Fig Leaves & A Grumpy Jesus: Renaissance to Baroque Art

Summary

Not Just the Tudors — Fig Leaves & A Grumpy Jesus: Renaissance to Baroque Art

Podcast: Not Just the Tudors (History Hit)
Host: Professor Suzannah Lipscomb
Guest: Verity Bab (art historian & comedian)
Date: October 2, 2025

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Overview

This episode explores art history's transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, focusing on the quirks, scandals, and humour often hidden within famous masterpieces. Joining Suzannah Lipscomb is Verity Bab, art historian and comedian, whose new book "The History of Art in One Sentence" brings irreverence and accessibility to centuries of art — from Donatello and Michelangelo to Caravaggio and Vermeer. Together they dissect the myths, memorable characters, and surprising stories behind the paintings — all with a healthy dose of laughter.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Verity Bab’s Approach to Art History

[03:06–05:20]

• Verity brings comedy and accessibility to art’s “stuffy” reputation, using "one sentence answer" videos and live comedy events at the National Gallery.
• Her entry point to art history: “I knew that in this day and age I had to be putting something online. And a sentence was just about how much I could be bothered to do. So the book is actually really born out of that fundamental laziness.” (Verity Bab, 03:12)
• Suzannah notes the effort in condensing complexity: "To make things short is actually much more difficult often than making them long." (04:05)
• Verity’s comedic approach is rooted in highlighting the human failings, feuds, and funny stories behind historical figures.

2. Why Personality and Story Matter in Art History

[05:20–07:51]

• People make history relatable; stories of artists behaving badly are far more engaging than dry lists of dates.
• Verity: “I found history quite difficult… but as soon as I was able to pinpoint, oh, but this person is doing this interesting thing. Or aren't these couple appalling? Then suddenly there was something to make it a bit more human and real.” (05:45)

3. Renaissance in Italy: What, Where, Why?

[09:10–11:54]

• Definition: “The name comes about from the Italian for rebirth... this real time of... restructuring and a fresh start after the Middle Ages.” (Verity Bab, 09:35)
• Harking back to Antiquity: Artists and patrons looked to Greco-Roman art for purity, beauty, and intellectual ideals.
• Ever-changing nostalgia: “Every 10 years someone has written an article saying everything has gone to pot. What's happened to proper manners? No one wants to work anymore… Every generation has said, the kids these days are awful. But that's always been the case.” (Verity, 11:29)

4. Patronage, Power, and the Church

[11:54–13:41]

• Wealthy families like the Medici shifted art from exclusive church commissions to displays of family power and legacy.
• Guilds offered early training and created a ‘family tree’ of artists.
• “It’s without these families commissioning them that art history, as we know, would not exist, other than the sort of really purely religious things made within the church.” (12:15)

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Memorable & Quirky Details

5. Why Do Renaissance Paintings Look So Airbrushed?

[13:41–14:43]

• Sfumato technique: Allowed painters to delicately blend oils, creating flawless skin.
• “Everyone’s wearing primer, everyone’s got a matting mousse on. Everyone looks gorgeous.” (13:48, Verity)

6. What’s Up with Baby Jesus Looking Like a Tiny Old Man?

[14:43–15:29]

• Theological reason: The "homunculus Christ concept" — Jesus was painted with the proportions of a grown man to emphasize divinity.
• Suzannah: “At the risk of sounding blasphemous, he does remind me of Benjamin Button quite a lot in these pictures.” (15:24)

7. Why Is the Virgin Mary Always in Blue?

[15:40–16:39]

• Blue pigment from lapis lazuli was rare and more precious than gold: “It only came from one mine in Afghanistan… The Church control[led] the use of lapis lazuli to make sure that it’s basically only ever used for really significant figures in the Bible, like Mary.” (15:44, Verity)

8. The Mystery of Michelangelo’s “Bosoms”

[16:44–19:19]

• Michelangelo’s female nudes often look anatomically male with “tennis balls strapped on.”
• Theories: Michelangelo’s artistic preference for male bodies; the Renaissance’s idea that male form was the highest beauty; or newly suggested interpretation of breast cancer in sculpture "Night."
• Leonardo da Vinci’s jab: “He always makes his male figures look like a bag of walnuts.” (18:27, Verity)

9. The Rock-Star Life of Raphael

[19:19–20:49]

• Raphael was “fit and sleeps around a lot because you would.” Infamously, he allegedly died from too much sex.
• “The only way to get Raphael to concentrate for long enough is to get him to get his girlfriend to be a couple of doors down to save on the time [from work].” (19:29, Verity)

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Art Beyond Italy: Expansion and Humor

10. Northern Renaissance — More Down to Earth, More Scatological

[21:04–23:10]

• Ideas spread via artists’ travel and printing. Northern works became cheekier, focusing on ordinary people and bodily functions.
• Brueghel’s "Netherlandish Proverbs": “It’s like a Where’s Wally? But everyone in the painting is pooing out of a hole or weeing against something or having it off with each other.” (22:26, Verity)

11. Bosch’s Bizarre Imagery

[25:41–27:32]

• Bosch’s visions were filled with psychedelic, surreal imagery: “If Hieronymus Bosch had been born in the 1890s, he would have ended up being a surrealist.” (26:01, Verity)
• Both Bosch and Brueghel offer a rare glimpse at 16th-century humor, often missing from written sources: “Jokes don’t get written down… we don’t see this evidence of people having a laugh.” (27:32, Verity)

12. The Mysterious and The Realistic

[28:38–32:05]

• Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait: “We’re not really sure who it’s of. We’re not really sure why it was made.” (28:58, Verity)
• Dürer and Holbein: High realism, but sometimes fanciful (e.g., Dürer’s rhinoceros—drawn without having seen one).

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From the Renaissance to Mannerism and Baroque

13. Shifts in Style and Attitude

[32:05–34:28]

• Mannerism amped up drama and emotion, breaking “perfect harmony” of the Renaissance.
• Michelangelo’s shift: compared via Sistine Chapel ceiling vs. his “Last Judgment.” Strong personalities entered their critics into history with biting satirical detail (“papal minister… naked, with donkey ears, being bitten on the penis by a snake”—Michelangelo’s revenge, 34:26).

