or knifing each other in the street, and when Romeo commits murder, his dad goes immediately to the head of state and is like, you're never gonna punish my son for committing murder. Right? That would be absurd. There is no consideration that Romeo might face real penalties for having committed murder, when that's what you live with. And you read about the ancient Romans, like the early Roman Brutus, the one that the one who killed Caesar descended from, who was consul of Rome early on and learned that his sons were trying to take over the state and make him king, and he executed his own sons for that treason, right? You read about that when you're living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and you're like, that's what we need. How do we get. The idea is that you get it by reconstructing the library of the ancients to find the books that were the education of these people. Let's reconstruct the library of the ancients and then use it to educate our ruling classes so that the next generation of young Romeos and young Juliets will have been shaped by the philosophy of Seneca, who was so serious and noble, of Plato, who is so good at thinking about virtue and the soul. And that education will shape them into better and more competent rulers who will put the good of the people and the good of the state before themselves. And perhaps this new education of a ruling class will save us.
- [22:19]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [23:53]
Ellie Cautious
This idealistic vision of building better rulers touches on one of the chapters in your book, which I found really interesting, which is about how you've got your students to recreate or simulate the Papal Conclave of 1492. This sounds a bit out there, but it's really fascinating. Tell us more and what it taught you about the time.
- [24:20]
Ada Palmer
Yeah, so this is one of our best documented papal elections, one of the ones we know the most about. We know about every single person who's in the room. So I'm able to take my students. I'm just gearing up for this class now. Every single one of them gets a unique character sheet, and they play a different person. Some of them are the cardinals competing with each other to become pope. Some of them are the vote counters and the secretaries who run the election. Some of them are the crowned heads of your Europe manipulating this from outside. Henry vii, Emperor Maximilian, Queen Isabella of Castile. And the students are not told what they have to do. They are told what their character wants. And they're given resources and they negotiate. This is not a reenactment with a set ending. It is a simulation where they are let loose to make their own decisions, form their own factions, elect their own pope. And then the pope makes policy decisions, and then there is a war, because inevitably, somebody is not happy with these power decisions. So one of the things that's really neat about it is that it lets you see how all of this both succeeds and fails at the same time. And the generation of 1492, this is not the first generation that was trying to assemble the libraries. It's not the second generation that were barely supporting and having the beginnings of the libraries and starting to read ancient Greek again. This is the third generation of this project. These are the young princes and princesses who grew up, up with Cicero and Seneca and Greek and all the Plato back in translation. This is the generation that they have been working toward for 70 years of can we produce a ruling class that has the education of the Romans? And just as in history. So in my classroom, the students get together and they form their factions and they advance their personal goals, and they elect a terrible pope who does terrible things and is a terrible tyrant. Right. Because this is not a golden age. This is the moment of Cesare Borgia, who had the same education that this is, and yet rampages through Italy recreationally, murdering.
- [26:32]
Ellie Cautious
And you've done this several times. It's always a terrible pope that emerges. Is it?
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Ada Palmer
Yeah. Sometimes they come within a hair's breadth of electing a good pope. It's so close. We're always rooting for them. But the bad popes will bribe the vote count. Bad popes will sabotage something. Bad popes will lie and promise the good guys what they want. And, you know, we root for the good popes every time, but they elect terrible popes. And the reason I do 1492 and the reason we do this whole simulation is to then read Machiavelli's prints together, because these are the events he talks about, these are the people he talks about. And one problem with our efforts to understand Machiavelli, we all recognize how important his innovative political thought is. But when you actually sit down to read it, he doesn't explain his contemporary examples because he assumes you're his contemporary and that you lived through it. And then he can just say the Duke of Valentinois, and you know who he means. And so he has chapters that say things like, some princes don't have to work hard to maintain their power, like the Duke of Ferrara, period, end of chapter. And you're like, I don't know anything about the Duke of Ferrara, so that meant nothing to me. And then you just don't remember and you don't understand. But once the students have done it and lived through it and knew the Duke of Ferrara and saw him sit on his butt and keep his power easily while they were working their butts off to try to keep their power and save their cities from ruin and conquest by terrible tyrants, and he was just sitting contentedly in Ferrara, being protected by ancient treaties and the stupid Venetians. Then when they read Maquila, they understand every line because they understand who all these people are and why he did the things that he does. And the thing I have observed in iteration after iteration of that simulation, and which I find very hopeful, especially now in our global authoritarian surge, which I think history can help us understand, how crises work and how resistance Works right, Because the terrible popes manage to get power. And even if they don't, even if an okay pope gets power, the terrible people still have their strength and they have their allies, and they have their motivations, and they still start something terrible. 