- 6/2/2025
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00:00St Peter's Square with St Peter's Basilica, or just St Peter's.
00:07It's a monumental, magnificent building with larger-than-life statues of the Apostles
00:13that come across as divine images.
00:17It's the most impressive monument of the Renaissance.
00:21The colossal colonnades are reminiscent of ancient temples.
00:25St Peter's is the largest church in the world.
00:29Just a few generations before its time, it would have been impossible to construct such an edifice.
00:36Nobody would have been able to plan and organise all the work.
00:40Nobody had the necessary knowledge of mathematics, physics and structural engineering.
00:46People would simply have been unable.
00:49Then, in the mid-16th century, artists and scholars made their entry onto the stage of history.
01:01It was the age of the Renaissance.
01:03They managed to do what had seemed impossible for the previous thousand years.
01:08Within just four generations, they had the knowledge to implement such massive projects as St Peter's.
01:16It's as if a turbocharger had accelerated Europe's development.
01:21The driving forces were men like Michelangelo Buonarroti, polymaths who found solutions to all the problems,
01:28so that the seemingly impossible became possible.
01:32Their achievements still resonate today.
01:36But what was their secret?
01:38The secret of an age in which the world seemed to undergo a paradigm shift.
01:43The age of the Renaissance.
01:45Rome in 1547.
02:05Among the all-rounders of the Renaissance, this man stood out.
02:09Michelangelo Buonarroti.
02:11At the construction site for St Peter's, probably the largest in Europe,
02:17he was project manager, architect and artist all in one.
02:2272 years old by this time, he was still a man driven by ambition.
02:33Michelangelo was a titan of the Renaissance.
02:36He was a painter, sculptor, architect, a scientist, a nuisance and a genius.
02:42An all-round talent.
02:44One of his works became the icon of an entire era,
02:48and he himself became the prototype of the modern man
02:52who entered the world stage with the Renaissance.
02:55Michelangelo's David is the best known sculpture in art history.
03:04Men like Michelangelo were the managers of an era in which art and culture,
03:11knowledge and technology developed at near lightning speeds.
03:15Florence in 1501.
03:20Michelangelo surprised his contemporaries with works that bordered on the miraculous.
03:25His task was to carve David out of a marble block weighing 12 tons,
03:30a task at which two sculptors before him had failed.
03:34It was the start of an obsession for Michelangelo.
03:37He spent three years working non-stop on the 5-metre statue,
03:43the first monumental sculpture of the High Renaissance.
03:48His David is a statement.
03:50Men equal to gods.
04:00That was almost the motto of the age.
04:07The image of mankind changed in the Renaissance.
04:13Pope Innocent III had said at the end of the 12th century
04:16that man was excrement, a slimy secretion, a contemptible creature.
04:21The medieval belief was that the sinful nature of man was visible on man.
04:25In the Renaissance you could sense how tired people had become of this pessimistic view.
04:31The idea arose that man was almost like God.
04:35Man was God's creation, endowed with reason, with strengths
04:40and as his image, man could almost become a God.
04:50Around ten years after the completion of his David,
04:53Michelangelo finished his Moses for the tomb of Pope Julius II.
04:58It too is larger than life.
05:00An angry prophet with bulging veins and a fearsome demeanor.
05:05In antiquity, that's how gods were depicted.
05:16Michelangelo learned from the masters of antiquity, but he didn't copy them.
05:21The Renaissance was more than just the rebirth of antiquity.
05:26Men like him created something new.
05:28They took the techniques and art of the ancient Greeks and Romans
05:32and developed them further.
05:35You won't find a single artwork of the Renaissance that simply copied an ancient one.
05:42The crucial thing is that the Renaissance didn't just rediscover the critical minds of the Greeks, for example.
05:47It didn't just confront the science and scholarship of antiquity.
05:51It developed everything further.
05:53It invented completely new things and it toppled the ancient giants who'd originally been its teachers.
05:59A Renaissance work.
06:02Botticelli's Primavera, one of the best-known works of the West.
