Historian Answers Renaissance Questions

I'm Historian Alex Bevilacqua,

let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Renaissance Support.

[upbeat music]

A question from the Ask Historian subreddit,

Seriously though,

what actually is 'The Renaissance'?

The European Renaissance

is a period in history when scholars

and artists rediscovered

culture of classic antiquity of Ancient Greece

and Rome, then they created art

that was inspired by the Pagan past,

and while the Renaissance began in Italy,

it soon spread all over Europe.

This was also a period however,

of political instability,

Italy itself was fragmented,

and so, the Renaissance

is also a period of warfare,

and great violence.

New technologies, such as artillery

were transforming the battlefield,

and new ideas,

such as the ideas of Martin Luther

and the Protestant Reformation

were fragmenting Europe,

and causing new forms of division,

and conflict.

From the History subreddit we have,

What event marks

the beginning of the Renaissance?

Great question,

for this one I'm going to need

my trusty timeline,

because the Renaissance is a cultural

and intellectual movement,

it is hard to pinpoint a single date

on which it started.

In 1345, the poet Francesco Petrarca,

Petrarch goes to the Verona Cathedral Library

and discovers a forgotten manuscript of Cicero,

the ancient orator,

and this starts the race to recover

other manuscripts of classical antiquity.

In 1453, Constantinople falls

to the Ottoman Empire,

and a new era begins in the Middle East.

It's also when we have the development

of moveable type,

and of the printing press.

In 1492, Columbus makes his first journey

to the Americas.

And in 1498,

the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama

arrives in India.

And in 1517,

Martin Luther makes his protest

against the Catholic Church in his

Ninety-five Theses,

which set off the Protestant Reformation.

In 1599, the Globe Theater in London is built,

where Shakespeare staged many

of his most important plays.

When we periodize history,

we usually say that,

With the end of the 16th Century,

the Renaissance era ends,

and the Baroque period begins.

By the time we get to the beginning

of the Thirty Years' War in 1618,

which is a conflict that involves all of Europe,

we are definitely not in the Renaissance anymore.

@gatagraceful says,

Why is the Mona Lisa so popular?

I literally don't give a [beep].

She's ugly.

First of all, rude.

To think of the Mona Lisa

as the equivalent of a Renaissance pinup,

is the wrong way of approaching this painting.

Leonardo's portrait of this wife

of a Florentine silk merchant,

is one he worked on for much of his life.

The del Giocondo family who had commissioned it,

never actually received the painting,

which was found in his atelier in France.

The Mona Lisa

is the most famous painting in history,

so why is that?

I'm going to give you two reasons,

one has to do with Leonardo's technique,

which is known as sfumato,

he layered glaze over glaze,

over glaze, so that all of the different

colors blend into each other,

so that there's no trace of the brushwork.

Of course this painting is completed

after he's done his studies of anatomy,

so he understands how the musculature

of the lower face works,

when he gives her that mysterious half-smile,

it's deliberate.

Leonardo has to sit her almost completely still,

she's immobile,

and yet she's bursting with life,

all we want to know is what she's thinking,

and that is the power of Leonardo's portraiture,

that he can convey so much anteriority,

with so little motion.

Now, if you go to the Louvre,

you might be disappointed

that you won't get a close encounter

with Mona Lisa,

because she is so popular.

If you're ever in Washington DC,

you can have an encounter

with the first woman

that Leonardo portrayed,

Ginevra de' Benci,

and you can have her probably all to yourself.

Ginevra de' Benci called herself

a mountain tiger,

she was the original Ice Queen,

as you can tell by looking at this painting,

and getting to see it up close

is one of the pleasures of The National Gallery,

you can see Leonardo's brushwork,

for example, the beautiful way

in which the pearl hovers over her chest

as it buttons together her very fine blouse.

TheNintendoCreator asks,

What were common people's diets like

in Renaissance era Europe?

Their diets were pretty terrible,

the diet of an ordinary person

would really have been based

around a staple crop,

in Europe it was mostly wheat

that would give them the calories they needed

to get through the day,

and this they would've eaten

in the form of bread,

or perhaps gruel,

which is a kind of porridge

made with old bread,

so not very exciting,

not very delicious.

