Original subtitles

(classical music)

St. Peter's Square with

St. Peter's Basilica or just St. Peter's.

It's a monumental, magnificent building

with larger than life statues of the apostles

that come across as divine images.

It's the most impressive monument of the Renaissance.

The colossal colonnades are reminiscent

of ancient temples.

St. Peter's is the largest church in the world.

Just a few generations before its time,

it would've been impossible to construct such an edifice.

Nobody would've been able to plan

and organize all the work.

Nobody had the necessary knowledge of mathematics,

physics, and structural engineering.

People would simply have been unable.

(dramatic music)

Then in the mid-16th century,

artists and scholars made their entry

onto the stage of history.

It was the Age of the Renaissance.

They managed to do what had seemed impossible

for the previous thousand years.

Within just four generations,

they had the knowledge to implement

such massive projects as St. Peter's.

It's as if a turbo charger had accelerated

Europe's development.

The driving forces were men like Michelangelo Buonarroti,

polymaths who found solutions to all the problems

so that the seemingly impossible became possible.

Their achievements still resonate today.

But what was their secret?

The secret of an age in which the world

seemed to undergo a paradigm shift,

the Age of the Renaissance.

(dramatic music)

(men hammer)

Rome in 1547.

Among the all rounders of the Renaissance,

this man stood out, Michelangelo Buonarroti.

At the construction site for St. Peter's,

probably the largest in Europe,

he was project manager, architect,

and artist all in one.

Seventy-two years-old by this time,

he was still a man driven by ambition.

Michelangelo was a titan of the Renaissance.

He was a painter, sculptor, architect,

a scientist, a nuisance, and a genius,

an all-round talent.

One of his works became the icon of an entire era,

and he himself became the prototype of the modern man

who entered the world's stage with the Renaissance.

(men speak in foreign language)

Michelangelo's David is the best known sculpture

in art history.

Men like Michelangelo were the managers of an era

in which art and culture, knowledge and technology,

developed at near lightning speeds.

Florence in 1501.

Michelangelo surprised his contemporaries with works

that bordered on the miraculous.

His task was to carve David out of a marble block

weighing twelve tons, a task at which

two sculptors before him had failed.

It was the start of an obsession for Michelangelo.

He spent three years working non-stop

on the five-meter statute.

The first monumental sculpture of the High Renaissance,

his David is a statement.

(classical music)

Men equal to gods, that was almost the motto of the age.

The image of mankind changed in the Renaissance.

Pope Innocent III had said at the end

of the 12th Century that was man was excrement,

a slimy secretion, a contemptible creature.

The Medieval belief was that the sinful nature

of man was visible on man.

In the Renaissance, you could sense

how tired people had become of this pessimistic view.

The idea arose that man was almost like god.

Man was god's creation endowed with reason,

with strengths and, as his image,

man could almost become a god.

Around ten years after the completion

of his David, Michelangelo finished his Moses

for the tomb of Pope Julius II.

It too is larger than life,

an angry prophet with bulging veins

and a fearsome demeanor.

In antiquity, that's how gods were depicted.

(dramatic music)

Michelangelo learned from the masters of antiquity,

but he didn't copy them.

The Renaissance was more than just

the rebirth of antiquity.

Men like him created something new.

They took the techniques and art

of the ancient Greeks and Romans

and developed them further.

You won't find a single artwork of the Renaissance

that simply copied an ancient one.

The crucial thing is that the Renaissance

didn't just rediscover the critical minds

of the Greeks, for example.

It didn't just confront the science

and scholarship of antiquity.

It developed everything further.

It invented completely new things,

and it toppled the ancient giants

who'd originally been its teachers.

A Renaissance work, Botticelli's Primavera,

one of the best known works of the west.

Raphael's School of Athens glorified ancient thought.

Then there's Leonardo's Mona Lisa,

an icon of her age.

For more than a thousand years,

it had fallen into oblivion.