06:06Raffaele's school of Athens glorified ancient thought.
06:11Then there's Leonardo's Mona Lisa, an icon of her age.
06:17For more than a thousand years, it had fallen into oblivion.
06:22The skill of capturing the three-dimensional world realistically on a flat canvas.
06:27A quantum leap for architecture.
06:30The Renaissance rediscovered perspective.
06:36It emphasized symmetry.
06:38Architecture borrowing from antiquity was one of its themes.
06:42The art of building huge domes had fallen into oblivion in the Middle Ages.
06:51It was rediscovered in the Renaissance.
06:54But the Renaissance didn't limit itself to art.
06:57Thanks to the invention of double-entry bookkeeping,
07:04businessmen now knew what funds they had available when…
07:09As a result, the fortunes of the newly rich flowed into the pockets of the talented.
07:15An investment programme for scholars and artists.
07:19Never before was so much invented and devised in such a short period of time.
07:25New machines were constructed.
07:31And the human machine was explored.
07:34It was a heyday for anatomy.
07:40It was also the first time people had followed the time.
07:44Another first.
07:45Pocket-sized timepieces were invented.
07:47But from now on they also measured the orbits of the planets.
07:51The heavens-guided seafarers, adventurers discovered new trade routes.
07:56The known world tripled in size.
08:00There's probably no place in the world where so much was discussed in one big conversation
08:07with such a large number of participants, where new things were invented in such quick succession.
08:12Printing triggered a huge discourse that captivated large parts of the population.
08:18Elites, scholars and clerics too, of course, exchanged ideas.
08:24In this way, they invented groundbreaking new things.
08:27But what were the triggers for this exceptional period of history?
08:35What were the ingredients of this explosive development?
08:39How come men like Michelangelo were suddenly masters of knowledge and techniques that had been lost for centuries?
08:46A look back in time. Rome in the first century.
08:53For the Romans of this era, the construction of St. Peter's would have been a feasible task.
08:59That's evidenced by the Forum Romanum, the power center of an empire that ruled the entire Western world.
09:07And one that exported its way of life to the farthest provinces.
09:12Rome dictated the art, culture and architecture of an entire era.
09:26Rome was home to a million people at the time.
09:29That's twenty times more than one of the largest cities of the Renaissance, London.
09:40But Rome's dominance was built on the oppression of millions of slaves.
09:45Entire peoples were subjugated.
09:47For centuries, the Roman military machines succeeded in holding the empire together.
10:00But at some point, the barbarians got the upper hand.
10:03The Germanic tribes, the Goths and Vandals.
10:06In the fifth century, the Western Empire ceased to exist.
10:18Roma Kaputmundi, the capital of the world, the city that was home to a million, fell into decay.
10:26The dark ages began.
10:29The knowledge of antiquity was lost.
10:32Knowledge in all areas, particularly in engineering, architecture, mathematics and physics.
10:40The ruins of antiquity were plundered as quarries.
10:47A few generations after the fall, nobody was any longer capable of creating anything remotely comparable.
10:54In 330 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine had moved his capital to the Bosporus.
11:03Constantinople became the empire's new centre.
11:08After that, the empire split into an eastern and western half.
11:15This eastern Roman Empire survived as an ancient island on the Bosporus until the 15th century.
11:21It was home to more than half a million people.
11:26They called themselves Romaoi, Romans.
11:30Their emperors saw themselves as descendants of Caesar and Augustus.
11:34Constantinople was the second Rome and its patriarch was the head of the Orthodox Christians.
11:40Something else too.
11:41Constantinople was the back-up folder of antiquity.
11:46Its scholars were leading figures in every faculty.
11:50The Rome of the East was the bullock of antiquity in a medieval world.
12:01Nobody had been able to conquer the city on the Bosporus.
12:04But one-seventh of the population were merchants from Genoa, Pisa and the Republic of Venice, known as Latins.
12:19An affluent minority unpopular with the Eastern Romans with a reputation of being arrogant and quarrelsome.
12:30In early 1171 there were riots in the Gionese Quarter in Pera.
