At Renaissance Court How to Get Ahead

Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance,

and home to one of the most famous, or infamous, families in history -

the Medici.

A dynasty of bankers turned royals.

The Medici were patrons of the finer things in life.

Painters and sculptors and thinkers flourished at the Florentine court.

The Renaissance shrank from the brute strength of medieval days,

and instead embraced a new refinement and culture.

It would take a special kind of ruler to marshal such talents -

a stealthy, string-pulling kind or ruler.

No wonder he's almost slipped through the net of history.

Now, you might have heard of Lorenzo the Magnificent,

or what about the Medici Popes? There were four of them.

But it was this guy who was the real deal -

Grand Duke Cosimo I of Tuscany.

He was reigning at the same time as the far better known

Henry VIII of England,

but it was Cosimo who wrote the book on how to be a Renaissance prince.

He was ruthless and yet, at the same time, a man of culture.

Cosimo was arguably the greatest ruler you've never heard of.

Cosimo became Duke of Florence unexpectedly in 1537.

He was a distant cousin of the main branch of the family.

His ancestors had been patrons of the arts since the 1400s...

..encouraging the greatest flowering of Western Art

since classical antiquity.

But there'd also been a period of terrible artistic destruction

driven by religious fervour.

If Cosimo was to succeed,

he had to restore the original ideals of the Renaissance...

..of beauty, humanity and learning.

Under Cosimo, there would be a new age of portraiture...

..and the nude.

'Florentines would learn to enjoy themselves...'

I'll tell you what, Paolo, this is la dolce vita, isn't it?

'..in their dress...'

What's this, Roberta?

Wow, that is a real minestrone strainer, isn't it?

'..even in the chivalry of their swordplay.'

Cosimo set out to make Florence the most sophisticated city in Europe.

But he would also usher in a new age of ambition and intrigue.

The year was 1539.

The young Cosimo, newly installed on the ducal throne of Florence,

needed a grand gesture.

What better way to announce himself

and his vision than to throw a lavish party?

Everyone loves a wedding, don't they?

Especially a royal wedding.

The groom, Cosimo de Medici, cut a dashing figure at just 20 years old.

His blushing bride, Eleonora of Toledo,

was a 17-year-old Spanish princess.

The marriage brought Cosimo lots of money and glamour.

But it was also that rare thing - a royal love match.

It was a brilliant start to Cosimo's reign.

Eleonora was shown off everywhere in Florence,

the original trophy wife, and thousands turned out to see her.

Everywhere she paraded she was serenaded by choirs,

orchestras, volleys of fireworks.

The thousand-strong wedding party included trumpeters,

scantily clad dancers, jousters,

horses decorated in fine harnesses, even professional footballers -

the Posh and Becks of the day weren't about to miss this event.

The party went on for days. The pomp and pageantry,

the feasts and festivities,

they all sent a message - the new court was to be a splendid affair,

and everyone was invited.

Florence hadn't seen a party like it for years.

There was free cake for everybody,

and the fountains overflowed with wine.

Salute!

What do you do if you're a Renaissance monarch

and you ascend the throne, albeit a ducal throne,

only to find you haven't got a palace to call your own?

Well, that's easily fixed - you just annex the old town hall.

Painters and decorators from all across the city

were called in to transform what had been a slightly dreary

municipal building into a royal residence that proclaimed a new age.

This used to be the people's space, at the heart of their city.

Now it was the centre of Cosimo's court.

In theory, everybody was equal under this massive roof in the old days,

at least that was the idea.

But now the new disposition was that one voice

and one voice alone mattered - the duke's.

This great, overblown cartoon strip, really, that's what it is,

of Cosimo's glory and his righteousness

reaches a kind of blasphemous finale with the apotheosis.

There's the duke rising up into heaven,

crowned by Florence, the feminine figure representing the city.

Elsewhere in Italy at this time artists who would become

world-renowned were putting saints

and members of the holy family on the ceiling.