The skill of capturing the three-dimensional world

realistically on a flat canvas,

a quantum leap for architecture.

The Renaissance rediscovered perspective.

It emphasized symmetry.

Architecture borrowing from antiquity

was one of its themes.

(classical music)

The art of building huge domes

had fallen into oblivion in the Middle Ages.

It was rediscovered in the Renaissance,

but the Renaissance didn't limit itself to art.

Thanks to the invention of double-entry bookkeeping,

business men now knew what funds

they had available when.

As a result, the fortunes of the newly rich

flowed into the pockets of the talented,

an investment program for scholars and artists.

Never before was so much invented and devised

in such a short period of time.

New machines were constructed,

and the human machine was explored.

It was a heyday for anatomy.

(dramatic music)

It was also the first time people had followed the time.

Another first, pocket-size time pieces were invented,

but from now on they also measured

the orbits of the planets.

The heavens guided seafarers.

Adventurers discovered new trade routes.

The known world tripled in size.

There's probably no place in the world where

so much was discussed in one big conversation

with such a large number of participants.

When new things were invented in such quick succession,

printing triggered a huge discourse

that captivated large parts of the population.

Elites, scholars, and clerics too,

of course, exchanged ideas.

In this way, they invented groundbreaking new things.

But what were the triggers

for this exceptional period of history?

What were the ingredients of this explosive development?

How come men like Michelangelo

were suddenly masters of knowledge and techniques

that had been lost for centuries?

A look back in time, Rome in the First Century.

For the Romans of this era,

the construction of St. Peter's

would've been a feasible task.

That's evidenced by the Forum Romanum,

the power center of an empire

that ruled the entire western world

and one that exported its way of life

to the farthest provinces.

Rome dictated the art, culture, and architecture

of an entire era.

(dramatic music) (men cheering)

Rome was home to a million people at the time.

That's twenty times more than one of

the largest cities of the Renaissance, London.

(people chatter)

But Rome's dominance was built on

the oppression of millions of slaves.

Entire peoples were subjugated.

(dramatic music)

(rain pouring)

For centuries, the Roman military machine

succeeded in holding the empire together,

but at some point, the barbarians got the upper hand,

the Germanic tribes, the goths, and vandals.

(men shouting)

In the 5th Century, the western empire ceased to exist.

Roma Caput Mundi, the capital of the world,

the city that was home to a million, fell into decay.

The Dark Ages began.

The knowledge of antiquity was lost,

knowledge in all areas, particularly in engineering,

architecture, mathematics, and physics.

The ruins of antiquity were plundered as quarries.

(classical music)

A few generations after the fall,

nobody was any longer capable of creating

anything remotely comparable.

In 330 A.D., the Roman Emperor Constantine

had moved his capital to the Bosporus.

Constantinople became the empire's new center.

After that, the empire split into

an eastern and western half.

This eastern Roman empire survived

as an ancient island on the Bosporus

until the 15th Century.

It was home to more than half a million people.

They called themselves Romeoi, Romans.

Their emperor saw themselves as descendants

of Caesar and Augustus.

Constantinople was the second Rome,

and its patriarch was the head of the orthodox Christians.

Something else, too, Constantinople was

the back-up folder of antiquity.

Its scholars were leading figures in every faculty.

(classical music)

The Rome of the east was the bullock of antiquity

in a medieval world.

Nobody had been able to conquer the city on the Bosporus.

But one-seventh of the population were merchants

from Genoa, Pisa, and the Republic of Venice,

known as Latins, an affluent minority

and popular with the eastern Romans

with a reputation of being arrogant and quarrelsome.

In early 1171, there were riots in

the Genoese Quarter in Pera.

Emperor Manuel I, Komnenos, accused the Venetians

of being trouble-makers.

Venetian merchants were arrested and locked up,

and their possessions confiscated.

(men shout)

Venice tried to defend its people but in vain.

It was the start of a conflict that lasted decades

and ultimately ended in disaster for Constantinople.

