Meanwhile, in Renaissance Florence...
May. 26th, 2018 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSome weeks back doing a meme reminded me that I never got around to watching Da Vinci’s Demons. Also, Netflix had put up the first season of Medici: Masters of Florence, which is an Italian-American coproduction. (A second season is in production.) So I marathoned through two series which had Renaissance Florence as a central location, and members of the Medici family in important roles. Result: I was entertained, but wouldn’t call either one a must.
I Medici/ Medici: Masters of Florence is the more conventional of the two, a straightforward historical.
Our central character is Cosimo de‘ Medici, whom history refers to as Cosimo Il Veccio and whom Florence also honored with the title Pater Patriae. He’s the one who took the Medici from influentual (but one of several) Florentine banking clan to inofficial rulers of the Florentine Republic. Now, if I tell you that he’s played by Richard „Robb Stark“ Madden in the series, you’ll deduce Cosimo The Old isn’t very old in this series. The season has two timelines, flashbacks to „twenty years ago“, and a present day action in which Cosimo has an adult son and is about to become a grandfather but looks barely aged, safe for a few artfully dyed in grey hairs. The same is true for the actors playing his brother Lorenzo and his wife Contessina. Make-up did a more credible job on his archenemy Albizzi, who does look like decades have passed, but hey.
Cosimo’s father Giovanni dies within the first few minutes of the show, though in the flashback timeline he’s around and very present, so you understand why casting went to the expense of hiring Dustin Hoffman to play him. „Who killed Giovanni de‘ Medici?“ is the narrative red thread through the season, but it should have occured to me earlier than it did that the series also blatantly uses The Godfather as a narrative template as far as Cosimo’s personal arc is concerned. This version of him wanted to become an artist as a young man, which his father of course nixed (presto the explanation for Medici art patronage), so despite not wanting to, he went into the family business and turned out to be very efficient in it, while also emotionally shutting down. In case that doesn’t sound sufficiently like Michael Corleone, I’ll add there’s also a doomed young love and an intense but difficult relationship with his wife, a brother who is both hotheaded (Sonny) and at one point suspected of betraying the family (Fredo), and the death of a father as a big turning point. And belated bloody revenge cross cut with a mass.
Now, the problem right there ist hat Richard Madden isn’t a young Al Pacino. Pacino truly carries the first two Godfather movies, he manages to make stillness utterly compelling in Michael. (One case in point: Michael gearing himself up to his first murder while everyone else around him is talking; you’re unable to look away from Pacino in that scene, who doesn’t say anything.) Madden tries his best, and his thousands-yards-stare at his enemies isn’t bad, but it’s still not the same effect.
Otoh, Cosimo’s wife Contessina is utterly unlike Kay Adams Corleone, and certainly the series‘ most compelling character. She’s most definitely part of the family business and hers and Cosimo’s relationship is an interesting take on the arranged marriage trope in that basically Cosimo starts out resenting her for not being able to resent her, because on the one hand, he’s been forced to renounce true love ™ for this arrangement, on the other, not only is there a powerful physical attraction between him and Contessina but she’s smart and cunning and fiercely loyal: pretty much the ideal wife. If the show wasn’t aware Cosimo was being an ass to Contessina quite often, I’d have disliked the show, but thankfully the series is entirely on Contessina’s side in this, and once we get to the intermezzo where Cosimo is in exile, we see her represent the Medici business in Florence in desperate circumstances really well.
Supporting cast: Cosimo’s sidekick Marco Bello is a clear take on the „loyal enforcer“ trope, but alas, the show never tells us what forged his loyalty to Cosimo, and only in the last third of the season does he gain an emotional life outside of Cosimo, so he doesn’t have the same emotional reality as, say, Micheletto does in The Borgias. Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo as mentioned wavers between being Sonny and being Fredo, whereas the next generation, Cosimo’s and Contessina’s son Piero and his wife Lucrezia, are neat originals – idealistic kids, yes, but also an example of an arranged marriage working out just fine even when things for a while turn dire for the Medici. Lucrezia has a good protegee/mentor relationship with her mother-in-law, Contessina, which is in great contrast to the one Contessina had to her own mother-in-law. (Contessina: a great believer in not repeating mistakes across generations.) Then there’s Maddalena, slave girl from Venice whom I was at first ready to complain about since she’s not played by a poc actress but by a white one, but then I read up on this generation of Medici (who aren’t my forte; I know far more about their grandkids) and lo, Maddalena was Circassian, so the casting is justified. Anyway, laudably Maddalena is more than a plot device; she’s got one of the season’s best put downs (of our heroes, no less) in the finale. Lastly, we have Hugo the bookkeeper and faithful old retainer (keep your eye on him).