12:36Emperor Manuel I, Comnenos, accused the Venetians of being troublemakers.
12:44Venetian merchants were arrested and locked up and their possessions confiscated.
12:49Venice tried to defend its people, but in vain.
13:02It was the start of a conflict that lasted decades and ultimately ended in disaster for Constantinople.
13:09The conflict culminated in a crusade that went down in history as the fourth.
13:20Not a crusade against people of a different faith, but a war waged by Catholic Christians against Orthodox Christians.
13:27And then the seemingly impossible happened. The Crusaders broke through the walls of Constantinople.
13:45On the night from the 12th to the 13th of April, 12,004, the resistance from the imperial troops collapsed.
13:53For three days the Crusaders plundered the city, abusing, raping and killing many of its residents.
14:07Emperor Alexios V managed to flee at first, but he was caught by the Crusaders, who blinded and killed him.
14:15It played a major role for the development of the Renaissance that Byzantium collapsed, that it was damaged by the West during the Fourth Crusade, that it fell into the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
14:34And many scholars left for Italy, bringing manuscripts with them and trying to instill new values, texts and ideas into a culture they perceived to be barbaric.
14:45It was a boost in innovation of hitherto unseen proportions.
14:49Treasures of immeasurable worth piled up in the libraries of Constantinople. The collective knowledge of antiquity.
15:00Hundreds of scholars and artists left the pillaged city and fled west. And they took valuable books with them.
15:08The scholar Manuel Cresceloras was one of them. The Chancellor of Florence offered him a chair at his university.
15:19He also sent Cresceloras a wish list of ancient works.
15:24A new era began with this exodus of Eastern Roman scholars.
15:41In this way, two techniques of ancient artists were rediscovered in the West.
15:46A level of movement, vitality and reality was captured in marble that had been unknown in the Middle Ages.
15:52Ancient frescoes inspired painters. Works of ancient engineering also reached the West.
15:59They triggered a wave of technical innovations. Ancient ideas of the movement of the heavenly bodies were taught once more.
16:07Science, and first and foremost maths and physics, experienced an unexpected revival after centuries of oblivion.
16:15The Europeans learned from several civilizations. They learned from the Greeks and Romans, from the Arabs, from the Byzantines and also from the Indians.
16:28The famous Arabic numbers actually came from India. They developed something new with what they learned. They didn't just copy. They learned these things and disseminated them through printing. They discussed the information in numbers that hadn't happened in any other culture before.
16:45Florence in 1410. A city-state with a population of 50,000, the size of London and bursting with self-confidence. The Italian city was something of the Silicon Valley of the Renaissance.
17:03It was a font of knowledge. It was a font of knowledge, elites from the East taught here, and it was a meeting place for artists and scholars.
17:10The plans for the cathedral of Maria del Fiore were created in around 1300.
17:19Ambitious plans because it was to be the largest church in Christendom. A prestigious project, larger and more beautiful than the cathedrals in Pisa, Siena and Milan.
17:30And that's what it became. With a length of 153 meters, Florence Cathedral still ranks fourth in the world today. Back then, it was number one.
17:44With a diameter of 45 meters, the dome was also a world record. The work on the 4,000 square meter fresco was begun by the painter Giorgio Vasari, who was also famous as an artist biographer.
17:59It was to compete with Michelangelo's last judgment, but Vasari's figures are lost in the height of the dome. Visitors down below can barely see them.
18:13In 1418, more than a hundred years after its construction began, the cathedral remained unfinished. It was missing its dome.
18:23Nobody in the Middle Ages had the knowledge to solve the structural and technical problems. But then, Filipo Brunelleschi came along.
18:36He was an architect and sculptor. Inspired by the ancient domes of the Pantheon and the Hagia Sophia, he had clear ideas about how to implement the ambitious project.
18:48Brunelleschi was also an engineer and inventor. He developed special cranes for the dome's construction. New inventions that were to revolutionize building methods.
19:02Architecture students from the Technical University of Daumstadt in Germany have recreated Florence Cathedral on the computer.