(dramatic music)

(men shout)

The conflict culminated in a crusade

that went down in history as the fourth,

not a crusade against people of a different faith,

but a war waged by Catholic-Christians

against orthodox Christians.

(men shout) (dramatic music)

And then the seemingly impossible happened.

The crusaders broke through the walls of Constantinople.

On the night from the 12th to the 13th of April 1204,

the resistance from the imperial troops collapsed.

For three days, the crusaders plundered the city,

abusing, raping, and killing many of its residents.

(dramatic music) (fire crackles)

Emperor Alexios V managed to flee at first,

but he was caught by the crusaders

who blinded and killed him.

(dramatic music)

It played a major role for the development

of the Renaissance that Byzantine collapsed,

that it was damaged by the west

during the Fourth Crusade,

that it fell into the hands of the Ottoman Empire,

and many scholars left for Italy,

bringing manuscripts with them

and trying to install new values, texts, and ideas

into a culture they perceived to be barbaric.

It was a boost in innovation of hitherto unseen proportions.

Treasures of immeasurable worth

piled up in the libraries of Constantinople,

the collective knowledge of antiquity.

Hundreds of scholars and artists

left the pillaged city and fled west,

and they took valuable books with them.

(harpsichord music) (attendants clap)

The scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was one of them.

The Chancellor of Florence offered him

a chair at his university.

He also sent Chrysoloras a wish list of ancient works.

(harpsichord music)

A new era began with this exodus of eastern Roman scholars.

In this way, too, techniques of ancient artists

were rediscovered in the west.

A level of movement, vitality, and reality

was captured in marble that had been unknown

in the Middle Ages.

Ancient frescoes inspired painters.

Works of ancient engineering also reached the west.

They triggered a wave of technical innovations.

Ancient ideas of the movement of

the heavenly bodies were taught once more.

Science and, first and foremost, maths and physics

experienced an unexpected revival

after centuries of oblivion.

The Europeans learned from several civilizations.

They learned from the Greeks and Romans,

from the Arabs, from the Byzantines,

and also from the Indians.

The famous Arabic numbers actually came from India.

They developed something new with what they learned.

They didn't just copy.

They learned these things

and disseminated them through printing.

They discussed the information in numbers

that hadn't happened in any other culture before.

Florence in 1410, a city-state

with a population of 50,000, the size of London,

and bursting with self-confidence.

The Italian city was something of

the Silicon Valley of the Renaissance.

It was a fount of knowledge.

Elites from the east taught here,

and it was a meeting place for artists and scholars.

The plans for the Cathedral of Maria del Fiore

were created in around 1300,

ambitious plans because it was to be

the largest church in Christendom,

a prestigious project, larger and more beautiful

than the cathedrals in Pisa, Sienna, and Milan,

and that's what it became.

With a length of 153 meters,

Florence Cathedral still ranks fourth in the world today.

Back then, it was number one.

With a diameter of 45 meters,

the dome was also a world record.

The work on the 4,000 square meter fresco

was begun by the painter Giorgio Vasari,

who was also famous as an artist biographer.

It was to compete with Michelangelo's Last Judgment,

but Vasari's figures are lost in the height of the dome.

Visitors down below can barely see them.

(gentle music)

In 1418, more than a hundred years

after its construction began,

the cathedral remained unfinished.

It was missing its dome.

(classical music)

Nobody in the Middle Ages had the knowledge

to solve the structural and technical problems,

but then Filippo Brunelleschi came along.

He was an architect and sculptor.

Inspired by the ancient domes of the pantheon

and the Hagia Sophia, he had clear ideas

about how to implement the ambitious project.

Brunelleschi was also an engineer and an inventor.

He developed special cranes for the dome's construction,

new inventions that were to revolutionize building methods.

Architecture students from the Technical University

of Darmstadt in Germany have recreated

Florence Cathedral on the computer.

Using virtual models, they're analyzing

every one of Brunelleschi's construction steps.

