Medici: Masters of Florence: Season 2: At the Edge of Our Age

It was a golden age, right before Columbus's voyages to the New World - literally.   Italy was still 400 years away from becoming a unified nation.  But, in some ways, it was better.  It consisted of city states, many in their own ways as great or greater in art, philosophy, and even predictive science than any nation would ever be.  Rome was flourishing, as the capital of the powerful Papal states.  Florence was home to Botticelli, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and the greatest of them all, Leonardo da Vinci.  The superb and riveting second season of Medici features only Botticelli, who plays a significant role in  Lorenzo de' Medici's - aka Lorenzo the Magnificent - early years of power.  We'll likely see Leonardo in the third season, already in production.

Lorenzo was head of a potent banking family who, in effect, ruled the city. The Renaissance was throbbing and thriving and new ideas were bursting out all over.  The countryside and city bore signs of the glory of the Roman Empire, would didn't seem quite as ancient to Lorenzo and his contemporaries as it does to us.  But life was not easy - not for the people, whose lives Lorenzo had a sincere desire to improve, and not for Lorenzo and his family, beset by cunning enemies on all sides, and dependent on alliances with other city states like Milan and Venice and most of all, Rome and the Pope.

I enjoyed this second even more than the first, which was excellent, too, and looked at Florence when Lorenzo was a boy.   Now he's feeling and enjoying his power, though how that power and his equanimity is tested is the mainspring of this narrative.   Technology is not quite in the modern age, and Lorenzo and his contemporaries can communicate long distance only by letters delivered on horseback or riding themselves to other cities.   Weaponry is swordplay, knives, and fire, but they can do plenty of damage.

An intrinsic problem with any historical drama is that, if you know the history, you know how crucial events in the narrative turn out.  To make matters worse, you might know the outcome of crises even from watching a previous historical drama that covers the same period.  I suppose Medici 2 suffers from such problems, but they didn't bother me in the slightest.  Superb acting by Daniel Sharman as Lorenzo, Bradley James as his brother Giuliano, and Sean Bean as their chief antagonist Jacopo de' Pazzi - indeed, everyone, including actors of smaller roles, like Synnove Karlsen as Lorenz's wife Clarice, Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz as Giuliano's true love Simonetta, and Matteo Martari as Pazzi's nephew Francesco, was great - carry the story, and I was not at all surprised to see Frank Spotnitz, who produced the first season as well as The Man in the High Castle, back as one of the creators, along with Star Trek's Nicholas Meyer, who likewise always does a fine job.

Binge-able on Netflix and highly recommended.

 

Da Vinci's Demons 2.2: Renaissance Radio

Radio had enormous influence on the world politics of the 1930s and 1940s, when it first became a device in many households in America and Europe.   As I detail in The Soft Edge, a radio broadcast from Adolf Hitler after a bomb put him the hospital in 1944 confirmed his leadership and kept him in power for almost another year.   Radio was also used by FDR, Churchill, and Stalin to rally their publics against Hitler, and, in FDR's case, to establish a direct relationship with the American people during the Great Depression.

Radio, of course, did not exist in the time of Leonardo Da Vinci, not even in his sketches, many of which were prescient about the future.  But radio played a major role in last night's Da Vinci's Demons 2.2, and worked perfectly as an instance of the historical science fiction in which the series really excels.   Much like Hitler, Lorenzo Medici is badly wounded (Lorenzo actually worse than Hitler). Much like Hitler, Lorenzo's tenure as leader is in dire jeopardy, because the populace is not even sure he's alive.  In Hitler's case, his Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, went to his hospital room with a microphone and a hook-up to Germany's radio system, via which Hitler was able to assure the German people that he was ok and still in charge.  In Lorenzo's case, the genius Leonardo creates a radio system on the fly, via his understanding of acoustics, and Lorenzo uses it to assure the people of Florence and ratify his power.

Just to be clear, Lorenzo in both history and in Da Vinci's Demons has nothing else in common with Adolf Hitler.  To the contrary, Lorenzo was a benevolent despot, a classical Renaissance prince who brought his city and people much prosperity.  He actually helped maintain a measure of peace among the contentious Italian city states, and his reign is considered the high point of the golden age of Florence.

If the series moves to New World as it's been promising to do, I'll miss Lorenzo and Florence.  On the other hand, in real history, the real Lorenzo died in April 1492, so there's not much more of his story for Da Vinci's Demons to tell, if it wants to remain true to history.   In any case, the first two episodes of the second season have been outstanding, and I'm looking forward to more.

See also Da Vinci's Demon's 2.1: Science Fiction v Fantasy

And see also Da Vinci's Demons:  History, Science, and Science Fiction ... Da Vinci's Demons 1.7: Leonardo Under Water with a Twist ... Da Vinci's Demons Season 1 Finale: History, Science Fiction, Time Travel

 
Interested in a story with a passing reference to Leonardo?   Try The Plot to Save Socrates ...