Renaissance Man (with Peter Weller)

an incredible life. You've done so much. We're going to be talking about the Holy Roman Ember of Frederick the Second, but before we dive in, I would just love to ask, and I think my listeners would love to know what was your transition like going from the acting world in Hollywood to going back and studying Italian Renaissance art.

Ali McGraw is one of the great beauties of the world and also one of the smartest people I've ever known, and I did the movie with her, and I usually don't get involved, but after the movie she asked me to go to see Sweeney Todd. When Sweeney Todd first open and Angel Lansbury, I went to see it on Saint Patrick's day. I'll never get it. And then when he started up this affair, and then we turned into

a longtime friendship. It goes on and on and on on, and she's to this day one of the first real life thank in my new book, it's because just cannot game to University press about Renaissance Guide. But Ali's personally took me by the hand, introduced me to Picasso Picasso's GUERNI leave New York and go to Once Franco was either passed away and Spain had a social democracy, Picasso wanted this cornerstone piece of anti fascist art and horror

to go to Spain. And so there was a big exhibition at MoMA and you couldn't get in, but if you were Ali, you could get in. Because Allie's friends were. People think that she ran with movie No No, she ran with the literal that glitter out, that she ran with Halston and Truemy, Capodi and Veland and the head of moment, and they head of the met powerful powerful people in New York, both women and men. So she thinks, by the hand threw me into Picasso, I come out

of five flowers at Picasso. I'm so But this bears this embarrassment because the second person, other than Maria Connell, who's a great friend and head of Fit in America Folk Art Museum, one of the people got me to the Renaissance. After this happened, I am at the National Film Festival of Japan with the great Jean Moreau, one of the greatest actors as ever, Mike met a Boy, one of the great producers ever, producer Robo cop and

Victoria Sto. And if you haven't heard of him, or your listeners haven't heard of him, then they have to leave the show. Because Touroro is the first guy to filter technicolor, which was against the law to be filtered. If you see visions of Light, He's the first guy that the experiment. Really you know, we just take tepic color for granted. And if you know Apocalypse Now or Last Time in Paris or The Sheltering Sky or Last Emperor or Dick Tracy, can I go on and on

and on. Vittorio is a very elite dude and was versace all the time, and he had this VERSACEI scar pond and not playing mister Horton because I know I could talk about Sich Twombley and I could talk about franket Dollar or whatever. So I say, vittoyo Keia Rito Pettori too, or this is nineteen ninety two. I say, who's your favorite painter nineteen ninety one and work Kyoto

and he goes uh. And even the Padua they see Jolto in the very first one by one four frames of narrative of light color, perception, dark emotion, negative space narrative. I go, what this is, Jolto. I don't know who you're talking about, man, And he takes his versace scar and he flips it. Look, Francis Coppola said, Victoria Sore is the only guy who spent two years in the Philippines in a white suit, and he did, and that's Vittorio. So he flips his scar, but he says, well, Peter,

we cannot talk about it, and he walks away. Then I say, you get really pretentious, man, and he goes, no, you're like the most Americans. You're pretentious, You're like so many people. You can drop all these names and you don't know Joto. You have no context, You have no context. He's the one person that's indemnified in contemporary art. Karo karof Father of Cubas, that talks about him, Precisions, that talks about him, roth Coo talks about him, Picasto talks

about him. Rembrandt. I'm going I feel like a dummy. And I got to sitting at church in the Capella Scrotin, which is in my book now, and I find out that that's the one piece, the one Nama piece of art in the Western world that is like solarified as a cornerstone, and all the art that comes after it in the Western world doesn't matter what you're talking about, post Cubism, abstract Depressionism, piet Mondrian, whatever, They're all gonna go back to Joto. They're all going to go back

to that. I called up Ali, I go, look, why didn't you talk about Joto? She says, I did. You had no interest in the Renaissance. I'll do the horny Toy New York scene like every other idiot, you know, I couldn't get you out of modern art. I couldn't get you out of get there where art. So that's how I started. I said, how do I start this? They said, take a classe at Syracuse. Do ten weeks. You go to Italy anyway, but you know nothing. But I was the ugly American Dana. I'm telling you this

