gardega on the renaissance

Renaissance means rebirth and and the real renaissance began with that sketchy banker Cosimo Medici ...His patronage of Brunelleschi (a genius among men) is the spark that started the whole barn burning. Cosimo gambled on his money and put a pirate in place to become pope and this is another key factor in building the renaissance as the Medici fortune grew. All great things in this world have been built on crime (sad but true) from the Renaissance to the Kennedy fortune. It seems that this sand grain of evil and corruption is what eventually leads to a pearl as it did with the Medici oyster. Cosimo was a smart man and he knew that great artists are a temperamental lot and he was willing to deal with them to get what he wanted. That is my view on life as well--some things are worth the trouble they cause. Mediocrity is abundant and conformity is the most common element in the periodic chart of man. Great artists are quirky and unreliable and Da Vinci would flee from city to city to hide from unfinished projects. Artists and bankers are strange bedfellows and their offspring is at times brilliant but very often it is a gimp- chicken. So take heed and forgive the artist his temperament. After all, how would the bankers and Popes painted the Sistine chapel if not for that loon Michaelangelo? Methinks that would have chosen a nice shade of green and went back to studying their ledgers.