Netflix Medici – The first two seasons: How well do history and soap opera mix?

Fresh off the plane from Florence, the reluctant wife and I set about trying to figure out what we had been immersed in – and what better place to do that than by learning about the Medici – that family that has stamped their crest on every building of note in Florence – and whose private collection of art that is the basis of the Uffizi – essentially tells the story of the history of art – art that they not only bought, but nourished – by supporting schools to train artists.  Indeed, one could make the argument that this family single handedly brought about the renaissance.  They supported Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli.  Copernicus was the family tutor – and their patronage protected him from being assassinated by the pope.  The Prince, Machiavelli’s how to book of using power, is largely about the machinations of their family. 

We saw the Medici’s art collection, we hung out in their crypt, saw a piece of Jesus’s cross in their chapel, and we got it that they were a big deal for 400 years, but we didn’t get much a narrative about how that happened.  So we turned to Netflix.  Well, that was an interesting muddle.  On the one hand, it was a little like going back to Florence – even though the show used a nearby town as the set for Florence – the square is modeled on Florence’s and it was little like extending our stay (one of the charms of Florence is that essentially all of the buildings in town are 500 or more years old).  On the other hand, the narrative that we received was transparently untrue – so we had to use other sources to pick out which parts were historically consistent and which were not. 

Even more essential to the revolutions of the renaissance, though not in a flashy, Sistine Chapel Ceiling kind of way, this family of wool merchants and then bankers elbowed their way into the power structure of Florence and Rome – a power structure that had long been determined by aristocratic families – and one that was evolving into a republican form of government.  Ordinary citizens were given seats on the Signoria – the governing body of the City State – in somewhat random fashion and for brief periods of time – allowing them to share in governance without consolidating power.  The Medici, however, despite periods of exile, retained great governing power over an amazing stretch of time – and transitioned into the ranks of the royals, while continuing to support the merchant class.

The tension between Royalty, who often no longer had the income to sustain their standard of living from largely agrarian sources, and the merchant class, who gained capital from trade as the isolated villages of the middle ages became reconnected again and as European powers began to colonize the rest of the world, is the subtext for much of the drama in the renaissance.  Shakespeare in Love, the Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman movie, pits the impoverished playwright against a royal who will marry Shakespeare’s love for her money (not that the playwright with a wife in Stratford was free to marry her anyway).  Another line of thinking maintains that Shakespeare was not a poor man from Stratford, but Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who was prevented from writing by his noble station – writing was a means of earning a living – something royalty should never have to stoop to do.  When thought about in this way, Shakespeare’s consistent defense of the monarchy throughout his plays is not just seen as a sop to throw to the author’s royal patrons, but as a self-protective position.

Aspects of this struggle are nicely portrayed in the first season.  Giovanni Medici, the original patriarch, is played by Dustin Hoffman.  His two sons – Cosimo (Richard Madden) the older, shorter, and more ambivalent about his role in the family (patriarch in training), and Lorenzo (The Elder: Stuart Martin), the taller, more randy, and apparently more resigned to his fate as the son of a tyrannical family founder – chaff under Giovanni’s stern and unyielding parenting, even though it is intended to keep them firmly in the seat of power.  We see two stories unfold simultaneously.  One is told in flashback from Giovanni’s murder, which helps us appreciate the various motives that may have led many people to be ready to murder him.  The other moves us forward in time when Cosimo is both trying to ferret out whodunit and to grow into the role of leader of the family and city in the wake of his father’s death.

Cosimo is at the center of this drama.  An aesthetically interested young man with at least moderate artistic talent, he feels somewhat ashamed of his banking family – which his father states emphatically creates wealth through a means that is different from usury – which would be a sin (though the writers never explain to the viewer how the Medici banking wealth is determined – somehow (magically?) having the Pope’s considerable income from the tithes all over Europe flowing through the bank creates wealth for the Medici apparently without usury…) and establishes relationships with artists – and falls in love with a model.  He is no more free to pursue his love of the model than he would be to pursue his love of art than the de Vere would have been to publish under anything other than a pen name.  He was not a royal - but he was wealthy and therefore shouldn't stoop to scratching out a living.  Isn't it ironic that the giants of art that we remember - Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael - were hirelings being told what to do by their patrons most of whom - with notable exceptions like the Medici - we no longer remember at all.  So, Cosimo's love is crushed by his father, Giovanni, who needs him to marry for political expedience.  And his father’s watchwords are: to achieve a good end, it is sometimes necessary to engage in bad deeds.  What the father’s bad deeds may have been that got him into power are never described (nor is it described how the Medici get to rig the apparent random selection of Signoria members) – but the bad deeds that he does to the family end up coming back to haunt him.

This season, and the next, suffer from an overly pious and boy scout like description of the Medicis and their machinations.  Cosimo’s worst bad deeds are carried out by his fixer, a very likeable Marco Bello (Guido Caprino), but Cosimo is consistently portrayed as trying to do the right thing and it is the fixer, who knows how dirty the world really is, who stretches the orders so that murder and mayhem ensue – Cosimo’s hands are never dirty of the most venal sins.  Despite feeling that this is implausible, we continue watching the series.  While far from perfect, it is good drama and holds our interest, but the fabricated central elements (including the murder of Giovanni) make the taking of this as straight history problematic.  But I think there is something to the construction of this particular narrative in this squeaky clean way that is worth commenting on and this a more central fatal flaw in the thinking of the creators. 