14. Censorship: The Fig Leaf Campaign

[35:07–36:27]

• Driven by the Council of Trent, an effort to “make everything more modest” by covering nudes with fig leaves and strategically placed objects.
• “Sort of the first move of cancel culture. Real censorship happening.” (35:07, Verity)

15. Enigmatic and Playful — Bronzino and Arcimboldo

[38:04–40:28]

• Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid: Allegedly includes a personification of syphilis as a sly dig at the French king.
• Arcimboldo: Painted faces made of fruits and books; an outlier, but evidence that “everyone has always had a sense of humor.”

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The Dutch Golden Age and Baroque Art

16. Merchant Class and Female Artists

[40:28–42:08]

• Dutch Golden Age: A rising middle class fuels more art, with women becoming significant artists (some outselling Rembrandt at the time).
• Ordinary life depicted: “You have a lot of paintings that have children in or have women in domestic scenes… in their homes.”

17. Vanitas Paintings – Art as Memento Mori

[42:08–44:54]

• Still lifes rich in hidden symbolism and reminders of mortality: “Basically these paintings were designed for the Dutch middle classes to have in their homes as a reminder that death comes to us all. That money cannot shield you from demise. In the end, one must remain humble.” (42:08, Verity)

18. Baroque Drama, Technique, and Caravaggio

[44:54–46:31]

• Baroque style: More emotion, “relatable human darkness,” and chiaroscuro (dramatic light-shadow contrasts).
• Caravaggio: The “ultimate bad boy,” a violent murderer but “a lovable scamp” five centuries later.
• “He straight up killed someone in a duel and he killed him in a way which highly suggests that he was aiming to castrate him while he did so.” (46:31, Verity)

19. Method Acting in Marble — Bernini’s Self-Portrait

[48:11–49:09]

• Bernini, for realism, “spent the entire time while he was carving [a damned soul] continuously burning his hand on a candle to really get across that ow, I’m in hell look.” (48:15, Verity)

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Playfulness, Hidden Messages, and Humanity in Art

20. Playfulness and Hidden Meanings

[49:09–51:07]

• The idea of “hidden” elements—whether proverbs, sly jokes, or moral jabs—runs throughout art’s history.
• Humor, naughtiness, and sex are ever-present, even when official artifacts are “solid and reliable and quite pure of the messiness of human nature.”

21. The Importance of Humour

[51:07–51:41]

• Verity’s book and perspective offer a way into art for those put off by jargon and solemnity: “What I personally needed in order to. To feel like I liked art and knew about art was were these stories of men behaving badly.”
• Professor Lipscomb: “You have given a gift to the world in your book, which is tremendous amounts of fun. The history of art, in one sentence. I loved it.” (51:07)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Everyone wanted to look fit.” (Verity Bab, 13:48)
• “Baby Jesus… slightly spooky thing going on… excellent control of his neck for a newborn.” (14:48, Verity)
• “If Hieronymus Bosch had been born in the 1890s, he would have ended up being a surrealist.” (26:01, Verity)
• “People have always found bums funny. Sexy. Yes.” (28:38, Verity)
• “He always makes his male figures look like a bag of walnuts.” (18:27, Leonardo da Vinci via Verity)
• “Everyone has always loved shagging, everyone has laughed at Pooh. Not everyone has murdered in cold blood, but some of them did.” (49:45, Verity)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Verity’s intro & method — [03:06–05:20]
• Renaissance “rebirth” explained — [09:10–11:54]
• Sfumato & perfect Renaissance skin — [13:41–14:43]
• Homunculus Christ — [14:43–15:29]
• Mary in Blue — [15:40–16:39]
• Michelangelo’s anatomy — [16:44–19:19]
• Raphael’s reputation — [19:19–20:49]
• Brueghel & bodily humor — [22:10–23:10]
• Bosch’s surrealism — [25:41–27:32]
• Arnolfini Portrait mystery — [28:38–30:06]
• Dürer’s rhinoceros & realism — [30:30–32:05]
• Mannerism & Baroque emerge — [32:05–34:28]
• Fig Leaf campaign — [35:07–36:27]
• Bronzino & syphilis as a diss — [38:04–39:09]
• Arcimboldo’s faces — [39:11–40:28]
• Dutch Golden Age, female artists — [40:28–44:54]
• Vanitas meaning — [42:08–44:54]
• Baroque drama & Caravaggio’s misdeeds — [44:54–46:31]
• Bernini’s self-punishing sculpture — [48:11–49:09]
• Humour & humanity in art — [49:09–51:07]

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In Summary

This episode is a sparkling journey through Renaissance and Baroque art with Professor Suzannah Lipscomb and comedian-historian Verity Bab. They root out the scandal, comedy, and quirks underpinning centuries of beautiful paintings. Listeners will come away with a new appreciation for the humor, complexity, and humanity pulsing beneath art’s polished surfaces — and for the irreverent experts who help make sense (and fun) of it all.

Transcript

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tutors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Have you ever wandered around an art museum or an ancient church and thought to yourself, why is the Virgin Mary always painted wearing BL egg tempura? Was that actually made of eggs? And do those paintings smell a little sulfurite? And why is the baby Jesus proportioned like a tiny, creepy old man? Well, those are just a few of the questions addressed by my guest today who is on a mission to challenge what she sees as the stuffiness of art history. Verity Babs is herself a decidedly unstuffy art historian and a comedian whose work focuses on making the art world more accessible and bringing irreverence and laughter into cultural spaces. She's the founder of Art Laughs, Live Art Themed comedy events, and her art historical One Sentence Answer videos have been seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers on social media, They've now been collected into Verity's new book, the History of Art in One Sentence. And while Verity ranges across the entire history of Western art, from Donatello to Damien Hirst, we're going to root ourselves very firmly today in in not just the Tudor's territory and get to grips with the Renaissance to the Baroque, hopefully in more than one sentence, because otherwise it's going to be a very short podcast indeed. Verity, welcome to Not Just the Tudors.