Here it was just a man.

Every wall and ceiling

proclaims the absolute prowess of the new monarch...

..Cosimo the brave,

Cosimo the wise...

..Cosimo the visionary.

Even Cosimo - classical hero.

And everywhere his distinctive coat of arms bears down upon you.

It cost a fortune, but it was cheap at the price

to turn a mere man into a monarch.

Perhaps for the first time, though certainly not the last,

a banker was getting well above himself.

Cosimo was a monarch in need of some regalia.

Today, at the old ducal treasury, one splendid surviving piece

hints at the magnificence of his crown jewels.

It's an altarpiece commemorating one of his descendants.

He's Cosimo II, grandson of the duke,

and what he's worshipping are the old boy's tools of the trade,

his crown and sceptre.

He's like an operatic tenor at La Scala -

hymning, celebrating these baubles.

They rest on the beautiful red-damask drapery of this altar,

achieved through jasper, fringed with real gold.

Cosimo II is wearing his grandfather's official robes,

and they're brilliantly, dazzlingly realised here

through enamel, chased gold and diamonds.

This is how our Cosimo would have looked at his most regal.

His ducal crown was a Renaissance masterpiece.

Today, Florentine master goldsmith Paolo Penko

still marvels at the artistry of his predecessors.

The ducal crown is no longer with us, it's lost, but what was it like?

If you were going to make the crown, any idea how much it would cost?

Just between us.

A Renaissance city was only as great as its art and architecture,

and Duke Cosimo had a problem.

Florence's most famous artist, Michelangelo,

had defected to Rome to create such wonders as the world-famous ceiling

of the Sistine Chapel.

Cosimo needed to get Michelangelo back to Florence.

But it wasn't going to be easy.

Cosimo had begun writing Michelangelo

cringe-makingly heartfelt letters, basically fan mail,

in which he attempted to persuade him to return to Florence.

In one he says, "We do exhort and entreat you with all of our hearts,"

that's the royal we,

"assuring you that to us it would be most gratifying to see you."

And he goes on to say, "You can come and go as you please,

"you can live as you choose.

"For us, it would be enough just to have you here."

For the duke, to woo Michelangelo, to get him back into the fold,

into court, well, that would really put the froth on his cappuccino.

Sometime earlier, before Michelangelo left Florence for Rome,

he'd created the ultimate symbol of the city.

Powerful, but beautiful,

strong, but sensitive,

David, the boy who killed the giant, Goliath,

proclaiming the triumph of the weak over the strong.

Now the figure of David stood outside Cosimo's palace -

a silent and yet nagging reminder

of the artist who'd refused to return.

Cosimo had to find another sculptor to create a symbol of the new age.

He chose Benvenuto Cellini,

who would use classical mythology as his inspiration.

Cellini's monumental Perseus slaying Medusa is a fantastic combination

of the elegant, the refined,

and the utterly lurid and gory.

In the myth, the allegory,

Perseus has brought peace back to Ethiopia

by slaying the gorgon Medusa.

And this was read in these parts, not least by Cosimo and his court,

as testament and tribute to what he'd done in getting rid

of the republic and replacing it with his dukedom - with monarchy.

Cellini really has a field day here,

representing Perseus as a cold, ruthless, single-minded,

Mafiosi-style killer -

that in itself a reference to Cosimo's cold-eyed rule.

It drips with viscera.

Cellini was really enjoying himself here,

going for the full Hammer horror.

Not only does her head spew blood and gore,

but so does her poor severed neck here.

It's a fountain of innards.

A bit of a parody or maybe an homage to the Sistine Chapel,

the last flicker of life in the extended finger there.

Cosimo was pleased with the Perseus,

a figure that defined a new identity for the city.

But when court artists turned their hand to a portrait

of Cosimo himself, things would go badly wrong.

Down the road at the Bargello, Cellini's strapping bust of Cosimo

lurks in a neglected corner.

