Bettany Hughes on the Medici, Bankers to the Renaissance [30min]

The Medici are synonymous with the Renaissance, but why did these bankers act as patrons to artists like Michelangelo and Donatello -- was it a love of art or something more sinister? Bettany Hughes begins a three part re-evaluation of one of the most creative and complicated partnerships in the western world. Set against the contrasting sun and shade of a Florentine summer, amongst the ochre splendour of the Piazza della Signoria, beneath the dome of the Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore -- historian Bettany Hughes begins a three part re-evaluation of one of the most creative and complicated partnerships in the western world, that between the millennium's most inspired artists and the family who supported them.

Set between the founding of the Medici Bank in 1397 and the aftermath of the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1494, this is a critical, intimate, yet spectacular portrait of the two halves of the equation that added up to the most extraordinary celebration of the power of mankind, presented by a broadcaster and historian who inhabits their world and the world they allowed to re-enter Western thought.

Standing at the moment when those ancient values fused with the possibilities of the modern, Bettany encounters the soap opera life of a single family that personified the agonies, excesses and breath-taking beauties of the Renaissance.

The Medici were the gatekeepers to the ancient world. Their nurturing of University understanding, the collection of Roman and Greek manuscripts for their library and their sponsorship of humanist artist made them the lynchpin of the Renaissance as the medieval world began to re-examine the relationship between man, God and the world.

But underpinning these cataclysmic changes was a very close, intimate relationship -- between the historians, philosophers and artists on the one hand, and the Medici businessmen and Princes on the other. Theirs is not just a simple story of artist and patron; theirs is a story of politics, insight, faith and understanding.

This series is about that symbiotic relationship and the vast change in our perceptions that stemmed from it. Bettany is a historian of the ancient world -- but much of the world that so fascinates her is seen through the prism of a century or so of cultural activity in Florence.

The Renaissance, though, was not a unified, predetermined event that washed the values of the ancient world into the mainstream of the new. It was a far more fragile, random entity than that. The one great constant? The presence of a Medici at every turn of the story.

This will also be a critical examination of the Medici micro-climate of fifteenth century Florence too. We won’t get too misty eyed about these benign dictators and inveterate dispensers of political and cultural patronage. Their love of the arts was a pragmatic one too. It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for a rich man to get to heaven -- and the Medici of the fifteenth century were very rich men indeed. They were also bankers -- engaging in the moral sin of usury. They needed artists to glorify the works of God and Man to buy them salvation. We can’t tell if that strategy worked – but in this life at least, the artists they fostered left a legacy that has ensured their immortality.