The Great Myths Of The Renaissance (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) - Perspective

This may look like an ordinary door in Florence, but it isn't. The man who lived here invented the Renaissance. There he is, Giorgio Vasari, the one with the interested cherub looking on. Vasari was a painter and, as you can see, not a particularly good one. His work lacked elegance and grace. In a word, it was clunky. He was actually born just down the road from here, in Arezzo, but when he was in his teens, very impressionable, he came here to Florence and wheedled his way into the company of the city's greatest artist, the divine Michelangelo. For the rest of his career, Vasari remained a Michelangelo groupie. It shows in his painting and, more importantly for us, it shows in his writing. In 1550, Vasari published a book, a very special book, because it turned out to be the most influential art book ever written. It was called The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, though these days we usually shorten that to The Lives of the Artists. As the first book of its kind, Vasari's lives set the agenda for all the art books that followed. Inside, it was packed with biographies of the artists that Vasari admired. And in the preface, for the first time in art, Vasari uses the term Rinascita to describe what was going on around him. Rinascita is Italian for rebirth, or, as we call it now, Renaissance. What Vasari says in his famous preface is that under the ancient Greeks and Romans, civilisation reached its greatest height and the arts achieved perfection. Then along came the barbarians who destroyed everything and the arts fell into ruin until we get to Vasari's own times, roughly between about 1400 and 1600. The dates are a little vague when there's this great Rinascita, this Renaissance, and civilisation returns to Italy. It's a rousing tale of cultural triumph. Unfortunately, it's just not true. Civilisation wasn't completely lost for a millennium and a half, and it wasn't reborn suddenly in Renaissance Italy. Vasari's Renaissance is the creation of a jingoistic Florentine who's cheering on his own team in the great football match of civilisation. But if the momentous rebirth didn't happen, what did? This is Padua, and that is the famous equestrian statue of the mercenary Gattamelata by Donatello. Now, this was made in around 1450, and according to Vasari, this was the first great equestrian statue of the Renaissance, the first time a Renaissance artist matched the achievements of the ancients. But was it? If we head north from Padua, out of Italy, a long way north, into the land of the barbarians, or, as we call them today, the Germans, we'll find a different storyline being enacted. The Germans, poor mites, they barely get a mention in Vasari. But in the real world, their artistic achievements were huge. This stone fellow here is called the Bamberg Horseman. He's life-size, and he was made here in Germany in around 1220. So that's two-and-a-half centuries or so before Donatello's Gattamelata. The Bamberg Horseman isn't mentioned in Vasari, and when you do come across him in books, he's invariably dismissed as a piece of Gothic art, something backward or primitive. But that's not what I see up there. I see a remarkable piece of equestrian carving. Look at the detail of the cloth, the hair, the musculature of the horse. This isn't some impossible bronze beast ridden by an impossible bronze warrior. This is something more modest, less heroic. And real horses, ridden by real people, have proportions like these. The fact is, when Vasari ignored the North in his story of the Renaissance, he ignored some of the key developments in art. So in this series, yes, we'll be looking at Leonardo da Vinci. And at Vasari's divine Michelangelo. And at Botticelli and his Venuses. All Vasari's Italian favourites will be looked at. But not yet. Not before their time. First, we need to catch up with the furious progress that was being made in this bubbling cauldron of Renaissance creativity. Bruges. Ah, Bruges. These days, it's so pretty and well-preserved. It's hard to imagine what a frantic, cutting-edge, wild west of a town this was in the early days of the Renaissance. If you're ever in the Stadtbibliothek in Berlin, ask to see the manuscript of Antony of Burgundy. And open it on folio 244. It shows you what went on in the bathhouses in Bruges in around 1400, when the businessmen were in town. On the right, the baths. On the left, the beds. All those fellows in the bathhouses, the travelling businessmen, were trading in cloth, fabrics. That's what made the city rich. And they were doing it here, in the cloth hall in Bruges. At its peak, there'd be 400 stalls crammed into here, selling cloth from around the world. And if you want to know what these fabulous fabrics looked like, it's all recorded in spectacular close-up, in the art of Renaissance Flanders. So, all these merchants in here were from Spain, Poland, Russia, England, and one of them, an Italian, we know very well, because his face is one of the most memorable in Renaissance art. Ah, yes. The Arnolfini Marriage, by Jan