His work, which came at the start of the Renaissance,

is now considered the construction highlight of its era.

His dome was double-walled and self-supporting.

That was new.

The dome was to the Renaissance

what the tower had been to the Middle Ages,

the expression of state power.

The project head at the Technical University

of Darmstadt is Marc Grellert,

an internationally renowned expert

in the field of computer reconstructions

of historic buildings.

Brunelleschi wasn't just a brilliant builder.

He was also an outstanding engineer.

He invented construction machines

that hadn't been around before,

the ox crane, for example.

This crane made it possible to

get the stones up to the dome.

He invented a brilliant system of gears,

which meant that the materials could be lifted

and lowered without removing the animals from their harness.

(harpsichord music)

Brunelleschi's machines were a novelty

of his era, and they were admired.

The rope that carried the stones weighed half a ton.

It was seven centimeters thick and 180 meters long.

Years later, the builder received

the sole right to build a ship with a crane on it.

It was the first patent in industrial history.

Brunelleschi was also known for

rationalizing work processes.

He got the men who were working on the dome

to take their breaks and eat their meals up in the dome,

which saved the time of them having to go up and down.

Brunelleschi's machines are similar

to modern crane systems in how they work.

They revolutionized the construction sites

of the Renaissance.

It's not just in its architecture

that the Gothic Period differs from the Renaissance.

The predecessors of the Renaissance architects,

the builders of the Gothic Period,

neither had the technical nor the

structural knowledge Brunelleschi had.

They worked by trial and error,

ever higher and more delicate,

but they had no mathematical way of calculating

the structural limits of their constructions.

(dramatic music)

The history of Gothic architecture

is a history of failed experiments.

(dramatic music)

(building blocks thud)

There were no detailed architectural drawings either.

All the planning took place in the architect's head.

That's inconceivable from today's perspective.

There was a merely a plan that outlined the dimensions,

a simple outline of the building.

(classical music)

In the Gothic Period, you had three generations

of architects working on one building.

The idea and implementation takes place

in the architect's head

and cannot be separated from him.

That wasn't the case in the Renaissance.

There was a separation of design and construction.

Filippo Brunelleschi managed to

rediscover perspective, a technique

largely forgotten since antiquity,

a geometrical system to depict

three-dimensional views realistically.

That way he managed to put the building down on paper,

providing a visual basis for a discussion.

It was the birth hour of the architect.

(classical music)

Perspective drawing also inspired painters.

Paintings became realistic projections of reality.

Artists took viewers on a journey to a new world

as if it were part of the scenery.

The Renaissance paintings achieved a greater closeness

to reality than ever before.

This rediscovery of perspective drawing

was a powerful engine of progress,

and it was necessary for one of the most

important tools used by architects today.

C.A.D., computer-aided design,

the 3-D animation of a building.

The virtual construction work starts

before the actual construction.

C.A.D. is a realistic depiction of reality.

It provides the data for

computer-controlled robotic systems.

Robots that build independently are still

a vision for the future,

but the technology to make it happen

was invented by Brunelleschi

more than half a millennium ago.

Brunelleschi didn't invent perspective drawing,

but he represented a milestone

on the road from antiquity to the Renaissance.

He developed a recipe with which you, anyone,

could construct a realistic perspective

for every object step-by-step.

As a result, everyone could design buildings

and create realistic paintings.

Suddenly architects were able to design

ten, twenty buildings, while an architect

in the Gothic Period spent his entire life

on a single construction site.

In Italy's competing city-states,

particularly in Venice, Milan, Florence, and Pisa,

the hip architects became some of

the top earners of the Renaissance.

They weren't nameless like they had been

in the Middle Ages.

They were celebrated and pampered elites.

Venetian noblemen paid for palaces in the new style.

The Swiss architect Antonio Contino

designed and built the Bridge of Sighs.

It's one the most photographed motifs in the world.

The new construction style became an export hit.