Even the rich people were not eating

many of the things that we consider

characteristic of European cuisine,

for example, the tomato

is one of the many products

that came from the Americas,

and that was not available in Renaissance Europe.

So, what even is Italian food without the tomato?

Likewise, peppers,

corn, squashes,

avocados, also pineapples,

and most depressingly perhaps,

cacao, so no chocolate in Renaissance Europe.

In addition to this,

something that is essential to many of us,

coffee, was not yet known in Europe.

So, all of the achievements of the Renaissance,

they were all achieved without caffeine.

Eventually however, these goods start

to trickle in,

and they start to decorate the tables of,

by the end of the 16th Century,

of elite households.

And in 17th Century art,

we see many beautiful still-life paintings

that depict all of these rich

and wonderful agricultural products,

that are coming into Europe

from all over the world.

@fosterhunterart asks,

What hidden message does Leonardo da Vinci's

'The Last Supper' hold?

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci,

is a fresco that is found in Milan,

on a wall of the dining hall

of the Dominican Convent

of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Many people have read The da Vinci Code

and have developed conspiracy theories

about this painting,

specifically, they think that the Apostle John,

the youngest Apostle,

who's seated to the right of Jesus Christ

is actually a secret depiction

of the Mary Magdalene,

this is nonsense.

The fact that John looks slightly androgynous

is actually entirely characteristic

of Leonardo's art,

Leonardo painted androgynous,

or we might say gender-fluid young men

throughout his entire career,

there's no coded message there.

But, there's a lot to love about this painting,

for one, the use of linear perspective,

the ability to make a flat surface

seem like it has spacial depth,

and this is something that was not practiced

in medieval art,

but he makes very elegant use of it here,

by centering all of those spacial lines

in the painting,

on the face of Jesus Christ.

Because this was painted on a large wall,

and Leonardo had to keep track of the design,

he actually used a nail in the center

of the face of Jesus Christ,

and there's still a trace of it.

He chooses a specific

and very dramatic moment to depict,

which was the moment immediately

after Christ has said,

One of you will betray me.

And what we see,

is the extraordinary psychological shock

that ripples through

the group of the Apostles,

as they process this information.

All of their different responses

expressed with their hand gestures,

except of course for Judas,

who is leaning forward knowingly.

The movements of the body

convey the movements of the soul.

@OG_SSX asks,

If social media existed

in different historical eras,

which period would have the spiciest posts?

My money's on the Renaissance.

The Renaissance is an age of rivalry,

first and foremost,

between different princes,

between the courtiers,

who are competing for their favorite at court.

It's also an age of rivalry in the arts,

Leonardo da Vinci,

and Michelangelo famously did not get along

when they were commissioned to paint

two different walls in the same room,

in the Center of Florence.

So, you can imagine how that went.

The Medici are a family of merchants

who become wealthy bankers,

they're bankers to the pope,

they sponsor a lot of artists,

and Lorenzo de' Medici,

Lorenzo the Magnificent in particular

is famous for living like a Renaissance prince.

One of the artists

who worked for Lorenzo for example,

was Sandro Botticelli,

who is famous for The Birth of Venus.

@zerthezer says,

Can y'all art people explain to me

why of all the great Sandro Botticelli's,

it's 'The Birth of Venus'

that seems to grasp

pop culture by the neck? Weird.

Well, it's true that there are many

great paintings by Sandro Botticelli,

but I think there's good reason

that The Birth of Venus

is one of the most famous,

it is quite a sexy painting.

So, most of Botticelli's earlier paintings

are religious scenes,

Virgin Mary's,

and other saints.

So, this turn to Pagan subjects,

really marks a change in the history of art.

Venus is the ancient Pagan Roman Goddess of love,

and she's emerging according to myth,

out of the waters fully-formed,

and being welcomed by a gentle breeze.

In Renaissance Florence,

there were sometimes debates

about how much nudity was appropriate

to be displayed in public places,

so a painting like this

would definitely have been

for the inner rooms of a palace,

where only a select number of people

would've been able to view it.

@hlonela_tanda says,

Just realized the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

were named after Italian Renaissance artists.