19:14Using virtual models, they are analyzing every one of Brunelleschi's construction steps.
19:20His work, which came at the start of the Renaissance, is now considered the construction highlight of its era.
19:27His dome was double-walled and self-supporting. That was new. The dome was, to the Renaissance, what the tower had been to the Middle Ages. The expression of state power.
19:38The project head at the Technical University of Daumstadt is Mark Grelat, an internationally renowned expert in the field of computer reconstructions of historic buildings.
19:50Brunelleschi wasn't just a brilliant builder. He was also an outstanding engineer.
19:58He invented construction machines that hadn't been around before. The ox crane, for example.
20:04This crane made it possible to get the stones up to the dome. He invented a brilliant system of gears, which meant that the materials could be lifted and lowered without removing the animals from their harness.
20:21Brunelleschi's machines were a novelty of his era, and they were admired.
20:27The rope that carried the stones weighed half a tonne. It was seven centimeters thick and 180 meters long.
20:36Years later, the builder received the sole right to build a ship with a crane on it. It was the first patent in industrial history.
20:45Brunelleschi was also known for rationalizing work processes. He got the men who were working on the dome to take their breaks and eat their meals up in the dome, which saved the time of them having to go up and down.
21:01Brunelleschi's machines are similar to modern crane systems in how they work. They revolutionized the construction sites of the Renaissance.
21:14It's not just in its architecture that the Gothic period differs from the Renaissance.
21:21The predecessors of the Renaissance architects, the builders of the Gothic period, neither had the technical nor the structural knowledge Brunelleschi had.
21:33They worked by trial and error, ever higher and more delicate, but they had no mathematical way of calculating the structural limits of their constructions.
21:43The history of Gothic architecture is a history of failed experiments.
22:03There were no detailed architectural drawings either. All the planning took place in the architect's head.
22:10That's inconceivable from today's perspective. There was merely a plan that outlined the dimensions, a simple outline of the building.
22:25In the Gothic period, you had three generations of architects working on one building.
22:31The idea and implementation takes place in the architect's head and cannot be separated from him.
22:38That wasn't the case in the Renaissance. There was a separation of design and construction.
22:47Filippo Brunelleschi managed to rediscover perspective. A technique largely forgotten since antiquity.
22:57A geometrical system to depict three-dimensional views realistically.
23:02That way he managed to put the building down on paper, providing a visual basis for a discussion.
23:11It was the birth hour of the architect.
23:15It was the birth hour of the architect.
23:16It was the birth hour of the architect.
23:17It was the birth hour of the architect.
23:21Perspective drawing also inspired painters. Paintings became realistic projections of reality.
23:29Artists took viewers on a journey to a new world as if it were part of the scenery.
23:34The Renaissance paintings achieved a greater closeness to reality than ever before.
23:43This rediscovery of perspective drawing was a powerful engine of progress.
23:48And it was necessary for one of the most important tools used by architects today.
24:01CAD, computer-aided design. The 3D animation of a building.
24:07The virtual construction work starts before the actual construction.
24:12CAD is a realistic depiction of reality. It provides the data for computer-controlled robotic systems.
24:23Robots that build independently are still a vision for the future.
24:28But the technology to make it happen was invented by Brunelleschi more than half a millennium ago.
24:34Brunelleschi didn't invent perspective drawing, but he represented a milestone on the road from antiquity to the Renaissance.
24:47He developed a recipe with which you, anyone, could construct a realistic perspective for every object, step by step.
24:55As a result, everyone could design buildings and create realistic paintings.
25:00Suddenly architects were able to design 10, 20 buildings, while an architect in the Gothic period spent his entire life on a single construction site.
25:12In Italy's competing city-states, particularly in Venice, Milan, Florence and Pisa, the hip architects became some of the top earners of the Renaissance.
25:23They weren't nameless like they had been in the Middle Ages. They were celebrated and pampered elites.
25:31Venetian noblemen paid for palaces in the new style.
25:35The Swiss architect Antonio Contino designed and built the bridge of size. It's one of the most photographed motifs in the world.
