:
Massimo Marinoni
:
Justin Hardy
see all cast/crew...
: Not Rated
: PBS Home Video
: Documentary, Foreign, Biographies, Art, UK
: 220 min.
: English
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This title is currently out of print.
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Produced in association with Lion Television in the U.K., The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance is a four-part documentary miniseries about the famous financiers of Western art history. Episode one, "Birth of a Dynasty," starts with the family's beginnings in Tuscany during the 15th century. Cosimo de' Medici inherits the world's largest bank from his father and sets up his headquarters in Florence. He makes powerful friends and political allies while cultivating his passions for classical education and the arts. His engineer friend Filippo Brunelleschi builds his greatest achievement, an octagonal ribbed dome on the top of the Florence cathedral. Cosimo also makes friends with Donatello (considered the founder of modern sculpture) and Fra Filippo Lippi (a great influence of Florentine painting). Cosimo de' Medici passes on in 1464 and is honored by being declared Pater Patriae (Father of the Fatherland). The Medici series was first broadcast on PBS in February 2004. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
Special Features:
- Making of The Medici
- Who's Who: Key Characters of the Renaissance
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| A terrific documentary and great teaching moment
by MKaliher
February 21, 2009 - 2:23 AM PST
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3 out of 3 members found this review helpful
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Wow. This is one of those films that uses a fairly straightforward story as a framework on which to hang many other complex, intersecting stories, and then ties them all together on a large canvas. It's almost as if Director Justin Hardy deliberately chose to make his film a grand, 360-degree painting in imitation of Michelangelo's mural in the Sistine Chapel. Rather than simply a documentary series on the Medici family of Florence, this four-hour tour-de-force from the United Kingdom covers about three centuries of Tuscan history, Church history, and the Renascimento (Rebirth) of Western art and ideas with gusto, and pulls no punches. It also conveys a dramatic story of power, its acquisition and predictable downfall (in the end, Cosimi Medici II would need a bodyguard of 300 to simply walk safely through the streets of Florence. Does this sound familiar?), and incorporates all the passion, intrigue, and romance of the era. Hardy's achievement is truly remarkable.
After viewing one of Rossellini's documentaries, I wasn't really expecting much here. Rossellini's film, created for an Italian audience, assumed a great deal of knowledge on the part of the viewer, covered a much narrower field of information, and came across quite flat in comparison to this film. Hardy's version assumes nothing, and tells the true tale as if it were a novel, using many of the same story-telling techniques good novelists do. The differing result is wonderful. We not only learn how the Medici acquired, maintained, and ultimately lost their wealth and power, but how they came to patronize such incomparable artists as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, and Da Vinci, as well as the beleaguered and betrayed scientist Galileo.
Along the way, we see how the Church was as much a temporal power as a spiritual one, corrupt as any large, unquestioned bureaucracy, and how it deviously compromised great artists and intellects. And we witness the abuses that led to the Reformation: absolute power does, indeed, corrupt absolutely. But any rational person will discover, alas, that it's difficult to determine who was more destructive to this apex of human ingenuity and creativity--the maniacal, book-burning Savonarola and other reformers, or the sadistic, reactionary Italian Inquisition which exiled Galileo--and will understand that if either of these extremist factions had prevailed earlier, the Renaissance would never have blossomed. May such a magic time come again. The Medici, Godfathers of the Renaissance is a film that accurately represents the age in all its glory, complexity, and brutality. Due to its intellectual demands and graphic violence, however, I wouldn't recommend it for children younger than around fifteen years. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 8.25)
16 Votes
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