The men who made Florence the richest city in Europe,
the bankers and wool merchants the pious realists,
lived in grim defensive houses,
strong enough to withstand party feuds and popular riots.
They don't in any way foreshadow the extraordinary episode in the history of civilisation
known as the Renaissance.
There seems to be no reason why suddenly, out of the dark streets
and forbidding stone facades,
there arose a building as light and delicate as the Pazzi Chapel.
By its rhythms and proportions, and its open, welcoming character,
it totally contradicts the dark, Gothic style that preceded it
and, to some extent, still surrounds it.
What has happened?
The answer is contained in one sentence by the old Greek philosopher Protagoras:
"Man is the measure of all things. "
The building in front of which I am standing, the Pazzi Chapel,
built in about 1430 by the great architect Brunellesco,
has rightly been described as the architecture of humanism.
His friend, and fellow architect Leon Battista Alberti
addressed Man in these words:
"To you is given a body more, graceful than other animals
to you power of apt and various movements,
to you most sharp and delicate senses,
to you wit, reason, memory, like an immortal god. "
Well, it's certainly incorrect to say that we are more graceful than other animals,
and we don't feel much like immortal gods at the moment.
But in 1400, the Florentines did.
There's no better instance of how a burst of civilisation depends on confidence
than the Florentine state of mind in the early 15th century.
(MUSIC) Gloria
Where did it come from this light, economical style,
which is unlike anything before or since?
I think that it really was the invention of an individual - of Brunellesco.
But of course, an architectural style can't take root unless it satisfies some need of the time.
And Brunellesco's style satisfied the need of the clear-headed, bright-minded men
who appeared on the Florentine scene
at the moment when the discipline of trade and banking, in its most austere form,
was beginning to be relaxed,
and life - the full use of the human faculties - became more important than making money.
People sometimes feel disappointed
the first time they see the famous beginnings of Renaissance architecture -
the Pazzi Chapel, the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo -
because they seem so small.
Well, so they are, after the great monuments of Romanesque and Gothic architecture.
They don't try to impress us or crush us by size and weight,
as all God-directed architecture does.
Everything is adjusted to the scale of reasonable human necessity.
They're intended to make each individual more conscious of his powers,
as a complete moral and intellectual being.
"The dignity of man. " Today those words die on our lips.
But in 15th-century Florence, their meaning was still fresh and invigorating.
One of the second generation, of humanists, named Manetti
wrote a book entitled On The Dignity And Excellence Of Man.
And this is the concept that Brunellesco's friends were making visible.
(MUSIC) In Tempore Passionis
The grandest of all these testimonies to the dignity of man is by Masaccio
in the series of frescoes he painted in the church of the Carmine.
Two of them represent the apostles Peter and Paul performing acts of mercy.
As St Peter moves gravely through t,he streets, his shadow cures the sick
including this noble old man, more like a bishop than a beggar.
And in the balancing fresco, Peter and his disciples give alms
to a poor woman who is one of the great sculptural creations in painting.
What characters they are. Morally and intellectually, men of weight -
the least frivolous of men -
infinitely remote from the gay courtiers of Jean de Berry, who were only 30 years older.
They have that air of contained vitality and confidence
that one often finds in the founding fathers of a civilisation.
Those that come first to my mind are the Egyptians of the first four dynasties.
The most famous group in the series represents the story of the Tribute Money,
and the heads of the apostles seem to reflect the high seriousness of the Florentine republic.
It was directed by a group of the most intelligent individuals
who have ever been elected to power by a democratic government.
The Florentine chancellors were scholars
believers in the studia humanitatis - in which learning could be used to achieve a happy life -
believers in the application of free intelligence to public affairs,
believers, above all, in Florence.
The second and greatest of these humanist chancellors, Leonardo Bruni
compared the civic virtues of republican Florence with those of republican Rome.
Later, he went even further and compared her
to Athens in the age of Pericles, which wasn't far wrong.
As I have said before all the great ages of civilisation
have seen themselves as part of history, both as heirs and as transmitters.
And on Bruni's tomb in the church of Santa Croce
are inscribed the words:
"History is in mourning. "
Bruni and his friends had derived these ideals from the authors of Greece and Rome.
Now, much as one would like to say something new about the Renaissance,
the old belief that it was largely based on the study of antique literature remains true.
Of course, the Middle Ages derived much more
from classical antiquity than used to be supposed,
but their sources were limited, their texts corrupt, and their interpretations often fanciful.