[Verity Bab]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So how did you decide on this approach to talking about art history?

[Verity Bab]

I think when I'm asked this question, I can choose to go down the sort of real answer, the true route, or the one that makes it sound slightly more heroic. So I was interviewed by someone once when I hadn't got the book out, but it was doing these one sentence answer videos online, and I was being interviewed by someone who very kindly, very charitably said, this is a really innovative and accessible way to talk about art in really small chunks. How did you come up with it? And they wanted me to say something about accessibility and about reaching bigger audiences, but really it was because I knew that in this day and age I had to be putting something online. And a sentence was just about how much I could be bothered to do. So I'd record these as I walked to the shops or whatever it might be. So the book is actually really born out of that fundamental laziness.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I don't believe that really, though, because actually, to make things short is actually much more difficult often than making them long. You know that famous line about I didn't have time to write a short letter. So to boil the Renaissance down into a sentence is not just something you do on your way to the shops, it's actually something that takes some thought. Well, for most of us, anyway.

[Verity Bab]

Yeah. I mean, there were definitely times where I regretted the format because every sentence really had to pack a punch or had to get everything across really quickly.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Or have a semicolon.

[Verity Bab]

There are a lot of semicolons in this book. I've gone with the rule that if I can join it together with semicolons and hyphens and commas, then it counts as a sentence. Even though some of these are, some of them might be four sentences if people are looking to catch me out. There are a lot of long sentences in this. But, yeah, it definitely meant that we had to try to get to the point quickly, find the core interesting thing. So, by nature, the book doesn't touch on everyone in art history, it doesn't touch on lots of important facts and that kind of thing. I say in the beginning of the book that it's really just a reflection of the things I found and said. Ooh, when I read them, or things that were funny, or artists who come up in University Challenge. That was what we were going for, is hopefully it'll make me better on a pub quiz is what we were going for.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And that means drawing on a lot of you know human stories about the artists and their subjects. It's kind of interesting. Cause there's always this big discussion at the moment again about. About whether you need to like the artist. You know, do you have to approve of Picasso to like what he painted? But you're very much rooting it in the people. Is that. I mean, I guess that makes it more relatable, doesn't it?

[Verity Bab]

Yeah, I think that's always been the way that I have found art and history interesting is really tying it onto the people. And a lot of the time the people behaving badly. Who are the people who are actually most interesting. Oftentimes they're the most famous artists. There are a lot of sort of art historical bad boys that we all know and we know and love them because of their appalling behavior. So that's always been my way into art and history. I remember at school finding history quite difficult to grasp when we were doing the various battles of the First World War, or various bits of legal changes or even religious scuffles in the Tudor period and that kind of thing. But as soon as I was able to pinpoint, oh, but this person is doing this interesting thing. Or aren't these couple appalling? Then suddenly there was something to make it a bit more human and real. Whereas I think when we go a bit further back in time, everything can feel a bit so other. Unless we have a real sense of who these people were and what they were like to their wives and the beef they had with each other. And these sorts of things can really help us to. For it to feel real enough to care.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And so does that mean if you can't find an interesting story about an artist or an artwork, then it's.

[Verity Bab]

It shouldn't be, but it probably is for me. I think the good thing though is that it's very hard to find an artist or a historical figure where there isn't at least something funny or shocking or amusing that they've done in their life or a brilliant sort of pithy thing they've said, or these hearsay tales of them. There's almost always something funny to be said about them. With the comedy nights that I do, we'll often be. And these mostly run out of the National Gallery at the moment that we'll be stationed in a room. And then I'll pick a painting to speak about, the comedians will pick a painting to speak about. And then I'll go and do the research to see what sort of funny things we can tie these comedy sets onto. And there's always something. There's always something that even if it's not obviously funny or amusing or interesting, it can be twisted and turned. And, yeah, there's always something good.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And we're gonna be spending our time in the 16th and 17th centuries, because that's where I hang out. But perhaps you could start us off by telling us one particular story from those comedy nights in your performance. Never fails to get a laugh.

[Verity Bab]

Yeah, it's tricky thinking of. I really enjoyed the last one we did when we were stationed in an Italian 17th century room in the National Gallery. And I spent a lot of time looking at Tintoretto and I really enjoyed, enjoyed that because actually, as a freelancer, I dot about history all the time doing different things. So it was really nice. It's always nice to get to spend some time with an artist that you've not spent time with before. And my favourite thing I learned about Tintoretto was that he's called Tintoretto because his father was a dyer. So he is the little dyer, which is also a reference to the fact that basically he was a short king as well. So it's a backhanded compliment anyway. But I love the fact that because his paintings were so full of vivacity and energy, he was also nicknamed Il Furioso, which is such a better nickname. And it's like so much better.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

You'd definitely go with that, wouldn't you?

[Verity Bab]

If you imagine that Tintoretto is somehow brought to life now he's, wow, I wonder what my legacy is. I'm going to go to this library and find books about Il Furioso. It's going to be amazing. And then he just finds that he's still Tintoretto. That must be absolutely appalling. Galling.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Absolutely galling. Okay, so Italy is a good place to start because we're going to talk about the Italian Renaissance. I never know whether to say Renaissance or Renaissance actually, but it's a term we've often mentioned here on not just the Tudors. It's a period we've covered often. So we're talking about Italy and the Renaissance. Renaissance. When are we talking about where exactly is it happening? And why this name?

[Verity Bab]

So the name comes about from the Italian for rebirth. It's this. And the name is given after the Renaissance is already underway. So people during the Renaissance wouldn't be like, ah, we're living during the Renaissance. But it comes from the term for rebirth because it's seen as this real time of not just in art, but also economically and politically. A time of real restructuring and a fresh start after the Middle Ages. So it's viewed as this new prosperous time that we now think of as quite a specifically bookended period, but actually at the time was very amorphous. But looking back, it feels like a real clean cut from the Middle Ages.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And why were people so interested in harking back before the Middle Ages to antiquity?