Historical fidelity: the costumes are a bit more faithful than the ones from Da Vinci’s Demons, but still cut with an eye to modern taste, especially for the women. The series uses some actual events – the Medici/Albizzi feud, Cosimo’s temporary exile, Cosimo as an art patron, the importance of the Medici becoming papal bankers and the Pope’s stint in Florence, for example – but adds a lot, usually for drama (including, of course, Giovanni’s death having been murder), not to mention that I don’t think events around the building oft he Duomo’s famous cupola happened this way. While Donatello shows up in an early flashback and his David is frequently showcased, the series’s most prominent artist is Bruneschelli. Since no one but villains (and the Pope, who in a rarity for Renaissance Popes isn’t one) objects to art, you can spot the unsympathetic characters by them objecting to either of those two. Subtle, this show is not.
The season ends with the political power struggle in Florence resolved, ditto for the question of Giovanni’s murder, and almost everyone’s relationships having made progress for the better, while the next generation gets born – that would be Lorenzo Il Magnifico, who plays a supporting part in Da Vinci’s Demons. It’s a qualified happy ending, since various tragic events occur first, but still, compared with The Godfather, it’s downright optimistic. I hear the second season will skip two decades and will bring us to Lorenzo and his brother Guiliano and the Pazzi Conspiracy, i.e. the very events the first season of Da Vinci’s Demons uses as background. Presumably without Leonardo da Vinci.
To get the most obvious out of the way first, Da Vinci’s Demons does not feature any literal demons. (Lots of metaphorical ones, though.) It is historical fantasy, but the supernatural elements mostly consist of telepathy, prophecy and Vlad Tepes, Dracula himself, having an uncanny ability to survive things which kill other people. (He shows up in season 1 and season 3 and is played gloriously over the top by Paul Rhys. Since geography in Da Vinci’s Demons is as excentric as history, trips to Romania and back pose no problem for our heroes.)
What Da Vinci’s Demons also is: batshit, to use a fannish term. A very entertaining kind of crazy, with Jacobean and modern tropes thrown in to a wild mixture. Secret societies! (Two of them are basically responsible for most major plot twists.) Evil twins! Surprise other relations! Double (and triple) agents! Lots of assasinations (with various degrees of success)! Revennnnnge! Enemies turning allies! Daddy issues! Evil clerics! Evil military overlords! Orgies! And so on, and so forth. The cinematography matches. Also, the score by Bear McCreary (he who gave us the music for Battlestar Galactica, The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Black Sails) is gorgeous.
The series‘ evil Pope to take on all evil Popes, Sixtus IV., is introduced in the pilot ibathing in a gigantic water basin in the Vatican holding a knife to the throat of some poor boy, and when I tell you that’s not the most over the top thing that happens in the Pope’s Renaissance swimming pool, you can take my word for it. (Other events include Leonardo having invented both diving and submarines and thus arising out o fit when he needs to infiltrate the Vatican, and in s3 a major character being found crucified in it.)
Leonardo (his friends call him Leo, and his enemies keep calling him „Da Vinci“, for which I would blame Dan Brown if that misuse of a name wouldn’t have been common long before he inflicted it on unsuspecting readers) is played by Tom Riley. (If you watch Doctor Who: more recently, he was Robin Hood in Robots of Sherwood.) Now, one of the reasons why I didn’t watch the show when it was originally broadcast was that I heard it has heterosexualized Leonardo da Vinci. Which turned out to have been mostly true. Well, technically it presents him as a bisexual, and it does make canon that he had sex with a male model, but the problem is that aside from one m/m kiss, Leonardo having sex with men is something referred to only in dialogue, whereas his relationships with the ladies aren’t only shown on screen but form an important part of the overall narrative, especially his affair with Lorenzo de‘ Medici’s mistress Lucrezia Donati. So, show: no cookies for that one kiss and some lines. You could have done better.
Sexuality aside, Leonardo gets to invent not just stuff his historical counterpart is famous for but just about everything the plot needs him to, and these inventions almost always work. (If only, thinks historical LDV.) He’s the easily distracted, wildlly inventive type of hero who who at different points has touches of either Sherlock Holmes or the Doctor which I don’t think are incidental. When the show wants to do depth, we get Leonardo having to face the darker side of his (war engineering) inventions working, or we have the relationship with his archenemy turning ally, Girolamo Riario, the Pope’s „nephew“ (read: illegitimate son).
