1. Python slams 'overrated' Renaissance
" I'm sick of the way people's eyes light up when they start talking about the Renaissance. I'm sick of the way art critics tend to say: 'Aaaah! The Renaissance! "  
Terry Jones

2. Terry Jones
" Why does everybody think the Renaissance was such a wonderful thing – this amazing, wonderful step forward for all humanity…and the modern world ? It doesnt look like that to me. There were a lot of unpleasant things going on. "

3. Is the Renaissance over rated ?
"The word "Renaissance" was coined in the 16th century to plug artists in Florence…they had a vested interest in saying these new Italians were the bees’ knees.
"So they called everything in between the ages of darkness or the Middle Ages - the age in between."
"The Renaissance writers and thinkers went out of their way to rubbish the centuries that preceded them. Which is why we call them the Middle Ages.
"The word "medieval" means anything backward and dirty…On the news war crimes are sometimes described as " medieval savagery" but there have been more holocausts in our time.

4. Is the Renaissance over rated ?
"I want to vent my irritation at the Renaissance," Jones explains, brimful of passion for his subject and reaching for images of medieval art on his laptop to underline his point.
"The Renaissance has bad-mouthed the middle ages for so long, and because of our embracing everything about the Renaissance, we've swallowed that. But it was just propaganda: it was in Renaissance interests to pretend that nothing had happened between antiquity and them and to portray themselves as a forward-looking modernising movement.
Whereas, in fact, they were neo-conservatives supporting petty tyrannies in northern Italy. I'm saying, look at the medieval world: contrary to what you may have heard, it's full of life, vitality and individuality."

5. Pretty nasty regimes
The Renaissance was given an impulse by despots. Michelangelo, Leonardo and others were givng there services to pretty nasty regimes like the Medici. They were being used to prop up brutal regimes and made them look good.

6. Mantegna making despotic materilaists look good ?

7. The Prince
In the Medieval period there was a lot of debate about the differance between a tyrant and a good ruler.
Chaucer and others gave instructions for Princes on how to rule in the interests of the people.
Machiavelli’s book is all about holding power in your own interests.

8. The Huguenot Gentillet in his Discours contre Machievel in 1576…
Machiavelli's "books were held most dear and precious by our Italian and Italionized courtiers in France, and at the root of France's present degradation, which has culminated in the St Bartholemew massacre."
Catherine de Médicis & François Mitterrand…les florentins…

10. Artistic innovation ?
I don’t think Renaissance architecture was a step forward.
"But the Medieval world was modern. At least it was modern to them. I mean their architecture for instance, nobody had seen anything like this before, ever.
"Whereas the Renaissance was very conservative in looking back to the classical world of Greece and Rome and going back to domes and columns and pretending that the only time of enlightenment had been the ancient world.

13. Did they think the earth was flat ?

14. Flat Earth ?
To mark the start of the new millennium, the New York Times ran a leader that stated: 'A thousand years ago, when the earth was reassuringly flat and the universe revolved around it, the ordinary person had no last name, let alone any claim to individualism...
Then came the Renaissance, an explosion of scientific discovery and humanist insight and, as both cause and effect, the rise of individual self-consciousness... the beginning of our modern era.'

15. Flat Earth ?
But the medieval world wasn't a time of stagnation or ignorance. A lot of what we assume to be medieval ignorance is, in fact, our own ignorance about the medieval world.
Take for example the idea that the people of the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat. It simply isn't true. And yet the New York Times takes it as gospel and, indeed, some get quite cross when you try to tell them that people in the Middle Ages were quite aware that the world was round.
The idea that they thought it was flat was invented by an American journalist by the name of Washington Irving. In 1828, he wrote a biography of Columbus in which he described the great man confronting the Church leaders who accused him of heresy for claiming the earth was round when the Church taught that it was flat.

16. Over to you Harry…
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace...and what did they produce ? ...the cuckoo clock.”
Orson Wells as Harry Lime in The Third Man

17. Which do you prefer ?