[Verity Bab]

I suppose that this comes up time and time again in art history, when even later on in closer to our time, when people have taken a look back at the past. So neoclassicalists looking at the ancient art, but also then looking at the Renaissance. And sometimes we have these movements that throw back to a time before, even when they're throwing back to not that long before their own time. There's this sense, and I think we have it today, is that there's always a sense that before was better, there was something morally purer, there was something more intellectually stimulating, people had better values. So I think that this harking back to the ancient past was part of that search for purity and for proper beauty and for real artistry before everything got quite medieval and flat.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

One of my favourite lines of all time is Cicero saying, times are bad, children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book. So, like, the idea that forever people have been complaining and saying that there was a golden age that's lost is quite interesting.

[Verity Bab]

I think someone did a good compilation of newspaper cuttings going back sort of 10 years every time, and going back to the mid 19th century, and every 10 years someone has written an article saying everything has gone to pot. What's happened to proper manners? No one wants to work anymore. There are no jobs, no one wants to put in hard work, no one has any goals anymore. That every single generation has said, the kids these days are awful. But that's always been the case.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So two slightly serious topics that we need to get our heads around, I think probably if we go on, are patronage and the kind of role of families like the Medici in making art movements happen, if that's the right way of thinking of it. And the importance of guilds you talk about early on as well. So tell me, tell me about both these things. How critical are they to the history of art?

[Verity Bab]

Artists wouldn't make art unless someone is facilitating that. And in a time when a lot of the money is in the church and lots of things are being commissioned by the church, it's the Renaissance that sees the beginning of this step away from two powerful families actually beginning to commission these works and A lot of time, the work commissioned is still for a church, but families like the Medici bankroll these sort of countless projects that we now think of as the most iconic buildings in Rome, the most iconic buildings and artworks in Florence. And what a family. They popped out four popes in a hundred years, which is very good innings. But fundamentally powerful families begin to have a real stake in how do they show this power, how do they show their riches? And this is a brilliant way to do it. So they enable artists to make art. They either give them accommodation, they pay for the privilege of having commissioned these works. And guilds are where the artists will have been being trained and oftentimes from a really young age. And they're actually a lovely system because it's really nice to hear about the fact that Tintoretto was being trained under Titian, and that ends up being a bit of a family tree of who taught who and these kinds of things. But it's without these families commissioning them that art history, as we know, would not exist, other than the sort of really purely religious things that are being made within the church.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Okay, now let's turn to some of the important questions you ask in your book. Firstly, why has everyone in the Renaissance got such great skin?

[Verity Bab]

One of the reasons why everyone's got such great skin in all of these paintings is a technique called sfumato, which is developed in the Renaissance, where basically you blend your oil paints very slowly, very delicately. So everyone has got this really beautiful, beautiful airbrushed thing going on. Everyone's wearing primer, everyone's got a matting mousse on. Everyone looks gorgeous. And that will be part of it. Another part of it is that lots of paintings in history, which I found really difficult to get my head around as a child, is a lot of old paintings look so pristine. And part of that is these layers of varnishing and techniques like sfumato that make everyone look so perfect. I always found it really hard to get my head around the idea that These objects are 500, 600 years old. But no. So sfumata let everyone put their best face forward, basically. And no one was commissioning ugly portraits of themselves. Everyone wanted to look fit.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

They may not have been commissioning ugly portraits of themselves, but Jesus, the baby.

[Verity Bab]

Jesus, had a rough time.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It really did. What's going on with the old man Look?

[Verity Bab]

Yeah. Baby Jesus in paintings always has a really unnerving, excellent control of his neck for a newborn. Slightly spooky thing going on. And this comes back to this idea called the homunculus. Christ concept. And it's this idea that Jesus wasn't born like any old baby. He was born as, like a small version of a grown man. Jesus wouldn't have been like any old baby because he's Jesus. So that's why he always looks slightly alarmingly strong.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes. At the risk of sounding blasphemous, he does remind me of Benjamin Button quite a lot in these pictures.

[Verity Bab]

Some of the paintings of Jesus as a baby, you wouldn't want to turn a corner in a dark gallery and be jump scared by them. Some of them are quite appalling. That's so true.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And why is the Virgin Mary always in blue? What's that about?

[Verity Bab]

So I love this fact because it really nicely ties together art history and sort of economic history. So the Virgin Mary always being in blue. These paintings in the Renaissance are happening at a time when lapis lazuli, the stone, is one of the most valuable things on earth, more valuable than gold. And it only came from one mine in Afghanistan, so it's had to travel such a long way to get to Italy. And for artists to then make paint out of it is a huge privilege and also a huge sort of financial stress. So the Church control the use of lapis lazuli to make sure that it's basically only ever used for really significant figures in the Bible, like Mary. So she ends up becoming blue by consistently being painted with lapis lazuli, even though there's not reference to her wearing blue in the Bible. It's come from the Renaissance and this interest in blue.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And another very important question is, what's up with Michelangelo's bosoms?

[Verity Bab]

Yes. In the beginning of the book, I say that's the main reason why the book starts at the Renaissance, is because I want the opportunity to talk about Michelangelo's bosoms. So we talk about night in the book, his sculpture. But this also goes for his paintings, but also other people's paintings. A lot of the bosoms in the Renaissance do have the visual vibe of tennis balls that have been strapped on afterwards onto male bodies.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yeah. Like augmentation surgery gone wrong.

[Verity Bab]

Yes, they're on botched, that programme. Botched. There's quite a lot of bosoms that have. That almost seem like they've been an afterthought of Michelangelo's. Painted or sculpted a man and then gone, oh, whoops. This is meant to be a lady and has put these bosoms on afterwards. So in night, they are infamously misshapen. And there are lots of reasons why people have hypothesized why Michelangelo would do this. Some people say it's because he was gay and that actually his interest was not in painting the female nude. But other people don't believe that theory at all.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

But it is true that Michelangelo's Knight does also have strangely powerful thighs.