The City Hall in Zurich is a masterpiece

of the late Renaissance.

A hundred years earlier, the sculptor and builder,

Anton Isenmann had built one of the most

picturesque examples of Italian Renaissance

in Switzerland, Lucerne Town Hall,

a high-tech building based on Albrecht Durer's

plan for the ideal defensive structure,

Munot Fortress in northern Switzerland,

captivating in its symmetry.

Symmetry and borrowed from antiquity,

a clear system for the arrangement of

columns, arches, and domes.

Architecture, gardens, and sculptures

came together to form a total artwork.

It sought to please, be decorative,

and provide enjoyment for people, not praise God.

Medieval art was basically religious art.

That in part evidenced by the fact

that we only know some of the artists.

Although it was customary to sign individual things,

we often speak of the master of such-and-such

whose name we don't even know.

In the Renaissance, we see the trend

to the named author of a work.

Art became free from religious motifs.

It turned towards everyday life.

It also described everyday life more accurately.

If you think of perspective drawing, for example,

they tried to describe everyday life in detail.

Powerful and extremely self-confident artists

came to the fore.

They confronted the powerful.

They made their demands.

They were courted by the powerful.

Michelangelo, for example, he was an artist

who would dictate certain things to the Pope.

(dramatic music)

In 1347, the Black Death

broke out in Europe.

It killed around 45% of the population in England

within just seven months.

Hundreds of thousands died.

There's no comparable catastrophe in history.

After that, nothing was the same anymore.

(wheels of hearse creak)

(dramatic music)

A trauma that was processed in art,

the plague changed the world.

In the end, it even changed people themselves.

(dramatic music)

It might sound cynical,

but the plague didn't just have a negative effect

on the culture of the Renaissance and the arts.

The wealth of the dead was concentrated

in the hands of the survivors,

and to those who survived,

saw life with completely different eyes.

Some will have said, "Let's enjoy our days

"and spend them in the best way possible."

Maybe they wanted to surround themselves

with beautiful art.

Others will have wanted to straighten

their accounts with God and do something

for the well-being of their soul,

like Medici who built an entire church.

It's certain that the plague deeply influenced

the people's attitude to life.

The imperative of the Renaissance was,

"Live in this life, enjoy your life."

That hadn't been the case in the Middle Ages.

Naked bodies everywhere,

beautiful people enmeshed in idyllic landscapes,

open eroticism.

Michelangelo's Last Judgment, the heavenly hosts

are naked with discernible genitalia, a revolution.

The plague completely ravaged Florence.

Only a fifth of the city's population

survived the Black Death.

(dramatic music)

The plague also changed how wealth was distributed.

It promoted a new species, tycoons,

people who were unimaginably rich.

Families like the Medici,

merchants and bankers, people who were despised

in the feudal society of the Middle Ages.

Now they were the ones in charge.

(classical music)

A journey to the year 1425.

The sculptor Donatello and his patron, Cosimo de' Medici,

the first great sponsor of the arts,

a wealthy banker, a reserve tactician,

a strategist with almost mafia-like methods.

He was one of the richest men of his day.

His money was the fuel for the development

of art and architecture in Florence

and the spark that ignited the Italian Renaissance.

But his success never would've been possible

without a small invention that had revolutionized banking.

(classical music)

A simple formal financial instrument became a catalyst.

Two accounts were kept:

the credit account with takings,

and the debit account with outgoings.

The first complete double-entry bookkeeping system

can be dated to 1340.

Ledgers from Genoa with the income

and expenditure of the government.

The account holder knew at all times

how much capital he had.

He was able to compare his financial past to his present.

(dramatic music)

Konrad Hummler, a well-known Swiss entrepreneur,

journalist, a patron, and former private banker,

knows what that meant.

A rich man comes to you with a sack of money.

But is he really rich?

If you look at his liquid assets, then yes.

But if you know that he has debts,

then maybe his net worth is negative.

He's bankrupt.