25:44The new construction style became an export hit. The city hall in Zurich is a masterpiece of the late Renaissance.
25:54A hundred years earlier, the sculptor and builder Anton Isenmann had built one of the most picturesque examples of Italian Renaissance in Switzerland, Lucerne Town Hall.
26:08A high-tech building based on Albrecht Dürer's plan for the ideal defensive structure.
26:18Monon Fortress in northern Switzerland, captivating in its symmetry.
26:23Symmetry and borrowed from antiquity, a clear system for the arrangement of columns, arches and domes.
26:30Architecture, gardens and sculptures came together to form a total artwork. It sought to please, be decorative and provide enjoyment for people, not praise God.
26:45Medieval art was basically religious art. That's in part evidenced by the fact that we only know some of the artists.
26:52Although it was customary to sign individual things, we often speak of the master of such and such, whose name we don't even know.
27:01In the Renaissance, we see the trend to the named author of a work. Art became free from religious motifs. It turned towards everyday life.
27:10It also described everyday life more accurately. If we think of perspective drawing, for example. They tried to describe everyday life in detail.
27:18Powerful and extremely self-confident artists came to the fore. They confronted the powerful. They made their demands. They were courted by the powerful.
27:33Michelangelo, for example. He was an artist who would dictate certain things to the Pope.
27:39In 1347, the Black Death broke out in Europe. It killed around 45% of the population in England within just seven months.
27:56Hundreds of thousands died. There's no comparable catastrophe in history.
28:02After that, nothing was the same anymore.
28:17A trauma that was processed in art. The plague changed the world.
28:23In the end, it even changed people themselves.
28:27It might sound cynical, but the plague didn't just have a negative effect on the culture of the Renaissance and the arts.
28:42The wealth of the dead was concentrated in the hands of the survivors.
28:47And those who survived saw life with completely different eyes.
28:50Some would have said, let's enjoy our days and spend them in the best way possible.
28:56Maybe they wanted to surround themselves with beautiful art.
29:00Others would have wanted to straighten their accounts with God and do something for the well-being of their soul, like Medici, who built an entire church.
29:10It's certain that the plague deeply influenced the people's attitude to life.
29:20The imperative of the Renaissance was, live in this life, enjoy your life.
29:25That hadn't been the case in the Middle Ages.
29:31Naked bodies everywhere. Beautiful people enmeshed in idyllic landscapes. Open eroticism.
29:40Michelangelo's last judgement. The heavenly hosts are naked with discernible genitalia. A revolution.
29:48The plague completely ravaged Florence. Only a fifth of the city's population survived the Black Death.
30:04The plague also changed how wealth was distributed. It promoted a new species. Tycoons. People who were unimaginably rich.
30:13Families like the Medici. Merchants and bankers. People who were despised in the feudal society of the Middle Ages.
30:23Now, they were the ones in charge.
30:30A journey to the year 1425.
30:33The sculptor Donatello and his patron, Cosimo de' Medici. The first great sponsor of the arts.
30:41A wealthy banker. A reserve tactician. A strategist. With almost mafia-like methods.
30:49He was one of the richest men of his day.
30:52His money was the fuel for the development of art and architecture in Florence.
30:58And the spark that ignited the Italian Renaissance.
31:01But his success never would have been possible without a small invention that had revolutionised banking.
31:10A simple formal financial instrument became a catalyst.
31:24Two accounts were kept. The credit account with takings. And the debit account with outgoings.
31:30The first complete double-entry bookkeeping system can be dated to 1340.
31:42Ledgers from Genoa were the income and expenditure of the government.
31:46The account holder knew at all times how much capital he had.
31:52He was able to compare his financial past to his present.
31:56Conrad Hummler, a well-known Swiss entrepreneur, journalist, patron and former private banker, knows what that meant.
32:08Conrad Hummler, a rich man comes to you with a sack of money.
32:21But is he really rich?
32:24If you look at his liquid assets, then yes.
32:28But if you know that he has debts, then maybe his net worth is negative.
32:34He's bankrupt.
