Renaissance Man (with Peter Weller)

Frederick II was celebrated as a "renaissance man" who championed education and the arts. But his conflicts with the Pope would lead to multiple excommunications. Actor and historian Peter Weller (RoboCop, author of Leon Battista Alberti in Exile) joins the show to discuss his complicated legacy. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840578/anatomyalovestoryand its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story' https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250861016/immortalityalovestory See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:05Speaker 01

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• 0:35Dana Schwartz?

  Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Menke. Listener discretion advised.

• 0:45Dana Schwartz?

  Hi, this is Dana Schwartz. I am so excited to be here today for a very special episode of Noble Blood. I'm joined by the incredible actor, director, historian, writer, Peter Weller. Just an incredible figure, an incredible life. You've done so much. We're going to be talking about the Holy Roman Emperor 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?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  So I knew nothing about art. My mother tried to introduce me to art. You know, I didn't really get it. There's a wonderful actress. Most people know her as actress model. She's actually an art history design degree from Wellesley, was a girl of the year under Diana Breland, was a stylist for Vogue, a lot of other stuff, Ally McGraw.

• 1:34Dana Schwartz?

  Yep.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  And Ally 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 opened, Angela Lansbury. I went to see it on St. Patrick's Day. I'll never forget it. And then we started up this affair, and then we turned into a longtime friendship that goes on and on and on. And she's to this day, one of the first people I thank in my new book, it's just come out Cambridge University Press, about Renaissance guy. But Ally is the person that took me by the hand, introduced me to Picasso. Picasso's Guernica was leave New York and go to, once Franco was either passed away and Spain had a social democracy, Picasso wanted this cornerstone piece of

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Anti fascist art and horror to go to Spain. And so there was a big exhibition Dana at MoMA and you couldn't get in. But if you were Ally, you can get in because Ally's friends were, people think that she ran with movie. No, no, she ran with the literata glitterata. She ran with like Halston and Truman Capote and Vreeland and the head of MoMA and the head of the Met. Powerful, powerful people in New York, both women in Met. So she think by the hand, threw me into Picasso. I come out of five floors of Picasso, I'm sold. But this bears this embarrassment because the second person, other than Maria Cannelli, who's a great friend and head of FIT and American Folk Art Museum, one of the people got me to the Renaissance.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  After this happened, I am at the National Film Festival of Japan with the great Jean Moreau, one of the greatest actresses ever, Mike Metaboy, one of the great producers ever, producer of a cop, and Vittorio Storaro. And if you haven't heard of him or your listeners haven't heard of him, then they have to leave the show. Because Storaro 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 to experiment, really, you know, we just take Technicolor for granted. And if you know Apocalypse Now or Last Tango 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 wears Versace all the time.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  And he has his Versace scarf on and not playing Mr. Hoarder because I know I could talk about Si Twambley and I could talk about Frankenthaler, whatever. So I say, Vittorio, chi è favorito petto di tuo? This is 1992. I said, who's your favorite painter? 1991. They were Kyoto and he goes, uh, have you been to Padua to see Joto? In the very first one by one four frames of narrative of light, color, perception, dark, emotion, negative space, narrative. I go, what? He says, Joto. I don't know who you're talking about, man. And he takes his Versace scarf and he flips it. Look, Francis Coppola said Vittorio Serrois is the only guy who could spend two years in the Philippines in a white suit.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  And he did. And that's Vittorio. So he flips his scarf and he says, well, Peter, we cannot talk about art. And he walks away. Then I say, you're really pretentious, man. And he goes, no, you're like the most Americans. You're pretentious. You have 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. Kato Karaf, father of Cubism, talks about it. Precisionism talks about it. Rothko talks about it. Picasso talks about it. Rembrandt. I'm going, I feel like a dummy. And I go to sit in that church in the Capella Scovini, which is in my book now. And I find out that that's the one piece, the one, Dana, piece of art in the Western world

• 5:13Speaker 02

  that is like solidified as a cornerstone in all the art that comes after it in the Western world. Doesn't matter what you're talking about. You know, post-Cubism, abstract impressionism, Piet Mondrian, whatever, they're all gonna go back to Joto. They're all gonna go back to that. I call up Ally, I go, look, why didn't you tell her about Joto? She says, I did. You had no interest in the Renaissance. You wanted to 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 I am. So that's how I started. Yeah. I said, how do I start this? They said, take your class at Syracuse, do 10 weeks. You go to Italy anyway, but you know, nothing. I was the ugly American, Dana. I'm telling you some benefit of your podcast.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  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 Colosseum, but never did a deep dive into it. Took 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, art. I think I'll do this. I'll Frederick the Second, Owen Staub, and I think I'll 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, where they only take about four or six people a year, is I get fascinated with the Franciscan movement,

• 6:40Speaker 02

  which is, by the way, contemporary to Frederick the Second, who we're gonna talk about today, Owen Stauffen. So Francis of Assisi, we've all heard of him.

• 6:49Dana Schwartz?

  Big saints, statues in gardens all the time.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, big deal. Okay, you connect Joto. Francis is the guy who preaches, never is a priest, never does a marriage, never holds a mass. Francis. And Francis, man, started walking and talking. And, you know, I was talking to a guy from Oxford and I was speaking in a historiography class PhD level at my alma mater, UCLA. And I'd say the influence of Francis is a quarter million people following him within eight years without a fax machine. But here's what he say. He's saying, look, man, walk the walk of the human Jesus. You don't have to do the seven steps to heaven.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  If you handle 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 gotta do, you know, and people have been listening to this pulpit crap. 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, I'd have followed the dude. I mean, yeah, I'd have gone with him. So anyway, when he dies, there's a whole lot of people really want to follow his thing. And then, of course, the IRP of the church gets hold of his movement. And says, no, no, no, we gotta build churches, make money, la, la, la, and that's too bad. Dog, okay, this is right around the time of Frederick.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Frederick has got some towns and Francis has got some towns that sympathize with the Franciscans and some who sympathize with the Pope and want to make money. So dig this, history of the world simply. Rome falls in Rome. Route 450, they burned the books. You got nothing. You got tribes coming in, we used to call them barbarians. Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, et cetera, la, la, la. They come raiding in Italy. Why Italy? Why does everybody want Italy? Now, that's my question to you. You can answer. Why does all of Europe want Italy?