Riario is vaguely based on a historical person as well, but the only thing he shares with his counterpart (who, btw, in rl was married to Caterina Sforza, sadly Mistress Not Showing Up In This Series) is being Sixtus IV’s bastard, his job, and the fact he was involved in the Pazzi Conspiracy. Otherwise, he might as well be an OC, and ridiculously suited to become a fandom favourite by ticking off all the boxes: he’s first introduced as a dastardly (if smart) villain who ruthlessly kills and tortures, but wait! He has depth! Like Leonardo, he has a mean dad, only his is truly evil and responsible for some (but not all) of Riario’s most horrible actions. And of the male characters, Riario is the sole true believer who struggles with his faith throughout the show and considers himself damned but very much wants not to be. Before you can say „woobie“, he also aquires a mistress who is the first person to show him true affection but whom he’s then forced to kill to, gasp, save our hero’s life. And of course he’s got an obsession with our hero, is the first outsider to acknowledge his genius, and spends a lot of time chasing after him in some way or the other. By the time season 3 comes along, the two of them are at a point where Leonardo after finding out that Riario is currently having a Jekyll and Hyde episode in that he has developed a secondary killer personality (there are plot reasons for this, and the show takes some trouble to establish this is different from Riario murdering people out of his own volition, which he also has done a lot), his response is to spend the next episode trying to fix his frenemy by inventing psychotherapy. While Riario is tied up, of course. It’s that kind of show.
Now I’m as receptive to these tropes as the next fangirl and the actor playing Riario does a fine shop both with the sinister snark and the vulnerable humanity (oh, and in s2 at one point Leonardo is pretending to be Riario, which leads to hilarious impersonation), but the one thing holding me back from actually loving the character is that the show loves him a little too much. By which I mean: in s2, the woman who loves him he’s forced to kill? She urges him to do it to save Leonardo and himself, and forgives him instantly. In s3, when he has the Mr. Hyde thing going on, there’s also another woman who fell for him, and whom his alternate personality almost kills. Hearing Dr. Leonardo’s explanation, she forgives him instantly. Look, show, I recognize a Byronic hero when I see one, but those guys truly benefit from someone holding a justified grudge. (Someone who isn’t shown to be mistaken by the narrative, that is. Leonardo’s best buddy Zoroaster – not based on anyone, I think – is basically the only one in Team Good Guys who holds out, but that’s mostly used for comic relief.
Speaking of Leonardo’s support team: Zoroaster, aka Zo, is your typical „don’t do the dangerous thing! Oh, to hell with it, let’s help you anyway“ sidekick with the quips; there’s also young Nico, Leonardo’s apprentice, who in s2 developes an interesting relationship with Riario who once tortured him for information but afterwards basically sees his younger self in Nico and apprentices him somewhat, so when Nico reveals in the s2 finale his full name is Niccolo Machiavelli, it isn’t entirely surprising. Then we have Vanessa, a young prostitute/barmaid who also modelled for Leonardo back in the day and in the first season has a fling with Giuliano de‘Medici which results in her becoming the mother of a future Pope. Now I don’t think any of this is true of Cousin Giulio’s mother in history, but that’s actually a minor departure compared with some others.
Vanessa giving birth to the future Pope Clement is a bigger deal on the show than it was in rl because the show has removed all of Lorenzo’s sons from existence. (The daughters still exist.) (Which means no Piero the Unfortunate to ruin the Medici fortunes in Florence and no Giovanni to study with Cesare Borgia at Pisa and become Pope Leo, the very one whom Martin Luther went up against.) This means her kid is the sole male Medici heir around, which is a plot point, and Vanessa going from powerless barmaid to most powerful woman in Florence is a surprisingly effective arc.
The main female character, however, is Lucrezia Donati. Her historical counterpart is something of an obscure figure. I might be wrong, but I don’t think we know more about her than that she was married and that Lorenzo wrote some poems explicitly for her; even whether she was his mistress sexually as well as platonically is debated. This show’s Lucrezia starts out married as well, though the husband is forgotten after s1 (and even there, he was only visible in one or two scenes). She’s our hero’s true love (and vice versa), with her relationship to Lorenzo being solely due evil machinations of Team Villain. Lucrezia switches teams repeatedly and does some dark deeds, but it’s usually either because of her own tragic backstory, and the blackmail or manipulation she’s under for a good deal of the show). I found her at her best in s2 when she spent the entire season (save the finale) in her own storyline instead of the s1 triangle one, and gets fleshed out. Meanwhile, Lorenzo de Medici’s wife Clarice starts out promisingly as competent and smart, and the arranged marriage between her and Lorenzo works despite his infidelity, but the show from later s2 onwards keeps inflicting her with depressing twists, alas.