Even today, it's strangely unloved.

And this is what Cellini came up with -

a great hunk of bronze in more senses than one.

You want to rap it with your knuckles just to hear it clang,

though I doubt the curators would appreciate that.

This is Cosimo, yes, as Duke of Florence, but also as Caesar.

Cosimo the comic-book hero.

Look at the size of the man's pecs,

he's been spending some time in the gym.

Eagles tweak at his nipples - more than tweak, they bite them.

But does Cosimo start out in pain? He certainly doesn't.

How good is this piece of work?

Well, a courtier of Cosimo's described him in a note

in this fashion.

He said, "His eyes are large, his forehead wide,

"his beard strong, and the gaze of his eye will strike terror."

And that's one aspect of Cosimo that Cellini has definitely caught here.

You really wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of him

when he was in that mood.

The only problem was Cosimo hated it.

Perhaps it was a little too lifelike.

This kind of look would have been fine for the medieval period,

when a prince could be a barbarian and slake his every desire.

But it just didn't cut it for the new Renaissance era.

Now a ruler would certainly still get his own way

but do so without seeming to invest much effort in it,

without breaking sweat,

let alone with the eyes popping out of his head.

So Cosimo still needed a portrait of himself to help define the age.

Something that would cast him as a great Renaissance monarch -

strong but just,

forceful and yet civilised,

a warrior with a heart.

It was an artist's nightmare.

Who could pull off such a balancing act?

The answer lay in the relatively untested skills of Agnolo Bronzino.

Now, this was a bit more like it.

Here was a painting that Cosimo could live with on his walls,

and I think you can see why.

He's still very much in charge, he's the ruler,

and a military ruler at that.

You can't miss the splendid armour that Bronzino has rendered here.

He's actually made him rather slimmer than that Cellini bust,

which is part of the reason it satisfied the Duke.

Essentially, though, here is a man

who is rational, composed, in charge.

If he wants to get even with you, he will do it in his own good time.

Revenge - a dish in Italy best served cold.

Compared to that Cellini offering, this is less psycho, more capo.

He's a prince of secrets, emerging from the darkness.

At all events, Cosimo was so pleased with this picture,

he had copies of it made.

It was his official likeness,

and you could see it everywhere his writ ran.

Bronzino became the court artist,

and the Duke refused to sit even for the mighty Titian.

This portrait became a powerful template -

the pose and look were copied and were updated across the years,

but were unmistakably Bronzino's invention.

The artist had branded the age of Cosimo.

Modern Florence still salutes the Renaissance love of naked flesh.

And, as the painter of the age,

Bronzino couldn't resist indulging his own flourish of nudity.

The ancient world of Rome and Greece had celebrated the naked form -

its heroes and gods were seldom clothed.

But for more than a thousand years, since the advent of Christianity,

the naked body spoke of carnality and sin.

Now Bronzino would deliver an image of monarchy

quite inconceivable today.

Bronzino had painted the Duke as you'd never imagine him

appearing in a portrait, and I think it's the most extraordinary,

candid, intimate picture of a ruler I've ever seen.

Bronzino depicts Cosimo as Orpheus,

the hero of a story of passionate, undying love.

And that proved to be prophetic, because the Duke and his wife

were seldom parted and had an enduring and intense relationship.

On the one hand, this is an enchanting love token.

An intimate exchange between Cosimo and his wife.

It's almost as if he'd sent her a selfie -

not through the medium of an iPad,

but with the good offices of an old master, Bronzino.

Cosimo here is an ardent young man,

impatient to get his hands on his new wife.

At the same time, he's an exemplar of the new, of modernity,

of a new wave in art.

Renaissance life wasn't all spangled parties and old masters,

there was plenty of room for the dark arts, too,

and nobody understood that side of court life

better than Niccolo Machiavelli.