1492 was a really difficult moment politically, when everybody has a reason to want to have a war. The peace faction is vastly outnumbered. Everyone benefits, especially the powers outside of Italy, because Italy is full of tiny, lonely city states with big bags of gold in their basement, tiny armies and no friends. If you're a king and you want to sack something, do you want to fight anything else, or do you want to go for Italy? Italy is the correct answer to this. This is where you want to send your nobles to fight their wars. Even Shakespeare has this happen repeatedly. There's a great scene in the beginning of All's well that ends well, where the ambassador from Florence is in France petition the king to send help to Florence in its wars. And the king says, we shall not help Florence in his wars. But it is good for our young nobles to get some exercise so they may go and fight on whichever side they feel like fighting on. Fighting in an Italian war will be good for them. So you can't stop there being a war. The real people in real 1492 didn't stop there being a war. My students have never stopped there being a war. But the ones who work hard, the ones who have a city to defend, a family to rescue, a region to stand faithful to, who reach out and find friends and talk to other good actors and find trustworthy allies. When they work hard, they protect the small things they're working hard to protect. And I've seen time after time, it'll be different. Which city burns right? There will be a war, a city will burn. But some years it's General. In some years it's Milan, and some years it's Florence. But the people who work hard and say, I'm going to work really hard to protect Florence this year, they do. And there's a metaphor that I found myself coming to that Machiavelli himself also used, that sometimes there are tensions built up in history, that bad stuff is about to break forth like water behind a dam, when the dam is going to break. And sometimes we're in a moment where the dam is going to break and terrible things are going to be unleashed from it. But that doesn't mean we're powerless to do anything, because we can dig the channels that direct that floodwater and make it destroy less, not more or make it at least have mercy on the things we hold most dear. That's what it feels like every time I see a few of my students manage to save through hard work what they're trying to save. It's what it felt like to Machiavelli. This is the closing chapter of the Prince that he uses the metaphor of digging the channels to direct the floodwaters away. That's what it felt like in 1492. That is, in fact, what's going on right now. And even as many terrible things are being unleashed by surges in authoritarianism around the globe and other crises, when we work hard and dig our channels, we can direct those floodwaters, we can mitigate that damage, and we can carve out space to protect precious things. And I think that's one of the most valuable forms of hope we can take from history, is to remember that victory. Blowing up the bad guy's palace and having a cathartic happy ending to your action movie is all well and good, but rarely happens. And in real history, victory often takes the form of, we directed the floodwaters around and it could have been really bad, and instead it was merely medium bad and we saved half of it. But with half of it, you build the hole back again.
- [32:25]
Ellie Cautious
Something else you do in the book is introduce readers to several key figures from the Renaissance. Who do you think are some of the Renaissance figures? Maybe some of the big hitters that people might think they know, but in your mind, have been misunderstood.
- [32:42]
Ada Palmer
So Machiavelli is one of my favorites because we get Machiavelli the villain, right? Machiavelli the scheming, ambitious political advisor. The Machiavelli sinister villain figure that used to actually be big in Shakespeare, right? When he has Richard III give a speech saying, and I'll send the murderous Machiavel to school, right? That is the Machiavelli of our imagination. And. And when you read his personal letters and you learn about his life, Machiavelli was a deep patriot, and he dedicated his life to working for the safety and government of Florence. He served in her bureaucracy, he fought in her armies, he served as her ambassador. He took on terrifying roles. He was Florence's ambassador to Cesare Borgia during the worst of things. There's this amazing letter from his wife when there was a big massacre at Sinigalia in which Cesare Borgia massacred two thirds of his staff because some of them had been plotting against him. And so he invited them to a banquet, locked the doors, and then just murdered everyone. And the letter is from Machiavelli's wife. And it's four months later and it's saying, oh, I finally got a letter sent saying, you're alive. I'm so relieved. We heard that he'd killed most of his people and we didn't know. We didn't know that. He took on this most dangerous of missions, where his job was to forever persuade Cesare Borgia that Florence should not be his next conquest, that Florence could wait, that Florence wasn't resisting, that he should hit the other cities first and buy Florence a few more months of free freedom. And later in his life, Machiavelli was pushed out of power when the phase of the republic he worked for was overthrown by the return of the exiled Medici family. And Machiavelli was tortured and banished to a small farm hamlet in the countryside. Usually, when a political leader and a great figure like that is banished, there'll be a specified place that he's supposed to go. And if he stays there and is on his good behavior and is very faithful to the city, he can earn a return. Or he can say, eh, I have job offers from great minds all over the place. I'm just going to go work for someone else, right? And Machiavelli could easily have gotten a job at the court of the King of France, in Rome for any number of cardinals or for the pope in lots of different cities. But he sat on his butt rotting in the countryside instead, because Machiavelli only works for Florence and he would not put his skills and services to aid any other power. And so instead, he sat and he wrote the prince as a manual for how to sustain power and stability in Florence and sent it to the very government that had tortured and exiled him, refusing to publish it broadly and share it with anyone else, because his secrets on how to succeed in politics were not, not for the world. They were for the protection of his homeland. They were for digging that channel to direct the floodwaters away. And he would rather help the men who tortured him than work for any other power. That is a patriot. And we hear that Machiavelli's takeaway line is the end justifies the means, forgetting that the end is the survival of your people from conquest and annihilation. And when he says the end justifies the means, say, murdering a political rival, what he means is, if the city is going to fall to conquest and massacre, otherwise, do it. And when we take him out of context and say the end justifies the means, without remembering that the end. How does he put it? In the Discourses, in order to exercise any of the excellences, virtues and artistic achievements, a people must first be alive. That's Machiavelli and the Discourses.