As for the Medici in general: Giuliano the doomed-to-die-young starts out as an angry hothead and then develops into a competent charmer before being murdered (twice). Incidentally, the show’s depiction of the big climax of the Pazzi Conspiracy for the s1 finale, the assassination attempt on both Medici brothers in the Duomo during Easter Mass (successful for Giuliano, unsuccessful with Lorenzo) is only slightly more over the top than the historical event itself was. (Leonardo gets Angelo Poliziano’s role of dragging the wounded Lorenzo into the side chapel and into safety, though that’s where the show departs from its nod to history in its depiction of the aftermath.) Lorenzo de‘ Medici, played by Elliot Gowan, in general gets depicted as on the lighter side of the morally ambiguous ruler spectrum, until later s3, to which I’ll get in a moment. Unfortunately, the series has one basic structural problem with historical Lorenzo de‘ Medici – the accomplishment he’s most famous for (other than being a patron of the arts and surviving the Pazzi Conspiracy) is preventing a war and saving Florence in a mixture of bravery, intelligence and diplomatic skill, when he responded to Sixtus IV excommunicating him, putting Florence under the interdict as well and encouraging various Italian lords to have a go at it by travelling to the most feared of those, King Ferrante of Naples of „Keeps his dead enemies as mummies“ fame, on his lonesome. Historical Lorenzo managed in three months as a prisoner/guest in Naples to convince Ferrante to switch sides, and that was that for excommunicated Florence.
(Ferrante remained impressed; as opposed to his show counterpart, he outlived Lorenzo de‘ Medici and his epitaph upon hearing about Lorenzo’s death years later was that Lorenzo had lived long enough for his own fame, but not long enough fort the good of Italy.)
Meanwhile, Show!Lorenzo travels to Naples with just this intention as well, but this is not a show where war gets prevented and imprisonment is of the type where you get to successfully negotiate with your host. (Also, Lorenzo is a supporting character, and if anyone gets to save Florence, it's our hero Leonardo.) Nope, Show!Lorenzo gets tortured within an inch of his life, and when Ferrante finally is ready to actually listen, Ferrante’s son Alfonso (who like most younger male characters on this show has daddy issues for a reason) kills him and starts the imprisonment anew. Then the Turks invade. (There was, in history, a Turkish conquest of Otranto, but it happened years earlier.) Then Lorenzo gets captured again (by them), and vanishes from the s3 plot by virtue of being gruesomely imprisoned in a labour camp for most of the season, until he returns to Florence in the last third with a severe case of PTSD, and where his historical counterpart managed to weave alliances with many an Italian city state and held together a balance between them, Show!Lorenzo at the very moment when unity is more important than anything else announces Florence will stand alone. In short, he doesn’t get to do any of the things his historical counterpart was actually good at and gets to do the opposite instead, and since I happen to be interested in historical Lorenzo, I found that somewhat frustrating. Ah well, I guess I can hope for the second season of I Medici (where the doomed Guiliano, btw, will be played by Bradley James (Arthur in Merlin). In the meantime, here’s my favourite fiction depicting historical Lorenzo, a Yuletide story from 2008 set in the aftermath the Pazzi Conspiracy with Sandro Botticelli as the pov character: The Seventh Circle.
(In Da Vinci’s Demons, Botticelli shows up in s1 in two episodes where he gets to be jealous of Leonardo and little else, unfortunately. The only artist other than Leonardo who gets featured extensively is his former teacher Andrea Verrocio, who also doubles as the sole benevolent father figure around.)
In conclusion: don’t watch this in the hope of learning something about actual history. Watch it for the entertaining crazy and all the tropes used. If you want to watch only one episode, take the s1 one with Dracula, because that’s more or less self contained and has it all: Leonardo has to use his wits to best a powerful evil, there is delicious scenery chewing, and some villain tragic background (though as opposed to Riario’s tragic background, Vlad’s time imprisoned by the Turks isn’t treated as a reason why the audience should forgive him his present day brutality).
I Medici/ Medici: Masters of Florence is the more conventional of the two, a straightforward historical.
Our central character is Cosimo de‘ Medici, whom history refers to as Cosimo Il Veccio and whom Florence also honored with the title Pater Patriae. He’s the one who took the Medici from influentual (but one of several) Florentine banking clan to inofficial rulers of the Florentine Republic. Now, if I tell you that he’s played by Richard „Robb Stark“ Madden in the series, you’ll deduce Cosimo The Old isn’t very old in this series. The season has two timelines, flashbacks to „twenty years ago“, and a present day action in which Cosimo has an adult son and is about to become a grandfather but looks barely aged, safe for a few artfully dyed in grey hairs. The same is true for the actors playing his brother Lorenzo and his wife Contessina. Make-up did a more credible job on his archenemy Albizzi, who does look like decades have passed, but hey.