van Eyck. And there's Giovanni Arnolfini himself, wealthy cloth merchant from Lucca, pledging his fidelity to the lovely Mrs Arnolfini. Exactly what they're pledging has been the subject of much controversy, to which I'm not going to add here. What I want to discuss is something much more important, what the Arnolfinis are wearing. Let's start with Mrs Arnolfini. Now, she's wearing a bulky green dress that's made from a Bruges speciality, wool, like this outfit here. Now, this wool was mostly imported from England. Then woven here by the famous Flemish weavers. Now, in the painting, the dress looks rather bulky. That's because it's lined with fur. If you look carefully at the edges, you'll see this white fur poking out. Now, that is actually the fur of one of these, a red squirrel. And not just any bit of the fur, but this bit here. The white bit, the purest bit, what they used to call miniver. It would have taken around 2,000 squirrels to line Mrs Arnolfini's dress. So when you look at her again at the National Gallery in London, try to forget she's actually wearing 2,000 dead squirrels. As for her headdress, which looks so complicated, that's just a piece of white linen, like this, which has been folded over five times and is then worn on the head like so, kept in place with pins. So that's Mrs Arnolfini, but what about him? Well, he's wearing these. These pine martins, imported from the forests of Poland and Russia. Hugely expensive. The second most expensive fur after sable. And Arnolfini's tunic would have required about 100 of these. So that's a lot of money right there. On top of the fur, there's this dark purple velvet that's probably imported from Lucca, Arnolfini's hometown, where the best velvet was made. But the most interesting thing he's wearing, I think, is his hat. That huge, wobbly top hat affair that looks several sizes too big for him. It's actually made of this straw that's been dyed black and it's a kind of fashionable Renaissance boater that everyone was wearing in 1432. Very light, practical and, as you can see, flattering. Look closely at Van Eyck's hat and all becomes clear in the microscopic, almost magical detail that was Van Eyck's trademark. 30 years before the birth of Leonardo, 50 years before Michelangelo was born, the artists of Bruges were already seeing as clearly as this. What was happening here in the early years of the 15th century was nothing less than a pictorial revolution, a completely new way of seeing and painting. And in its clarity, its precision, it was far ahead of anything that was happening in Italy at the time. But that's not how art history sees it. Ever since Vasari until very recently, these early masters of Bruges and Flanders have been looked down on, patronised. Do you know what they call them in art history books? This is what they call them. The back of the Arnolfini marriage, high up on the wall, there's one of these, a convex mirror. These convex mirrors keep popping up in Flemish art in various ways and for various reasons. In the Arnolfini marriage, Van Eyck uses it to smuggle in a cunning self-portrait. Now, if I ask our handsome cameraman, Matt, to step up to the mirror and film it, you'll see his reflection in the glass. And in exactly the same way, Van Eyck uses it to show himself as a mysterious second figure, rhyming, as it were, with the Arnolfinis at the front. But other Flemish artists use them in different ways. When Quentin Matsys put one on the table used by a money-changer and his wife, it's there for their protection. In Flanders, the bankers used them to see round corners and make sure no-one was sneaking up on them. It's like those helpful mirrors you get on the London Underground in the corridors, so you can see if anything's coming the other way. Interestingly, here in Bruges, the Guild of the Mirror Makers was the same guild, the Guild of St Luke, to which painters also belonged. St Luke was actually the patron saint of painters, so you often see him in Renaissance art presented as an artist who's drawing the Madonna, imagining the unimaginable. With St Luke by their side, the painters of Bruges were changing what art does and how it does it. This is the Madonna with Joris van der Paele, as it's called, painted by Van Eyck again in 1436. And it's another miraculous feat of observation. Look at the robes that St Donatian on the left is wearing. His cross, his mitre. Or, on the other side, the lovely reflections in St George's armour. And look, there's Van Eyck again, haunting the picture with his secret presence. Now, to see as clearly as this, you either need eyesight that's miraculously good, or you need these. Joris van der Paele, who commissioned this great devotional picture from Van Eyck, has been using his glasses to help him read his prayers. Joris is Dutch for George, and that's why St George is presenting his patron to the Madonna and making sure he's read his prayers, even though his old eyes are going. Now, glasses weren't actually invented in Bruges in the 1400s. They were invented in Italy about a century earlier, in Pisa. And if you examine the older faces in Renaissance art, you'll