- [36:41]
Ellie Cautious
And alongside Machiavelli, are there any other figures from the period that you think need re examining?
- [36:49]
Ada Palmer
Michelangelo, who hated painting and never wanted to paint the stupid Sistine Chapel, he loathed painting. That was a punishment because he ran away from the stalker pope. And the stalker pope was like, I ain't gonna punish this man. I know he just wants to sculpt, so I'm gonna make him paint for two years. He always hated painting. Michelangelo. If he had a bumper sticker, it would be, I'd rather be sculpting. Right? This man spoke the language of rocks. And people describe seeing him working. Normally when you're working with a stone statue, you make very careful measurements and you knock off tiny little bits because you're working from your model. Michelangelo just sits there with a chisel, hacking off like 6 inch chunks at night in the dark, with a candle tied to a headband so that he could see. People were like, how can you do this? It's like you're fluid to stone or what are you? Like a stone golem come to life. He just loved sculpture, but you also have to master sketching and drawing when you're planning out art and architecture. He was a skilled artist. He was also very competitive. He never liked anyone to say that anyone else could be better at something than him. So whenever anyone was praising painters, he'd be like, why painting? Here's a painting. Now I'm going to go back to sculpting. But Pope Julius II was obsessed with Michelangelo and wanted Michelangelo to build him this incredibly giant tomb, which would have been like the largest tomb ever made with something like 30 life size monumental statues of prisoners chained to the base of it with the triumphant warrior pope on top. And Michelangelo kept getting more and more frustrated with. Julius had just wanted to go home to Florence and sculpt, man. He'd come to Rome hoping to gain fame as a young man in his very early 20s, and he'd done some good work there, the famous Pieta. But Michelangelo, by the way, who has a lot of chutzpah, like the contract for the Pieta, which was his first big commission, he put in the contract that it would be the best sculpture anyone had ever seen in Rome and that if it wasn't, the guy could have his money back. And that is an amazing thing to do when you're Rome. That's 21, right? Like, yes. And the guy did not ask for his money back. It's a great statue. But Michelangelo was commissioned to do this impossible tomb. And then things went wrong. The marble wasn't there. The Pope kept being a jerk. He got more and more frustrated. He hated Rome. He just wanted to go to Florence. He just loved, oh, the dome. He loved Florence's enormous dome. He insisted as an old man, when he couldn't get out of Rome and realized he was was going to die there, he asked for them to send his body home so it could be buried in Florence, so that at the end times, when he rose from his grave, he would at least get to see the great dome one more time before the earth ended. At the end of things, anyway. But he tried to run away from Rome to just get home. And the Pope sent guards to chase him down and seize him by force and drag him out of the inn. And there was a confrontation between them and the Florentine militia people. They ended up protecting him. He went to Florence. The Pope was like, I'm going to besiege Florence. I'm going to send my armies there right now. Send me Michelangelo. We have these letters where Michelangelo's like, I'll build really good defensive fortresses, guys. Please don't make me enter Rome. And the chief of the Senate is like, I'm sorry, Michelangelo. We're not going to fight a war for one man. Go and apologize to the Pope. And he goes and apologizes Pope. And the Pope makes him payton the Sistine Chapel seal because he knows he'll hate, hate that. So it's a very stalker relationship. Michelangelo, who lived a very long and miserable life and the one moment in it that will make everyone feel better. I thought about this a lot all through Covid. There was one pope after Julius, Pope Adrian. In the book, I referred to him as Pope Adrian, the no fun. This was a German pope. And he was into piety and getting rid of corruption and serious theological questions and church reform. And everyone wrote, hated this guy. And he fired all the other artists and the architects and the poets and was like, I'm not going to continue having parades with the papal elephant collection. Popes shouldn't collect elephants. Popes should pay attention to the soul. And everyone's robe was like, what's with that? We like the elephants, man. What is wrong with this pope? And in the middle of this terrible pope who fired him, you know, Michelangelo was fired day one. No commissions for him. He was also being sued about the stupid Julius tomb, which still Wasn't done, but he'd signed the contracts. Julius's heirs are suing him. And. And he wrote that he was so stressed out, he couldn't touch a chisel for a year and a half. He just made no art because he was so stressed he couldn't do it. And if you ever feel like I'm stressed out and I can't do anything, I'm a loser. So is Michelangelo, and I don't think he's a loser. So if you ever feel overwhelmed by stress, or if your Covid years did not produce the COVID book or Covid masterpiece or Covid whatever, that's perfectly normal, and it's okay. You can still be Michelangelo, even if you had a year and a half where you were too stressed out to do anything.
