History Video Blog #32

Posted on March 15, 2010 by admin

Florence is a city in Italy on the River Arno about 170 miles north of Rome in Tuscany, Northern Italy. it was an important city in the Middle Ages and it is considered the center of the Italian Renaissance, a “rebirth” of the arts and architecture after the constrictive days of the Middle Ages (or so Renaissance people thought). That rebirth was made possible because Florence was also a center of banking and trade, and its wealthy patrons made the burgeoning of the arts possible. It was the richest city of its time, and home to one of the wealthiest families in Europe, the de’ Medici family.

Florence was a city-state that began as a republic ruled by a council called the signoria, appointed by a ruler that was elected every two months. It was a republic beginning in 1115 and it soon came to dominate most of Tuscany (there was no nation of Italy until the nineteenth century), despite frequent coups and political unrest. The Medici family and the papacy together finally destroyed the republic completely in the 16th century and made it a kingdom controlled by the de’ Medici family for decades and decades. The Medici man who made all this possible was named Cosimo.

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  • http://www.modernera.us/wordpress culfinatan

    New Post: Let's sail down the River Arno to Firenze on the latest History Video Blog! http://is.gd/aJjX5 #hvb

  • will_spicer

    when it comes to visual fine art, i just keep coming back to Breughel's “Landscape with the fall of Icarus.” it really speaks to two different world-views– one that allows for the fantastic and miraculous, and one that doesn't.
    And then there is Auden's take in “Musee de Beaux Arts”, which seems equally valid, if not more essential to the human experience:
    …In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
    Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
    Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
    But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
    As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
    Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
    Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
    had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on…

    i never tire looking at it and when i do, i carry it round the whole day

  • mzzkelly

    That's so hard! There is no single piece of work but I do have overall artists. For now…

    I like the color and transparency of Helen Frankenthaler woodcuts. You've gotta see them up close.