In a world still dominated by religion,

Machiavelli's great work, The Prince,

took a long, hard look at human nature,

and decided ambitious men would do better

if they were more cynical about the world around them.

Machiavelli's The Prince is a bracingly unsentimental primer

on how to cheat and deceive your way to the top.

Principles were for losers, he said,

to be jettisoned in pursuit of fame, success, wealth.

Although his apologists would say he was just describing

the way the world was.

Here's what Machiavelli wrote about you and I,

"One can make this generalisation about men -

"they are ungrateful, fickle liars and deceivers.

"They shun danger and are greedy for profit.

"While you treat them well, they are yours."

Machiavellian philosophy transported Cosimo from a world

of medieval piety to sharp-elbowed modern politics.

And the influence of Machiavelli's thinking

is still all around us today.

You can't help feeling that many politicians and their aides,

and by no means only here in Italy, would have been out of business

but for this character...

..the patron saint of spin.

16th-century Florence was a dangerous place.

The Medici family had many enemies

and they'd often been targeted by jealous assassins.

For the new, young ruler,

it was going to be tough just to stay alive.

Cosimo was not a man to be trifled with -

ruthlessness became his metier.

For instance, what was he to do with his cadre of Italian generals?

Could he trust them?

Didn't they harbour ambitions themselves?

He simply fired them all and had them replaced

with an army of mercenaries -

300 men from Germany and the Low Countries.

They owed their allegiance to Cosimo and to Cosimo alone.

It fell to Cosimo's German guard

to thwart the many attempts on his life.

Protecting the Duke was no easy feat because his business affairs

took him all over the city.

His would-be assassins were as dastardly as they were persistent -

snipers laid in wait for him,

his face towels were impregnated with poison,

and his enemies even hid a macabre apparatus

of spears and swords beneath the waters of the River Arno,

at the very spot where he liked to bathe.

Then one courtier came up with an ingenious solution...

..a secret elevated corridor

which allowed Cosimo to move around the city without being seen.

He could even look down on his subjects as he went.

Built by architect Georgio Vasari,

this astonishing structure still swoops across the River Arno -

an extra storey on the great Ponte Vecchio bridge

as it extends its reach right across the city.

This is so exciting.

The Vasari Corridor, as it's now known, is still off limits

to the general public, especially the section which crosses the river.

But I'm getting privileged entry.

Today it's used as an overflow for the Uffizi art gallery.

But it's still a private and exclusive vantage point on the city.

On the other side of the river,

Cosimo was even able to make his religious observances

without leaving the safety of his bespoke walkway.

The way Vasari designed the corridor, it actually passed through

the back of the Santa Felicita Church,

so that Cosimo and his family could come here and attend Mass

through this peephole

without the risk of murderers getting to their Communion wine -

a very real danger.

With the help of Giorgio Vasari,

Cosimo had adroitly outsmarted his enemies.

Cosimo's court prized classical proportion and symmetry.

And what was true for buildings and gardens

was also true for the human body.

Renaissance theories of architecture

and physical perfection mirrored one another -

humanity at its most refined was on display.

But when it came to real-life courtiers,

Cosimo's favourite didn't quite fit the mould.

And here he is, the prince's favourite familiar,

Morgante the dwarf -

naked and riding a tortoise.

He seems to be saying, "Nothing to see here,

"just a guy out for a ride on his amphibian, deal with it."

His job essentially was to amuse Cosimo and to make him look good.

Where he was on the short side,

and carrying a certain amount of heft,

Cosimo appeared all the taller, all the slenderer.

If the Duke went out hunting on a fine stallion,

poor old Morgante was bringing up the rear on his tortoise.

In Cosimo's day, and, let's face it, until quite recently,

it was assumed that physical deformity

must be mirrored by a weakness in the mind.

So Morgante made his living by playing the fool.

He deliberately lost at cards,

and his raucous, outrageous behaviour

was the source of great amusement to people at court.

But, like the fool in Shakespeare's Lear,

Morgante was one of the few people who dared tell the truth to Cosimo.