Almost the first man to read classical authors with real insight was the poet Petrarch,
that complex figure of the 14th century, that false dawn of humanism
whose love of opposites -
of fame and solitude, of nature and politics, of rhetoric and self-revelation -
makes us think of him as the first modern man until we begin to read his works.
Petrarch never learnt Greek but his younger contemporary Boccaccio did,
and so there entered into Florentine thought a new, regenerative force and a new example.
The first 30 years of the 15th century was the heroic age of scholarship,
when unknown works by the greatest writers of antiquity -
Tacitus, Plato, Cicero and a dozen others -
were discovered in monastic libraries
where they had lain since they were copied in the Dark Ages.
And it was to house these precious texts, any one of which might contain some new revelation,
that Cosimo de Medici built the library of San Marco.
It looks to us peaceful and remote,
but the first studies that took place there were not remote from life at all.
It was the humanist equivalent of the Cavendish Laboratory.
The manuscripts unpacked and studied under these harmonious vaults
could alter the course of history, with an explosion not of matter but of mind.
(MUSIC) Ave Verum Corpus Natum
Next to the Pazzi Chapel are the cloisters of Santa Croce
also built by Brunellesco some years later.
I said that the Gothic cathedrals were hymns to divine light.
These cloisters with their round arches "running races in their mirth",
happily celebrate the light of human intelligence.
And sitting in them, I found it quite easy to believe in man.
When I first came here, nearly 50 years ago,
I felt "this is my true centre".
Well, twice it seemed that they were lost.
Once, at the end of the German occupation,
and once when the floods came
and there were fishes swimming where my feet are, in the ambulatory.
But so far, the forces of destruction have been defeated.
Clarity, economy, elegance.
These are the qualities that give distinction to a mathematical theorem.
And no doubt, early Renaissance architecture
is based on a passion for mathematics, particularly for geometry.
Of course, Gothic architects had designed on a geometrical basis,
but it had been of immense complexity,
as elaborate and as logical as scholastic philosophy.
Nothing could be more geometrical than the Florentine Baptistry,
which is one of the earliest buildings in the city.
But the Renaissance added to this tradition of design all sorts of philosophical notions,
including the idea that these forms must be applicable to the human body -
that each, so to say, guaranteed the perfection of the other.
There are dozens of drawings and engravings to demonstrate this proposition,
of which the most famous is by Leonardo da Vinci.
Mathematically, I'm afraid it's really a cheat,
but aesthetically, it has some meaning,
because the symmetry of the human body, and the relation of one part of it to another,
do influence our sense of normal proportion.
And philosophically, it contains the germ of an idea
which might save us if we could really believe it:
that through proportion, we can reconcile the two parts of our being -
the physical and the intellectual.
The same approach was applied to painting, in the system known as perspective,
by which it was thought that by mathematical calculation,
one could render on a flat surface the precise position of a figure in space.
And this too seems to have been invented by Brunellesco.
But we can see it best in the works of his two friends Ghiberti and Donatello
whose low-relief sculpture is really a kind of painting.
Ghiberti's Jacob and Esau on the famous Baptistry doors
shows perspective used to achieve a spatial harmony that has almost a musical effect.
(MUSIC) Music For Maximilian
Donatello's relief of St Anthony of Padua curing a boy's leg,
shows the other use of perspective:
to heighten emotion by a more intense awareness of space.
I don't know why, I always feel there's something alarming about an empty amphitheatre,
which suits the drama of this particular subject.
The Florentines were extremely proud of this invention
which they thought, wrongly as it turned out, was unknown to antiquity.
But has it anything to do with civilisation?
Well, when it was first invented, I think it had.
The belief that one could represent man in a real setting
and calculate his position and arrange figures in a demonstrably harmonious order,
this belief expressed symbolically a new idea about man's place in the scheme of things
and man's control over his own destiny.
As an aid to realism perspective is of no importance.
The realistic painters of Flanders got on very well without it.
But as a symbol, it means something,
and it's as a symbol that it passes into the decorative arts of the early Renaissance
and one finds it as the principal theme of those wooden inlays in panelled rooms or choir stalls,
which are a repertoire of Renaissance symbolism.
Perspective was concerned with the representation of towns,
if only because it was by the paved floor and receding arcade
that the system could be shown to advantage.
And in the 15th century, painters did a number of pictures of ideal towns,
which are both architectural harmonies and the perfect setting for social man.
Alberti describes, in his great book on building,
the necessity of a public square where young men may be diverted
from the mischievousness and folly natural to their age,
and, under handsome porticos, old men may spend the heat of the day
and be mutually serviceable to one another.