32:36You can find out more about the economy if you do double-entry accounts.
32:41And cash flows can only be depicted through double-entry bookkeeping, too.
32:46You can show, too, what happens over time in the economy.
32:53Double-entry bookkeeping allowed for a greatly expanded perspective of what was happening in the economy.
33:10The Medici were bankers.
33:12They issued loans and signed secure credit notes for travelers that could be cashed in many countries.
33:19The precursors to travelers' checks.
33:22They were global players.
33:24Cosimo de Medici earned huge sums and spent them again.
33:28By the time of his death, 600,000 florins, more than a quarter of a billion euros, in taxes, donations to the needy, on buildings and on art.
33:42A whole pool of creative individuals, artists and architects were dependent on his money.
34:01They, in turn, made his life nicer.
34:03Medici Palace is a glorious stage of Renaissance art.
34:09It's hard to believe that Cosimo instructed the architect not to make it too magnificent, as he didn't want to rouse the envy of other patrician families.
34:20The Medici invested in the well-being of their souls as well.
34:23They donated money for a new church, the Basilica di San Lorenzo.
34:29As patron, Cosimo de Medici supported artists' careers and something that had never existed in this form before, the celebrity cult.
34:39This celebrity arose in an intellectual greenhouse climate, in a market full of competition, where humanists, creatives and artists of all kinds were supported, often very well paid by patrons.
34:59They, in turn, hoped for more fame and standing for their courts through these artists.
35:04Fantasy increasingly came to the fore, over the actual ability of the painter or the sculptor.
35:12In this way, you had some standout figures in this busy market, whose status was known at the time and is still known to us today.
35:20That means the underestimated artist, the suffering genius, will have been a particularly frequent phenomenon.
35:27Donatello was one of the first great artists celebrities of the Renaissance.
35:38He was almost 60 when he showed Cosimo de Medici the designs for his David.
35:44The boy who defeated Goliath is his most significant work, a brave work, because Donatello's David is naked.
35:53Only a few generations earlier, ancient statues were destroyed simply for portraying nudity.
36:02Donatello's David was the first sculpture of a naked, life-sized person since antiquity.
36:09Medici and Donatello certainly will have been aware of the revolutionary nature of this work.
36:15Unlike other cultures, the Renaissance didn't worry about depicting naked bodies, or almost naked bodies.
36:28That was very significant for medicine.
36:31You can't study anatomy if you can't depict naked bodies.
36:35That was crucial for a different understanding of people.
36:38The person wasn't just animated by his spirits and guided by his stars.
36:44Instead, he was a mechanically controlled machine, an organism.
36:50Before Donatello, nobody had been brave enough to depict a human body uncovered.
36:58That was as unusual as his interpretation.
37:01Donatello's David is no muscle man. Rather, he's a youth with somewhat feminine traits, and fascinatingly lifelike.
37:11Like Donatello's David, the model, a sports student has shifted his weight onto one leg, the engaged leg.
37:19The other, the free leg, is relieved. He copies David's pose exactly, an experiment in the lab that analyzes movement sequences at the Sports University of Cologne.
37:29The artist and artwork are put to the test. Cameras record every movement phase.
37:36A program translates the film footage into computer data.
37:40Denise Temme is a professor of dance and movement culture. She's monitoring the experiment.
37:47She wants to find out how well Donatello understood the movement apparatus and anatomy of the human body.
37:54It's almost impossible to stand in such a relaxed manner when you've got your weight on both legs.
38:05He's standing contraposto, meaning his weight is shifted to one side, so he's resting on his hip.
38:13The shoulder blades stick out, and his tummy also follows gravity in this position.
38:17We see a very relaxed dance, but because it's not broad, it can move in any direction.
38:24He's standing on one leg and can shift his weight very quickly and get going.
38:28The principle behind Contraposto was already known to Greek sculptors 2,000 years ago.
38:38After almost a whole millennium, the artists of the Renaissance picked it up again.
38:44Donatello before all the others. They copied human poses very realistically.
