The Medici: Makers of Modern Art

£4,200,000. Sold! Thank you.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

In the modern world, few commodities are worth more than art.

If the artist's name is right, works can fetch sums that make the mind boggle.

61 million. 62 million.

But if you want to understand the strange and scandalous affair

between art and money you have to look back 600 years.

Last chance. Sold.

In Renaissance Florence, there was a far more shocking collision of market forces and masterpieces.

The world's most beautiful art was created in the service of one rich and ruthless family -

the Medici!

With their money, the Medici turned Florence into one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

They were the first great modern art collectors.

But their relationship with art was anything but straightforward.

All kinds of complicated emotions were involved - guilt, the lust for power, sexual fantasy.

And in the end, they didn't just collect paintings and sculptures,

they changed the very nature of art itself and unleashed a monster even they couldn't control.

In Florence, it's impossible to escape from the Medici.

Everywhere you look you can see their coat of arms made out of palle, or balls.

It's as if they've trademarked the city for eternity.

A lot of balls has been talked about the famous Medici balls.

There's a modern myth according to which their medicine pills - Medici, medicine. Not true.

The Medici themselves liked to pretend that they were descended from a valiant knight,

who performed heroic deeds, and these were the dents on his shield. Not true.

What they actually symbolise, right from the start, was bezants, coins.

They're tangible symbols of the fact that these were men who dealt in money.

The family's extraordinary journey began with Giovanni di Bicci.

Born into poverty, this hard-nosed merchant had a plan to make his family rich.

Giovanni set up the first Medici bank in Florence in 1397, which traded on this exact spot.

Now, there was nothing discrete or well mannered about the world of renaissance banking.

These were money traders who carried out their work in public, in the market.

Each one of them would call out his best offer of the day.

"I've got 50 florins to lend you to be paid back by Saint John's day."

"I've got 30 florins to be paid back by Christmas."

And each banker would work from his own table, set up in the aisle of the market.

"Banko" is Italian for table, hence our word "bank".

It was a high-risk business, they were going bust all the time, and

when they did go bust, they had to ceremonially break their table.

Hence the English word "bankrupt", "banco rotto", "broken table".

The first Medici bank succeeded because it had rules,

such as don't lend to royalty - they never paid you back.

This was the birth of capitalism, and no family prospered more than the Medici.

BELLS RING

But the Medici were also men of their time,

devout Christians bound by Church laws.

The world of the afterlife, teeming with angels and demons,

was every bit as real to the Medici imagination as the world in which they traded.

And that gave them a problem, because according to the Bible,

usury, money lending, was a mortal sin.

God had decreed that man might save himself by labour, but there was no sweat on the Medici brow

because they got their money through interest, by doing nothing at all.

And as the riches piled up on the credit side of their ledger,

they were terrified of what lay on the debit side - the threat of eternal damnation.

The spectre of hell haunted all Florentines, including the celebrated poet Dante.

In his Inferno, usurers were depicted in the depths of hell.

Why was usury such

an evil business to be in?

The usurer, in the fullest sense of the term, goes to hell.

He goes to hell because usury offends against the goodness of God.

Dante says that the usurer sells nothing.

He lends money and expects to be paid more back than what he loaned.

But he hasn't given anything

for this profit. He's selling nothing.

When Dante describes the punishment of the usurers in hell,

he says that they sit in the seventh circle and their hands are continually moving.

They can't keep their hands still.

And that is because in their lives they did nothing with their hands.

The church of Santa Maria Novella contains a fresco where

the Medici's worst nightmares would've been realised.

This is the Strozzi Chapel, painted in the 1350s by Nardo di Cione,

to give Florentines a glimpse of the afterlife.

The reason the chapel was really famous - it was known as "la Capella dell'Inferno" -

is because it contains this monumental, extraordinary depiction of the terrors of hell.

In fact, it's the first really epic depiction of hell as Dante had described it.

But there's one scene in particular that would've struck terror into the heart of the Medici.