[Verity Bab]

I know there's something really compelling and strong about lots of his female figures that are quite masc. But another theory is that in the Renaissance the highest beauty ideal was male. So actually the most good looking women are the ones who look like blokes. But Knight's very interesting. Knight is having a current sort of academic rewrite because some academics think that it's actually a depiction of someone with breast cancer. So they are now looking at it from an anatomical point of view of actually this would have been a known disease and that Michelangelo might have been doing that. But throughout the Renaissance you see a lot of.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

No, I feel really bad about joking about it, Verity.

[Verity Bab]

I feel bad about writing about it before that came out. So I've written this sentence being like, what's he like with his wonky boobies? And then it turns out that I've done a hate CR right in. But I think the other theories do still stand for other depictions. And this interesting play between the feminine and the masculine in terms of beauty standards and also Michelangelo's own personal tastes. Like he was known to specifically hire hunky assistants, hunky male assistants because he liked having them around to the extent that Leonardo da Vinci once slightly habitually referred to Michelangelo's male figures as he always makes his male figures look like a bag of walnuts because he's so into this really ripped guy that he makes them all so ripped that he ends up painting all these bags of walnuts, which I always love.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And the other name, of course, in that triumvirate is the rock star artist Raphael. Yeah, your description of him is quite interesting.

[Verity Bab]

I loved learning about Raphael. Writing this has been really interesting because I didn't really have anything to do with the Renaissance. In university where I studied art history, I did mostly the 19th century artists behaving badly. So it was such a lovely joy to get to visit the Renaissance. And artists behaving badly then as well. Raphael, absolute rock star, real prodigy. Everyone's so excited by him. And he's also really fit and sleeps around a lot because you would. And there's one story in Vasari in the lives of the painters where basically Raphael is being commissioned to paint in some palace. And the person who's commissioning this Work To Be Done has to convince Raphael's girlfriend at the time to move into the palace to save on the commute, because Raphael is constantly leaving work to have a good time. And so they decide that the only way to get Raphael to concentrate for long enough is to get him to get his girlfriend to be a couple of doors down to save on the time. But Raphael has got this amazing legacy and also this amazing art. But then sometimes the amazing art is completely eclipsed by the fact that he is now known as the Artist who Died from Too Much Sex.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I mean, it's better than being known as Tintoretto, I suppose, but how sad.

[Verity Bab]

I'm welling up just thinking about Tintoretto. All of the people and there's 100 years either side of him have got these great, amazing stories that make them look like absolute ladies men. And he's like a short guy named after his dad, dyeing clothes. Bad times.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So let's head up from the Mediterranean to the Low Countries because the Renaissance begins to have an impact there after taking Italy by storm. How did the ideas spread north?

[Verity Bab]

It spreads into northern Europe through multiple channels. And one of them is the fact that Renaissance artists in Italy are now so known throughout Europe that they're being invited into courts in northern Europe to work there as well. People being brought into Paris, and that spreads from there. Also, developments in things like the printing press in the 1600s mean that suddenly you can share an image or a print of something, an engraving of something an artist has made in Italy. And suddenly word gets around and through these channels and sort of new movement, it takes hold in Northern Europe. But in what I would say, in what is a more sort of cheeky and fun way, potentially, than it had been in Italy. There's a lot more humanist works happening. There's a lot more things starring regular people. And eventually you're moving into the. The Dutch Golden Age and into the lowlands. And there's a lot more bums.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes, there are. When we look at someone like Brueghel, I think it's fair to say they're quite scatological, those pictures.

[Verity Bab]

Yeah.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Why is he obsessed with showing people emptying their bladders or bowels?

[Verity Bab]

So Brueghel has this amazing painting called Netherlandish Proverbs, and it's like a Where's Wally? But everyone in the painting is pooing out of a hole or weeing against something or having it off with each other. It's just never ending. And each of these scenes represents an old Dutch saying. So there's one bit where two men are pooing out of the same privy hole, and it comes from a saying, to poo out of the same privy or to poo out of the same hole. That just means they're great friends. So each of these has a saying attached to it. And I just. I just couldn't see Michelangelo doing that. It took someone Dutch to be like, we're doing someone Flemish doing that, to be like, this is what we're doing now, which I think is so great.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

What's going on there. I mean, it's irreverent, but kind of how is it expressing humanist ideas? How has it taken the Italian Renaissance and made it so much more kind of down to earth?

[Verity Bab]

I'm not sure about that one. I'm not exactly sure. But what I do think is interesting is how we look back at these things from a modern perspective of. Actually, Brueghel's work ends up feeling very much modern in comparison to Renaissance works, even when there's not that. That many years in between the works being made. So it almost says more about what we want as audiences and the fact that we're probably more drawn to these silly drawings of people weeing on each other than we are potentially by. We're in awe of the Sistine Chapel, but what we want is to have a laugh about poo. Foreign.

[Mario Lopez]

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[Don Wildman]

What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America? I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit. My expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed. Meet the characters who have altered it with their touch and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit. A podcast from History Hit.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And some of these pictures from the Northern Renaissance are just weird. I mean, like the Hieronymus Bosch paintings, to be frank. Look to me a bit like Bosch has ingested a bit too much rye bread and had one of them had an ergot induced trip. Why are they so mad? How should we interpret them?

[Verity Bab]

It's so interesting. I remember the first time I saw a Hieronymus Bosch painting and I just could not get my head around how old it is. Because we have this idea of the past as being a very serious place where people do serious things and they take everything very seriously. And then you remember that these people are making these paintings that are interpretations of stories in the Bible, which is full of mad stuff and full of these amazing visions and full of a lot of it is full of really balmy detail. So people like Hieronymus Bosch are basically just really going to town of what sort of thing might you see in hell and what sort of thing you might in the Garden of Eden or in heaven and really letting loose, which ends up with these paintings that if Hieronymus Bosch had been born in the 1890s, he would have ended up being a surrealist. Because these works are so vivid and odd and come from somewhere very unconscious and human and very bizarre, that he feels really like he's been planted there from nowhere. He's a really fascinating artist.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It's so interesting, isn't it, that I hadn't realized that before, but with Bosch and Bruegel then we're having an opportunity to grasp humour in the 16th century. And it's so difficult to access. It's not really something that gets written down in documentary sources. Humour's so contextual, you kind of have to be there. But actually we do have this. Just this sort of hint at it in these pictures.

