Florence: The Art of Magnificence

(dramatic music) Buongiorno, everyone, and welcome to Florence, Italy.

There's no better place to introduce this city than up here at the Piazzale Michelangelo.

And I'm using this viewpoint to illustrate the skyline of Florence the way you see it today.

That church that's closest to us here is the Basilica of Santa Croce, which is technically the world's largest Franciscan c Construction on that building started in the year 1294.

Across town, you see that massiv marble-clad church with the big red dome on it.

That is the cathedral of Florenc which is technically the world's third-largest Christian Church.

And construction there started in the year 1296.

Across town again, that big brownstone tower that you see is a building known as Palazzo V It was built as town hall beginning in the year 1299, and it still serves as town hall Not bad for continuity there, about seven centuries or so.

That pointed tower just beyond sits on the major Dominican church of Floren which is called Santa Maria Nove If any of you have ever taken a train to the city, you may remember getting off at train station with the same name because it's located right behind the church.

That church went up in the year The reason I'm throwing all thes dates at you right off the bat is that you may have picked up a pattern here, and that is that almost the enti of the city dates back to the ye This is a very important point to begin with, because most people who come to Florence come here looking for something called the Renaissance That rebirth of all things Greek and Roman.

But consider that the Renaissanc does not begin until the year 14 So technically speaking, Florenc is not a Renaissance city.

It is a medieval city where the Renaissance began.

[music] Now if you want to know what Flo looked like during the Renaissan here you go.

This is an image of the city from around the year 1471.

Let me give you a little context A guy named Leonardo da Vinci wa 19 year old hell-raising teenage running through the streets of t A guy named Michelangelo was not He would be born four years late But this is the city in which both of these great artists grew So let's go monument for monumen But let's go backwards this time to see how much the city has changed over the last 500 years.

We begin with the great Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, already standing by 1471, as was the great Cathedral, just down the street.

A little bit further south, town or Palazzo Vecchio, already stan as was the great Franciscan chur Santa Croce located just behind.

In other words, 500 years ago, the city looked more or less the way it does today.

So remember, when you come to Florence, it's not just the Uffizi and the Accademia.

It's the whole city that serves as an open-air museum.

When you're walking down these narrow streets and these back al remind yourselves you're walking down the same streets and alleys that guys like Dante and Brunell and Leonardo and Michelangelo walked as many as 700 years ago, and there's no other city in the that can brag to that kind of ex [music] We're here in the Piazza Della Signoria, and this is the space where the history of Florence begins and e This was where, 2,000 years ago, the Romans built their forum, when they founded a city that they called Florentia.

A forum space in a Roman city was where all the major political and social-economic buildings were concentrated, and a forum was always located i the exact center of a Roman city Now, the fate of the Roman city Florence was tied into the fate and when the empire fell in the 5th century after Christ, the city of Florentia was abando And for about 500 years or so, it was essentially uninhabited.

And then, around the year 1000, there was the rebirth of the city in Europe, and people began to migrate back from the surrounding countryside and they decided to take advanta of this large open plot of land, that had once been the Roman for to build a market.

A market is one of the most important aspects of any thrivin That market continued to functio for approximately 1,000 years.

All the way up until the most re important date in Italian histor which is the year 1861: the year in which Italy was unif When Italy was unified, one of the most pressing questio where to set up a capital.

Rome, of course, was the logical but the Pope in Rome did not wan become part of this new country.

So the decision was made to choo another Italian city that was very conveniently locat about halfway down the peninsula That city was called Florence.

So between the years 1865 and 1870, Florence became the capital of the new country of Italy.

The problem was that most of the characterized by medieval archit so what they decided to do was to come back into the area where the history of Florence be to knock down all the medieval b that were once located here and to rebuild them in what we c the neoclassical style.