It's the seventh circle of hell, presided over by an evil-looking winged demon called Geryon,

in which were placed blasphemers, sodomites and money lenders.

The fresco's much faded now, but peer closely and you can make out

the desperate hands of the usurers, under a downpour of fire.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom because this chapel's also a vivid demonstration that

there was a get-out clause to renaissance money lenders.

According to Church doctrine, you could buy your way out of hell,

you could purchase salvation, by sponsoring a great work of art and architecture such as this.

And it was, indeed, paid for by a moneylender, a man called Strozzi - there he is, with his wife, and the

artist has been careful to paint him being led by an angel to the congregation of the blessed.

Food for thought for a Medici - pay for a spectacular work of art and maybe save your soul.

Bankers were accused of splintering society because they created debt and greed and division.

All the more reason to give to the Church, the place where people were brought together.

In Florence there was no more communal building than

the Baptistry, where every single citizen, rich or poor, was christened.

In 1401, a great pair of bronze doors was commissioned to the glory of God.

And Giovanni di Bicci, the head of the Medici family, was on the committee that chose the artist.

Now, the Medici involvement with art in Florence begins right here on this spot.

And the artist whom Giovanni di Bicci and his fellow

committee members chose to create this great work was a man called Lorenzo Ghiberti.

Ghiberti invented a totally new method of sculpting in bronze.

Each panel was cast in a single piece, which gives these images a tremendously organic quality.

Each one's a story distilled to its essentials, a miniature drama from the life of Christ.

Here's the last supper, apostles hunched round the table.

Here's Christ on his donkey, entering Jerusalem.

There's even an image of the traders, moneybags and all, being driven from the temple -

a little reminder of the ancient Christian distrust of riches.

Now, it took Ghiberti and his workshop 20 years to complete these great doors.

They were finished in 1424, just five years before Giovanni di Bicci died, and

I think that when he looked up at what he and his fellow commissioners

had been responsible for commissioning, it was so much in excess of

what anyone could've expected, it really is one of the great masterpieces of renaissance art.

I think it alerted him and indeed the whole Medici family to the potential of art.

Giovanni's son, Cosimo Il Vecchio, expanded the Medici bank across Europe.

< HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

And with new wealth came new opportunities.

Cosimo was a political genius, who turned the Medici into the most powerful family in Florence.

But he also knew that the city was a republic, in name at least, where everybody was supposed to be equal.

So he dressed in the plainest clothes and even rode a donkey instead of a horse.

He was determined to do everything he could to wipe the stain of usury from his family's reputation.

This is the monastery of San Marco.

In the 1430s, the Pope promised Cosimo redemption if he would pay for its construction,

a heaven-sent opportunity to launder his piles of dirty money.

It was fairly standard practice for extremely rich people to endow

a chapel, to commission a cycle of religious frescoes.

But here, the Medici had paid for the construction of an entire monastery.

This was a completely unprecedented act of private patronage.

It seems that as far as Cosimo Il Vecchio was concerned, when it came

to the state of his eternal soul money really was no object.

San Marco was the home of the austere Dominican order.

Each monk had a tiny cell, containing a single fresco by

Fra Angelico and his assistants of Christ's passion,

a focus for their spiritual contemplation.

And Cosimo, the moneylender, had even made his way inside the temple.

Now, this is the entrance to Cosimo's own cell, and right over

the door there's an inscription that makes official the nature of the exchange that's taking place here.

It says that the Pope, Eugenius IV, promises that Cosimo de Medici

will be absolved from all his sins in exchange for having built this monastery.

How typical, somehow, of this money man, this banker,

to get his own pardon, to get his own salvation in writing.

At first sight, Cosimo's own cell is pretty much like

all the others - he, too, gets an image of the crucifixion to contemplate.

But while it's hardly luxurious - and I should stress that Cosmo came here -

he fasted, he prayed he did penitence, for the sake of his eternal soul - his chamber is

more luxurious than the rest because where they are single bedrooms,

he gave himself the equivalent of a hotel suite. Look, there's a whole other chamber.