some benefit of your podcast. I was the guy who went to Italy and hung out on the piazza smoking a cigar, walking here and there. Yeah, looking at the thing, looking at the coliseums, or but never get a deep dive into it. Pit me eight years before I started to look at the art and now, yeah, PhD book with Cambridge University Press. But it wasn't for those two people shaming me into it, you know. It wasn't like I just kind of went, oh wow, or I think I'll do this. I'll flip with the second O and

stop and no, they gonna do this. Here's a good segue here. One of the things I get fascinated in when I get my master's degree in a very special program at Syracuse University, whether it only take it by four six people a year, is I get fascinated with the Franciscan movement, which is, by the way, contemporary to Frederick the second who we're going to talk about today, Owenstaufen. So Francis of a SIZI. We've all heard of him.

of the human Jesus. You don't have to do the seven steps to happen. If you Hannah what's in front of you with kindness, if you understand Christ trying to preach kindness and the suffering with it, then you identify with it. That's all you got to do, you know. And people have been listening to this pulpit crack. You know, God wins and you don't, man, You're the loser and he's the winner. And all of a sudden, Francis comes on.

You ought to follow the dude, I mean yeah, I to go in so anyway, when he dies, there's a whole lot of people really want to follow this thing. And then of course the hierarchy of the church gets hold of his movement and says, no, no, no, we got to build churches, make money, la la la, And that's too bad, dog, right, Okay, this is right around

the time of Frederick. Frederick has got some towns, and Francis has got some towns that sympathize with the Franciscans and someone who sympathize with the pope and want to make money. So dig this history of the world. Simply Rome falls in Rome around four point fifty, they burn the books. You've got nothing. You got tribes coming in. We used to call them barbarians, oss, vandals, etc. They come raiding in Italy. Why Italy? Why is everybody want Italy?

Now that's my question to you. You can answer why does all of Europe want Italy?

in Sicily forever, and they gonna give it up. So Charlottatne says, okay, all you tribes are under me now, la la lah. The only one group that doesn't follow him is Venice. I love it. That's an whole nother story. I gotta talk about. Venice goes few man, we follow no emperor nowhere, man. We are Venetian, Venetian, Venetian. They know, they go off and do their own thing. Yeah, and everybody else's got to follow him, right, So anyway, Charle

Maine becomes that. Then his Holy Woman empire splits up. The next thing you know, there's a crusade, and the crusade is essentially by the time that late ten hundreds, a pope goes Man, you know what, we're doing enough business now with the Levant, which is that you got to think of like your Joe blow out there thinking of what Islam is now with reactionary fundamentalism as opposed to moderate and some for Islam, with the Moors and all the way into the Levant. That's Turkey and Judea

was the most sophisticated civilization of planet Earth. They gave us numbers, they gave us star science, They brought back science, brought back medicine, brought back to everything. Whatever you may think of any religion when it goes into its crusade stage, Islam at that point was really sophisticated. Yeah, the Moors are Islamic. They fought against the Arabs to keep Spain. So you can't just group them all together and go, hey, this is all a bunch of Arabs. No, they're not

the tribal. So what happens is they got Baliland, and the Western world wants it. They don't want a new business with it, they want to own it. It's the place of Jesus and Moses and you know, Joshua or whatever man. And so they send a crusade to send another crusade, another than a crusade, right, okay, So then.

named Frederick Barbara Rosa. Okay, you know the Robin Hood lender, right, Robin Hood of course. Okay, So Robin Hood is the servant. Really he's looking for the good king to come back. Remember his name, Richard the Lionheart Great, And what's wrong with Richard why can't Richard come back?

talking about the famous Normans that invaded England. Normans are not just normandy knights anymore from you know, Norway or whatever. They are sexually guns for hire, and they really take over Sicily. The Norman inclusion of Sicily is amazing. And these kings, these tancred Norman kings, Roger the first, Roger the second, these are the guys that bring sovereignty to Sicily. By what by tolerance? Here's unheard of you. You don't do tolerance in the Middle Ages, man, You cut off

people's eyes and and so forth. But Roger the second is the guy who's tolerant of Jews, He's tolerant of Muslims, He's tolerant of like the princes who want their own lands off. So this Norman guy right is swinging. Okay. You know the German guys want like I said, remember they want Italy. Okay, they can't get it. Why because in between is a pope going. You can't have the bottom of the world and the top of the world.

