Welcome back to the history of art, decline, and fall edition.

So we are going on a little journey to coincide with my actual journey to Italy.

I didn't want to leave you guys high and dry with two fully clavin-less weeks.

And so I thought I would take a little

exploratory venture with you into some visual art in the history of the beginning of the Renaissance,

and in order to do that, because this is the classical education you didn't know you were missing,

I thought we would go all the way back to antiquity and talk not just about some of what

Georgiol Vassari has to say. Remember we're following him through his story of the

the kind of birth of Renaissance art. But we're also I think reflecting on his idea that his

governing idea that what makes art into a tradition and that what measures the greatness of art

is this sense of the ordered harmony in the universe. So just to recap, right, we read his

sort of opening reflections, preface, in which he describes God as the great sculptor,

God as the great artist who makes man and man as the mind in God's image that reflect the order

and harmony in the world back at him. And this is an idea which, according to Vassari,

you know, has antecedents, has precedence in the ancient world. And so the story that I want to

kind of pick up today, I want to begin there, we were looking at some sculptures, now we're going

to talk about painting, painting in ancient Greece. And then I want to talk about this story that

Vassari tells of how it all went wrong, as it were, because remember he has three stages in the

lifespan of art, he believes that art is, you know, great art artistic traditions are born,

they become refined, and then they become perfected, which we might just describe as completed,

right, they kind of reach their tea loss. And as they're straining yearning toward the perfection

that was already in the mind of God, you know, mankind kind of refines his art. And I talked about

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