And up here, on the wall of this second space, he's looking at an image

of the three wise men,

who come to the infant Jesus bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Cosimo chose one of Fra Angelico's most gifted pupils, Benozzo Gozzoli,

to create a painting that would transform the Medici image.

What Cosimo's done here is asked himself - how can I release us Medici, usurers,

from the taint of our profession?

And I think he's combed the Bible

for an example of rich men,

who are also good, and more or less the only people to whom that applies are the Magi,

who are obviously a kind of visual metaphor or

alter ego for Cosimo and the rest of his family.

They bring gifts to Jesus.

What is this monastery if not a splendid gift to Christ?

The Medici became so obsessed with their new heroes,

they joined a fraternity celebrating the Three Wise Men.

They wanted the whole of Florence to share in their devotion.

Every year on the 6th January, a huge procession would take to the streets of Florence.

Hundreds of people dressed up in brightly-coloured clothes, and they had with them a menagerie

of animals - apes, baboons, tigers, cheetahs, re-enacting the journey of the Wise Men.

And at the centre of it all, wearing gold crowns,

playing the part of the Magi themselves, were the Medici.

The parade of the Magi would snake its way past Cosimo's own house, the Palazzo Medici.

Inside the palazzo, only the most privileged visitors were invited to see a room where, away from the

prying eyes of the city, Cosimo could indulge his wildest fantasy.

In Cosimo's private chapel is a spectacular fresco showing the journey of the Magi to Bethlehem.

Once again, Cosimo turned to the artist Benozzo Gozzoli,

who'd painted the same subject in San Marco.

But there's no trace of austerity here.

It's a blaze of colour, with a cast of hundreds.

Gozzoli even had the audacity to insert himself,

and members of the Medici family, into this Biblical scene.

At its centre we find wily old Cosimo himself,

dressed in a rather muted black robe. But, of course,

this is the one moment when Cosimo, cautious Cosimo, is actually indulging himself

in an orgy of self congratulation - "Look how rich we've become!"

He looks like he might be counting, and this fresco is

a pictorial version of counting your money, and the picture's full of gold.

Above all, on the harnesses of the horses and their bridles,

there's the shine and shimmer.

It's still with us today.

The taste that created this is the taste that created the Gianni Versace handbag.

There's something fantastically vulgar about this painting.

You almost wonder if the worship Cosimo did to God in his cell

at San Marco hasn't been displaced to the world of consumer durables.

It's an incredible celebration of the sheer naked joy of capitalism.

And the excitement of making money was seeping into every aspect of Renaissance life.

Artists were inspired by the mathematics of banking and accountancy

to create a new language for painting.

The Medici weren't just great patrons - they created a culture

that revolutionised the nature of art itself.

The neat and tidy columns of their bookkeeping

were reflected everywhere in the art and architecture of Florence.

Theirs was a world where calculation was all,

where the skills of the mathematician were regarded as one of the essential tools of life,

so it's no surprise that it was here in Florence that artists took those same mathematical skills

and used them to develop the first convincing perspective illusions.

The tools of early capitalism, the principles that had made

the Medici rich, had worked their way into the very texture of art.

The Medici sponsored artists like Paolo Uccello,

who obsessively attempted to create the illusion of space in his work.

This was a whole new 3D world - art commissioned by merchants

to appear as real as the world in which they traded.

And it seems that cautious old Cosimo, having discovered

the joy of art, became ever more daring in his tastes.

He fostered the unconventional genius of Donatello,

who created this statue of David for the Medici palace.

David was a traditional symbol of Florence,

but that was just a pretext for a shocking experiment -

the first freestanding nude since Roman times.

The statue is now being restored by Dr Ludovica Nicolai.

She has been lovingly cleaning the figure for 18 months.

Cosimo was famously prudent, but I think it's pretty clear

from the art he commissioned there was more to him than met the eye.