I think that Piero della Francesca who derived so much from Alberti
may well have had this, and similar passages in mind,
when he painted this, the most harmonious of all ideal cities.
The early Florentine Renaissance was an urban culture, bourgeois, properly so-called.
Men spent their time in the streets and squares and in the shops.
A good Florentine, says one of their moralists, "sta sempre a bottega" - is always in the shop.
And these shops were completely public.
You can see in this engraving, how a craftsman's workshop was open to the street
so that passers-by could see what was being done
and rival artists make scathing comments.
The Renaissance historian of art, Vasari
when he asked himself why it was in Florence more than elsewhere
that men became perfect in the arts, gave as his first answer:
"The spirit of criticism, the air of Florence making minds naturally free
and not content with mediocrity. "
And this harsh, outspoken criticism meant that there was no gap of incomprehension
between the intelligent patron and the artist.
Our contemporary attitude of pretending to understand works of art
in order not to appear philistines
would have seemed absurd to the Florentines.
They were a tough lot.
Many people since Bruni in 1428 have compared them with the Athenians,
but the Florentines were more realistic.
Whereas the Athenians loved philosophical argument,
the Florentines were chiefly interested in making money
and playing appalling practical jokes on stupid men.
However, they had a good deal in common with the Greeks.
They were curious, they were extremely intelligent,
and they had, to a supreme degree, the power of making their thoughts visible.
I hesitate to pronounce the much-abused word "beauty", but I can't think of a substitute.
Like the Athenians the Florentines loved beauty.
This is a constant source of surprise to anyone who knows them,
but as Walter Pater said of Michelangelo,
"Out of the strong, came forth sweetness. "
Donatello paid an even more direct tribute to the antique concept of beauty in his bronze David.
The body is almost disturbingly physical
and the head is derived from that of the great male beauty of the ancient world:
the emperor Hadrian's beloved Antinous,
although with a sharper Florentine accent that makes it far more attractive.
Donatello's David stands in the hall of the Bargello,
once a court of justice and a prison, is now a museum
but still quite a good place to get the flavour of 15th-century Florence
because it not only contains great works of the Florentine imagination, like the David,
but also the portraits of famous Florentines.
There were a few likenesses of individuals of the 14th century -
Dante, Petrarch, Charles V of France Jean de Berry -
but they were exceptional.
As a rule, medieval people were presented to the eye as figures that symbolised their status.
The painter of the Spanish Chapel in Santa Maria Novella
although he included so much lively detail,
made his popes, kings and bishops into stereotypes -
their status would have been recognised all over the Gothic world.
But these proudly individual characters
wished to record for posterity exactly what they were like.
In fact, many of these busts are done from actual death masks
which even great artists like Donatello didn't hesitate to incorporate in their work.
Of course, this bronze relief isn't at all a death mask.
It's the self-portrait of that character who so often flits in and out of the programme,
the architect and universal man Leon Battista Alberti.
What a face!.
Proud and alert like a wilful intelligent racehorse.
Among other things, Alberti wrote an autobiography,
and as we should expect, he is not inhibited by false modesty.
He tells us how the strongest horses trembled under him
how he could throw further and jump higher and work harder than any man.
He describes how he conquered every weakness because:
"a man can do all things if he will. "
It could be the motto of the early Renaissance.
And it's reflected in the heads of Renaissance heroes
as they have come down to us in their memorials -
in Donatello's Gattamelata in Padua.
Of course, these heads are so much idealised as to be, in our sense, scarcely portraits at all.
Realistic portraiture, the use of the accidents of each individual face to reveal inner life
wasn't a Florentine or even an Italian invention.
It was invented in Flanders
and came to an immediate perfection in the work of Jan van Eyck.
No-one has looked at a human face with a more dispassionate eye
and recorded his findings with a more delicate hand.
But in fact, many of his sitters were Italians -
Albergati, the cardinal who employed Alberti as secretary,
and Arnolfini, a member of the international world of the wool trade
banking, papal diplomacy.
And perhaps it was only in such a society
that these evolved and subtle characters
could have accepted the revelation of their personalities.
Van Eyck's exploration of personality extended beyond the face.
He shows people in their setting
and lovingly records the details of Arnolfini's daily life -
his wooden pattens for walking the muddy streets of Bruges,
his little dog of nameless breed,
his wife's elaborate sleeve
his own fur-lined cloak and convex mirror
and above all, his splendid brass chandelier.