see a pair of specks popping up quite often, sometimes in unexpected places. Some are painted, some are carved. Some are for seeing God, others for seeing money. Hieronymus Bosch, the great Flemish dune merchant, even managed to find a pair being sported in hell. Although glasses had been around for the best part of a century, it was in Flanders at the time of Van Eyck, early in the 15th century, that the art of lens-making was perfected, and great steps were taken in ways of seeing. Unfortunately, I can't tell you exactly how these newly precise lenses and this new magnification were used in Bruges. Flemish artists were very secretive about it. To this day, it's a controversial topic. But when you look into the minute details crammed into this miraculous Renaissance art, a bit of help was surely needed. Let me put it this way. Either, for the first few millennia of Western art, no artist anywhere was born with good enough eyesight to record reality as clearly as it was recorded here in Flanders, or, after these first few millennia, something happened here that made it finally possible to see things more clearly. I know which version, I believe. I don't know if you've seen that rather bad George Clooney movie, The Monuments Men. Well, this was the painting they were trying to steal back from the Nazis. It's van Eyck's greatest achievement, the Ghent Altar. A masterpiece of spectacular complexity and mysterious ambition. With so much going on in it, and this strange god looming up in the centre like an all-powerful oriental potentate. Now, the mirror makes a secret appearance in here as well, sort of. You see the Virgin Mary sitting on the right hand of God. Look at the band of writing above her head. See what it says. It's in Latin, but you can just about make out the first bit. Speculum sine. And if you could see through that gorgeous bit of cloth below, it would continue macula. Speculum sine macula. It means the immaculate mirror. It's a quote from the Bible, the Book of Wisdom. Mary, who was born without sin, is being compared to one of these. Speculum sine macula. And that is how van Eyck paints her as well, as a vision of unblemished female perfection. As with so much Flemish art, the Ghent Altar is very confusing at first sight. This is just a handy replica they keep at Ghent Cathedral. But even this is a challenge. As for the real thing, that sits behind bulletproof glass in a dark chapel at the back, where even the Nazis can't steal it again, and where it looms up before us like a daunting cliff face of dense Flemish symbolism. But that's only from a distance, because the real joy of the Ghent Altarpiece, the real joy of all of van Eyck's art, is to get close and to see the details. When you press your nose against van Eyck, the confusion ceases and it all gets intoxicating. Botanists have identified 42 different species of plant painted accurately on the Ghent Altar. And see that delightful landscape at the back? It's supposed to be the New Jerusalem, as described in the Bible at the end of the world. But it looks an awful lot like Flanders, doesn't it? Bruges made biblical. All this perfectly recorded reality, this shiny truth that Flemish art invented, isn't reality for the sake of it. It's not trying to fool anybody. This is reality. It's a powerful new weapon of conviction. Van Eyck is smuggling big religious truths into the everyday life of Flanders, making them touchable, bringing them nearer. This is art that's having to envisage things that have never been envisaged before. And what a feast of invention it is. So how's it done? To see that, we have to get even closer. Normally, you can't get any closer than this to Van Eyck's masterpiece. But this isn't any old arts programme. This is the Renaissance Unchained on the BBC. So I've managed to arrange some exclusive access to the Ghent Altarpiece. Not even George Clooney could get as close as we're going to get. In just a moment, we're going to be going in there, where they're restoring some of the panels of the Ghent Altar, and we're going to get really close to Van Eyck and see exactly how he does it. But first, I want to show you something. This is by Filippo Lippi, a painter from Florence, much loved by Vasari. And it's a scene from the life of Saint Benedict, painted in around 1450. So that's 20 or so years after the Ghent Altarpiece. Now, this wasn't painted in oil paints, which is what Van Eyck used. It was painted in egg tempera, the medium they preferred in early Renaissance Italy. It's basically watercolour, with a binding of egg yolks to hold the pigments together. And it dries very quickly into these fabulous glowing colours. What a gorgeous pink that is. So that's tempera over here. But over here is Van Eyck's Annunciation. So that's the angel Gabriel telling the Virgin Mary that she's going to give birth to Jesus. And this was painted about 20 years before the Filippo Lippi. But look how Van Eyck's captured the fabrics. Look at what the angel's wearing. And compare this with this. See how the cloth's done in the Filippo Lippi. Or these plants over here. And compare those with the plants in the Van