I don't want you to make the same mistake that most people make when they come to Florence when they look at these building and they say "It's amazing that they're in su good shape considering how old t In fact, these buildings are only about 130 years old, and it doesn't take me to tell y these are 19th-century buildings Because, if you look right up th behind me, above that arch, you'll see a plaque with Roman numeral dates.

Consider that in the U.S. we think, of course, that the only practical applicat Roman numerals is Super Bowls, but believe it or not, in Europe almost all dates are, in fact, given in Roman numerals.

And if you read the date there, you'll see that the plaque reads that a majority of this architec was completed at the end of the 19th century.

And even more poetically, above the date, you'll see that plaque with thre And those lines essentially telling you in three verses what it just took me about eight minutes to tell you.

That is the entire history of th It reads: l'antico centro della or "the ancient center of the ci referring to the forum.

Da secolare squallore, "from centuries of squalor," meaning the decay of the market that was here.

A vita nuova restituito, or "to new life restored."

This climactic ending, essential 19th century, ramping up the spa which brought it back to its former ancient glory.

Which is why I think this is the best place to introduce Florence because we've just actually cove about 2,000 years of history and we haven't moved an inch.

[music] Although the Uffizi and Accademia galleries are the two most visited monuments in Florence, on a local level, the nearly 1,000-year-old baptistry is the most important of all monuments.

Like all baptistries, it is dedi the guy who invented baptism, St. John the Baptist, and it was the exclusive place f in Florence during the middle ag The most extraordinary part of the baptistry is its interior When you walk through the door and you look up, this is what you see: the entirety of the dome covered in a medium called mosaic, which means little pieces of colored glass that are about the size of our t embedded into wet plastic to create imagery.

Now, how large is that mosaic?

Well, that figure of Jesus Chris that you see there is exactly 25 feet tall.

You notice that Jesus looks very serious in this image with his right and left hands extended outward, because the main subject of three of the eight sections of t is Last Judgment: the Christian belief that time w eventually come to an end and that Christ will return to judge all of us, living and dead So his hand gestures indicate his judgment.

Jesus's right hand gesturing upward, inviting a very small group of p just to the lower left of that s who are being led by an angel through the gates of Heaven, and into the bosom of the Old Testament patriarchs, or hea With his left hand, or his sinis the sinister hand, the hand of the devil, Jesus is condemning down into the bowels of hell.

Your host is the figure in the m You know him as Satan or Lucifer and the single punishment in thi hell image is for sinners to be eaten by him, then digested by h and then excreted by him.

And after that happens, you reconstitute, you get right back in line, and all over again for all eternity.

And doesn't that sound like a lot of fun?

In fact, everyone in this scene being prepared to be eaten by Lu And my favorite figure, down in the lower right hand corner, is a sinner who's tied up and being slow-roasted on a spit, as a demon stands over him with a ladle and actually bastes him in the image, because presumably Lucifer likes his meat moist, as most of us do.

Now, before I ruin your day comp let's get out of the baptistry a talk about the Cathedral complex The first thing I want to do is clear up the terminology.

In order for a church to qualify as a cathedral, it has to have a bishop.

Because the root of the word "ca is the Latin word cathedra, which means seat or chair.

In other words, a cathedral is t seat of a bishop from which he controls a territo which we used to call the bishop Today, instead, we call a dioces The other name that you'll hear for this church is "duomo," which of course everyone misinterprets as meaning "dome" for two pretty obvious reasons.

One, because the word "duomo" sounds so much like the word "do And two, because, look at the thing, it just dominates the entirety of the structure.

The Italian word for dome is, instead, cupola.

"Duomo" is a nickname for a cath regardless of whether it has a d and they invent this word "duomo mangling together two Latin word the first of which is domus, Latin for home or house, and the other is dei, Latin for God.

So we nickname a cathedral "the house of God" because typically they're so lar the idea is that they could symbolically accommodate the alm Construction on the cathedral began in the year 1296, and the final piece of construct that gilded bronze ball way at t which I like to call the cherry on the cake, and it was put up there in the y So the total construction time for this church was 172 years, nearly six generations of Floren involved in putting it together.

