Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb.

If you'd like not just the Tudors ad-free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit.

With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries,

including my own recent two-part series, A World Torn Apart, The Dissolution of the Monastries, and enjoy a new release every week.

Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.

Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to not just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise.

Relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

On a sultry evening in the heart of Renaissance Italy, two artists, one celebrated for his radiant

colours, the other for his brooding, powerful figures,

strolled side by side through the winding streets of Florence.

To all appearances, they were friends.

But by the end of that fateful night, and in the centuries that followed,

they would be remembered not as comrades, nor even as rivals,

but as a murderer and his victim.

Their names would echo through time as the protagonists in a shocking tale of betrayal,

exposing the sinister underside of artistic genius.

According to Giorgio Vazari, the man who invented the very idea of the artist as a solitary

genius, André del Castagno lured his fellow painter Dominico Veniziano away from his work

under the guise of friendship.

Then, driven by a toxic brew of envy and ambition,

he smashed in his companion's skull with lumps of lead.

And for what reason?

...