Eyck. These beautiful white lilies, which, like the Immaculate Mirror, symbolise the purity of the Virgin Mary. It's a different world, isn't it? And, critically, a different technique. Now, Vasari tells us that Van Eyck invented oil paints. And that's just not true. They were already in use in Afghanistan, in the 7th century, in Buddhist art. But he did master them in ways that no-one had mastered them before. And used them with extraordinary skill. And it's these oil paints, along with the lenses and the glasses, that made Flemish art possible. And inside here, they've been restoring Van Eyck's panel. So it's a wonderful opportunity to see exactly how it's all done. The whole restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece is a very big project. The first step is the outside wing panels, which we're currently working on. And we're already quite far. We took already all the varnishes off, the discoloured varnishes. And now we're actually in the process of removing old overpaint. So we're actually scraping away these later additions to reveal the original intention of the artists. And you can see it actually really well there. All those dark brown and greens here are actually dirty varnishes that we left on to show people. And this is the original colour that's underneath. So there's a bright white underneath those dark discoloured varnishes. It's very vivid. You do see very, very clearly there. The white now has sort of come out of persol white. Beautiful. Looking at the Angel, what strikes me is, as you said, the colours are brighter. This beautiful green that's come out of the Angel's wings. Yeah, after the cleaning, they are a bit brighter. And especially, yes, the green does jump at you. Well, I think most importantly it has an effect on the depth of feel. Because not only the colours, I think the colours are, as I said, a bit muted. But once we start taking off these first varnishes and then the overpaint, you feel like you're in a room again. You get drawn into the picture and I think the whole 3D effect will be... I think it's this experience of being there in the room. So what else could you do with these exciting new paints? One of the things you could record more clearly was people. In Flanders, the great artists of the Northern Renaissance began making their contemporaries immortal. We simply haven't seen faces as tangible as these in art before. This fierce-looking chappie and Vladimir Putin look-alike is Chancellor Roland staring with scary determination across one of Van Eyck's finest landscapes. And they say this is Van Eyck himself in a big red turban and the touching crow's feet around his eyes. There was so much invention, too, about this thrilling Flemish portraiture. This is the Saint-Yves Hospital in Bruges and it's full of the work of Hans Memling, a Bruges master who was particularly good at portraits. Memling was a master painter of that very difficult subject, young men, when they haven't got any character yet, no wrinkles or flabby bits. This fellow here is Martin Van Nievenhove and this is a two-part painting, or diptych, painted in 1487. And it's very clever. Martin Van Nievenhove is at a table praying. Look at that beautiful purple velvet jerkin he's wearing, bought from the Arnolfinis, perhaps. And in the other half, the Virgin Mary and Jesus, noticeably less realistic, and the objects of Martin's prayer. So he's praying to them, but, and this is so brilliant, they're both in the same room. This space and that space are next to each other. And look at the table here. That goes across both pictures as well. And see Mary's robe. It flows to the bottom, goes over into Martin Van Nievenhove's bit and it even overlaps a bit of the frame. So it's a wondrous blending of realities. And at the back, there's a typical Flemish payoff. Look, a convex mirror. And reflected in it, Mary and Martin, from the back and from the side, sitting around the same table. This is art that can paint miracles. In the hands of the Flemish, reality became such a powerful weapon in the artist's armoury. Yet look what they call it. When Vasari wrote the North out of the story of the Renaissance, he planted 500 years of prejudice in the annals of art. Another thing oil paints were especially good at capturing was textures. Oh, my God, they were good at textures. In particular, the artists of the Northern Renaissance had a lot of fun with armour. And that's handy, because one of the saints who pops up most often in their art was the armour painter's delight, Saint George. You know, whenever I see Saint George adopted as a nationalist symbol by right-wing factions, in England, for instance, it always makes me laugh, because he was actually a Turk of Greek origin who was born in Palestine, near Tel Aviv, and who served in the Roman army. So all those skinheads who've got Saint George tattooed on their foreheads, they're actively promoting Turkish, Greek, Palestinian, Roman and Jewish unity. Well done, lads. Saint George was popular because he saved a princess from a dragon, and that made him a ready-made symbol of Christian salvation and an exciting challenge for the new oil