And by a miracle that defies the laws of artistry,
he was able to show them to us enveloped in daylight,
as real as if it had been observed by Vermeer of Delft.
This sensibility to atmosphere, the Florentines never attempted.
They were a sculpture-minded people.
But in their portrait busts, they came to achieve an almost Flemish realism.
How like these Florentine worthies are
to the confident faces that we see in Victorian photographs.
This is the professional man, a doctor, his face lined with the wisdom of experience.
In fact, he was Donatello's doctor and saved his life.
And this is a businessman called Pietro Mellini.
A character in one of Alberti's dialogues says,
"A man cannot set his hand to more liberal work than making money,
for what we sell is our labour - the goods are merely transferred. "
Yes, that was really written in 1434, not in 1850.
And, contrariwise, if you dressed Mellini in 19th-century clothes,
he would look perfectly convincing.
But this atmosphere of liberal materialism is less than half the story.
After the middle of the 15th century, the intellectual life of Florence took a new direction
very different from the robust civic humanism of the 1430s.
Florence had ceased to be a republic in anything but name,
and for almost 30 years, it was virtually ruled by that extraordinary character Lorenzo de Medici.
His father and grandfather had prepared the way for him by their activities as bankers.
He himself was no financier - he lost a great part of the family fortune -
but he was a politician of genius,
who could distinguish between the reality of power and its outward trappings.
The frontispiece of his book of poems, shows him in the streets of Florence
dressed as a simple citizen, surrounded by girls who are singing his ballads.
What a contrast is this modest printed page to the rich manuscripts of the Duke of Berry.
In fact, Lorenzo was a good poet and a most admirable patron of other poets,
also of scholars and philosophers.
But he wasn't much interested in the visual arts
and the paintings by which his period is remembered
were commissioned by his cousin Lorenzino.
And it was for Lorenzino that Botticelli painted the works
in which the Florentine sense of beauty appears in its most evolved and peculiar form -
The Spring and The Birth Of Venus.
In the earlier of them, The Spring, the subject is derived from Ovid,
but this classical inspiration is given a new complexity by memories of the Middle Ages.
The pagan divinities sway before a background of leaves,
like a Gothic tapestry.
What a marvellous feat of the imagination.
As for the heads, they're a discovery of beauty that means much more to us
than the full, smooth oval of antiquity.
(MUSIC) Ecca La Primavera
The subject of Botticelli's other great allegory, The Birth Of Venus
is taken from a contemporary poet, Poliziano.
(MUSIC) Tres Douce Regard
Poliziano was part of a group of subtle Florentines
who were inspired by the late Greek philosophers known as neo-Platonists.
It was their hope they might reconcile these pagan philosophers with Christianity.
And so, Botticelli's Venus
not at all the amorous strumpet of paganism,
is pale and withdrawn,
and dissolves into his image of the Virgin Mary.
The discovery of the individual was made in early 15th-century Florence.
Nothing call alter that fact.
But in the last quarter of the century, the Renaissance owed quite as much
to the small courts of northern Italy - Ferrara, Mantua, and above all Urbino -
this small and rather remote town on the eastern perimeter of the Apennines.
It could be argued that life in the court of Urbino
was one of the high watermarks of Western civilisation.
The reason is that this court and its dominions were protected from the surrounding ruffians
by Frederigo Montefeltro, the first Duke of Urbino
the greatest general of his day,
who was also a humane and intelligent man.
And the town itself, with its soft pink bricks,
so different from the harsh stones of Florence
seems to reflect the same feeling of humanity.
It's small enough for a good ruler to know all the inhabitants
and listen to their troubles.
Which, in fact is exactly what Duke Frederigo did.
His palace began as a fortress,
built on an impregnable rock.
And only when he'd fought his way to security
could he afford to give it the sweet and delicate details
which make it one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture in the world.
The Palace of Urbino has a style of its own.
The arcaded courtyard, where I'm standing now,
isn't speedy and springy like Brunellesco's cloister
but calm and timeless.
And the rooms are light and airy.
And so perfectly-proportioned that it exhilarates one to walk through them.
In fact, I think the interior is the most beautiful in the world
and the only palace that I can go round without feeling oppressed and exhausted.
(MUSIC) Se Me Grato
Curiously enough,
we don't know the name of the architect who was responsible for this masterpiece.
A famous fortress builder named Laurana did the substructure
but he left Urbino long before the lived-in part of the palace was begun.
But the painter Piero della Francesca was there
at exactly the date when it was being decorated.
And, personally, I believe that he was responsible for its style.