Cosimo’s father Giovanni dies within the first few minutes of the show, though in the flashback timeline he’s around and very present, so you understand why casting went to the expense of hiring Dustin Hoffman to play him. „Who killed Giovanni de‘ Medici?“ is the narrative red thread through the season, but it should have occured to me earlier than it did that the series also blatantly uses The Godfather as a narrative template as far as Cosimo’s personal arc is concerned. This version of him wanted to become an artist as a young man, which his father of course nixed (presto the explanation for Medici art patronage), so despite not wanting to, he went into the family business and turned out to be very efficient in it, while also emotionally shutting down. In case that doesn’t sound sufficiently like Michael Corleone, I’ll add there’s also a doomed young love and an intense but difficult relationship with his wife, a brother who is both hotheaded (Sonny) and at one point suspected of betraying the family (Fredo), and the death of a father as a big turning point. And belated bloody revenge cross cut with a mass.
Now, the problem right there ist hat Richard Madden isn’t a young Al Pacino. Pacino truly carries the first two Godfather movies, he manages to make stillness utterly compelling in Michael. (One case in point: Michael gearing himself up to his first murder while everyone else around him is talking; you’re unable to look away from Pacino in that scene, who doesn’t say anything.) Madden tries his best, and his thousands-yards-stare at his enemies isn’t bad, but it’s still not the same effect.
Otoh, Cosimo’s wife Contessina is utterly unlike Kay Adams Corleone, and certainly the series‘ most compelling character. She’s most definitely part of the family business and hers and Cosimo’s relationship is an interesting take on the arranged marriage trope in that basically Cosimo starts out resenting her for not being able to resent her, because on the one hand, he’s been forced to renounce true love ™ for this arrangement, on the other, not only is there a powerful physical attraction between him and Contessina but she’s smart and cunning and fiercely loyal: pretty much the ideal wife. If the show wasn’t aware Cosimo was being an ass to Contessina quite often, I’d have disliked the show, but thankfully the series is entirely on Contessina’s side in this, and once we get to the intermezzo where Cosimo is in exile, we see her represent the Medici business in Florence in desperate circumstances really well.
Supporting cast: Cosimo’s sidekick Marco Bello is a clear take on the „loyal enforcer“ trope, but alas, the show never tells us what forged his loyalty to Cosimo, and only in the last third of the season does he gain an emotional life outside of Cosimo, so he doesn’t have the same emotional reality as, say, Micheletto does in The Borgias. Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo as mentioned wavers between being Sonny and being Fredo, whereas the next generation, Cosimo’s and Contessina’s son Piero and his wife Lucrezia, are neat originals – idealistic kids, yes, but also an example of an arranged marriage working out just fine even when things for a while turn dire for the Medici. Lucrezia has a good protegee/mentor relationship with her mother-in-law, Contessina, which is in great contrast to the one Contessina had to her own mother-in-law. (Contessina: a great believer in not repeating mistakes across generations.) Then there’s Maddalena, slave girl from Venice whom I was at first ready to complain about since she’s not played by a poc actress but by a white one, but then I read up on this generation of Medici (who aren’t my forte; I know far more about their grandkids) and lo, Maddalena was Circassian, so the casting is justified. Anyway, laudably Maddalena is more than a plot device; she’s got one of the season’s best put downs (of our heroes, no less) in the finale. Lastly, we have Hugo the bookkeeper and faithful old retainer (keep your eye on him).
Historical fidelity: the costumes are a bit more faithful than the ones from Da Vinci’s Demons, but still cut with an eye to modern taste, especially for the women. The series uses some actual events – the Medici/Albizzi feud, Cosimo’s temporary exile, Cosimo as an art patron, the importance of the Medici becoming papal bankers and the Pope’s stint in Florence, for example – but adds a lot, usually for drama (including, of course, Giovanni’s death having been murder), not to mention that I don’t think events around the building oft he Duomo’s famous cupola happened this way. While Donatello shows up in an early flashback and his David is frequently showcased, the series’s most prominent artist is Bruneschelli. Since no one but villains (and the Pope, who in a rarity for Renaissance Popes isn’t one) objects to art, you can spot the unsympathetic characters by them objecting to either of those two. Subtle, this show is not.