paints. The new paints transformed armour into a delicate metal mirror on which sophisticated games could be played with light. Apart from encouraging all this exciting investigation of light and its symbolism, something else the Saint George story did was to pull Renaissance art out of its comfort zone and to send it slithering into dark new areas of the imagination. Forced to imagine the terrible beasties that Saint George had to slay, Renaissance art took a step into dark new territories. And not just in Flanders. Back in Italy, that very strange painter, Cosimo Tura of Ferrara, relocated his Saint George on what looks like another planet. So the Saint George story pushed Renaissance art into these dark new areas. And that wasn't all. It also made it necessary to tackle combat and movement, and that had an especially powerful impact on sculpture. This is what I think is the finest of the northern Saint Georges. He's certainly the most spectacular. You probably haven't heard of him because he's in Stockholm, in Sweden, in the Church of Saint Nicholas. What a thing. Bigger than life-size and carved out of wood with breathtaking skill and drama. And the details are horrific. Bits of dismembered body are strewn across the plinth. And little baby dragons poke their heads out of the ground, waiting to be murdered. And then, in a very un-Renaissance detail, this bisexual dragon is so traumatised by Saint George's mighty spearing that it's emptied its bowels with fear. This was made by a German sculptor called Bernd Knotke in around 1487, when Michelangelo was still a teenager. Now, Bernd Knotke isn't in Vasari, of course, because this is a Renaissance that obviously isn't trying to quote the Greeks or the Romans. It's a Renaissance that's slapping you about the face with action, drama and darkness. There's nothing Italian about it, that's true. But why does that make it a lesser achievement? The mad imaginings of the Northern Renaissance didn't stop with dragons. When art armed itself with oil paints, it armed itself with the power to make anything real. This really is supposed to be it, the mythical Fountain of Youth, where you go in old and you come out young. Now, you may not believe in the Fountain of Youth, but plenty of Renaissance folk did. This is how Lucas Cranach, prickly genius of the German Renaissance, envisaged its wondrous effects. Legend has it that a Spanish conquistador called Ponce de Leon, who'd been sent to the Americas to find it, landed here in Florida in 1513 and discovered that it wasn't a myth. The Fountain of Youth really existed. In Cranach's delirious masterpiece, all the Joan Collinses in the village have been rounded up, dipped in the special waters and turned again into St Trinian's girls. It may have stopped working. Anyway, here we are in the Renaissance, this great rebirth of ancient knowledge, but all the old legends, superstitions and myths are exerting just as powerful a hold on the artistic imagination as they ever did. Enjoying Lucas Cranach is like visiting a German nature camp. What a lot of nudes there are romping about his pictures. Some of them are Lucretias. Others are Venuses. But all of them, you feel, are here because Cranach understood temptation and had personal reasons to warn us of its dangers. Perhaps that's why he's so unusually keen to paint Adam and Eve. Now, the Adam and Eve story, about the first man and the first woman committing the first sin, was the only story in the Bible that forced painters to paint nudes. There's another way to do it. Clothes, after all, hadn't been invented yet. Set free in paradise in their birthday suits, Adam and Eve gave Renaissance art a perfect biblical excuse to depict tempting human nudity. According to the Bible, Eve's crime was to pick forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge and to tempt Adam with it. But I think we all know what really went on in paradise when the first naked man met the first naked woman. But all these Adams and Eves of the Renaissance weren't just there for erotic reasons. There were other forces at work on the art of the times, and the one that's always forgotten but shouldn't be is geography. It wasn't just the fountain of youth that was discovered roundabout now. So, too, was paradise itself. It's a story told gloriously in a Renaissance art form that's been unfairly ignored. The great art form of the map. These days, we're blasé about maps, but in Renaissance times, maps were extraordinary creations with a huge cosmic significance. I can't think of many things that would have been harder to make than this. The so-called Fra Mauro map, made in Venice in around 1450 by a Venetian monk. In those days, north was south and south was north. So the world was upside down. It's exquisite, isn't it? The glorious imagining of a glorious new world. But, interestingly, roundabout here, there's something missing. A little place called America, which hadn't been discovered yet. So the first Renaissance map with the Americas actually on it is this one. The Waldseemüller world map of 1507. There's America there. Or, as they called most of it in those days, terra