You can also trace the workings of his imagination, sense the appeal

that decadence had for him, outside the city itself.

Renaissance Florence was a famously violent and volatile place,

and no matter how well you SEEMED to be doing,

you could never be quite sure of your position.

So the Medici soon realised that they needed a bolt hole -

a place of refuge away from the city.

This is the Villa Cafaggiolo,

a miniature fortress in the Tuscan countryside.

It was designed to repel outsiders,

but inside Cafaggiolo, miles from anywhere,

Cosimo literally developed all kinds of new tastes.

Chef Michele Bosco is going to show me

how the Medici even turned food into an art form.

THEY GREET EACH OTHER IN ITALIAN

What an extraordinary object!

Extraordinario!

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

As one course follows another,

it's like entering one of Cosimo's paintings,

being on the receiving end of the procession of the wise men,

being given rich and luxurious gifts.

But there were also perils to all this excess.

It's certainly pungent.

In fact, I think the whole experience of a Medici banquet is just too much.

And history tells us that it was too much for the Medici themselves,

because the whole family suffered famously from gout.

In fact, Cosimo il Vecchio's son was even known as Piero the Gouty,

and at certain points during his short life

he was so incapacitated by the disease

that the only thing he could do, so it is said,

was waggle his tongue.

It's a horrible thought!

I think the Medici were among the first really rich, self-made men

to live fast and die young.

Gout carried off Cosimo in the 1460s,

and his grandson, the next great patron in the family line,

would banish any trace of Medici guilt forever.

Lorenzo il Magnifico - Lorenzo the Magnificent -

was given the best classical education money could buy.

But Lorenzo, rich beyond belief, didn't use that education for banking...

but in the pursuit of pleasure.

I think the key to Lorenzo's character was his flamboyance.

Whereas Cosimo was very cautious,

Lorenzo made no bones about being the most powerful man in Florence,

and he didn't care if everybody knew.

Whereas Cosimo never took his eye ofF the ball of the Medici bank,

Lorenzo, frankly, was bored by banking.

For him, the only, the sole, the main point of life was to commission art,

and in his vision of Florence, art was absolutely at the centre.

Lorenzo's great dream was to revive the beauty and myths

of the ancient classical past.

And he took practical steps to create a generation of artists

capable of making his fantasy real.

Now, if it wasn't for the Medici, these students might not be doing what they're doing today,

because the story goes that Lorenzo il Magnifico

was so concerned that standards were dropping in Renaissance Florentine art

that he had the idea of founding an academy.

He gathered together a number of choice works of art from the Medici's own collections,

he hired a tutor and bang, the modern art school was born.

Lorenzo set up this academy in his own garden,

where students would copy from his collection of classical sculptures.

And Lorenzo's devotion to Pagan rather than religious art

moulded the minds of his students.

One of them was the young Michelangelo.

Lorenzo nurtured his genius when he was just 15 years of age.

Now, if you want visual evidence of the huge impact

that Lorenzo the Magnificent had on the young Michelangelo,

it's to be found in this room, because here we've got the only two sculptures

that he's known to have created while studying in Lorenzo's sculpture garden.

Here we've got this beautiful low-relief sculpture, a classical technique.

It's the Madonna of the Stairs, and he was taught this technique

by the sculptural instructor that Lorenzo had installed in the garden.

Beautiful piece, but it's still within the religious language.

If you want to see how Michelangelo's imagination was really opened up

by the influence of Lorenzo, it's here in this great sculpture

called the Battle of the Centaurs,

which is one of the most precious things in the Michelangelo house,

although they've actually allowed me to open the perspex case

so we can see the sculpture in its full glory.

Isn't that fantastic?!

Here you've got these writhing bodies, not a religious reference,

not a trace of saintly iconography.

This is a purely classical work of art.

And its subject is struggle, and, in a sense, that's very appropriate,

because what we're seeing here is Michelangelo

wrestling the forms of sculpture into a new shape.

This is really the birth of Western European secular art.

