OSHER 567 - Italian Renaissance: Art, Culture, and Ethics after the Middle Ages

During the Renaissance, a new culture spread across Italy based on enjoyment, order, and beauty, happening despite numerous wars, epidemics, and unhinged rulers. Florence, for instance, under the rule of Lorenzo the Magnificent, a poet-banker who ran the state without being elected nor nominated, became one of the most splendid cities in Europe. Being the size of Ogden today, your neighbour could have easily been Leonardo da Vinci, or the model for Michelangelo's David. At the local Town Hall, you could have met Botticelli and Simonetta Vespucci, the lady we now know--five hundred years later--simply as Venus. You would have seen in the streets Pico della Mirandola, an aristocrat who published 900 theses to reform the Catholic church, 30 years before Luther published his 95, or Machiavelli who would publish the perfect self-help manual for poisoners and murderers. Milan, on the other hand, the biggest Renaissance court, hired Leonardo not as a painter or an architect but as the event planner for its Duke and hairstylist for the Duchess of Milan, successfully to the point people were still talking about Leonardo's "Feast of the Paradise" 10 years later. By exploring this complicated cultural system which also occurred in Venice, followed by Rome, Ferrara, Padua, Verona, and Naples, we will recreate the environment that gave birth to the most famous pieces of art in Western civilization.