The season ends with the political power struggle in Florence resolved, ditto for the question of Giovanni’s murder, and almost everyone’s relationships having made progress for the better, while the next generation gets born – that would be Lorenzo Il Magnifico, who plays a supporting part in Da Vinci’s Demons. It’s a qualified happy ending, since various tragic events occur first, but still, compared with The Godfather, it’s downright optimistic. I hear the second season will skip two decades and will bring us to Lorenzo and his brother Guiliano and the Pazzi Conspiracy, i.e. the very events the first season of Da Vinci’s Demons uses as background. Presumably without Leonardo da Vinci.
To get the most obvious out of the way first, Da Vinci’s Demons does not feature any literal demons. (Lots of metaphorical ones, though.) It is historical fantasy, but the supernatural elements mostly consist of telepathy, prophecy and Vlad Tepes, Dracula himself, having an uncanny ability to survive things which kill other people. (He shows up in season 1 and season 3 and is played gloriously over the top by Paul Rhys. Since geography in Da Vinci’s Demons is as excentric as history, trips to Romania and back pose no problem for our heroes.)
What Da Vinci’s Demons also is: batshit, to use a fannish term. A very entertaining kind of crazy, with Jacobean and modern tropes thrown in to a wild mixture. Secret societies! (Two of them are basically responsible for most major plot twists.) Evil twins! Surprise other relations! Double (and triple) agents! Lots of assasinations (with various degrees of success)! Revennnnnge! Enemies turning allies! Daddy issues! Evil clerics! Evil military overlords! Orgies! And so on, and so forth. The cinematography matches. Also, the score by Bear McCreary (he who gave us the music for Battlestar Galactica, The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Black Sails) is gorgeous.
The series‘ evil Pope to take on all evil Popes, Sixtus IV., is introduced in the pilot ibathing in a gigantic water basin in the Vatican holding a knife to the throat of some poor boy, and when I tell you that’s not the most over the top thing that happens in the Pope’s Renaissance swimming pool, you can take my word for it. (Other events include Leonardo having invented both diving and submarines and thus arising out o fit when he needs to infiltrate the Vatican, and in s3 a major character being found crucified in it.)
Leonardo (his friends call him Leo, and his enemies keep calling him „Da Vinci“, for which I would blame Dan Brown if that misuse of a name wouldn’t have been common long before he inflicted it on unsuspecting readers) is played by Tom Riley. (If you watch Doctor Who: more recently, he was Robin Hood in Robots of Sherwood.) Now, one of the reasons why I didn’t watch the show when it was originally broadcast was that I heard it has heterosexualized Leonardo da Vinci. Which turned out to have been mostly true. Well, technically it presents him as a bisexual, and it does make canon that he had sex with a male model, but the problem is that aside from one m/m kiss, Leonardo having sex with men is something referred to only in dialogue, whereas his relationships with the ladies aren’t only shown on screen but form an important part of the overall narrative, especially his affair with Lorenzo de‘ Medici’s mistress Lucrezia Donati. So, show: no cookies for that one kiss and some lines. You could have done better.
Sexuality aside, Leonardo gets to invent not just stuff his historical counterpart is famous for but just about everything the plot needs him to, and these inventions almost always work. (If only, thinks historical LDV.) He’s the easily distracted, wildlly inventive type of hero who who at different points has touches of either Sherlock Holmes or the Doctor which I don’t think are incidental. When the show wants to do depth, we get Leonardo having to face the darker side of his (war engineering) inventions working, or we have the relationship with his archenemy turning ally, Girolamo Riario, the Pope’s „nephew“ (read: illegitimate son).
Riario is vaguely based on a historical person as well, but the only thing he shares with his counterpart (who, btw, in rl was married to Caterina Sforza, sadly Mistress Not Showing Up In This Series) is being Sixtus IV’s bastard, his job, and the fact he was involved in the Pazzi Conspiracy. Otherwise, he might as well be an OC, and ridiculously suited to become a fandom favourite by ticking off all the boxes: he’s first introduced as a dastardly (if smart) villain who ruthlessly kills and tortures, but wait! He has depth! Like Leonardo, he has a mean dad, only his is truly evil and responsible for some (but not all) of Riario’s most horrible actions. And of the male characters, Riario is the sole true believer who struggles with his faith throughout the show and considers himself damned but very much wants not to be. Before you can say „woobie“, he also aquires a mistress who is the first person to show him true affection but whom he’s then forced to kill to, gasp, save our hero’s life. And of course he’s got an obsession with our hero, is the first outsider to acknowledge his genius, and spends a lot of time chasing after him in some way or the other. By the time season 3 comes along, the two of them are at a point where Leonardo after finding out that Riario is currently having a Jekyll and Hyde episode in that he has developed a secondary killer personality (there are plot reasons for this, and the show takes some trouble to establish this is different from Riario murdering people out of his own volition, which he also has done a lot), his response is to spend the next episode trying to fix his frenemy by inventing psychotherapy. While Riario is tied up, of course. It’s that kind of show.