I think that keeping Cosimo’s hands relatively clean while portraying soiled deeds is the author’s way of retaining a hero that his viewership can identify with.  I think this says something about us – the audience of today.  We are imagined and, I think probably rightly, in the mind of the producers and writers and in our own minds as too clean – too pure, to have committed the crimes that Cosimo, Giovanni, and the rest of their tribe, I feel certain, did.  Some of their sins are portrayed.  They supported the candidacy of a pope through bribery and, in the moment that sealed Cosimo as the true heir apparent, blackmail (Yes, Cosimo committed blackmail – and adultery – in the series.  The most centrally despicable thing that he did, though, was to fail to recognize what an asset his wife was.  My use of squeaky as an adjective went too far – but I think the authors are afraid that there are certain sins that we will not forgive).  And the papacy – indeed the entire upper echelons of the church – were rampantly disordered at that point and the Medici were playing on that and implicated in it (and would be for centuries).  But it is important from the position of the writers and director that the viewer gets it that Cosimo is essentially a good guy – and that Giovanni is not.  This, then, turns into a morality play rather than a tragedy.  In a tragedy, heroes are fatally flawed.  In the morality play, the good guy, in spite of his flaws, is rewarded.  Cosimo gets a pass.  We feel sorry for him – he has lost a lot to assume the mantel of the family business – but we do not pity him and we never get to feel crushed by his discovery of his complex nature.

Nor, interestingly, do we pity Giovanni when he dies again at the end of the season.  When we finally get the whole story, we feel some kind of justice has been served.  Interestingly, for me, a different shift occurs.  Through the season, it felt to me that Hoffman was just mailing in the role of Giovanni.  He seemed to be being more Hoffman and less Giovanni throughout.  But the second time through the murder scene – watching him die again – I felt him to be Giovanni.  He had – and since much of the scene had been shown at the beginning of the series – it was the same acting taking place – been transformed, across the period of my watching – into the person who was being killed.  And there was satisfaction – Giovanni (not Hoffman) deserved to die.  Giovanni was a heartless bastard - one whom Hoffman had nicely inhabited - so much so that the character finally transcended the actor playing him.

I think that having bad guys and good guys – and hiring people to do our dirty work who turn out to be dirtier than we have ordered them to be – helps us maintain plausible deniability.  When we are using drones to our dirty work – when wars are fought in remote parts of the world and we don’t see the impact of what we do – I think that we can stay soundly asleep.  And I think this modern portrayal of some of the stinkiest times in our history as reasonably clean – helps keep us asleep to our contributions to problems an ocean away or in our own backyards.

  

The second season picks up after the apparently forgettable period of Piero the Gouty, who was Cosimo’s ungroomed son.  The hero of this season is Lorenzo the Magnificent (Daniel Sharman).  If the first season was a morality play, this season is pure melodrama – or soap opera.  It is a compelling story, and the relationship between Lorenzo and Botticelli is interesting (why did they leave Michelangelo out?), though the extracurriculars between Botticelli and the woman who posed as Venus are apparently made up, it certainly keeps the pot stirred and it is interesting to imagine what muse must have driven Botticelli.  The final drama in this season does seem to be based on actual political events and it also makes for incredibly compelling theater.  That said, the same criticism of the first season’s relationship with the audience applies here, but even more compellingly.  Lorenzo has changed the family motto to something like “Let’s do good in order to create good.”  A nice motto when you can afford it – but I find it hard to believe that a mercantile family who were just trying to do good was all that caused the royals to become murderously infuriated with the Medici.

Again, Lorenzo is not a purely likeable figure.  His relationship with his wife – mirroring Cosimo’s relationship with his wife in the first season, is marked by infidelity, though he comes to view his wife as an ally in a way that Cosimo is not portrayed as having done.  On the other hand, the virtues of both women are clearly on display to the viewer - did Cosimo's wife really ride into the Signoria to save his life? - Was Lorenzo's wife really so pure and chaste and yet worldly wise?  The women are more clearly two dimensional characters in the aspect of their goodness – and I suppose that is the center of the disappointment that I experience with this compelling and educating series (the viewing provides a narrative arc, the fact checking supplies the true education). 

Perhaps the central gift of the renaissance is the ability to portray three dimensions on a flat surface through the use of perspective.  As is the case with Rorschach scoring, where perceiving perspective on the cards is related to being able to take emotional distance from problem solving – and also to see deeply into difficulties, gaining perspective in painting was paralleled by perspective taking in the other arts, including in Shakespeare’s plays.  And if Shakespeare was an English nobleman who traveled to Rome in his youth, which the setting of so many of his plays there so accurately would support, we may have learned from him through the Italian playwrights something of what it means to be human.  The renaissance led us to be able to see ourselves in ways that we hadn’t been able to consistently engage in since the time of the Greeks and Romans, and also propelled us into entirely new ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us and this, in turn, led us to harness the world in ways undreamed of by the ancients.  Unfortunately, this series does not continue or even reside on that developmental arc.  In a time when we need the arts to help us consider how to prepare for an age of artificial intelligence and greater leisure, wealth, but also environmental threat than we have ever faced before, holding up an overly purifying mirror - one that fuzzes our view of ourselves rather than sharpening it – does us a disservice.  It keeps us comfortable at a time when we ought to be struggling with very uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

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