[Verity Bab]

Yeah. And probably throughout history, the people with the best senses of humour and the people who are most likely to be telling gags to each other and doing pranks on each other are people who are members of the illiterate masses. So these jokes don't get written down and so they haven't got this same. I think that's why it's quite easy to think that history is humorless, because we don't see this evidence of people having a laugh, because the people who are writing things down take things very seriously, or they're being commissioned by someone very rich who takes things seriously and takes their legacy seriously. But moments like Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs are a really nice moment to remember that even royalty and courts and really powerful Banking families seeing these paintings will have thought it was funny. In the same way that when we see these slightly erotic paintings happening throughout history, we always imagine that the people who own these erotic paintings don't find them erotic at all. And they're far too serious and important to find such things. Pawny. But actually, people have always found bums funny. Sexy. Yes.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It's one of the great truths of history is that people have always had sex or we wouldn't be here. There are some other artists we need to talk about with the Northern Renaissance and just a few of them that we could touch on. I'd love to ask you about Jan van Eyck's Adolfini portrait. What's so mysterious about it?

[Verity Bab]

The Adolfini portrait is one of those paintings that every art history student around the world has had to look at. Every big art historical text probably handles at some point. It's one of the most famous and popular paintings of all time. But what's going on? We're not really sure who it's of. We're not really sure why it was made. The mirror in the back that reflects van Eyck, is it reflecting Van Eyck? Has he written something around the corner? But my main question is why, given how hot it looks outside, why is the guy in a full foot? I'm mostly concerned. I couldn't do that. Like, I'm concerned for his temperature control. So it's just steeped in so many questions about what's going on. I think that's why it's got this lasting appeal, is the mystery of it. And that's why lots of art historical works have remained so popular in the modern imagination. Is we love the idea that, oh, was the Mona Lisa this lady, or was she secretly this male lover of Leonardo? Is she smiling? Is she not? Like, we love that kind of thing. And the Arnolfina portrait is another example of which. Interested because we don't know.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Two of the other really famous artists of this period are Albert Durer and Hans Holbein the younger. And in both cases, they're sort of famed for producing lifelike work. So it has this kind of photographic realism when we look at it, to us, but they're not photographs. How should we understand them when we're looking at these pictures?

[Verity Bab]

I think it's interesting, especially if we look at. At Jura, is that we do need to cut artists some slack at this time because like you say, they're not working from photographs. And in the example of something like Jura's 1515 engraving of a rhinoceros. For years we've been able to go, he's done an okay job. But why does this rhinoceros look like it's wearing a suit of armor? It doesn't really quite look like how a rhinoceros looks. But then you have to cut him some slack because he's making this engraving based on someone else's account of a rhinoceros they heard of that was once gifted to the King of Portugal from India. Like he's, Jura's just doing his best. And I think that's just the case for lots of artists at this time, is they are painting portraits of people based off other people's accounts. They are editing their portraits based off what the other person will want to see. So you do end up with these works that are easier to love them if you accept them as slight flights of fancy. The thing people said about the Middle Ages is, why are all the animals in illuminated manuscripts? Why are they all terrible? Or why do the cats look like that? Why has this horse got a human face, this kind of thing? And it's like the most important thing in that circumstance is that these animals were representing animals rather than needing to necessarily look perfectly like the animal. And I think if we accept the faults that may come with trying to paint or engrave something you've never seen, then suddenly the juror is rhinoceros really good.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So when do we see Renaissance ideas begin to fade out of Italy? What comes instead?

[Verity Bab]

So it comes in stages. And part of that is artists begin to try to go a step further. They're aware that they've been working in this really perfected, beautiful and really harmonious way. And then the style of Mannerism starts to come in, where artists are more interested in bringing more emotion into their works and more drama into their works than necessarily having a composition that is completely harmonious. And a lot of Renaissance large scale Renaissance works are fundamentally pretty much symmetrical. There's like even splits between colour usages, so it's completely in harmony with itself. And by the time Mannerism comes around, people are just trying to push it that bit further. So everything is still, by and large, anatomically correct as it had been before. But there's more of an emphasis on getting some feeling in there.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Is it about kind of saying, all is not right with the world, let's stop portraying it as if it were?

[Verity Bab]

It'll partly be that, and also just partly based on the fact that human taste does not stay the same for long, even when actually there's nothing wrong with the art of the Renaissance, it's all beautiful and lovely, but people will always want to go a bit further and they'll want to be the family who commissioned this brand new thing that is potentially controversial, but that ends up being. They want to be pioneering. But it's wonderful when you see artists who covered both bases. Michelangelo is a great example of this, of when he did the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He's doing that in a very typical Renaissance style. And by the time he's doing the Last Judgment, which is the mural on the wall, he's leaning into this new Mannerist style, because there's a couple of decades, if not three decades in between him doing both of them. And one of the papal ministers, I think, wasn't really keen on this new Mannerist style that Michelangelo was doing. And he complains about the fact that why couldn't Michelangelo have carried on doing things in the nice style he did the ceiling in? And Michelangelo hadn't finished the mural yet, so he decided to add in a final detail, which was this minister in the corner, naked, with donkey ears, being bitten on the penis by a snake make.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And that's there in the chapel for everyone to see.

[Verity Bab]

Exactly. And that's the thing of sometimes you see work in seriously holy places with real naughtiness going on. Real Michelangelo really saying, I'll show you. I'll have you in a deeply uncomfortable position there forever if you don't like my Mannerist style. So I love it when artists, yeah, go to these transitions. And Michelangelo's story of people not always taking kindly to his new style is great because how petty. I love that we never think of historical figures just being petty and rude to each other, but they often were.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And now this man has gone down through history in a naked form, being bitten on the penis by a snake. On which note, you write about the fig leaf campaign. What's that?