The architecture in this picture by Piero, which is in Urbino
shows exactly the same kind of delicate detail
one finds round the doors and windows of the palace,
and it was painted ten years earlier.
However, I think that the noble proportions and the whole sense of space
must reflect the character of the Duke himself.
His biographer, named Vespasiano da Bisticci
refers again and again to the Duke's humanity.
He asked the Duke "What is necessary in ruling a kingdom?"
The Duke replied, "Essere umano. "
"To be human. "
Whoever invented the style, this is the spirit that permeates the Palace of Urbino.
As a part of civilisation,
the Palace of Urbino extended beyond the 15th century.
The great architect of the High Renaissance, Bramante
was a native of Urbino.
He may even have worked on the palace when it was being completed.
The court painter was a silly old, creature named Giovanni Santi
the sort of obliging mediocrity who's always welcome in courts -
even in the court of Urbino.
No doubt the ladies, when they were in need of a design for embroidery,
used to say, "Let's send for dear old Mr Santi. "
And when he came
he brought with him his beautiful little son...
Raffaello.
And so, Raphael,
one of the civilising forces of the Western imagination,
found his earliest impressions of harmony and proportion and good manners
in the court of Urbino.
Good manners.
That was another product of Urbino.
In common with other Italian courts Ferrara and Mantua
young men went there to finish their education.
They learnt to read the classics, to walk gracefully,
speak quietly,
play games without cheating or kicking each other on the shins -
in short, to behave like gentlemen.
Under Frederigo's son and successor, Guidobaldo
the notion of a gentleman was given classic expression in a book called Il Cortigiano -
The Courtier - by Baldassare Castiglione.
It had an immense influence.
The Emperor Charles V had only three books beside his bed
the Bible, Machiavelli's Prince
and Castiglione's Courtier.
For over a hundred years, it formed everybody's notion of good manners.
Actually, it's very much more than a handbook of polite behaviour,
because Castiglione's ideal of a gentleman is based on real human values.
He mustn't hurt people's feelings,
or make them feel inferior by showing off.
He must be easy and natural.
Just as Castiglione himself appears to be in his portrait by Raphael.
And he mustn't be a mere worldling.
Il Cortigiano ends with a moving discourse on the subject of love.
Just as Botticelli's Spring unites the tapestry world of the Middle Ages
with pagan mythology,
so Castiglione's Courtier unites the medieval concept of chivalry
with the ideal love of Plato.
(MUSIC) L'amor Donna
There's no doubt that the court of Urbino under both Frederigo and Guidobaldo,
was a high point in the history of civilisation.
And the same is true, in a lesser degree, of the court of Mantua.
The palace of Mantua lacks the exhilarating lightness and lucidity of the palace of Urbino.
But it contains one room
in which more than anywhere else, perhaps,
one can get an idea of civilised life in an Italian court.
It's the room decorated by the court painter Andrea Mantegna.
Birds and cherubs... and people
look down from an imaginary hole in the roof.
A new use of perspective.
(MUSIC) Suite No1 pavane
Then come painted busts of Roman emperors.
But the scene below isn't at all archaeological.
It shows the Gonzaga family as large as life.
Also their dogs...
.. their courtiers...
their old retainers...
and one of their celebrated dwarves.
In spite of the formidable frontality of the Marchioness
the spirit of the whole group is extremely natural.
The little girl asks if she may eat an apple,
but her mother's interested to know what news
the Marquess has just received from his secretary.
In fact it is good news. Their son has been made a cardinal.
And in another scene, the Marquess goes to greet him accompanied by his dogs
and his younger sons.
What an agreeably informal reception.
One of the younger children holds his hand,
and the little boy takes the hand of his elder brother.
It's still without the odious pomposity that was to grow up in Europe during the next century
and reach its zenith at Versailles.
I'm bound to say that even Mantegna
has not been able to make the newly-created Cardinal look like a very spiritual type.
Which reminds one of the obvious fact
that this kind of social organisation depended entirely
on the individual characters of the rulers.
In one state is Sigismondo Malatesta, the Wolf of Rimini
who did things that even the most advanced theatrical producer
would hesitate to put on the stage.
In a neighbouring state, Frederigo Montefeltro,
the God-fearing father of his people.
And yet both of them employed Alberti
and both were painted by Piero della Francesca.
Frederigo was a lover of books,
who made the palace of Urbino into one of the finest libraries in Italy.
But when he read them
he left his armour on.
And he needed to.
This was one of the weaknesses of Renaissance civilisation.