Lorenzo was to make his most ambitious attempts to embrace the joys of antiquity

not in cramped Florence, but in the Tuscan countryside.

It wasn't enough for Lorenzo to promote classical styles of art.

He was fascinated by the whole ancient Roman and Greek way of life.

And as a result, he was to commission a truly revolutionary piece of architecture.

This is Poggio a Caiano,

a building where Lorenzo's most aristocratic ambitions were realised.

Raised up on a classical arcade

with this grand entrance plainly modelled on the portico of an ancient temple,

this is a building that looks straight back to the splendour of ancient architecture.

It was hugely original and bold, and it's been immensely influential -

think of the Renaissance villa, think of the English country house with its pillars and pediments.

Lorenzo had revived single-handedly the idea of the classical retreat from the cares of the city.

At the heart of the villa is the Great Hall,

a room that transports you back in time, bringing to life

the myths of the ancient world in full and vivid colour.

Now although this great space was created some time after Lorenzo's death,

I can't help thinking of it as a huge Pandora's box that he opened.

What Lorenzo gave to the Medici family was a totally free sense

of the classical world as a kind of space where the imagination could play.

These frescoes, begun in 1519,

are wonderfully free interpretations of Roman and Greek stories.

A classical vision of delight.

And on the far wall, my favourite fresco in the whole room,

created by Pontormo, is the pictorial expression

absolutely of an idea that Lorenzo brought into Medici taste -

this idea of the countryside

as free space for retreat

and for indulgence in pleasure.

Under the pretext of painting a classical myth,

the myth of Vertumnus and Pomona - nature god, nature goddess,

what Pontormo's really painted is a kind of aristocratic idyll.

These are the well-fed rich, who've come to the countryside to enjoy themselves.

I think what this picture is also doing

is it's calling down onto the Medici family the ideal of fertility.

It's saying, may the Medici always grow

as lavishly as these branches,

may their seed always be ripened like the fruit in these festoons.

Such a transition has taken place.

It's almost like a pagan prayer, that we will do well.

It's on the point of saying...

..that we don't need God any more -

we've got our own gods, and they're the gods of art.

Poggio a Caiano is much more than just a pleasure palace.

It's a wonderfully eloquent statement of Lorenzo's ambition to be much more than just a merchant.

He wants to enter the world of the landed aristocracy, to be a prince even.

Just think how far the Medici had come in less than 100 years.

But I think the pattern of their meteoric rise

can be compared, aptly enough, to the fluctuations of any market.

For every boom, there had to be a bust.

Lorenzo had wanted to revive ancient Rome,

but this was still Christian Florence.

He died in 1492, and with his death

the spectres of heaven and hell returned with a vengeance.

The backlash arrived in the shape of a fanatical monk

called Girolamo Savonarola.

This parade is held every year

in celebration of the memory of Girolamo Savonarola,

and it's a symbol of Florence's deeply ambivalent attitude towards its own past.

Because while still they cherish the memory of the Medici in this city,

in celebrating Savonarola's memory,

they are also celebrating a man who did his best

to tear down and destroy

everything that the Medici had spent so long attempting to create.

Savonarola ordered a purge of the pagan art the Medici had revived.

Nymphs, naked gods and goddesses, it all had to go.

The flowers mark the spot where he'd organised

these immense, almost frenzied religious festivals,

known as the bonfires of the vanities,

where all the people of Florence would be encouraged

to bring their most valuable possessions,

including works of art, paintings and sculptures,

and to pile them into great bonfires and burn them all for the glory of God.

In many ways, Savonarola was the Medicis' worst nightmare come to life.

The bonfire is one of the most infamous events of the Renaissance.

But Padre Tomasso, from Savonarola's own order, believes he should be remembered as a saint.

Savonarola preached that the end of the world was nigh.

A mood of apocalyptic terror gripped Florence, as the people turned against the Medici.

In 1494, just two years after Lorenzo's death,

his eldest son Piero realised the family was in mortal danger.