Morgante's life at court was bittersweet.

On the one hand, he was forced to perform in demeaning entertainments,

on the other, the Duke showered him with gifts,

including land and houses.

And then there was ultimate honour -

a handsome portrait by Cosimo's court painter.

Bronzino renders Morgante with some dignity here,

at least compared to that sculpture.

He's seen as a classical figure.

He's out hunting. He's a man of virility and action.

This is also a bravura artistic work.

Bronzino was locked in a furious debate with a man called Varchi

about which was better, painting or sculpture.

Varchi said it's got to be sculpture -

you can see more than one side of a figure at the same time.

Bronzino said, no,

he said follow the eyes of Morgante,

and we can go around and see him looking over his shoulder at us.

So painting is at least the equal of a marble.

Morgante was such a beloved and treasured figure

at the court of Cosimo that when he sadly passed away

the Duke immediately hired a new dwarf and called him Morgante.

The Renaissance elevated hand-to-hand combat

into an elegant choreography.

Gone was the machismo of medieval jousting.

Fights, though still deadly, were now a courtly dance.

Chief choreographer was Camillo Agrippa,

author of A Treatise on the Science of Arms,

published in 1553 and dedicated to Cosimo.

Master of arms at the Accademia Schermistica,

Lucio Nugnes is going to put me through my paces.

Agrippa's treatise on swordplay demands a core repertoire of moves.

There are four basic positions.

All thrusts should be made with a quick wheel-like motion.

Use fancy footwork, keep your sword in position,

and your body out of harm's way.

Super!

And finally, to anticipate your opponent's potentially lethal

thrust, keep your eyes firmly fixed on his sword hand.

I'm getting the hang of this...

up to a point.

Grazie.

100 miles east of Florence is the city of Urbino.

It was here that Italy's rule book of courtly etiquette was written.

Il Libro del Cortegiano - The Book of the Courtier.

It contained handy hints for negotiating the many

pitfalls of court life,

from picking up women...

..to how to crack jokes

and, in true Italian style, how to dress.

-Prego.

-Grazie, signor.

-Prego.

There was a simple rule of thumb

when it came to snappy dressing in the Renaissance: never forget your

three "N"s. Nuevo, netto and nero.

New, neat and, above all, black.

It's like putting on a small parachute.

Italian black was sober,

restrained and tasteful, except perhaps in one department.

What's this, Roberta?

This is called "braghetta" in Italian and "codpiece" in English.

Costume historian Roberta Orsi Landini is helping me

get to grips with a paradox of Renaissance fashion -

when chic black was coupled with the attention-seeking codpiece.

It's a very unmistakable shape, Roberta. Why is that?

It was a shape that suggested

the virility, the strength of a man.

Back in those Renaissance days, Roberta,

was the codpiece anatomically correct?

Of course not, it was a fake.

They want to appear bigger than they are, of course.

Is this a practical thing though, Roberta,

or is it all about male showing-off?

It is about mainly showing off.

But it can be used as a pocket, for example.

So you could keep your keys in there or some change?

Keys, of course, change, handkerchief, something like that.

Someone would say, "Where are my keys?

-"Oh, I think they're here in my codpiece."

-Yes.

And nobody thought it was a bit strange or

funny in the old days to be advertising,

drawing attention to your...what shall we say, your finer parts?

But I think that was normal for the time.

They don't see it as we see it.

As a lady, do you regret the passing of the codpiece?

-Oh, no, no, of course not!

-You don't?

Because it's very indecent, I think.

-Very indecent?

-Indecent.

Don't you think there's a certain comedy about it, perhaps?

I don't think so, I think that normal pockets are better.

And how do I look in the gear, would you say?

It fitted not so well but you can cover it with a coat.

Oh, there's more. OK, why not?

Now, that's... I like that.

You like that? That is comfortable.

It's slightly dressy, maybe. I don't know.