That's right, Michelangelo,

Donatello, Raphael,

and Leonardo.

Donatello is slightly earlier

than the others

and was a sculptor.

Michelangelo is both a sculptor,

and the painter of the Sistine Chapel.

Raphael is an exquisite painter,

who's a contemporary of Michelangelo's.

And Leonardo da Vinci of course,

everyone knows as a painter,

a draftsman, an engineer.

Aristocratie from Reddit asks,

Is it true that during the Renaissance,

some women used belladonna in their eyes

for a dilated attractive effect?

Belladonna is a highly toxic plant

that was used in the Renaissance,

not so much to dilate the pupils,

as to make the complexion paler.

Women in the Renaissance were obsessed

with having pale skin,

and they used a variety of means

to make their skin more fair,

some of these were highly toxic,

including a lead/mercury supplement

and arsenic.

They also bleached their hair

because of the importance of beauty

in a patriarchal world,

for many women,

their marriage prospects

were one of the most important

determinants of their lives.

When we laugh at them for these efforts,

we shouldn't assume that they were

always unaware of the side-effects

of the products that they used,

and there are indeed some examples

of women poisoning their husbands

with their cosmetics,

showing that they were extremely able,

both to understand that these

were toxic chemicals,

and to put them to lethal use.

Next question.

@YaBoyDLG says,

More important to mankind,

Johannes Gutenberg or Steve Gutenberg?

No shade to Steve Gutenberg,

but I'm gonna go with Johannes here.

Johannes Gutenberg is associated

with one of the most important

technological breakthroughs

in Renaissance Europe,

the printing press.

Here is a small-scale model

of a Gutenberg Press.

Printing had been known in China for centuries,

but it was block-printing,

it wasn't printing with moveable type.

So, the key breakthrough here

is having different characters for each letter,

made out of lead,

that can be recombined,

and this makes it much more economical

to produce many,

many pages of text in a short time.

And of course,

the abundance of paper,

which again, is a Chinese technology

that becomes increasingly common in Europe.

Paper is made by pulping old rags,

it's made of underpants if you will,

and it's much cheaper than the animal hides

on which people wrote earlier

in the middle ages.

The press itself is modeled on a wine press,

this is where we would put the piece of paper,

fasten it, so that it doesn't move.

Here, we would screw together

all of our type,

so that it stays tight.

Then we would place it,

and we would ink it,

using ink balls,

it would be covered with a viscous ink,

and then rolled here under the press,

and then the strongest man in the print shop

would screw it down

and make an impression of a page.

And this process can be repeated again

and again, so that you can make many impressions

of a single page.

The very first book to be made

with this new combination of technologies

is Gutenberg's Bible,

it imitates a medieval manuscript book

in every possible way,

including that they've had someone by hand,

decorate the initial letters.

In the 50-years from the invention

of the printing press,

some six-million books were produced in Europe,

in about 40,000 editions,

which is probably more books

than had been produced in Europe

in the proceeding millennium.

One of the many effects of the printing press

can be seen in the Protestant Reformation,

which starting with Luther's Theses of 1517,

relied on the ability of reformers

to print out their ideas,

and to distribute them quickly,

it almost became a form

of Renaissance social media,

without the existence of print,

it's hard to imagine that the new ideas

of the Reformation would have traveled

as widely, or reached as many people as they did.

@wonderboygenius asks,

Wait, was MLK named after Martin Luther?

Actually yes, Martin Luther King Jr's father

traveled to Germany as a baptist pastor,

and was so inspired by what he learned

about Martin Luther,

that he changed his own name,

and he changed

his five-year-old son's name as well,

and it's not difficult to see

why a baptist preacher of the 20th Century

might've been inspired by the figure

of the 16th Century Augustinian friar

that stood up to the Roman Catholic Church,

Luther's Reformation came from a very deep

spiritual insight,

which is that works,

that is good deeds,

charitable deeds are not

what leads to salvation,

it's fate that leads to salvation,

and that undermines the whole edifice

of pilgrimage,

and of indulgences,

and all of these ways in which late

medieval Christianity was telling people

that they could get to Heaven.