You can find out more about the economy

if you do double-entry accounts,

and cash flows can only be depicted

through double-entry bookkeeping too.

You can show, too, what happens over time in the economy.

Double-entry bookkeeping allowed for

a greatly expanded perspective of

what was happening in the economy.

(classical music)

The Medici were bankers.

They issued loans and signed secure credit notes

for travelers that could be cashed in many countries,

the precursors to traveler's checks.

They were global players.

Cosimo de' Medici earned huge sums

and spent them again.

By the time of his death, 600,000 florins,

more than a quarter of a billion Euros,

in taxes, donations to the needy,

on buildings, and on art.

(classical music)

A whole pool of creative individuals,

artists, and architects were dependent on his money.

They in turn made his life nicer.

Medici Palace is a glorious stage of Renaissance art.

It's hard to believe that Cosimo

instructed the architect not to make it too magnificent,

as he didn't want to rouse the envy

of other patrician families.

The Medici invested in the well-being

of their souls as well.

They donated money for a new church,

the Basilica di San Lorenzo.

As patron, Cosimo de' Medici supported artists' careers

and something that had never existed in this form before,

the celebrity cult.

This celebrity arose in an intellectual

greenhouse climate, in a market full of competition

where humanists, creatives, and artists of all kinds

were supported, often very well paid by patrons.

They in turn hoped for more fame and standing

for their courts through these artists.

Fantasy increasingly came to the fore

over the actual ability of the painter or the sculptor.

In this way, you had some standout figures

in this busy market whose status was known

at the time and is still known to us today.

That means the underestimated artist,

the suffering genius, will have been a

particularly frequent phenomenon.

Donatello was one of the first

great artist celebrities of the Renaissance.

He was almost 60 when he showed Cosimo de' Medici

the designs for his David.

The boy who defeated Goliath is his most significant work,

a brave work because Donatello's David is naked.

Only a few generations earlier,

ancient statues were destroyed

simply for portraying nudity.

Donatello's David was the first sculpture

of a naked life-size person since antiquity.

Medici and Donatello certainly will have been

aware of the revolutionary nature of this work.

Unlike other cultures, the Renaissance

didn't worry about depicting naked bodies,

or almost naked bodies.

That was very significant for medicine.

You can't study anatomy if you can't depict naked bodies.

That was crucial for a different understanding of people.

A person wasn't just animated by his spirit

and guided by his thoughts.

Instead, he was a mechanically controlled machine,

an organism.

Before Donatello, nobody had been

brave enough to depict a human body uncovered.

That was as unusual as his interpretation.

Donatello's David is no muscle man.

Rather, he's a youth with somewhat feminine traits

and fascinatingly lifelike.

Like Donatello's David, the model,

a sports student, has shifted his weight onto one leg,

the engaged leg.

The other, the free leg, is relieved.

He copies David's pose exactly,

an experiment in the lab that analyzes

movement sequences at the Sports University of Cologne.

The artist and artwork are put to the test.

Cameras record every movement phase.

A program translates the film footage

into computer data.

Denise Temme is a professor of dance and movement culture.

She's monitoring the experiment.

She wants to find out how well

Donatello understood the movement apparatus

and anatomy of the human body.

It's almost impossible to stand

in such a relaxed manner when you've got

your weight on both legs.

He's standing contrapposto,

meaning his weight is shifted to one side,

so he's resting on his hip.

The shoulder blades stick out,

and his tummy also follows gravity in this position.

We see a very relaxed stance,

but because it's not broad,

it can move in any direction.

He's standing on one leg and can shift

his weight very quickly and get going.

The principle behind contrapposto

was already known to Greek sculptors 2,000 years ago.

After almost a whole millennium,

the artists of the Renaissance picked it up again,

Donatello before all the others.

They copied human poses very realistically.

Michelangelo's slave statues combined

the relaxed element of the contrapposto

with the tension of someone in shackles.

Michelangelo, like Donatello, knew about human anatomy.