38:48Michelangelo's slave statues combined the relaxed element of the Contraposto with the tension of someone in shackles.
38:59Michelangelo, like Donatello, knew about human anatomy.
39:04Either Donatello had his own ideas about movement or he had his own experience, which he was able to depict.
39:13Because he depicted certain details very well, details that we didn't even think about when we tried to recreate the pose.
39:23The shape of the gluteal muscle, which is completely relaxed, the folds the muscle hangs over.
39:30The very flexible joints as a result of the muscle tension being so relaxed.
39:34With a trained sports student, we hardly managed to create the position of the hip on the right-hand side, because they need very high muscle tension.
39:45It's a very flexible David, and that's been captured in great detail.
39:49But where did Donatello get his knowledge of the human body?
39:53With the enthusiasm of the early Renaissance for all things classical, interests in anatomy grew as well.
40:05Almost all the artists, sculptors and painters of the Renaissance will have studied human anatomy, at least in theory.
40:12An illegal trade in fresh corpses flourished, but many places imposed draconian punishments for this crime.
40:24However, curiosity triumphed over fear.
40:27It's possible that Donatello dissected corpses too, just like Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci one or two generations later.
40:41But even in Donatello's time in the early Renaissance, the structure of the human body was known to artists.
40:48This knowledge allowed new, very lifelike depictions of people. Men like Donatello were either artistically talented scholars or scholarly artists.
41:03As the analysis by Cologne Sports University would suggest, Donatello's knowledge of the human movement apparatus went much further than previously believed.
41:14The surprising thing about Donatello is that almost 600 years ago, he had a David cast in bronze whose stance, according to modern research, represents an ideal in movement efficiency.
41:30Donatello's knowledge of the human movement.
41:37Straight and tall, he's standing very efficiently. That principle has been captured in a very visceral way. He's strikingly upright, with almost no muscle tension.
41:48As fate would have it, Donatello's interpretation of the Old Testament hero didn't achieve the same popularity as another sculpture of the Renaissance, one that was also created in Florence.
42:06Michelangelo's David. At five meters tall, it's a monumental statue in the pose of a god. Half a century after Donatello, it was a symbol of the self-confidence of the new man, the Renaissance man.
42:24The explosive thing about the Renaissance was that people became aware of their strengths and abilities in a new way. They unfolded an incredible energy with regard to their thinking and actions in business and technology. Human self-confidence skyrocketed.
42:46In the Middle Ages, more than 90% of people were illiterate. The few who could read and write were exclusively men of the church. They were the ones who produced books, owned them and looked after them like treasures.
43:05The life's work of a single copyist, ten to fifteen books. That makes them unimaginably valuable. One book back then cost the same as a farmhouse.
43:20A nice codex, such as a Bible, would require you to kill an entire flock of sheep, and that's expensive. But then books could be bought for little money.
43:34That meant reading became democratic. More and more people were able to participate in discussions about new ideas. That's the only way we can explain how Europe became the continent of innovations, much more than any other continent.
44:00The men of the church didn't just copy works. They also changed them and falsified sources. They claimed their interpretation was the word of God. That gave them power. But in the Renaissance, their monopoly on knowledge, one of the most important bastions of the church, disappeared.
44:21An awareness for sources and the truth developed. Not least because sources were now accessible. People started analyzing these sources with classical techniques. The traditional myths put forward by the church simply weren't accepted anymore.
44:43Mainz in 1450. His invention is maybe the most significant in a thousand years. But we don't even know what he looked like. Johannes Gutenberg, a printer in the city.
45:01Mainz in 1450. His achievement was to combine the methods of reproduction and printing into one overall system.
45:10Mainz in 1450. His hand mould was at the heart of his printing press. It allowed letters to be printed faster and more finely. In short, it was the invention of modern printing.
45:24Mainz in 1450. And so it was the birth hour of mass communication. The principle back then was exactly the same as today. People multiply opinions.
45:43Mainz in 1450. That also changed the value of people attached to information. During the Renaissance, the printed word was worth more because people could read it black on white.