The Medici were forced to flee the city in fear of their very lives.

Piero, the head of the family, got his wife and children together

and they escaped under cover of darkness on horseback.

The family's possessions and palaces were ransacked,

their works of art were either seized or destroyed.

And Michelangelo, by now Italy's greatest artist, was swept along by the new republican fervour.

The city commissioned him to create a Christian symbol of Florentine strength.

His heroic David, ready to vanquish Goliath,

stood against all those who would corrupt this sacred republic,

including the Medici.

The family would remain in exile from Florence for nearly two decades.

The Medici redirected their energies, building up their power within the Church.

Another of Lorenzo's sons, Giovanni, even became the first Medici Pope.

So in 1512, the family could draw on papal military muscle

to return to power in Florence.

The years of exile had bred a new, brutal generation of Medici.

When the Medici came back to Florence,

they were determined to destroy the old dream of the Florentine republic.

They didn't just want to be rulers.

They wanted to be absolute dictators.

And as always, art was central to the plan.

This time, they'd use it as a tyrant's weapon.

In 1519, the Medici attempted to construct a great statement

of their authority and control in the church of San Lorenzo.

They returned to the genius they had fostered -

Michelangelo.

In many ways, Michelangelo had a love-hate relationship with the Medici.

He owed them so much when he was a child,

and yet when they were in exile, he worked against them and for the republic.

But despite all that, when they came back to the city and took over the reins of power once again,

they invited him here to their church, San Lorenzo,

where Cosimo il Vecchio himself is buried just in front of the high altar.

And they wanted him to create for them a great memorial chapel,

a tomb or a set of tombs that would make the family name live forever.

And Michelangelo was certainly the man for the job.

But what he created was something they could never have expected.

The Medici used the death of two minor family members

as an excuse for commissioning a thumping symbol of their dominance over Florence.

But Michelangelo had his own ideas.

He transformed the dead Medici into abstract and rather chilling images of rule.

He wasn't interested in them as individuals.

He even sneered that it didn't matter what they'd looked like

because no-one would even know who they were in a thousand years.

Beneath the figures of the heroes enthroned,

crouched or reclining on their sarcophagi,

he's created these four figures.

Dawn, Dusk, Day and Night.

And what they symbolise is the passing of time.

Because these figures are so immense...

Look at that figure of Day.

He's absolutely enormous, muscular, vast.

He's a giant, an ancient titan.

But he represents the passage of time, the force of time,

the power of mortality, the strength of death.

That's what this chapel's about -

it's death, death, death, you're all going to die, and in a sense,

you're not just going to die, but you're going to be forgotten.

So, he's raised the Medici up,

only, almost with the same gesture,

to throw all of their pretensions of immortality

into the larger perspective of time destroys everything,

time devours all, lays all to waste.

Even the achievements of the Medici.

Michelangelo's mocking masks say that the world's no more than a piece of empty theatre.

He'd put his own genius before the wishes of the patron - a revolutionary idea.

Unwittingly, the Medici had helped create the first artist as rebel.

But Michelangelo had to leave Florence,

because the next Medici ruler had no time for unruly geniuses.

In the 1530s, the brutal Alessandro came to power.

He was only interested in art that would strike terror into the hearts of the Florentine people.

He commissioned the architect Antonio da Sangallo to build the Fortezza da Basso.

The result - the art of dictatorship.

Alessandro Medici was a philistine and a thug,

and certainly no great patron of the arts,

but he did order the construction

of this intimidatingly impressive fortress.

Now, the point is that this huge building faces towards the city of Florence.

It was designed not to protect the people but to subdue them.

But the most expressive aspect of the building

is the sinister metamorphoses of the Medici palle,

the Medici balls, because if you look below me,

you'll see that they've multiplied

so much so that they stud the walls of the fortress,

each one like a cannonball trained on the city of Florence.

And Alessandro even used one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance,

Benvenuto Cellini, to create a coin stamped with his imperial image.