And part of the reason why it to is because of its scale.

From front to back, the total le Florence Cathedral is 152 meters or just over a football field and a half in length.

For two centuries, it was by far largest church in the Christian until a basilica was completed i in 1626 called St. Peter's, which blew this church right out of the water.

Now, if you get a chance to go inside of Florence Cathedral, I think you'll be surprised by what you don't find, and that is a lot of decoration, because nearly all of it is conc up there on the underside of the where you'll find this painting: another Last Judgment.

It took me all of two minutes to find you another.

So if you're into this sick and and sadistic imagery, there's plenty more material up there for you to enjoy.

Now, technically, this is not the most important or innovative painting in the wo but it does qualify as the world's largest fresco painting.

35,000 square feet of dome surfa covered with fresco paint.

That's nearly an acre of paintin that you see up there.

If the cathedral is the religious center of Florence, then this building is the politi a building known as the Palazzo Now let's work on your Italian language skills a bit here as we Palazzo is the Italian word that means palace, and vecchio means old, but it doesn't make sense to build something and to call it "old" immediately.

The original name of the buildin was the Palazzo della Signoria, and I am here in the Piazza della Signoria.

And signoria was the name that Florence gave to its executive city council, a group of nine men who were elected into office.

In fact, probably the most important thing I can tell you historically about Florence is that during its heyday from 1300 to 1500 after Christ, this city was one of the few democracies in Europe.

And that building behind me has served as the seat of that democracy since it was built in 1299.

Now, I think most of us would be hard-pressed to describe that building as looking like what we think a city hall should look like.

In fact, it looks much more like a castle, or a fortress, or a prison.

And the reason is because when it came time for Florence to build a city hall, they had no idea what a city hall should look like, because none existed.

So they borrowed that fortified to give the impression of power and authority.

But at the same time, this style of architecture allowed the men who worked inside the building to protect themselves from the people outside.

Democracy is a very fragile creature.

And very often, when the men working inside that building made unpopular decisions, the very people who elected them would form into what we call lynch mobs, and they would storm the buildin to try to string them up.

So what do the guys inside the b Well, they defend themselves.

In fact, if you look up at that arches where the overhang is, each of the arches, which aligns with the window or door on the ground lev has a rectangular opening or hole inside of it.

And those holes were used to discourage people from sacking town hall, and for dropping things like boiling oil or rocks, or arrows shooting down, or spears hurled down as well.

And so the moral of the story is not only does it look like a pri or a fortress or a castle, it actually functioned as one as The style of the architecture of this building reflecting the political climate in Florence when it was built, and that climate was anything but stable.

Now we know things start to calm down when they start putting statues in front of city hall, and the most celebrated of those statues is of course this one: the copy of Michelangelo's David.

Consider that the original statue of David stood in this exact spot for exactly 369 years before it was moved into the Accademia Gallery in 1873.

Many people believe that this is the man who began the artistic revolutio that we call the Renaissance: Dante Alighieri.

Or as we like to call him around these parts: The Big D. Dante was the author of one of the greatest pieces of literature of all time, entitled "The Divine Comedy."

Dante was born in Florence in the year 1265, but he spent nearly two decades of his life in exile, wrote and published "The Divine Comedy" while in exi died in exile, and whatever is left of him today is still resting in exile.

The reason I bring this up is because if any of you decide to venture down and visit the Basilica of Santa Croce to see these celebrity tombs that it houses, tombs belonging to people like Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavel And as you're walking around taking pics of all these celebrity tombs, you'll bump into this thing, and you'll see people taking photos of this thing.

But don't waste your photos because he's not in there.

This is a cenotaph, or a funerary monument, in honor of Dante, who's actually buried in a city called Ravenna.

In fact, if you take a close loo at the monument, you'll see that the date there, two lines up is 1829.

