Beauty and Terror: The Italian Renaissance Re-envisioned

Historically Thinking

0:00

-1:05:22

Beauty and Terror: The Italian Renaissance Re-envisioned

Catherine Fletcher on the art, bloodshed, and passions of the Renaissance

Historically Thinking

Jul 08, 2020

Originally published on July 8, 2020 (Episode 166)

Introduction

In the movie The Third Man, Orson Welles delivered this sensational ad-libbed speech:

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

This was unfair to Swabia, which invented the cuckoo clock, and to Switzerland, whose mercenaries were involved with most of that warfare, and were up to their elbows in that bloodshed—which they then transmuted into gold flowing into Switzerland, where it funded banks, dairies, watchmakers, and the perfections of the multiplex knife.

But Welles’ take on sixteenth-century history is not that far removed from Catherine Fletcher’s new history The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West, which reminds us that the art of the Renaissance existed in a world of warfare; and that its literature thrived despite, or even because of, deep religious passions.

About the Guest

Catherine Fletcher is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University and a historian of Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. She is the author of The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West (Oxford University Press, 2020), and The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici. She has also served as historical adviser to the set designers of the BBC series Wolf Hall.