It's a secret treasure of the Renaissance, with a dark message.

Now, to us, it might seem like nothing much - just a coin.

But to a 16th-Century Florentine with republican sympathies,

this would've been an object of disgust,

it would have been an outrage,

because it broke with the centuries' long tradition in Florence

that the coinage should never have the portrait of an individual on it.

To have a Medici on the coinage was an incredibly strong symbol,

it said that the Medici now are, in Florence, the equivalent of kings,

the money men, the men who came from money

and who used their money to achieve power and status,

are now on the money of Florence itself.

In 1532, Alessandro became the first ever Duke of Florence.

The republic was dead.

And the Medici used Florence's main square to declare their new status as nobility.

They even had the nerve to take over the city's town hall,

the Palazzo Signoria, transforming it into a princely palace.

What's amazing about this place is that not only did the Medici

come to live in the Palazzo Signoria,

the heart of republican Florence as it had been,

but they covered its walls with celebrations of the Medici dynasty.

But what you get is a wonderful contrast of past and present,

because nowadays, these are offices, once again Italy is a democracy,

and they still run Florence from this building.

This is the office of the mayor

where they deal with all the day-to-day business of the city,

but they do it still under the eyes of the Medici tyrants that once were.

These frescoes, painted by Giorgio Vasari and his army of assistants,

show the Medici not as a family of merchants, but as an aristocratic dynasty.

At last, they'd well and truly made it,

but they were to give one final twist to the story of art.

The solitary and anaemic Francesco de'Medici,

ruler of Florence in the 1570s, was certainly no warrior.

He spent his life amassing strange and exotic objects, to show his mastery of art and nature.

He even created a miniature museum for his eyes only -

the Studiolo.

Each side of the room is governed by one of the four elements -

earth,

air,

fire

and water.

Under each element are a series of fantastical paintings, so on the wall of water are images of the sea.

These paintings at this level are also cupboards.

Because this is the wall of water,

it's thought that Francesco de'Medici

would've kept objects from his collection associated with water -

for example, there might have been a statue of Venus, borne from water.

But there would also have been objects from nature - pieces of precious coral,

wonderful shells, perhaps, from the Indies.

These things were regarded by Renaissance princes as exceptionally precious.

The whole space was really a kind of microcosm

of the prince's knowledge of all things.

I don't want to make the project sound too rational,

because there's some pretty weird stuff going on in here too.

For example, here you've got a weird hallucinogenic dream scene,

full of half-naked women,

and it's thought that Francesco de'Medici was addicted to opium,

like many a Renaissance prince, and maybe he actually kept his stash behind this paining.

I think what we've got here is a new sense of art,

of the experience of art, of the work of art,

as a kind of narcotic.

Art has become totally untethered from any notion of shared value.

It's untethered from notions of religion,

it's untethered from notions of politics,

it's really an experience in and of and for itself.

And the thing about this space

is that no matter how many art historians has studied it,

no-one has managed to fully decode its secrets.

Art has become a kind of private obsession.

I think it's fascinating that there's one image of Francesco de'Medici on these walls,

and what he is, he's the alchemist.

I think that's what this space represents - the Medici,

through their relationship with art, have alchemically transformed it,

they've turned it into something else,

it's no longer what it was when Ghiberti those doors for Giovanni di Bicci,

it's no longer a work of religious significance,

it can be anything, anything at all - art has been liberated.

Florence had been the laboratory for a great experiment

where art became more precious than gold.

The Medicis' power and desires were the catalyst for new forms of artistic expression.

And they made capitalism respectable.

Greed is good, they said.

But greed for art is best of all.

And that's why people pay fortunes for it today.

The Medici turned Florence into their own personal work of art.

But their story is far bigger than the tale of one city.

Because what they did reaches into the modern world.

They transformed art and changed the course of civilisation.

And the biggest irony of all is that they did it all to get away from their dirty roots in money.

But what they did was create the biggest, baddest,

hardest currency of all - the currency of art.

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