You can't smash us together. Henry the sixth, the guy's getting that bridge of the lineup, gets this great idea. You know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna marry Roger the Norman's daughter. Yes, Constance, I'm gonna marry her. And that way the Queen of Sicily and me, the King of Germany, will own the world together.

whole lot of Lombards does her up by Milan. French warrior families come down. I want to take over seas. Nobody's running Sicily now, man, the Rogers are gone. The Constances can't really do it on our own. This kid

is amazingly ferociously. There's a legend that when a guy named Mark Ward, one of the German thugs, came down to take over Sicily, they looked for the kid to kill him or to do what when he was hiding out he's five years old, that he jumped on mark Ward and started to scratch his face and so forth. And that's Frederick. I mean, the legends about Frederick are immense that what he goes on to be is this. He goes on to first tell the pope, look, the

auto dynasty, the wealth. This is factions and it was going to turn into guelfs and ghibelins, people who support the both people' support. They're right, I'm jumping to. This is about twelve hundreds Frederick's Morning, eleven ninety four, about ten years after the crusade. Then your mother dies, his mother tries to school it, his mother tries to give him tolerance. This is a one off, dude. You gotta learn stuff. You gotta learn languages. You got to learn Hebrew,

you gotta learn Arabic, you gotta learn Greek. You gotta learn these people. Man, these people are around you, and you better be talking their lingo if you want something to do with it, because you can't just win by domination, even though you gotta remember, despots do live and they are, you know, caged. Yeah, And Frederick second is going to spur a guy to debt, you know, and tell a guy that you're gonna have your tongue cut out somewhere, so they're not nice guys at the end of the day.

But in the realm of humanism, I'm reading about Franciscanism. It's Syracuse, and I'm reading about how these certain cities hid are the spiritual Franciscans. You wanted to just walk the walk of Francis and not be part of the money thing. And I'm reading about how certain parts of the pope did not support these spiritual Franciscans, but the only woman, Frederic the second, did so I get deep dive into Frederic second, and I see that he's into science,

see that he's in the literature. I see that this guy's obsessed with birds. I see obsessed with writing, that he's a vegetarian, that he weighs the same amount when he was sixty four years old and when he died that he did when he was eighteen. I also see that he went and got Germany back with the Pope's approval, with a whole lot lesser men than Otto, by going in and promising all these princes that I'm not going to get your jam man, I'm just going to be

the Holy Roman Emperor. You guys can continue your act. I don't want to dominate, you scold, you complain, you guys guy pay me the veig, but you guys can groove. And then within two months they support him. Then he's ordered to go on a crusader. He tells the Pope, I will I gotta go back and make sure Sicily's mine. And he goes back to Sicily and he does the

same thing. He essentially wings Sicily through diplomacy. Can't Klowich writes a book on the guy that lionizes and the great David Atalafia, who is wrote I think the greatest book on him, who is the mentor to my mentor. Pete Stacy at UCLA writes a book that like, say, wait a minute, you gotta put Frederic the Second because by now Beta everyone has hasted Frederic the Second on is like something else. But it's like Cyrus the Great with the freedom of the Jews from Babylon and the

Cyrus Cylinder. The Cyrus Cylindator says, you know, hey, all you Jews can go back from Babylon and live in your home, because I write a vision from Zora's division that people want to live on the turf of their homeland. Nobody did this in twenty six PC. They killed you or dispersed you or enslaved you. Yeah, but he did it once in a while as a dude or a woman who goes, you know what, I see that the freedom of people is better than the domination of people.