[Verity Bab]

Yeah. So the fig leaf campaign that happened in the 1500s was set up by the Council of Trent, who I asked a Catholic friend actually, to give me a good way to describe who the Council of Trent were. And they said that were they. They're. They're basically like the UN for priests. So the. The Council of. Of Trent, they decide, having looked at the Bible and looked inwardly and all that kind of thing, that nudity should be kept to a minimum. Everything should be made more modest. So after the fig leaf campaign, new artworks, which previously would have had full frontal nudity, you now see fig leaves in particular, and that's where it gets its name from. In hindsight, leaves and handily held objects placed in front of what would otherwise be full frontal nudity. But it also involves old artworks having new leaves put on and new things, new bits of drapery put on to cover everyone up in a sort of the first move of cancel culture. Real censorship happening. And because art is still so tied to the church, it really matters what the church thinks and everything is taken in this. That's the party like for a while.

[Mario Lopez]

Hey, what's up? It's Mario Lopez. Back to school is an exciting time, but it can also be overwhelming. And kids may feel isolated, a vulnerability that human traffickers can exploit. Human trafficking doesn't always look like what you expect. Everyday moments can become opportunities for someone with bad intentions. Whether you're a parent, teacher, coach or neighbor. Check in, ask questions, stay connected. Blue Campaign is a national awareness initiative that provides resources to help recognize suspected instances of human trafficking. Learn the signs and how to [e-mail] Blue Campaign.

[Don Wildman]

What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America? I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit. My expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed, changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit. A podcast from History Hit.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Can I ask you about a really enigmatic painting which is Bronzino's allegory with Venus and Cupid?

[Verity Bab]

Yes.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Can you describe it and hazard a guess at the moral messages it's trying to convey, given we're in this new era?

[Verity Bab]

So this is a brilliant painting. It's a group portrait. It's got Venus and Cupid in the starring role. But it's another one of those art historical mysteries, which is why people are so interested in the painting so many years on. And one figure in the background is basically, basically clutching their head and screaming in agony. And the sort of dominant theory about who this figure is, that they are an embodiment of syphilis. And a lovely detail about this painting is that this painting was made by Bronzino and was destined to be a gift for the French king. But the problem was that in Italy, syphilis was nicknamed the French disease. So actually a really harsh gift to give to the king of France to say this is your gift and your disease.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Another hidden message.

[Verity Bab]

Exactly.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And another person I want to ask you about is Giuseppe Arcimboldo. I don't think it's a name everyone will know, but I reckon everyone will recognise his work. You know, all the courgette noses and the peach cheeks. What is going on here? It's like Bosch again, isn't it?

[Verity Bab]

Exactly. He's another artist who, had he been born later, would have fit right in with Dali, even with Yakubists and in with your Dada lot, who make a lot of brilliant, funny art. I think Archimboldo is. I don't know. It's interesting, I think, when you're first trying to get your head around Renaissance art and how art developed one thing from another, it can be really hard to think of Archimboldo as being part of that. He feels like a real outlier, because the work is mad. There's people made out of books, there's a lot of people made out of vegetables and. And it comes back to that thing we were discussing, which is that everyone has always had a sense of humour. People have always liked things that are interesting and new and novel and silly. But Arkin Balder is one of the artists who's really stood the test of time and is one of the very few examples we have of really fun, really jolly and nice and silly work, whereas most of his contemporaries are doing things that stand the test of time because they are. Are commissioned by the right people. But no, I love Archen Boulder.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

In the north of Europe, the Renaissance gives way to what we now call the Dutch Golden Age. So who are the major painters in this period? What makes their art different?

[Verity Bab]

Yeah, so in the Dutch Golden Age, and this is happening at a time when the Netherlands is one of the world's absolute leading military and economic powers. And because of this, they have a brand new middle class of sort of merchant class who now have a bit of money to spend on their own art. So we start to see more artists commissioned, a broader variety of artists commissioned to make things, because now it's not just very few families and the church commissioning things. And we start to get some of Europe's first properly famous female artists as well as part of this, and lots of female artists who actually at the time, are selling work for more than Rembrandt is selling at the time. So it's a really fascinating time period for women, really going neck and neck with these male artists. But it's also a time period where we get most of the most famous Dutch artworks. So you have Vermeer doing Girl with a Pearl Earring. We've got Franz Hals, we have Rembrandt doing the Night Watch. This is the time when this is the Dutch big hitters, basically.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And I suppose we've had ordinary people depicted by Bruegel in that kind of satirical way. But is this the time when, because of the economic situation, because of the money going around, because of the fact they're not just painting religious and royal themes anymore, we're seeing ordinary people portrayed as portraits, literally portrayed in this period.

[Verity Bab]

For the first time, for one of the first times. And this is a brand new phenomenon of people, relatively normal people of this sort of new middle merchant class, having art in their homes rather than being able to see art in church or if they were ever in a court, Suddenly art gets brought into the domestic sphere. So you have a lot of paintings that have. Have children in or have women in domestic scenes in. And those works live right there in that domestic setting. And lots of these works, even though they have moved away from being always strictly biblical, a lot of them have really dominant moral messages for which a lot of the artists have used normal people as the. As the representatives for these messages. So a lot of children get used as ways to demonstrate how children should behave or about to pass on a message about curiosity or whatever it might be. And you get vanitas paintings which are. Which are brilliant. I think that in childhood, if I was brought through a museum and there were lots of Dutch still lifes and this sort of thing, I'd roll my eyes because it all just seems quite samey. It's all very brown and it's got a lot of. Yeah, a lot of flowers, a lot of lemons, a lot of lobsters, that kind of thing. But it felt quite samey. And then learning about vanitas paintings really opens up this whole new interest in still lifes. Because with the Van Anatas painting, Dutch artists would take one detail, one or two details from an otherwise perfect setup. So say it's this really amazing bouquet of flowers. And these flowers would have been so expensive. And they're being grown in the botanical gardens in Leiden and in Amsterdam. So these are real symbols of wealth and prosperity and being cutting edge of plant tech. And one or two of these flowers will be wilting or might have a green fly on them, or there might be a snail on them or something is slightly ruining this perfect setup. Or you have these great big banquet scenes. That's so much money been poured into this Banquet, and there's lots of fine silverware and there's food from all across the country, but one of the lemons is peeled or something is rotting or there's something awry. And basically these paintings were designed for the Dutch middle classes to have in their homes as a reminder that death comes to us all. That money cannot shield you from demise. In the end, one must remain humble and keep in the knowledge that you know that we will die. So even these paintings that look beautiful from the outside, and they look perfect when you take a closer look in, there's a real interesting human moral message there that I think can really open these works up to a new audience who will really love them. Whereas previously you might have thought, okay, here's another bunch of flowers.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And then Also in the 17th century, things get more elaborate still with the Baroque style. So can you parse that for us? What does Baroque mean? Can you describe what a typical Baroque painting looked like and who are the artists who are dominating the Baroque era?