So when you arrived somewhere and you greeted everybody,

you would do that and they immediately see your codpiece?

No, I don't think so.

Let's not go there, all right. Thank you very much.

Bye.

Believe it or not, the men of Cosimo's court

were practically metrosexual.

They attached huge importance to personal appearance

and grooming, although we've yet to find firm evidence of moisturiser.

Having said that,

what I'm doing here now would have been anathema to them. Shaving?!

But a man's very essence was in his beard.

In England, Henry VIII offered a tantalising glimpse of chin.

Francis I, King of France, sported a facial pelmet of man-fur.

And there's something of the night

about the beard of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Barbering was a vital occupation at the Florentine court.

Gabriele Filistrucci's family has been in the beard

and wig-making game for over 300 years.

Wow, that is a real minestrone strainer, isn't it?

Well, here he is - so what style would you call this?

-What were the different styles? Hang on, hang on!

-I'm sorry.

Easy.

Is Cosimo, I remove Cosimo, OK?

-The Pope.

-The Pope.

That's got something.

Roy Wood used to have one like this in Wizzard.

HE SIGHS

I feel a bit like a sort of an Alsatian or a yeti.

The term "Renaissance man" has become shorthand for a particular

kind of genius.

One adept at a variety of disciplines.

Multi-tasking was a signature of the age.

Marrying the scientific with the artistic,

inventive men were central to the working of Cosimo's court.

And one particularly gifted individual

seemed to offer more than most.

Bernadaro Buontalenti was the courtier whose gifts just

went on giving.

He actually was that much-spotted figure, the Renaissance man.

Architect, stage designer, inventor of mad self-propelled machines.

He came up with an incredible,

edible treat that was bound to tickle the Duke's fancy.

Ice cream - in a pre-refrigerated age, it was nothing short

of a miracle.

And today Paolo Pomposi is still making ice cream to that

original recipe.

Now, Paolo, you've got all this gubbins here,

if I can use the technical term, to make ice cream now.

What about Buontalenti? It was very primitive back then...

Mmm, it's good. I can almost taste the snow from the Apennines.

I tell you what, Paolo, this is la dolce vita, isn't it?

Mm!

Every Italian city needed the relics,

the bones of a venerated saint...

..in order to attract pilgrims and hence their cash.

But the Renaissance was an age when people began to exult

artistic genius almost as much as religious virtue.

On the 18th of February 1564, Michelangelo, the artist

who got away, died in Rome.

Cosimo's attempts to get him home had proved hopeless,

but he wasn't beaten yet.

At the monastery attached to the Church of the Saints

of the Apostles, in Rome,

the monks prepared for the burial of Italy's greatest artist.

-Buongiorno.

-Buongiorno.

'Franciscan friar Father Maximilian has agreed to talk to me

'about what happened here.'

Two henchmen, working on the orders of Cosimo,

had broken into the monastery cloisters to steal

the body of Michelangelo before he was even in his grave.

Tell me more about this extraordinary case of...

it's sort of premature grave robbing, isn't it,

when the body was taken away.

That's quite an event.

Si, it's an event.

They put Michelangelo's body in a cart along with other bundles

and packages and sped off as fast as they could to

the gates of Rome, hoping the guards would let them through unmolested

and they could return in triumph to Florence

with the body of that city's most famous son.

They were lucky and made it home.

In Florence, Cosimo's men were waiting to receive the body.

Now preparations could begin.

It was quite simply the most extraordinary spectacle

this old town had ever seen. Michelangelo, a genius, true,

but a flesh-and-blood genius after all - a man -

was beatified, turned into a saint.

He became to Florence what St Mark

and St Peter, Christ's own apostles, were to Venice and Rome.

It was as though the artist was up there on par with

those disciples.

He would be interred in the church

Florence reserves for its greatest heroes, Santa Croce.

The tomb itself would be a triumph of Florentine art.

