All language subtitles for (2008) BBC The Medici Makers of Modern Art.ENG

L4.200.000. 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.