45:58Printing was of truly enormous significance. And Gutenberg is the person who did the most of consequence in world history in a thousand years.
46:07Reading became increasingly widespread. The huge developments in the great religious revolution, the Reformation, wouldn't have been possible without printing.
46:19In the first 60 years after the invention of printing, 400 Bible editions were published in the languages of the people.
46:26At the same time, the number of lay people who were able to read and write increased. More and more people now had direct and immediate access to biblical texts, the word of God.
46:41The people of the Renaissance felt close to God. They felt themselves becoming God-like. They wouldn't have said that in the Middle Ages. It would have been considered blasphemous.
46:50People referred to the Bible and said they were God's creation. God made us in his image. We are almost miniature gods. God came closer to people in the Renaissance than he ever was in the Middle Ages.
47:04But it wasn't books that made up the bulk of the business of the printing shops. It was flysheets. They were affordable and cost two to three hours wages for a labourer.
47:17Everyone was able to print flysheets and so disseminate his opinions, verses and drawings.
47:24Three subjects dominated. Sensations and miracles, religious instruction and political and military propaganda.
47:35The illustrated flysheets also developed the first caricatures. They were an invitation, an opinion or a warning.
47:44Comparable to today's social networks, they took advantage of a fundamental need. The mass dissemination of one's own opinion.
47:57The Renaissance had flysheets. It had literature that was printed and spread very quickly. It would be printed in Nuremberg tomorrow and in two days' time it would be in Zurich.
48:12Information became faster and was much harder to control too. Church censorship, that doesn't stick anymore because the flysheets have long since been spread around.
48:25You can only understand the huge boom in free thinking in the Renaissance if you look at the media and at the flysheets in particular.
48:37Mass communication generated a new kind of person, the celebrity. Its creator was Giorgio Vasari, a painter and architect himself, but mainly a biographer of the most fascinating public figures of his day, artists.
48:54He was particularly taken with Leonardo da Vinci, but he also produced portraits of Raphael and Michelangelo.
49:02Leonardo was unconventional, a miracle of creativity, highly talented, strange, with a vanity that bordered on the grotesque, a man who wasn't scared of acknowledging his homosexuality.
49:16Vasari was the first to coin the term Renaissance, and who gave his artists the aura that made them stars shining lights of society.
49:29He created the image of an artist which hadn't existed before. Most artists were craftsmen. That's how they saw themselves, and that's how others saw them.
49:42But Vasari created the image of the genius, the strange, crazy man, the artist who is overcome by ideas. He paints a picture of an artist that seems strangely familiar today. He created the modern artist.
49:58The painter Holbein. The painter Holbein. The painter Holbein was the first to paint a portrait of his family. The star painters Botticelli and Albrecht Dürer even painted self-portraits.
50:08The self-portrait became the expression of a new self-confidence. And finally along came Raphael and Titian, the first painters to sign their paintings, a further step towards the notion of the star.
50:22The great names in art suddenly became world famous. A hundred years earlier, that would have been unthinkable.
50:30Titans of the Renaissance, first and foremost Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, were celebrated, invited to court and paid handsomely.
50:41In 1300, then Venetian glassblowers invented the convex mirror, an invention whose importance is underestimated.
50:50Compared to the mirrors of the antiquity, the Venetian variety provided an almost undistorted likeness and a bright image.
51:00Most people of the Middle Ages will only have seen their face as a blurry reflection in water.
51:07The glass mirror was the first time people could really see themselves.
51:12Maybe that's why the people of the Renaissance were more self-confident than their medieval counterparts.
51:19Self-confidence and pride in their personal achievements weren't sinful anymore.
51:26Humility was no longer in tune with the times.
51:30The person who keeps his chin up, who walks tall in the presence of God, who uses reason as his special gift from God, these are the new values.
51:48As a result, humility becomes less important. As humans, we're capable, and God wants us to be capable.
52:00But what was the secret of the Titans of the Renaissance?
52:05Did they have a magic formula for their creativity?
52:09Their charisma is, in any case, still with us.
52:14The end of the reform may become a genius.
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