And the other, no less obviously,
was that it depended on a very small minority.
Even in republican Florence, the Renaissance touched relatively few people.
And in places like Urbino and Mantua,
it was practically confined to the court.
This is contrary to our modern sense of equality.
But one can't help wondering how far civilisation would have evolved
if it had been entirely dependent on the popular will.
WB Yeats actually used the example of Urbino when he addressed a poem
"to a wealthy man who promised a subscription to the Dublin gallery
if it were proved that the people wanted pictures. "
He said
"And Guidobaldo, when he made that mirror school of courtesy
Where wit and beauty learnt their trade
Upon Urbino's windy hill,
Had sent no runners to and fro
That he might learn the shepherds' will. "
One may not like courts - I don't much like them myself-
but at a certain stage, it's only in a court
that a man may do something, extravagant for its own sake
because he wants to because it seems worth doing -
something like the extraordinary wooden inlays in this study.
And it's sometimes through such wilful, superfluous actions
that men discover their powers.
All the same, as one walks through these splendidly extravagant rooms,
one can't help thinking, "What about the people in the fields?"
All those shepherds who Mr Yeats rightly supposed that Guidobaldo did not consult
on matters of taste and good manners.
Could they not have had a kind of civilisation of their own?
Well, there is such a thing as a civilised countryside.
Looking at the Umbrian landscape with its terraces of vines and olives
and the dark vertical accents of the cypresses,
one has the impression of timeless order.
There must have been a time when it was all forest and swamp.
Shapeless, formless.
And to bring order out of chaos is a process of civilisation.
But of this timeless rustic civilisation we have no record beyond the farmhouses themselves,
whose noble proportions seem to be the basis of Italian architecture.
When Renaissance artists looked at the countryside,
it was not as a place of ploughing and digging
but as a kind of earthly paradise.
This is how it appears in the first evolved landscape in European painting,
the background of van Eyck's Adoration Of The Lamb.
The foreground is painted with a medieval sharpness of detail,
but our eye, passing over the towers and dense greenery of laurels and palms
floats into a gleaming distance.
(MUSIC) La Deploration De Johan Okeghem
Already, awareness of nature is associated with the desire to escape
and the hope of a better life.
And such it remained in the work of Giovanni Bellini, the founder of Venetian painting,
who first used his backgrounds to create a mood
in which the action or story of the picture can be more vividly felt.
Bellini was a religious painter.
His landscapes intensify the traditional subjects of Christianity.
His pupil, Giorgione, was to extend the humanisation of landscape to contemporary life.
And in this picture,
he has discovered or I suppose one should say rediscovered,
one of the comforting illusions of civilised man - the myth of Arcadia.
Of course, it is only a myth.
Our country life isn't at all like this.
Even on a picnic, ants attack the sandwiches and wasps buzz round the wineglass.
But Giorgione has shown us how fundamentally pagan it is.
This Arcadia is as much a tribute to antiquity
as were the republican virtues of the Florentine humanists.
And as much part of the rediscovery of man.
But in his sensual rather than his intellectual nature.
With Giorgione's picnic, the balance and enjoyment of our human faculties
seems to achieve perfection.
But in history, all points of supposed perfection have a hint of menace
and Giorgione himself discovers it in that mysterious picture known as the Tempesta.
What on earth is going on?
What is the meaning of this half-naked woman suckling a baby,
this flash of lightning,
this broken column?
Nobody knows. Nobody has ever known.
It was described in Giorgione's own time as "a soldier and a gypsy".
Well, whatever it means
it certainly doesn't show any confidence in the light of human reason.
"A man can do all things if he will. "
How na�ve Alberti's statement seems
when one thinks of that great bundle offears and memories
that every individual carries around with him,
to say nothing of the external forces which are totally beyond his control.
Giorgione, the passionate lover of physical beauty,
painted this picture of an old woman and inscribed it "col tempo" -"with time".
One can see that she must once have been a beauty.
It's one of the first masterpieces of a new pessimism -
new, because without the comfort of religion that was to be given final expression by Hamlet.
The truth is, I suppose,
that the civilisation of the early Renaissance was not broadly enough based.
The few had gone too far away from the many,
not only in knowledge and intelligence - this they always do -
but in basic assumptions.
When the first two generations of humanists were dead
their movement had no real weight behind it.
And there was a reaction away from this human scale of values.
Fortunately, they left in sculpture, painting and architecture
their message to every generation that values reason, clarity and harmonious proportion,
and believes in the individual.
(MUSIC) La Deploration De Johan Okeghem