Either Donatello had his own ideas about movement

or he had his own experience which he was able to depict

because he depicted certain details very well,

details that we didn't even think about

when we tried to recreate the pose.

The shape of the gluteal muscle,

which is completely relaxed,

the folds the muscle hangs over,

the very flexible joints as a result

of the muscle tension being so relaxed.

With a trained sports student,

we hardly managed to create the position

of the hip on the right hand side

because they need very high muscle tension.

It's a very flexible David,

and that's been captured in great detail.

But where did Donatello

get his knowledge of the human body?

With the enthusiasm of the early Renaissance

for all things classical, interests in anatomy grew as well.

Almost all the artists, sculptors, and painters

of the Renaissance will have studied human anatomy,

at least in theory.

An illegal trade in fresh corpses flourished,

but many places imposed draconian punishments

for this crime.

However, curiosity triumphed over fear.

It's possible that Donatello dissected corpses too,

just like Albrecht Durer, Michelangelo,

and Leonardo da Vinci one or two generations later.

But even in Donatello's time in the early Renaissance,

the structure of the human body was known to artists.

This knowledge allowed new,

very lifelike depictions of people.

Men like Donatello were either

artistically talented scholars or scholarly artists.

As the analysis by Cologne's Sports University

would suggest, Donatello's knowledge of

the human movement apparatus

went much farther than previously believed.

The surprising thing about Donatello

is that almost 600 years ago,

he had a David cast in bronze whose stance,

according to modern research,

represents an ideal in movement efficiency.

Straight and tall, he's standing very efficiently.

That principle has been captured in a very visceral way.

He's strikingly upright with almost no muscle tension.

As fate would have it,

Donatello's interpretation of the Old Testament hero

didn't achieve the same popularity

as another sculpture of the Renaissance,

one that was also created in Florence,

Michelangelo's David.

At five meters tall, it's a monumental statue

in the pose of a god.

Half a century after Donatello,

it was a symbol of the self-confidence of

the new man, the Renaissance man.

The explosive thing about the Renaissance

was that people became aware of

their strengths and abilities in a new way.

They unfolded an incredible energy

with regard to their thinking and actions

in business and technology.

Human self-confidence skyrocketed.

In the Middle Ages,

more than 90% of people were illiterate.

The few who could read and write

were exclusively men of the church.

They were the ones who produced books,

owned them, and looked after them like treasures.

The life's work of a single copyist,

ten to fifteen books.

That makes them unimaginably valuable.

One book back then cost the same as a farmhouse.

A nice codex, such as a Bible,

would require you to kill an entire flock of sheep,

and that's expensive.

But then books could be bought for little money.

That meant reading became democratic.

More and more people were able to participate

in discussions about new ideas.

That's the only way we can explain how Europe

became the continent of innovations,

much more than any other continent.

The men of the church

didn't just copy works.

They also changed them and falsified sources.

They claimed their interpretation was the word of God.

That gave them power, but in the Renaissance,

their monopoly on knowledge, one of the most important

bastions of the church, disappeared.

An awareness for sources and the truth developed,

not least because sources were now accessible.

People started analyzing these sources

with classical techniques.

The traditional myths put forward by the church

simply weren't accepted anymore.

Mainz in 1415.

His invention is maybe the most significant

in a thousand years, but we don't even know

what he looked like,

Johannes Gutenberg, a printer in the city.

His achievement was to combine the methods

of reproduction and printing into one overall system.

(gentle music)

His hand mold was at the heart of his printing press.

It allowed letters to be printed faster and more finely.

In short, it was the invention of modern printing.

And so it was the birth hour of mass communication.

The principle back then was exactly the same as today.

People multiply opinions.

That also changed the value of people

attached to information.

During the Renaissance, the printed word

was worth more because people could read it,

black on white.

Printing was of truly enormous significance,

and Gutenberg is the person who did

the most of consequence in world history

in a thousand years.

Reading became increasingly widespread.

