Empires Special: Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance TV - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie TV - Da Vinci: The Lost Treasure TV - Alan Yentob TV - Brad Meltzer TV - Jonathan Miller TV - Kenneth Clark TV - James Fox TV - Waldemar Januszczak TV - Matthew Collings TV - Civilisations TV - Andrew Marr TV -
Florence was also a cauldron of creativity. Empires Special: Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance: Birth of a Dynasty I, PBS 2004
The Medici would protect and pay for the greatest artists and thinkers of their age: Michelangelo et al. ibid.
The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance. ibid.
The Council brought together the greatest mix of thinkers, artists, merchants, and churchmen that the world had ever seen. ibid.
By the mid 15th century the Medici family had fought their way to power in Florence. They had dictated the taste of the city, presiding over a revolution in Western culture – the Renaissance. Empires Special: Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance II: The Magnificent Medici
The greatest artists the world had ever seen. ibid.
He was an artist who would take the world apart ... Leonardo da Vinci. ibid.
Lorenzo decided to bring Michelangelo into his family. ibid.
Under Lorenzo, Florence had reached new heights of culture and sophistication. ibid.
[Sandro] Botticelli ... hurled his own paintings into the flames ... The Bonfire of the Vanities. ibid.
Fifteen years earlier the sculptor had been adopted into the greatest family in Florence. Michelangelo had moved in with the Medici. Empires Special: Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance III: The Medici Popes
They had begun to procure corpses from the city’s hospitals for ‘private research’. The pioneer of this controversial method was the city’s most talked about personality – Leonardo da Vinci. ibid.
Michelangelo’s fresco was declared indecent. Empires Special: Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance IV: Power v Truth
They had been the patrons of genius. Renaissance men who had changed the Western world. In their name daring new artists had created the greatest works of the Italian Renaissance. ibid.
A renaissance if you will – today I am forty years old. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie I ***** starring Geraldine McEwan & Amanda Kirby & Lynsey Baxter & Vivienne Ross et al, Brodie to class, ITV 1978
Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the world’s most brilliant and extraordinary men ... The ultimate Renaissance man. Da Vinci: The Lost Treasure, BBC 2011
In the Renaissance world art and science went hand in hand. Alan Yentob, Leonardo: The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything, BBC 2011
The secrets of our future, our fate, may be found in the work of Leonardo da Vinci ... The ultimate Renaissance man. Brad Meltzer’s Decoded s2e8: Da Vinci, History 2011
The advent of new science and technology in the Renaissance would also have a role to play. Jonathan Miller: A Rough History of Disbelief II: Noughts and Crosses, BBC 2004
In a way these eighteenth-century amateurs were the inheritors of the Renaissance idea of universal man. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 10/13, The Smile of Reason, BBC 1969
Most people think of Italy ... The Renaissance is supposed to have passed us by. But that isn’t true. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance, BBC 2014
A handful of brilliant European artists brought the new ideas of the Renaissance to Britain. ibid.
[Pietro] Torrigiano’s tomb marked a turning point in British art. It brought a modern style to a medieval country. ibid.
Hans Holbein arrived in England in the autumn of 1526. ibid.
The art of a people obsessed with secrets. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance II: The Elizabethan Code
A distinctive native art-form emerged. ibid.
[Nicholas] Hilliard’s little miniatures ... intimate, private, coded. ibid.
Rich and clever and sophisticated – art for an urbane and educated society. ibid.
John Dee: the man who led the country out of its isolation ... a renaissance man. ibid.
By the early 1600s Britain had undergone a cultural revolution; the medieval world had been left behind. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance III: Whose Renaissance?
It was less about fantasies of ideal beauty and more about looking at new ways of reality. ibid.
The man who lived here invented the Renaissance. There he is – Giorgio Vasari – the one with the interested cherub looking on. Vasari was a painter and as you can see not a particularly good one. His work lacked elegance and grace: in a word it was clunky … For the rest of his career Vasari remained a Michelangelo groupie … The most influential art book ever written. Waldemar Januszczak, The Renaissance Unchained I: Gods, Myths and Oil Paints, BBC 2017
Vasari’s Lives set the agenda for all art books that followed. ibid.
Roughly between 1400 and 1600 … civilisation returns to Italy … Unfortunately, it’s just not true … Vasari’s Renaissance is the creation of a jingoistic Florentine. ibid.
Vasari ignored the north in his story of the Renaissance. ibid.
The artists of Bruges were already seeing as clearly as this. ibid.
It’s Van Eyck’s greatest achievement – the Ghent Altar – a masterpiece of spectacular complexity and mysterious ambition. With so much going on in it. ibid.
The armour painter’s delight – St George … the new paints transformed armour into a delicate metal mirror. ibid.
The era’s greatest talent – Albert Durer. Everyone knew how great he was. ibid.
In some bits of the Italian Renaissance the Greeks and the Romans are definitely being remembered, and modern thought is perhaps being invented. And it’s certainly getting more secular … Very few bits of it, very few indeed, are actually trying to do what it says in the books. Waldemar Januszczak, The Renaissance Unchained II: Whips, Deaths and Madonnas
When people go on about the pioneering art of Gioto they talk about the new solidity of his figures, the classical influences at work on his anatomies, this new naturalism of his landscapes and all that is true but it misses the point … Giotto has found a way to imagine the unimaginable. ibid.
It’s about making the impossible feel vivid and real. And if you can do that, that’s an enormous power. ibid.
When they painted the baby Jesus the artists of the Renaissance were trying to imagine a baby who was also a God. ibid.
The Renaissance never was as enlightened or as progressive as we’ve been taught. ibid.
Michelangelo: He’s such a huge Renaissance presence. ibid.
I’m hoping to discover why Venetian art was so different from everyone else’s. Waldemar Januszczak, The Renaissance Unchained III: Silk, Sex and Sin
Giorgione: he was born in Castelfranco in around 1477 – revolutionised Venetian art then died young. ibid.
This is where Tintoretto was born just a 100 feet away from the Madonna dell’Orto. ibid.
Titian painted his enormous altar-piece. ibid.
It was Venice that invented the reclining Venus. ibid.
Another story painted by Titian was Europa and the Bull. ibid.
The cloth-painter supreme among the Venetians was Paolo Veronese. ibid.
Mountains have a powerful effect on people. Mountains cloud your judgement. They heighten your emotions and intoxicate you. And in Renaissance times, the times we’re looking at, they intoxicated that especially disquieting Renaissance presence, Leonardo da Vinci. Waldemar Januszczak, The Renaissance Unchained IV: Hell, Snakes and Giants
One look at his paintings tells you there was something strange about him, something peculiar and visionary. ibid.
We’ll turn to all the other wild-eyed eccentrics who began popping up in the Renaissance in increasing numbers – Hieronymus Bosch, Arcimboldo, El Greco. ibid.