I can allowing people liberties. The way to control your sheep is give him a large pasture. And I think that is essentially what Frederick is famous for. And Frederick, by the way, goes on a crusade and he wins territory by diplomacy, and it pisss off the Pope. They say, we know what diplomacy, man, we want like dominance, and he goes, yeah, I ain't gonna do that. Then he comes back and you know, he's considered the Holy King of Jerusalem and so forth, and Pope hates that and

he gets into an antagonistic thing. Well, but it starts the very first state endowed university in Naples, which is called it called the University toa Frederica Secundo named after him. He does so many things to essentially trans formed the idea of and ab lafia. This guy ropes him in yeah, and essentially says that Frederick you cannot divorce Frederick from essentially the guy who was in a clash with Catholicism, as almost all emperors were, you know, until eighteen hundred.

Cannot take him out of the context though, the dude who wanted to be acknowledged as you know, the dude of it all. But the acknowledgment aside, yeah, which everybody wanted. How he went about it in so many ways, was so deferential to human rights in many ways, you know. And people say, yeah, okay, man, okay, look he took all the Muslims in Sicily. You didn't tell him he gave him a hundred thousand acres or ten thousand acres in Apulia.

why I don't kill him? Let him walk around. And that's the guy who later becomes the pope who hates veteran and he's a very humanist poet, Ugolino, very humanist, but he just can't take it that Frederick is not bowing to him.

so many times in there. Well, come on, thinking three thousand people into Germany, I guess an army of almost like you know, eight thousand dudes, and like talking your way diplomacy, diplomatically winning that whole thing back and doing the same thing at Sicily. This is gifted stuff. This is the art of rap I think that's his great legacy.

His great legacy is diplomacy, I think. And one can bring up all of the footnotes about brutality, but like you said, it's the time you're living in and somebody tries to kill you, you kill them. That's the way it goes. Well.

you do. You go here, you do that. I don't know Frederick had those people, the school, these kids. I don't think his kids knew international law. I don't think he spoke Brive languages. I'm sorry. I don't think they like travel with him in all his places. His one kid, Henry, tried to revolt against him. He had to take the guy down he had and imprison his own kid in Germany.

do pompe And I've never seen these sewage pipes. And I said, how did you do that? He says, I found it a TikTok. He found the friggin sewage pipes in POMPEII on TikTok. And then he's got the scholar Antonio and shows us. I almost started crying. Man, I was so impressed with him. I was impressed that he was showing me something. And two days ago, two scholars giving up to me and they were talking about the sewage systems in Roma. Said, were they essentially discovered by pass? Yeah?

She was just vompe have taught us everything. So my kid taught me about them. What do you mean your kid talking about it? I said, about two weeks ago, my kid on TikTok find out where the sewage systems were in POMPEII and were showing me. And these guys are like your thirteen year old kid on TikTok was showing you where the sewage systems or I said, yeah, and it's just stopped us dead data, so good dead good leader. I don't know.

And I just want to say this to wrap this up, is that you know, the beginning of this is my dissertation and also acknowledgement in this book and in the dissertation one page begins with this book owes the debt of inspiration to Alice McGraw, Maria Connelliot of the Brooklyn Academy, and cinematographer Victoria Stiro.

clonky deals. You can run up and down them, so that knights can run with armor and so forth. Right and these eight chaurrets around it. It's astounding piece of architecture that he supervised himself. So look in the notice of Frederick the Second wanting to be this polymath, which is what he wants us A language guy, scientist, guy, a berg guy, you know, biologist, architect, everything you've got. This dude here, Leon Butt STALBERTI which I'm sure who am?

I'm sure knew everything at Athletic the second it's meant. The second is like a one off. And he they say that somebody scholars said in the twenty century, oh you know what. His family was exiled and then he came to Florence and in eight months wrote the first Martyn book on painting in tripart at Latin Ciceronian ideas. And I'm asking when I was getting master, I'm asking all these holy to dots, I said, what a great Elaine.

I said, I can't buy it that this guy just came to Florence and in eight months wrote this astounding book on Lion's points light art of it. They said, yeah you did. And one guy rab Hadfield, his great scholar, said no, everybody knows. He came from Cadua. He came from Joe too, he came from Bologna, he came through all this stuff. I said, wh do you teach that? I said, because Florence is the apex of all things Renaissance,

which is horseshit. It's is horseshit. You know, Florence is the apex of all things Renaissance, but it's not the seed of all things Renaissance.

executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.