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Python slams
'overrated' Renaissance
" I'm sick of the way people's eyes
light up when they start talking
about the Renaissance. I'm sick of
the way art critics tend to say:
'Aaaah! The Renaissance! "
Terry Jones
Terry Jones

" Why does everybody
think the Renaissance
was such a wonderful
thing – this amazing,
wonderful step forward
for all humanity…and
the modern world ? It
doesnt look like that to
me. There were a lot
of unpleasant things
going on. "
Is the Renaissance over rated ?

"The word "Renaissance" was coined in the 16th century
to plug artists in Florence…they had a vested interest in
saying these new Italians were the bees’ knees.

"So they called everything in between the ages of darkness
or the Middle Ages - the age in between."

"The Renaissance writers and thinkers went out of their
way to rubbish the centuries that preceded them. Which
is why we call them the Middle Ages.

"The word "medieval" means anything backward and
dirty…On the news war crimes are sometimes described
as " medieval savagery" but there have been more
holocausts in our time.
Is the Renaissance over rated ?

"I want to vent my irritation at the Renaissance," Jones
explains, brimful of passion for his subject and reaching for
images of medieval art on his laptop to underline his point.

"The Renaissance has bad-mouthed the middle ages for so
long, and because of our embracing everything about the
Renaissance, we've swallowed that. But it was just
propaganda: it was in Renaissance interests to pretend that
nothing had happened between antiquity and them and to
portray themselves as a forward-looking modernising
movement.

Whereas, in fact, they were neo-conservatives supporting
petty tyrannies in northern Italy. I'm saying, look at the
medieval world: contrary to what you may have heard, it's
full of life, vitality and individuality."
Pretty nasty regimes

The Renaissance was given
an impulse by despots.
Michelangelo, Leonardo and
others were givng there
services to pretty nasty
regimes like the Medici.
They were being used to
prop up brutal regimes and
made them look good.
Mantegna making despotic
materilaists look good ?
The Prince



In the Medieval period
there was a lot of debate
about the differance
between a tyrant and a
good ruler.
Chaucer and others gave
instructions for Princes on
how to rule in the interests
of the people.
Machiavelli’s book is all
about holding power in
your own interests.
The Huguenot Gentillet in his Discours
contre Machievel in 1576…


Machiavelli's "books were
held most dear and
precious by our Italian and
Italionized courtiers in
France, and at the root of
France's present
degradation, which has
culminated in the St
Bartholemew massacre."
Catherine de Médicis &
François Mitterrand…les
florentins…
Artistic innovation ?

I don’t think Renaissance architecture was a step
forward.

"But the Medieval world was modern. At least it was
modern to them. I mean their architecture for
instance, nobody had seen anything like this
before, ever.

"Whereas the Renaissance was very conservative in
looking back to the classical world of Greece and
Rome and going back to domes and columns and
pretending that the only time of enlightenment had
been the ancient world.
Did they think the earth was flat ?
Flat Earth ?

To mark the start of the new millennium, the New
York Times ran a leader that stated: 'A thousand
years ago, when the earth was reassuringly flat
and the universe revolved around it, the ordinary
person had no last name, let alone any claim to
individualism...

Then came the Renaissance, an explosion of
scientific discovery and humanist insight and, as
both cause and effect, the rise of individual selfconsciousness... the beginning of our modern
era.'
Flat Earth ?

But the medieval world wasn't a time of stagnation or
ignorance. A lot of what we assume to be medieval
ignorance is, in fact, our own ignorance about the medieval
world.

Take for example the idea that the people of the Middle
Ages thought the earth was flat. It simply isn't true. And
yet the New York Times takes it as gospel and, indeed,
some get quite cross when you try to tell them that people
in the Middle Ages were quite aware that the world was
round.

The idea that they thought it was flat was invented by an
American journalist by the name of Washington Irving. In
1828, he wrote a biography of Columbus in which he
described the great man confronting the Church leaders
who accused him of heresy for claiming the earth was
round when the Church taught that it was flat.
Over to you Harry…

“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, five
hundred years of democracy and peace...and
what did they produce ? ...the cuckoo
clock.”
Orson Wells as Harry Lime in The Third Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFi4TdvBEVw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZg8a0nqjTE&feature=PlayList&p=6FE0F53A7A06EBB1&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5
Which do you prefer ?