- [41:38]
Ellie Cautious
A good lesson for us all, I think, there. And finally, Ada, if we're taking all this complexity that you brought to the conversation today into account, how should we think about or understand the Renaissance today?
- [41:51]
Ada Palmer
I think we should think about it as an era that shows that when we try very hard to change our world for the better, better, when we try the moonshots, when we have confidence that, hey, these new technologies we have and these new arts we have can probably save the world, let's really try. And a lot of bad things are happening around us, but let's build what we can and protect what we can. The net result of that isn't the world we want. The Renaissance did indeed end up making a world with politicians that acted like Seneca. It ended up making the world with Cesare Borgia, but it also ended up making the libraries that educated the scientists, that revolutionized medicine. This produces Galileo, right? And Bacon and Descartes of the scientific method and the germ theory of disease and gets us to the beginnings of the Enlightenment, it gets us to, you know, actually educating aristocrats didn't work. Maybe what we want to do is educate everyone and have democracy. It doesn't make the world Renaissance people imagined, but it does make a world that is weird, but better than they were aiming for. And when I returned to Petrarch and his letters about how if we do this and we make these libraries, then at least. Least we will have leaders who will have less war. That's what he hopes for, because his world is full of horsemen of the Apocalypse, right? There is famine and there is plague and there is war, there is death. And he's like, well, one of these we could do something about. So even though we're powerless in the face of the other ones, he thinks they can do something about war. There's an amazing set of of notes. Petrarch's letters during the Black Death are incredible because the first time a friend dies, so, all right, my friend is dead, but this is the will of God. I know that my friend isn't in a better place now. I'm praying for him. I feel comforted by this. When it's the third friend, Petrarch says, this was really hard. I'm having trouble seeing the plan. When it's the 10th friend, he can't even do it anymore. He can't see this as a plan of any kind of kindness. All he writes about it is to say, I don't understand what our generation did that was so much worse than every other generation that we were punished with this. And years later, when he's doing a book, his De Remedies, this is a book of advice on how to live a calm life, how to stay calm when you're angry, how to stay calm when you're super confident, excited, how to stay calm when you're scared and you know, is your country having a civil uprising? Here's how to console yourself. You know, Troy fell, and yet Troy is glorious and remembered forever. Would any Trojan exchange, being a Trojan for any other thing? No. He also has consolation for good things because he doesn't want you to feel too proud or too happy. One of my favorites is are you proud that you have the a book published? Well, people are going to criticize it far away from you, and you're not going to be there to defend yourself, so it's going to be terrible. You shouldn't be proud of publishing a book. I just love that one. He's so right. But when he gets to the plague and he says, you know, here's how to not be afraid of war. Here's how to not be afraid of old age. Here's how to not be afraid of sickness. When he gets to the plague, and he says, are you afraid of the plague? You should be, because it is that bad. That's all he has has. And he says, and that grief and fear you feel is kindness because it's pity for the human condition. And he says, if I can offer any consolation, it is, you don't need to fear more dying in good company with many friends dying with you than you would to die alone. That's all he has to comfort us for the plague and this project of, well, at least we can do something about warfare. Let's build the libraries, and the libraries don't do anything about warfare, the warfare gets worse. But the libraries lead to the germ theory of disease, which leads to vaccination, which leads to defeating the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He never thought we could battle, and we did well on famine, too. When we try hard, when we moonshot, when we hope, when we work to preserve the things around us, we don't get the world we are imagining. We get a future that is both weirder and better than the one we're imagining. And that's the message the Renaissance should have for us.
- [46:46]
Ellie Cautious
That was Ada Palmer speaking to me. Ellie Cautious Ada's book, which goes into the complexities of this era in much more detail, is Inventing the Renaissance, the Myth of a Golden Age. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.