Michaelangelo’s David, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: we know the bare images as if we were born with them already in our minds. Less well known are the forces that shaped their creation.
That’s the story Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty seeks to tell: one in which art was central to power and the men who made it gained an agency that made them more than mere artisans. But, it makes clear, less than kings – Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci and the upstart Raphael were all obliged to trade their skills, and to take them elsewhere as leaders rose and fell in the warring states of 15th- and 16th-century Italy.
At times, it was literally a matter of warcraft. Leonardo gained the favour of the royal court of Milan with a letter talking up his ability to design new weapons systems (“likewise I make paintings, anything you want”) and Michaelangelo got himself appointed “Governor and Procurator General of the Fortifications” when Florence endured a siege in the 1520s. More often, it was the ability to flatter the power of their patrons by creating astonishing works of art in their names and (especially in the case of Raphael) images – and to serve their political purposes.
“Art is a way in which you represent what’s happening and how politics is being played out,” explains historian Jerry Brotton at one point in The Blood and the Beauty. “They need the art – art is central to how messages are disseminated.”
The three-part BBC documentary takes a form familiar from Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius and Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. A narrator carries the thread, a series of contemporary commentators provide context, and a cast of actors mutely pace through re-enactments of the drama being described.
But The Blood and the Beauty is better than either, in part because it allows one of its subjects to speak. The key voice in it is that of Michelangelo, the one of the three superstar artists who “lives into old age, to bear witness to it all”, as played by Charles Dance. Dance’s performance to the camera, as a troubled and possibly unreliable narrator, is based on the artist’s own writings. It’s also not the only thing here that makes us think of Game of Thrones.
The Blood and the Beauty is also better as a simple matter of craft. Rise of a Genius was badly lit, and its talking heads were clunkily inserted against flat, grey backdrops. The Blood and the Beauty, befitting its subjects, is far more visually cohesive and its experts weave elegantly in and out.
It also doesn’t fall into the trap of trying too hard to depict a modern parallel for its story. The political commentators in The Making of a Dictator fell over themselves offering lessons about the perils of contemporary populism. Here, we’re left to muse for ourselves about Donald Trump making himself the chair of the Kennedy Center, or the fact that Russian statecraft is the work of a theatre director.
Perhaps there was, in the end, no real parallel. Perhaps the role of art in Renaissance Italy, as a tool of warring popes, princes and family dynasties, genuinely is unique in our history. Yet if we want to understand modernity, this tremendous docuseries about the age when modernity was born is a very good place to start.
Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty begins on Sky Arts on Monday, August 4, at 7.30pm
