Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC

History magazine.

Michelangelo's David, Machiavelli's The Prince, the Plays of Shakespeare.

The Renaissance produced some of history's most

astounding works of art, culture and innovation. But can focusing on these glittering

creations obscure the messy and often violent reality of actually living through the era?

Well, in her new book, Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer highlights the

complexities of this so-called Golden Age, and I spoke to her about everything from corrupt

popes and devastating plagues to why Michelangelo actually hated painting.

I wonder if we could start our chat with an analogy that you present us with at the beginning

of the book of a statue of David, Michelangelo's David, covered in glitter. It's an unexpected

image. Can you tell us what that's all about? Yeah, because all through the city of Florence,

you can buy little statuette copies of this.

And you can get white ones, but you could also get the rolled glitter glue.

And it's not only incredibly garish, but it also covers up all of the details, right?

Which is a perfect way to think about the way the Renaissance gets represented,

because we see the glitter, the shiny parts and the art and the music and the dramatic stories about princes and princesses and castles.

But it covers up all of the details with this sort of garish glittery surface.

And so as I present the goal of the book, as somebody who has lived in Florence for years and gotten to know the Renaissance facets of Italy Inside Out,

wanting to scrape that coating of glitter glue off of the messy underneath and show what's really there.

Yeah, so what are some of the myths that have grown up around their nascent,

some of those globs of glitter glue that've got stuck to it. And how do you think that they need correcting? So the biggest one is this myth

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