There is a growing fashion in historical documentary-making for blending factual accounts with dramatised versions thereof. Royal Kill List (about the Restoration) and Royal Bastards: The Rise of the Tudors used actors to deliver both, but others prefer to use sensible people for at least the factual stuff, and the latter is the path Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty has chosen to follow.
Here are gathered contemporary artists including Antony Gormley, Alison Lapper, biographers of the artistic colossi under discussion and art historians aplenty, along with pertinent others, such as Sarah Dunant – author of several novels about Renaissance Italy. Their role is to impart the vital facts about the careers, creations and increasingly intense rivalries of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael (the first person to make a Ninja turtles joke can see me after class) in 15th- ’n’ a little bit of 16th-century Florence – and Milan, Rome, Tuscany and Umbria. But mostly Florence, at least when it wasn’t being steamrollered by Savonarola.
And in the dramatised bits, Charles Dance plays Michelangelo, gamely resisting what is surely a gargantuan temptation to “Donald Sinden” (a ham so rare it can’t be cured) this bad boy up to the rafters (or Sistine Chapel spandrels, I guess, given what is coming in 1508). The script, we are told in an opening caption, is based on Michelangelo’s own writings and inspired by contemporary accounts. Between this and Dance’s formidable presence you get a sense of the towering ego – stopping short of monstrousness – as well as the vulnerabilities of the devout man suffering for his homosexual inclinations (Kate Lister, historian of sexuality, is drafted in to limn the terrors of the Office of the Night, a court that policed the crime of sodomy there for 70 years, in case God’s teachings weren’t enough). We see also the rage induced and spur to ambition provided by his competition.
The whys and wherefores of transformative cultural moments are eternally fascinating. If Florence had not been the home of the Medici family and the central beneficiary of their banking prowess and innovation. If they hadn’t coupled – almost uniquely in history – their wealth with an interest in art (as propaganda and for its own sake) and exquisite taste. If Medici patriarch Lorenzo had not been as interested in bringing along the next generation of artists and taken the young Michelangelo under his wing, would the world know of him? Or would he have obeyed his father and given up the dream of being what was then considered a lowly artist?
And then there were three. The quintessential Renaissance man Leonardo (“He could capture beauty and grace like no other,” says Dance with a mixture of hatred and awe) arrives from Milan – and the game is truly afoot. Leonardo’s endless curiosity and multitudinous talents make him less focused and more dilettantish than Michelangelo – but the kind of dilettante who produces The Last Supper and effortlessly introduces narrative into painting. And so his reputation grows and grows, however much the surrounding dukes and warmongers among Italy’s many bellicose city states get in the way of the smooth accomplishment of any artistic vision. Or is the ugliness surrounding them the grit in the oyster of genius?
Soon they are joined by Raphael and the race for commissions and the jockeying for position begins – the desire to be the best of the best mixing with the purer desire simply to do their finest work. Whatever the complexity of the motivation, the world is the winner. The documentary takes suitably lengthy pauses to showcase their greatest accomplishments and linger over details, each more astonishing than the last. How could anyone create Battle of the Centaurs – that mass of entangled bodies appearing to writhe before your very eyes, even though they are, impossibly, impossibly, made of stone. But then Michelangelo created his Pietà, the veins still visible under Christ’s skin as Mary both cradles him and offers him to the world. And then there’s David (Il Gigante), chiselled from a block of Carrara marble more than five metres tall over four years, and liable to drive you round the bend with its perfection if you look at it too long. There’s the Sistine Chapel, too, of course. But Michelangelo didn’t consider himself a painter.
If the other two get slightly less of a look-in – well, they should have lived longer, left more writings behind and made paintings as telegenic as sculpture. What Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty does for all three, though, is make you long to know more. About all of them, about all of art, about how we are able to create beauty out of bloodshed and when we might start doing so again.
Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty aired on BBC One and is available on iPlayer.