Luther's initial intention

was to change the church from within,

not to break from it,

over the course of the three-years

after he first published his criticisms

in 1517, he realized that schism was inevitable,

and this great division between Catholics,

and as they were called by their critics

Protestants lead to wars of religion,

that lasted almost 150-years.

@vinbrown asks,

What's with the sea monsters on old maps?

If you've ever looked at Renaissance maps,

such as this one,

you'll have noticed figures

of fantastical sea monsters.

The first thing to consider,

is that these maps were not made for navigators,

these are maps for people who like

to imagine distant places.

So, part of the function of the sea monsters

is to make these maps beautiful,

the sea monsters also tell us

about ideas people had,

the monsters was a category of thought

where people dumped things

that they couldn't otherwise explain.

This is a map of the Caribbean,

and of Coastal South America,

the people of the Americas

were of extreme interest to Europeans,

the Tupinamba people of Brazil

were depicted here,

wearing feathers,

and engaging in an act of cannibalism,

because Europeans heard that cannibalism

was practiced in Brazil,

and this became one of their most

enduring obsessions,

even in relative absence in evidence

of this practice.

@jaetok says,

OMG, The Sistine Chapel is unbelievable.

A human did that [beep]? No way.

Way. Many individuals collaborated together,

to make this splendid place of worship

in St. Peters in Rome.

Of course, the most famous is Michelangelo

who painted the ceiling,

and the back wall.

Michelangelo was a sculptor,

and he was initially skeptical

when approached by Pope Julius II,

one of the great Renaissance popes,

to paint the ceiling,

he wasn't sure he wanted to invest

that much time into this endeavor.

He was famous in his time for his sculpture,

including the David Facing Goliath,

depicted as a handsome youth,

and that you can still visit in Florence.

Eventually, Michelangelo was persuaded,

and he painted a ceiling with scenes from Genesis

that is still one of the most astonishing

ceiling paintings that you can see anywhere,

and that immediately sent out ripples

through Renaissance Rome

as other artists came to admire this work.

The most famous section of the painting

is at center,

it's God creating Adam.

Michelangelo suffered a lot to make this ceiling,

he was up on a scaffolding,

it used to be thought that he lay on his back,

but we actually have a doodle

that Michelangelo did in the margin

of a letter to a friend,

in which he shows himself

standing upright, painting.

Several decades later,

in a very different political climate,

he was brought back by a different pope

to paint the back wall,

that's when he created The Last Judgment,

which is an extraordinary scene,

filled with hundreds of bodies.

One detail that's worth noticing

in The Last Judgment

is St. Bartholomew holding his own flayed skin,

because that skin is thought to be

a self-portrait of Michelangelo.

Jeszkar from Reddit asks,

In a Renaissance era world,

what resource would be

really important in trading,

and worth fighting for?

We might think of gold or ivory,

but the one that maybe

is most important to consider, is spices.

Cinnamon from Sri Lanka,

pepper from the Malabar Coast,

the South Coast of India.

Cloves and nutmeg from the Spice Islands

in Southeast Asia,

these were things that could not

be produced in Europe,

and that had to be imported at great expense,

they were transported across the Indian Ocean

by Muslim merchants.

When in the 15th Century,

the Portuguese start sailing

along the Coast of Africa,

and eventually, reach India by 1498,

one of the main reasons for their journey

is to disrupt the spice trade,

to cut out the middle-man,

the Muslim middle-man,

and to make themselves masters of this trade,

which indeed they managed to do,

and which leads to a period

of Portuguese domination of the high seas,

and of global trade that connects Europe

all the way to Japan.

In order to be able to do this,

the Portuguese had to make breakthroughs

in open-sea navigation,

Vasco da Gama sailed out

into the open ocean,

in order to be brought back by the currents,

and that is also how the Europeans

first ended up in Brazil,

when they sailed out a little too far

off the coast of Africa.

This is the context for Columbus' voyage in 1492,

and his subsequent ones,

and of course it begins a new era of colonialism.

@BySilent asks,

What is inside Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks?

da Vinci's notebooks are to my mind,

as much of a masterpiece as his paintings.