Michelangelo had defied the Duke in life

but it was Cosimo who had the last word.

The artist was buried here in what amounted to a state funeral.

The finest talents of the Florentine academy were entrained

to create a tomb worthy of the great man, and of the great occasion.

Bronzino, Cellini

and crucially, above all, Vasari,

who designed this extraordinary sepulchre.

He wrote that not even a pope or an emperor would get a better

send-off than Florence would mount for Michelangelo, its prodigal son.

The three weeping maidens at the bottom represent

a trinity of the great disciplines in which Michelangelo excelled.

On the left, a figure representing the art of painting.

She's holding a sculpture

but she's also holding paint brushes in her other hand.

She's going to commit a likeness of that torso to canvas.

In the middle, the figure represents the art,

the discipline of sculpture.

She holds a chisel and a block of pure marble.

And over on the right, this figure stands for architecture.

She's holding what may be a set of plans in one hand

and a pair of dividers in the other.

And above them,

the great, craggy, benign figure of Michelangelo himself.

Vasari was inconsolable at the death of his idol.

He claims to have witnessed a near miracle when Michelangelo's

body was finally returned to the city 25 days after his death.

He said that they found it "perfect in every part

"and so free from any evil odour

"we were tempted to believe he had merely drifted into a sweet

"and quiet sleep".

The canonisation of the artist was assured.

Towards the end of his life, the Grand Duke

cut a much-diminished figure.

He'd always been ruthless

but that had been tempered by his love of his family.

However, in an annus horribilis, a malaria epidemic swept away

his wife, two of his sons

and two of his daughters, including his favourite, Maria.

Life no longer held any savour for Cosimo.

He handed over most of his power to another son,

and retreated into an unlikely late career as a womaniser,

or else into the shuttered seclusion of his lonely apartments.

After a series of debilitating strokes, he died in 1574.

But the Medici name would live on, immortalised for ever

in the world of astronomy and mathematics.

Cosimo liked to keep a pet mathematician at court, someone

he could consult on rarefied matters like ancient Greek geometry

and the movement of heavenly bodies.

It was all a far cry from the superstition

of medieval times. The post of numbers man to the Duke

would go on to inspire and sustain

one of the greatest thinkers in world history.

Galileo Galilei was just a young boy when Cosimo died.

But the artistic and intellectual life of the Florentine court

under Duke Cosimo had inspired him.

The Arcetri Observatory on the edge of Florence is on the very hillside

where Galileo made his observations.

'His discoveries would help to shatter the medieval

'belief system which insisted that the cosmos revolved around Earth.'

That's very pleasing, isn't it?

Today, astronomer Paolo Totsi enjoys the same view,

and we're going to spot the Medici Constellation.

Oh, that's good.

That's very clear, isn't it?

Isn't it exciting?

-So those are the Medici stars, is that right?

-Yes.

How important was Galileo's discovery of the Medici Stars

all those years ago?

The Medicia Sidera, like Galileo called them,

they are the four major satellites of Jupiter.

Jupiter is the biggest planet of our solar system

and now we know today that it has a lot of satellites.

However, four of them are quite prominent

and they are big, mostly like our moon, to give you an example.

So, studying the position of these satellites, around Jupiter,

he could tell that they were orbiting Jupiter.

And this was the main discovery.

Yes, up until that point

people believed something else altogether, didn't they?

Everything was orbiting around... was, you know,

had a revolution around the Earth.

This observation was a revolution, because for the first time

we saw something orbiting around another heavenly body

and this was not expected.

In this history of great scientific breakthroughs,

where would you put Galileo uncovering the Medici stars?

He was really opening the window on a completely new world.

And this was really the beginning of our modern view of the universe,

it was the beginning of modern science.

Heavenly art flourished

in an atmosphere of strong government and lavish patronage.

And the stars smiled on a new kind of artistic outrageousness

and absolute rule in 17th-century France, under the Sun King.

But that's for next time.