Something of a League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, off sorts. Hit the town in the company of this trio and you would have had a night not to forget, or more accurately a night you may not want to remember. Ugh, should not relegate the notion of meeting such cultural and political figures in such a purile way, my brain gets a bit lazy.Leonardo, Machavelli and Cesare Borgia. What a fateful collision of Renaissance energy this three generated. The book is a gripping historical, reaching back to the 15th century to explore the lives of three main movers of that period. Three men who's lives and influence shaped an era, well, added to its shared cultural zeitgeist in meaningful ways. Each bringing something different to the table. although this confluence of persona, the collision's of philosophy, art and politics impacted the body polotic in ways that reveberate to this day. Not just in Italy but anywhere the possibility of cultural progression was an outcome to be reckoned with. Roads less traveled were taken, meetings took place, with the visionary scientific mind brushing up against the real world political one, with a purveyor of brutal realism at both their elbows. as impossible as it all now sounds the historical text renders it all humanely plausible. Before starting it , the book, I thought I knew something about the era. But I quite quickly learned what I did know I had learned from two episodes of Doctor Who; The Masque Of Mandragora and The City Of Death. Sounds like one big episode does it not?
The Fourth Doctor had travelled back in time to the study and the workshop of Leonardo , although the great artist is off somewhere while The Doctor talks to himself (i.e.; to us.) before an amazingly brutal gaurd shows up to harrass and detain him. Before that though, the wonderfully detailed set, with half built contraptions, with fluttering sketches and hand drawn charts were the stuff of genius workshops. Its a BBC designer's idea of what a Rennaisance man's workshop would have looked like. They were so good at this sort of thing, back in the day, and did not require Disney money to tickle the imagination.
What I knew about Macchievelli I knew from his book The Prince. His how to be a bastard rotter thesise. I have come to think of that book as a sort of job application that Macchievelli wrote in the hope of re-emerging from a period of forced retirement. A job application, for a job, which in time he got although not until after he was dead. Consider; he was gone but his book lived on, never out of print. Its been used by cruel regime after cruel regime throughout the ages. From the court of Henry V111 to the boiler room of current Labour. Cruel necessity masquerading as virtue, just heart breaking. At the end of the day you may dress it up as you like, with a wry wink and a knowing sigh, but its a philosophy about dominating others, using humanity as it is rather than as we would like it to be.
As for Cesare Borgia, well, what can one say about the fruit of the Borgia Tree, a bloodline that drenched the era in ambition and selfish purpose. Even The Doctor could but roll his eyes.
We are led up to a military campaign in the Autumn of 1502, when the three men's lives became entangled in a shared and shaped destiny, caught up in the machinations of statecraft and religion. Paul Strahern has performed a Herculean task of research, mapping the life paths that led them to intersect in this period of history, much of which is mirrored in the state craft of modernity. Although the author never makes that claim, he never projects back in time the hubris of today, allowing the reader to think and see the past as it was, never causing the reader to unsee that which does not measure up to modernitys social mores.making history a hot meal to be enjoyed in the vibrating now.