Leonardo used his notebooks

to put down things that he observed,

Leonardo participated in dissections,

where dead bodies were cut up,

this allowed him to study all of the organs

of the human body,

including, as you see here,

a uterus with a dead fetus inside it.

Leonardo believed that the human body

was a microcosm of the universe,

and nowhere is this idea better expressed

than in his famous drawing

of the Vitruvian Man,

inspired by a passage in the Roman architect

Vitruvius' book,

what Vitruvius says is that,

The ideal human body can fit

both in the perimeter of a circle,

and of a square,

centered at it's navel.

Because the Renaissance was a time of warfare,

Leonardo spent a lot of time

imagining war machines,

this is a machine surrounded by sides

that it can operate as it moves,

that will slice down anyone who comes near.

He designed tanks,

and siege weapons,

and all kinds of other machinery,

most of which was never realized,

and in fact,

when Leonardo did get a closeup look at warfare,

the real thing,

he thought it was terrible.

Leonardo was also interested

in the flight of birds,

and he applied his insights

to trying to [indistinct] a flying machine

for human beings,

mostly built on flapping mechanisms,

later in life,

he designed some gliders as well.

And hereto, most of these machines

were never realized,

we have to think about them less as inventions,

and more as thought experiments,

ways of trying to penetrate

how aerodynamics work.

Leonardo's notebooks are written

in a very peculiar way,

from right to left,

in something that we call mirror script.

Now, people have thought this was a code

that Leonardo was trying to conceal

what he was writing,

it has a simpler explanation.

Leonardo was left-handed,

and if he had written from left to right,

the back of his hand would have smudged the ink

on ever line that he wrote,

so he solved the problem by simply writing

in the other direction.

Here's a question from Quora,

Was Leonardo da Vinci wealthy

by the standards of the day?

Leonardo was born the illegitimate son

of a small-town notary,

so no, he was not born wealthy,

and as a child,

he was apprenticed to a painter's workshop

in Florence, where he had to learn his craft.

A great way for a scholar or an artist

to make a living in the Renaissance,

was to receive the patronage of a prince,

Leonardo eventually moves to Milan

and seeks the patronage of the defector

ruler of Milan,

and he writes a letter which we still have,

which reads like a cover letter

of a resume today,

in which he lists all the things he can do,

and 9 out of 10 of the main points

pertain to military engineering,

because remember the Renaissance

is a time of warfare,

and Leonardo is saying,

I can make astonishing machines,

for example, For siege warfare,

that will help you

and make you more powerful.

And then, after he's made this long list,

at the very end he sort of casually adds,

Oh and by the way,

I can paint as well as anyone else too.

@live2tell_x says,

Does anyone know why Tupac

keep referencing Machiavelli in his music?

Tupac Shakur is just one of many admirers

of Niccolo Machiavelli,

the Florentine diplomat,

historian, politician,

who has become so famous in particular

for one short book that he wrote,

called The Prince.

His main argument is that the ruler

has to be willing to be bestial,

to do immoral things in order to hold onto power.

In fact, even today,

the adjective Machiavellian

indicates someone who will go to any length

in order to achieve their goals.

Machiavelli in fact was a more careful

thinker than that,

he was not saying that we all get a free pass

in immoral behavior,

he was concerned with the fragility of politics

in Italy during this time,

and he was trying to offer a solution,

not just for the prince himself,

but for how stability could be maintained.

@B4wekiss says,

Wait, did Machiavelli

and Leonardo da Vinci

really team up? #superteam.

Yes, this is the Renaissance equivalent

of a superhero crossover,

Machiavelli, and Leonardo were in Florence

at the same time,

in the early 1500's,

and both of them were serving the city government

in different capacities.

They collaborated on a project

to reroute the River Arno,

which flows from Florence,

towards the Mediterranean sea,

through the port city of Pisa.

Now, Pisa had been under Florentine rule,

but it had rebelled,

and so, to punish Pisa,

Leonardo and Machiavelli thought

it might be possible to do a gigantic project

of hydraulic engineering,

and reroute the river.

In the end,

the project proved beyond the capacities

of the Florentines,

and was abandoned.

Here's a question from the ren faire subreddit,

Quick, I need an outfit

for the ren faire tomorrow.