Dante died in 1321, so where the hell was he for all those years?

We just pretend like Dante is buried here.

And it was Dante's good friend Giotto who was responsible for this painting.

This is the first painting that you will see when you visit the Uffizi Galler The subject of the painting is the Madonna and Child, and it was painted in 1310.

Giotto is the painter celebrated as being the first to break with what we call the Byzantine style.

That is the style of painting where the Virgin Mary usually looks more like an alien than she does a woman.

And the Christ child looks more like a little adult than he does a little baby.

And Giotto was the first painter to reintroduce naturalism into his works.

And I know this sounds complicat but all it really means was that he was using nature as his model, and nature as his inspiration.

So when you look at this paintin I want you to notice the legs of Mary pushing up against that dark mantle.

Before this painting, she normal a paper cutout doll, where body and drapery were one and the same.

More importantly, look at the breasts of Mary pushing up against that tunic.

So more than just a human body, this is a female body.

And for the first time in seven centuries, Mary's femininity has been given back to her.

And more than just a female, notice the physical contact betw Mommy and Junior.

Most of the time, Mary simply indicates the Christ child, but here she is holding his right leg with her right hand and you can see the tips of her fingers of her left hand under Jesus's left arm.

She is cradling and presenting Jesus at the same time.

So in a single painting, the Virgin Mary appears as a hum as a woman, and as a mama, and this is a veritable earthqua in the history of Christian art.

But if you want to see the first Renaissance style painting, then you need to head over to the church of Santa Maria Novell to see this fresco called the Holy Trinity, which was painted by an artist named Masaccio in the year 1427.

It depicts the Christian mystery of the Trinity by depicting its three persons.

We have G. T. F., as I like to c God the Father, represented as the older man up We have G. T. S., or God the Son represented as Christ hanging on his cross.

And we have G. T. H. S., or God the Holy Spirit, traditionally represented as a dove.

In my opinion, this is the most painting in the city of Florence and one of the most important paintings of all time, because it was the first ever to make use of a scientific tool called linear, or single-point, perspective.

Renaissance artists had figured out a way to create the illusion of real three-dimensional space on two dimensional surfaces.

This was a technology that neither the Greeks nor the Romans had ever achieved, and was evidence that what was going on in Renaissance Florence was actuall surpassing the ancients.

Of course, the Renaissance was n just about science and mathemati It was also about pure, unadulterated beauty.

Many of you may recognize those doors behind me.

The so-called Gates of Paradise, often described as the most beautiful and famous doors in the world.

Ten gilded bronze panels depicti Old Testament subject matter, which used to stand in the Eastern portal of the baptistry.

Used to, because the original doors were taken down in 1991 for restorati and today are visible inside of Cathedral Museum here in Florenc The artist was named Lorenzo Ghiberti.

It took him 27 years to complete them.

In fact, Ghiberti includes his own portrait in the frame of one of the doors, and still today these doors represent the most expensive sculptural contra in the history of this city.

They invested what today would b millions of dollars with one simple objective: make the most important building in Florence, the Baptis more beautiful.

And when you talk about Florence and you talk about money, one particular family immediately comes to mind and that family was named Medici That building behind me is the Medici Palace.

It's where they lived for the second half of the 15th century and not only was that their home, it was also the world headquarters of their busi which of course was banking.

And think about how astute the Medici were at using architecture as a marketing tool.

Because I'd feel pretty safe putting my money in that bank, very fortified and strong on its exterior.

But if you go inside, you'll fin a completely different style of architecture, very classically-inspired architectur You can almost hear the Vivaldi music playing softly in the background the expensive complimentary herbal tea being served in the corner as we Because you want your bank to be more than just a cold-hearted financial institution.

You want it to be cultured and affluent as well.

In many ways, the Medici wrote the book on what bank etiquette would be for centuries after.