Now I’m as receptive to these tropes as the next fangirl and the actor playing Riario does a fine shop both with the sinister snark and the vulnerable humanity (oh, and in s2 at one point Leonardo is pretending to be Riario, which leads to hilarious impersonation), but the one thing holding me back from actually loving the character is that the show loves him a little too much. By which I mean: in s2, the woman who loves him he’s forced to kill? She urges him to do it to save Leonardo and himself, and forgives him instantly. In s3, when he has the Mr. Hyde thing going on, there’s also another woman who fell for him, and whom his alternate personality almost kills. Hearing Dr. Leonardo’s explanation, she forgives him instantly. Look, show, I recognize a Byronic hero when I see one, but those guys truly benefit from someone holding a justified grudge. (Someone who isn’t shown to be mistaken by the narrative, that is. Leonardo’s best buddy Zoroaster – not based on anyone, I think – is basically the only one in Team Good Guys who holds out, but that’s mostly used for comic relief.
Speaking of Leonardo’s support team: Zoroaster, aka Zo, is your typical „don’t do the dangerous thing! Oh, to hell with it, let’s help you anyway“ sidekick with the quips; there’s also young Nico, Leonardo’s apprentice, who in s2 developes an interesting relationship with Riario who once tortured him for information but afterwards basically sees his younger self in Nico and apprentices him somewhat, so when Nico reveals in the s2 finale his full name is Niccolo Machiavelli, it isn’t entirely surprising. Then we have Vanessa, a young prostitute/barmaid who also modelled for Leonardo back in the day and in the first season has a fling with Giuliano de‘Medici which results in her becoming the mother of a future Pope. Now I don’t think any of this is true of Cousin Giulio’s mother in history, but that’s actually a minor departure compared with some others.
Vanessa giving birth to the future Pope Clement is a bigger deal on the show than it was in rl because the show has removed all of Lorenzo’s sons from existence. (The daughters still exist.) (Which means no Piero the Unfortunate to ruin the Medici fortunes in Florence and no Giovanni to study with Cesare Borgia at Pisa and become Pope Leo, the very one whom Martin Luther went up against.) This means her kid is the sole male Medici heir around, which is a plot point, and Vanessa going from powerless barmaid to most powerful woman in Florence is a surprisingly effective arc.
The main female character, however, is Lucrezia Donati. Her historical counterpart is something of an obscure figure. I might be wrong, but I don’t think we know more about her than that she was married and that Lorenzo wrote some poems explicitly for her; even whether she was his mistress sexually as well as platonically is debated. This show’s Lucrezia starts out married as well, though the husband is forgotten after s1 (and even there, he was only visible in one or two scenes). She’s our hero’s true love (and vice versa), with her relationship to Lorenzo being solely due evil machinations of Team Villain. Lucrezia switches teams repeatedly and does some dark deeds, but it’s usually either because of her own tragic backstory, and the blackmail or manipulation she’s under for a good deal of the show). I found her at her best in s2 when she spent the entire season (save the finale) in her own storyline instead of the s1 triangle one, and gets fleshed out. Meanwhile, Lorenzo de Medici’s wife Clarice starts out promisingly as competent and smart, and the arranged marriage between her and Lorenzo works despite his infidelity, but the show from later s2 onwards keeps inflicting her with depressing twists, alas.
As for the Medici in general: Giuliano the doomed-to-die-young starts out as an angry hothead and then develops into a competent charmer before being murdered (twice). Incidentally, the show’s depiction of the big climax of the Pazzi Conspiracy for the s1 finale, the assassination attempt on both Medici brothers in the Duomo during Easter Mass (successful for Giuliano, unsuccessful with Lorenzo) is only slightly more over the top than the historical event itself was. (Leonardo gets Angelo Poliziano’s role of dragging the wounded Lorenzo into the side chapel and into safety, though that’s where the show departs from its nod to history in its depiction of the aftermath.) Lorenzo de‘ Medici, played by Elliot Gowan, in general gets depicted as on the lighter side of the morally ambiguous ruler spectrum, until later s3, to which I’ll get in a moment. Unfortunately, the series has one basic structural problem with historical Lorenzo de‘ Medici – the accomplishment he’s most famous for (other than being a patron of the arts and surviving the Pazzi Conspiracy) is preventing a war and saving Florence in a mixture of bravery, intelligence and diplomatic skill, when he responded to Sixtus IV excommunicating him, putting Florence under the interdict as well and encouraging various Italian lords to have a go at it by travelling to the most feared of those, King Ferrante of Naples of „Keeps his dead enemies as mummies“ fame, on his lonesome. Historical Lorenzo managed in three months as a prisoner/guest in Naples to convince Ferrante to switch sides, and that was that for excommunicated Florence.