If you want to go to the Renaissance Faire,

and be historically accurate,

here are some of the things to keep in mind.

First, you need to choose a fabric

for your clothing,

that was available in the Renaissance.

Cotton was not widely available in Europe

until centuries later.

Wool in particular is what makes

the fortunes of a place like England,

which exports it's wool,

and at Florence,

which processes the wool,

and turns it into fine

and expensive textiles.

The wealthy person would wear fine materials,

wool shot through with silver thread for example,

or fine velvets

and embroideries.

By contrast, ordinary people might save money,

not so much on the fabrics themselves,

but on the dyes that they use.

Red for example,

can be obtained from matter,

this is a cheaper,

but duller red,

whereas rich people will use Kermes,

which creates a brilliant crimson,

so the robes of the Holy Roman Emperor,

which you can still see in Vienna,

have a brilliant crimson.

And the same is true of blue,

which can reproduce with Woad,

which is a cheaper dye,

or the imported Indigo,

which makes a very brilliant blue.

In the Renaissance,

people express their social identity

through what they wore,

so a friar looked different from a duchess,

who in turn looked different from a merchant,

there was a lot of anxiety about the idea

that if you changed your clothes,

you might confuse people about who you were,

so people passed Sumptuary Laws,

trying to regulate clothing.

The other reason for Sumptuary Laws,

was to try to tamp down on luxury,

and to prevent especially women

from overdoing it.

As you may guess,

these Sumptuary Laws were ineffective,

people found ways around the regulations

to express their status,

to express their wealth,

to express their love of color

and ornament.

Octabo1 says,

Leonardo da Vinci wasn't gay,

people said he was as a joke.

Leonardo's sexuality is something

that people have speculated about for centuries.

Leonardo surrounded himself

with attractive young men,

and he was himself,

a very pleasing,

attractive, elegant person,

it is said that he walked

the streets of Florence in rose pink.

Leonardo never married,

and when he died,

he left his property to some of these friends,

these young men.

All of the evidence suggests

that these relationships were also intimate ones,

and this is something that was not

unconventional in Florence at this time,

especially for an older man

to have an intimate relationship

with a younger one,

it is something that was frowned upon,

but it nevertheless,

it happened quite frequently.

Having said that,

in this time period,

there's no concept of homosexuality

as we might have today,

and so, it's always very uncomfortable

to label somebody from the past

with a concept that they wouldn't have used

to designate themselves.

@Viper2024 asks,

Why is Nicolaus Copernicus

considered the father of astronomy?

He can be considered the father

of modern astronomy,

not of all astronomy.

Copernicus theorized that the sun

and not the earth was at the center

of the solar system.

Until that moment,

into the Renaissance,

the predominant theory was that the earth

was at the center of the universe,

surrounded by the sun

and the planets on fixed orbits

known as spheres.

Copernicus' model, which was published

as he was on his deathbed in 1543,

contains this diagram,

which shows the sun at the center,

and he waits until he is very old

to publish this.

Nowadays, we talk about

the Copernican Revolution,

but it wasn't a revolution in the 16th Century,

it's only really with the observations

of Tycho Brahe,

the work of Kepler,

and of Galileo,

about 50/60-years after Copernicus,

that the Heliocentric Model

of the solar system really erupts on the scene,

and changes how people think about the universe.

Among the reasons why the Heliocentric Theory

was so shocking,

is that it displaces the earth,

and the humans within it,

and it's a very humbling experience,

to be demoted from being in the center

of a perfect universe,

to being just one planet in an imperfect one.

The Geocentric Model lasted for such a long time,

because it corresponded to the way

the world is described in the Bible,

in the 17th Century,

Galileo famously said that,

Religion teaches you how to go to heaven,

not how heaven goes.

From the AskBalkans subreddit,

What do you think about

the fall of Constantinople,

and why do you think it fell?

The city of Constantinople falls

to the Ottoman Army in the year 1453,

this fall ends the Eastern Roman,

or Byzantine Empire,

and therefore a legacy

that goes all the way back to Ancient Rome.

The Byzantine Empire

was already weakened,

had already lost many territories

to the Ottoman Empire,

which was a growing Muslim empire.

