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Wall Street Journal

‘Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty' Review: On PBS, a Mixed View of Three Towering Masters

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly. Yes, the aforementioned was delivered in 'The Third Man' by Orson Welles, who might have acknowledged the Medicis, too. But his words otherwise sum up 'Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty,' the ambitious, three-episode account of Italy's artistic apogee and three monumental figures in European art—Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael (no Turtle jokes please). The fact that three geniuses could elevate human achievement itself amid city-states ripped by political warfare and religious oppression is one of the prime anomalies of human history. Likewise, the convergence of so much talent in such a relatively small space (mostly Florence, sometimes Rome). It is an astonishing thing. Less amusing is the sense that the makers of 'Renaissance' seem to think they're revealing all this history to a viewership emerging from its own Dark Ages.