(Ferrante remained impressed; as opposed to his show counterpart, he outlived Lorenzo de‘ Medici and his epitaph upon hearing about Lorenzo’s death years later was that Lorenzo had lived long enough for his own fame, but not long enough fort the good of Italy.)
Meanwhile, Show!Lorenzo travels to Naples with just this intention as well, but this is not a show where war gets prevented and imprisonment is of the type where you get to successfully negotiate with your host. (Also, Lorenzo is a supporting character, and if anyone gets to save Florence, it's our hero Leonardo.) Nope, Show!Lorenzo gets tortured within an inch of his life, and when Ferrante finally is ready to actually listen, Ferrante’s son Alfonso (who like most younger male characters on this show has daddy issues for a reason) kills him and starts the imprisonment anew. Then the Turks invade. (There was, in history, a Turkish conquest of Otranto, but it happened years earlier.) Then Lorenzo gets captured again (by them), and vanishes from the s3 plot by virtue of being gruesomely imprisoned in a labour camp for most of the season, until he returns to Florence in the last third with a severe case of PTSD, and where his historical counterpart managed to weave alliances with many an Italian city state and held together a balance between them, Show!Lorenzo at the very moment when unity is more important than anything else announces Florence will stand alone. In short, he doesn’t get to do any of the things his historical counterpart was actually good at and gets to do the opposite instead, and since I happen to be interested in historical Lorenzo, I found that somewhat frustrating. Ah well, I guess I can hope for the second season of I Medici (where the doomed Guiliano, btw, will be played by Bradley James (Arthur in Merlin). In the meantime, here’s my favourite fiction depicting historical Lorenzo, a Yuletide story from 2008 set in the aftermath the Pazzi Conspiracy with Sandro Botticelli as the pov character: The Seventh Circle.
(In Da Vinci’s Demons, Botticelli shows up in s1 in two episodes where he gets to be jealous of Leonardo and little else, unfortunately. The only artist other than Leonardo who gets featured extensively is his former teacher Andrea Verrocio, who also doubles as the sole benevolent father figure around.)
In conclusion: don’t watch this in the hope of learning something about actual history. Watch it for the entertaining crazy and all the tropes used. If you want to watch only one episode, take the s1 one with Dracula, because that’s more or less self contained and has it all: Leonardo has to use his wits to best a powerful evil, there is delicious scenery chewing, and some villain tragic background (though as opposed to Riario’s tragic background, Vlad’s time imprisoned by the Turks isn’t treated as a reason why the audience should forgive him his present day brutality).
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Date: 2018-05-26 06:10 pm (UTC)Is there actually Mithraism in this show?
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Date: 2018-05-26 06:16 pm (UTC)Meanwhile, it's the other Secret Society, the Enemies of Men, which uses a bull's head as its emblem, which is additionally confusing for those of us with a working knowledge of history.
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Date: 2018-05-26 06:17 pm (UTC)Oh, dear.
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Date: 2018-05-26 07:49 pm (UTC)when I tell you that’s not the most over the top thing that happens in the Pope’s Renaissance swimming pool, you can take my word for it.
I’m picturing the moment in The Rocky Horror Picture Show when the mist clears to reveal Frank in his swimming pool floating over the images of Adam and God, and the audience all shout “Michaelangelo, I told you to paint THE CEILING!”
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Date: 2018-05-27 04:43 am (UTC)But yes, the show is that kind of crazy.
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Date: 2018-05-31 04:22 am (UTC)We tried to watch Da Vinci, I just started thinking it was ridiculous but not in the cute Merlin way. I admire your fortitude!
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Date: 2018-12-18 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 03:58 pm (UTC)Re: Madden, I‘ve since seen him in Bodyguard as well, where he‘s good. Not specatular, but good. Who‘d have thought it from GoT?
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Date: 2018-12-18 04:23 pm (UTC)re: Madden, definitely much better than GoT, where the best actors were the girls. And well, Joffrey I suppose.