[Verity Bab]

Yeah, so the Baroque, a bit like Mannerism, inherits this Mannerist inheritance. There's even more emphasis on emotion. There's even more. Even more emphasis on theatrical dramatics within these paintings. So even though a lot of these works are still eyeball stories, there's a real relatable human darkness to them. The people look a bit more like people you might even know. There's a bit more of a sense of these being modern stories. And you have new techniques becoming popularized, like chiaroscuro, which means light dark in Italian. And it's just this really extreme contrast between highlight and shadow. If you walk through a gallery, you can tell when something is baroque because it's really harsh light, which adds so much to these portraits of the Last Supper or to moments in the story of Jesus life, because they are super tense. There's, like, really tense stuff is happening in the story of Jesus. And having these new techniques really adds theatricality to them that is really appealing. And you get maybe the ultimate bad boy artist at the head of it all. And you have a Caravaggio.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yeah, Tell us about Caravaggio. He's one of art history's great characters, isn't he?

[Verity Bab]

Caravaggio is such a fun character to delve into the life of, because I think that lots of people know that he was like a bit of a bad boy. And we assume that probably means there's some infidelity. He's probably a bit fighty. He's probably not very loyal to his government and this sort of thing. But Actually, he killed someone that we think of him as this sort of like cheeky chappie, but he straight up killed someone in a duel and he killed him in a way which highly suggests that he was aiming to castrate him while he did so.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Goodness me.

[Verity Bab]

There's a real. There's a bit of an aw, what's he like about Caravaggio? But straight up like a really nasty fella.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

There's something strange about the way that we do forgive people for their absolute murderous excesses if a couple or say five centuries have passed.

[Verity Bab]

Yeah. It's part of that whole not really being able to relate to people in the past because we don't imagine them having the same emotional depth as we do or the same issues as we do. We forget that every single person throughout history has had to deal with an annoying neighbour, has had to deal with being double crossed by someone you know, has fallen in love, has fallen out of love. Like that's happened to absolutely everyone. But it's hard to remember when lost. Our artefacts from these times are very serious and separate from the dirt and the dirt and the reality of everyday people's lives. So we do forget that murdering someone in the 1600s, just as bad for the person being murdered as being murdered now. But there is a slight sort of lovable scamp nature about Caravaggio, which means we should move past it.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And talking of emotional depth, how much did the Baroque artists want to capture.

[Verity Bab]

Emotional like the Mannerists before them? There's such an emphasis on creating paintings that are really dramatic, full of human emotion, to bring in these audiences. And there's this brilliant story I read about John Lorenzo Bernini, who was sculpting a self portrait of himself as a damned soul, one of the damned souls in hell. And he was adamant that he wanted this to be as accurate as possible. Were he actually in hell, that he spent the entire time while he was carving continuously burning his hand on a candle to really get across that ow, I'm in hell look. So artists were super dedicated to getting things right. And there's a lot of. There's a sense that all of these Baroque artists are like super brooding and there's a real sort of turbulence about them. And they're committed to the.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

They're really committed. Yes. That guy just needed therapy to be invented. Okay, so in conclusion, one of the things I've been struck by as we've talked is this sense of things being hidden. So whether they're hidden in the meaning of the Arnolfini or the Hidden proverbs, I suppose, maybe not that hidden to a Netherlandish audience, but this sense that, you know, the face that looks like syphilis in the background, it feels like a total slice as you give it to the French king. There's a lot of playfulness, isn't there? I mean, the main thing that's come out of our conversation actually is humour in art.

[Verity Bab]

Yeah. And we've touched on it already, that it can be hard, I think, for people to really relate to figures in history, because what survives a lot of the time, especially when we're going back 500, 600 years, are artifacts and artworks that are commissioned religiously. So there is an emphasis on it, on this being solid and reliable and quite pure of the messiness of human nature and of sin and of this sort of thing. But actually, throughout history, everyone has loved shagging, everyone has laughed at Pooh. Not everyone has murdered in cold blood, but some of them did that, actually. These things are always happening and it can be easy to forget that without having these stories unlocked or, or having these hidden facets explained. That really opens up art history. And I think that's what's always done it for me, is these human stories mean that I probably do want to look at a painting by Caravaggio or by Bruegel or by Michelangelo. Whereas without that human story, they can feel a bit impenetrable because then all you're left with is like very academic, jargon filled text explaining sort of the techniques going on. But actually what I personally needed in order to. To feel like I liked art and knew about art was were these stories of men behaving badly.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And you have given a gift to the world in your book, which is tremendous amounts of fun. The history of art, in one sentence. I loved it. And it is something people should be buying for themselves and also to give as gifts, so buying at least twice. Thank you, Verity Bab, for coming on. It's been really fun to talk to you and obviously we've only touched on the first couple of centuries that you cover and you cover 500 years, years of art in that book. So more to enjoy. Thank you for your time today.

[Verity Bab]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for Sub we can cover. So do drop us a line at [e-mail] and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History. Hit.