The city itself was conquered by using

all of the technology of siege warfare,

including tunnels,

including cannon,

and of course,

a very large Ottoman Army.

After less than two-months,

the city was overpowered.

But, this wasn't the end of the line

for Constantinople,

it flourished as the capital

of the Ottoman Empire,

known nowadays as Istanbul,

the Ottoman saw themselves

as the inheritors of Rome,

as much as the people of Italy did at this time,

they called themselves Rumi,

that is Romans,

because they had conquered Rome.

This is a 17th Century pocket book

that you could carry with you

to read in idle moments,

and it is a description of the Near East,

for European readers.

It focuses especially on the Arab lands,

but it describe also travel to Jerusalem,

and Istanbul,

and it's just one of many examples

of Western European curiosity

about the Ottoman Empire,

and the people of Islam at this time,

from whom they knew they had much to learn.

All We Know Art,

How did Brunelleschi build a dome

that defied gravity,

and defined the Renaissance?

Filippo Brunelleschi designed

the gigantic dome of the Florentine Cathedral,

to this day still,

the largest masonry dome in the world.

It expresses the ambition of the city,

which was newly rich from trade.

Now, Brunelleschi was given a huge

engineering challenge,

there was a giant octagonal space

where the dome was to be built,

to prevent the dome from buckling

under it's own weight,

he surrounded it with what you could consider

to be the equivalent of barrel hoops,

so a series of rings inside,

between the two structures

that hold it together,

and absorb that pressure.

Second, he actually built two domes,

not one, there is an inner-dome,

and an outer-dome,

and this means it was much lighter.

And finally, one of the big challenges here was,

how is it going to support itself

while it is being built?

He studied Ancient Roman architecture,

and he noticed that they laid brick

in a herring bone pattern,

and so, all of the brickwork

is inspired by this Roman technique

of herring bone,

because the herring bone pattern

is much stronger than laying bricks flat.

The brickwork sustained itself,

and didn't need to be supported,

until they were finally able

to connect the brickwork at the top of the dome.

Test0314 asks,

Was Renaissance European hygiene

really as bad as some say,

and everyone walked around very unclean,

and smelly?

This is a slightly unfair picture

of the Renaissance world,

people cared a lot about beautiful scents,

they bought expensive perfumes,

and they sought even exotic goods

that would give them pleasant sensations.

And the reason this was important,

was because they believed that disease

could be transmitted through something

called a miasma,

essentially a bad smell.

So, smell was very important in the Renaissance,

because it conveyed information,

it told you,

Is something healthy or unhealthy?

The wealthy could surround themselves

with fragrant gardens,

and have a much more fragrant lifestyle.

Here's a question

from the Ask Historian subreddit,

Did people before the age of modern dentistry

all have bad teeth?

In the Renaissance,

people cared about having beautiful teeth

about as much as we do today.

There were no dentists

however in the Renaissance,

if you needed a tooth pulled,

you went to your neighborhood barber,

who was also your surgeon.

The era before modern anesthesia,

the best surgeon is the fastest surgeon,

and the best dentist is the one

who can pull your aching tooth the fastest,

and causing you the least amount of pain.

Having said that,

already in antiquity,

people were making dentures

and bridges to improve people's smiles,

and hide the gaps in their teeth.

So too in the Renaissance,

the barber surgeon Ambroise Pare for example,

makes a set of dentures

for the French King Charles IX,

out of gold

and silver.

@sorryitsvic says,

Wait, was Shakespeare real?

Shakespeare was a real person,

and Shakespeare is also the person

who wrote the plays.

We have plenty of evidence

both of Shakespeare's existence,

and no reason to believe

that he is not the author of the plays.

When we think of the Renaissance,

we think first of Italy,

but in fact,

the ideas of the Renaissance

quickly spread all over Europe,

Shakespeare took inspiration from Italy

and read about it,

he even set some of his most famous plays there.

The Renaissance was not

just an Italian phenomenon,

but a European one,

it was a moment of cultural creativity,

of new ideas in all domains of life,

that changed urban civilization

all over the European continent at that time.

So, those are all the questions for today,

thank you for watching Renaissance Support.

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