And imagine the fabulous cocktail parties that they were throwing inside this building, and what were they chit-chatting about at these cocktail parties?

They were talking about stuff like this.

Alessandro Botticelli's famous "Birth of Venus," painted in the 1480s, and one of the first paintings of the Renaissance to depict a mythological subject The story depicted in the painti which hangs in the Uffizi Galler is a very simple one.

It shows how Venus, the goddess came into being.

According to a myth, she emerged fully-formed from the sea and was blown to shore by Zephyr the God of the Western Wind, who was accompanied by his companion, the nymph named Chlor And waiting for her on the shore is an hour, or personification, of the season of spring, who was waiting to clothe Venus in a flower-covered mantle to mark her as the queen of springtime.

It was exactly at this time that another famous artist appeared on the scene.

And you have all heard of this g His name: Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo was a whopping 20 years of age when he painted this Annunciatio which is also located in the Uffizi Gallery.

The key to looking at Leonardo's works is the subtlety with which he paint In most Annunciations, Mary's reaction to the Angel's message somewhat melodramatic, or as one students described it, looking a lot like the Heisman Trophy position.

Yet in Leonardo's Annunciation, the Virgin Mary looks calm and composed, at least on the surface.

The tension and the bending right hand of Mary reveals that she is indeed nervo She is just expressing that anxi in a much more subtle way.

And subtlety is not a term that I would use to describe the guy who made these statues.

Whenever we mention the name Leonardo, we always mention the name Michelangelo as well.

They were the two giants of the period that we call the Renaissa but I want you to realize is tha Leonardo da Vinci was 23 years older than Michelangelo Buonarotti, and that's a pretty significant age difference.

Their lives and their careers did cross over, but there was almost a generational gap between these two artists.

Now, when Michelangelo signed th contract for the David in 1501, he was 26 years old, and he sign that contract with the Opera, or the building committe of Florence Cathedral, because the originally-intended location for the statue was on one of the back buttresse of Florence Cathedral.

In layman's terms, about 85 feet up in the air.

And for that reason, the sculptu is as large as it is.

In fact, very few people ask why Michelangelo carved it as big as And the reason is because, if you're going to put it on a gargantuan church, it's going to have to be large.

The other thing that explains it is the disproportions, and despite what you might be thinking, the most famous disproportions on the David are the oversized hands and the oversized head.

Because when you put something 85 feet above the ground, it looks a lot different than it does at eye level.

So Michelangelo was anticipating the distortion that would be created by height.

About two and a half years into carving of a block of marble, that we estimate was about 18 feet tall and weighed upwards of 9 tons, the decision was made not to put the sculpture on top of the cathedral after al and the reason they gave was in describing it as being too magnifico, by which they meant two things.

The first, that the sculpture was too good, because many people believed the what many of us still believe to and that is pound for pound, it might just be the greatest sculpture that the human species has ever produced.

But they also mean size, because in its present scale, the statue of David stands at 17 feet, 1 inch in height.

It weighs in at just over five tons.

So the other lingering question was: "Just how the hell are we going to get it up there?"

A lot could go wrong in trying to lift such a massive object and to place it at such a precarious height.

So the decision was made not to put it on top of the most important building in Florence, the Cathed but instead in front of the second most important building in Florence, which is city hall or Palazzo Vecchio.

The statue of David represents the climax of everything that was happening in Florence in the 14th and 15th centuries.

But in many ways, it's also a turning point, because it's almost as soon as Michelangelo finishes this statu that he receives the phone call.

"We have a new Pope in Rome named Julius II, and he's calling all the great artists of Europe to Rome to rebuild the city," including Michelangelo himself.

So in many ways, it is this statue that marks this transition between Florence as the capital of the Renaissance, and Rome as that new capital at the beginning of the 16th century.

(dramatic music) If you enjoyed Florence: The Art of Magnificence, now you can purchase the program online and watch on-demand for $19.99 at rockyruggiero.com.

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