The huge developments in the great

religious revolution, the Reformation,

wouldn't have been possible without printing.

In the first 60 years

after the invention of printing,

400 Bible editions were published in

the languages of the people.

At the same time, the number of laypeople

who were able to read and write increased.

More and more people now had direct

and immediate access to biblical texts,

the word of God.

The people of the Renaissance felt close to God.

They felt themselves becoming godlike.

They wouldn't have said that in the Middle Ages.

It would've been considered blasphemous.

People referred to the Bible

and said they were God's creation.

God made us in his image.

We are almost miniature gods.

God came closer to people in the Renaissance

than he ever was in the Middle Ages.

But it wasn't books that made up

the bulk of the business of the printing shops.

It was fly sheets.

They were affordable and cost

two to three hours' wages for a laborer.

Everyone was able to print fly sheets,

and so disseminate his opinions, verses, and drawings.

Three subjects dominated:

sensations and miracles, religious instruction,

and political and military propaganda.

The illustrated fly sheets also developed

the first caricatures.

They were an invitation, an opinion, or a warning.

Comparable to today's social networks,

they took advantage of a fundamental need-

the mass dissemination of one's own opinion.

(dramatic music)

The Renaissance had fly sheets.

It had literature that was printed

and spread very quickly.

It would be printed in Nuremberg tomorrow,

and in two days' time, it would be in Zurich.

Information became faster,

and it was much harder to control, too.

Church censorship, that doesn't stick anymore

because the fly sheets have long since been spread around.

You can only understand the huge boom

in free thinking in the Renaissance

if you look at the media

and at the fly sheets in particular.

Mass communication generated

a new kind of person, the celebrity.

Its creator was Giorgio Vasari,

a painter and architect himself,

but mainly a biographer of the most fascinating

public figures of his day, artists.

He was particularly taken with Leonardo da Vinci,

but he also produced portraits of Raphael and Michelangelo.

Leonardo was unconventional, a miracle of creativity,

highly talented, strange with a vanity

that bordered on the grotesque,

a man who wasn't scared of acknowledging his homosexuality.

Vasari was the first to coin the term Rinascita,

Renaissance, and who gave his artists

the aura that made them stars,

shining lights of society.

He created the image of an artist,

which hadn't existed before.

Most artists were craftsmen.

That's how they saw themselves,

and that's how others saw them.

But Vasari created the image of the genius,

the strange, crazy man,

the artist who is overcome by ideas.

He paints a picture of an artist

that seems strangely familiar today.

He created the modern artist.

The painter Holbein was the first

to paint a portrait of his family.

The star painters Botticelli and Albrecht Durer

even painted self portraits.

The self portrait became the expression

of a new self-confidence.

Finally, along came Raphael and Titian,

the first painters to sign their paintings,

a further step towards the notion of the star.

The great names in art suddenly became world famous.

A hundred years earlier, that would've been unthinkable.

Titans of the Renaissance, first and foremost

Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo,

were celebrated, invited to court, and paid handsomely.

In 1300, then Venetian glassblowers invented

the convex mirror, an invention whose importance

is underestimated.

Compared to the mirrors of the antiquity,

the Venetian variety provided an almost

undistorted likeness and a bright image.

Most people of the Middle Ages

would only have seen their face

as a blurry reflection in water.

The glass mirror was the first time

people could really see themselves.

Maybe that's why the people of the Renaissance

were more self-confident than their medieval counterparts.

Self-confidence and pride in their

personal achievements weren't sinful anymore.

Humility was no longer in tune with the times.

(classical music)

The person who keeps his chin up,

who walks tall in the presence of God,

who uses reason as his special gift from God,

these are the new values.

As a result, humility becomes less important.

As humans, we're capable,

and God wants us to be capable.

(dramatic music) (attendants applaud)

But what was the secret

of the titans of the Renaissance?

Did they have a magic formula for their creativity?

Their charisma is in any case still with us.

(classical music)