incognita. When Columbus discovered America in 1492, he didn't just change history, he changed art. And particularly the story of Adam and Eve. Their depiction has always triggered powerful guilts and worries. Some of the most anxious paintings of the Renaissance are representations of the first man and the first woman. And up on the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo has left us in no doubt whatsoever as to the terrible consequences of the first sin. But these were still theoretical anxieties, distant imaginings of distant biblical events. When Columbus discovered America, that changed. It wasn't just the fountain of youth that turned up in Florida. As news began to filter through Europe of the strange new world discovered by Columbus, the Renaissance mind began putting two and two together. And paradise itself suddenly had a location. This is Hieronymus Bosch's famous Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting about sin and its terrible consequences. And look what Adam and Eve are sinning under. A dragon tree. Satan's tropical succulent of choice. Paradise was no longer theoretical. Columbus had found it. And that was bad news, because according to the scriptures, man and woman would only return to paradise after the Day of Judgment, the last day of all. When Columbus discovered America, he set in motion a countdown to the end of the world. A less superstitious era might have laughed it off, but the Renaissance really wasn't one of those. Later in this series, we'll be dealing in depth with Hieronymus Bosch. For now, all I ask is that you feel his anxiety. The anxiety of his times. At times like this, times of deep Renaissance despair, turning to the era's greatest talent ought to be a relief. But in this instance, it isn't. Because Albrecht Dürer, the greatest German painter of the Renaissance, was a stoker up of anxieties, not a reliever of them. Dürer lived here in his house in Nuremberg. It's been kept exactly as he left it, as a kind of shrine to him. Because one thing Dürer made sure of from the start is that everyone knew how great he was. If they handed out medals for arrogance, Dürer would have a shelf load. Born in Nuremberg in 1471, he was so good so quickly that by the age of 13, he drew this. A self-portrait as a teenage genius. Dürer invented the artistic self-portrait. Other artists had put themselves in their pictures before, but no-one had made themselves the stars of their own art, as Dürer did. Here he is at 22, enjoying mightily his own Renaissance handsomeness. And look, at 26, he's put on his best dandy wear and loves himself even more. And then, in 1500, in a momentous Renaissance slippage of human modesty, the 29-year-old Albrecht Dürer compares himself unmissably with Christ. All over Dürer's art, you find him interjecting himself into the storylines. You even see it in his altarpieces. In this busy crucifixion in Vienna, who is that standing at the back of the crowd? Oh, look, it's Dürer. And who's invited himself along to join the Virgin Mary and Christ in this ruined masterpiece in Prague? Who do you think? To my eyes, Dürer's altarpieces are not as successful as he'd like us to believe. He couldn't do grandeur or emotional bigness. Dürer gets better as he gets smaller. His portraits, for instance, are often transfixing. As with this divine portrayal of a girl from Venice. It's as if he couldn't work with a big brush, only a small one. Lots of little things combining to create the final image. It's a talent which came in particularly useful here in his printing studio. It's a belief widely held in art that Dürer was the greatest printmaker of all. He was certainly one of the busiest, and so successfully did his prints spread his fame that even Vasari heard of him and gave him a chapter in his book. Everyone knows Dürer's Melancholia. It's probably the most famous print ever made. A mysterious figure, surrounded by all this scattered Renaissance knowledge and made anxious by it. Lots of people have suggested that Melancholia is another disguised self-portrait. And I'm certainly prepared to believe that. Because as far as I can see, Dürer never passed up an opportunity to put himself in his art. But, you know, it wasn't actually Dürer's prints that finally convinced me of his genius, or his altarpieces, or even those extraordinary portraits of his. The day that took my breath away and finally blew away all the doubts was the day I saw his watercolours. The Albertina in Vienna has a collection of them that only goes on show every couple of decades. If you're alive for such an occasion, go there. This is Dürer's famous hair, twitching timidly before us. And the wings of a roller, coloured so freshly and brightly, they might have flown through yesterday's sky. He thought he was divinely chosen. And at moments like this, you find yourself believing him. So that's the Northern Renaissance. An epoch of startling invention. It gave us oil paints. It gave us optics. It gave us the truth. In the next film, I'm heading south again. If Vasari got the Northern Renaissance so wrong, what did he also get wrong about the Renaissance in Italy?