• 8:51Dana Schwartz?

  Let's see, is it because it's sort of a strategic stronghold before the Crusades?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Strategic, it's a finger that sticks into the Med and the Med is the only systemic of trade in the world. So you got this thing that sticks into the Med that nobody owns. Cause Rome's down, hey man, let's go conquer the dude. Got it?

• 9:12Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  So by eight, nine hundred, Charlemagne takes over and unites the, you know, war becomes Holy Woman of her and unites all these tribes. But there are still Czese and Muslim groups that have been in Sicily forever. And they're gonna give it up. So Charlemagne says, okay, all you tribes are under me now, la, la, la. The only one group that doesn't follow him is Venice. I love it. That's a whole nother story I gotta talk about. Venice goes, F you, man. We ain't following no emperor nowhere, man. We are Venetian, Venetian, Venetian. They, you know, they go off and do their own thing.

• 9:45Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  And everybody else has got to follow him, right? So anyway, Charlemagne 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 1000s, a pope goes, man, you know what? We're doing enough business now with the Levant, which is that you gotta think of like, you're Jopla out there thinking of what? Islam is now with reactionary fundamentalism as opposed to modern and so forth. Islam with the Moors and all the way into the Levant, that's Turkey and Judea, was the most sophisticated civilization on planet Earth. They gave us numbers. They gave us star science. They brought back science, brought back medicine, brought back everything.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Whatever you may think of any religion when it goes into its crusade stage, Islam at that point was really sophisticated.

• 10:35Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  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. They're tribal. So what happens is they got Holy Land and the Western world wants it. We don't want to do business with it. They want to own it. It's the place of Jesus and Moses and, you know, Joshua and whatever, man. And so they send a crusade, they send another crusade, another new crusade. Right. Okay.

• 11:06Dana Schwartz?

  So then, just for a brief context for our listeners, we're talking about the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. And this is going to be early 13th century, so, you know, early 1200s.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Right, same time as Francis, by the way.

• 11:21Dana Schwartz?

  And Frederick II was involved in the Sixth Crusades, right?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a dicey deal, because the First Crusade, they get stuff, and that essentially ends the feudal system, you know, because people get, leave the land and go, hey, man, they need numbers, guys and accounts and so forth, the lawyers, la, la, la, la. This goes to former university, the former University of Bologna and so forth, and University of Padua, and they start for count, so what. Then the Second Crusade is kind of dicey. Then the Third Crusade is a guy named Frederick Barbarossa. Okay, you know the Robin Hood legend, right? Robin Hood?

• 11:54Dana Schwartz?

  Of course.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Okay, so Robin Hood is the servant, really, he's looking for the good king to come back. Remember his name?

• 12:03Dana Schwartz?

  Richard the Lionheart.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Uh, great, and what's wrong with Richard? Why can't Richard come back?

• 12:09Dana Schwartz?

  Well, I think he was kidnapped by Germans at some point.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. So who's the German guy that kidnapped him and said, hey, you haven't recognized me as the Holy Roman Emperor? And by the way, you owe me some money because you went on this crusade and we financed you, so we're to keep you here. So who's this guy?

• 12:26Dana Schwartz?

  Is it Frederick?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  It's his dad, Henry VI.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  And his dad, the Holy Roman Emperor, you know, Charlemagne's the first one, and there's several, and there's Ottos and so forth. And then it breaks down, France says, we don't want to be Holy Roman Empire, we're going to be France. Germany continues this idea of the Holy Roman Empire. So you've got the starting 800, and by the time you get to 1100, in the Third Crusade, the son of Frederick Barbarossa, Redbeard, okay, I'm going to back up a second. And this period we're talking about, the famous Normans that invaded England. Normans are not just Normandy knights anymore from, you know, Norway or whatever. They are essentially guns for hire, and they really take over Sicily.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  The Norman inclusion of Sicily is amazing.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  And these kings, these tankred Norman kings, Roger the first, Roger the second, these are the guys that bring sovereignty to Sicily. By what? By tolerance. This is unheard of. You know, you don't do tolerance in the Middle Ages, man. You cut out people's eyes and tongues and so forth. But Roger the second is a guy who's tolerant of Jews, he's tolerant of Muslims, he's tolerant of like the princes who want their own land and so forth. 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

• 14:01Speaker 02

  of the world. You can't smash this together. Henry the sixth, the guy who kidnapped Richard the wiener, 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.

• 14:27Dana Schwartz?

  It's a pretty good plan. I can't imagine the rest of the world is happy about it, but.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  No, they're not. Florence goes, wait a minute. You know, the pope's going, hey, man, you know, I gotta handle this guy Francis, man. You know, what are you doing now? You're squeezing me. So, long story short, Henry the sixth dies and they have a kid and they have a kid in a place called Jesse, which is near Ancona in the eastern part of Italy, which is beautiful. And this is Frederick. And Frederick is like taken to Sicily and Frederick is a kid. Immediately, the infiltration of a whole lot of Lombards, those are up by Milan. French warrior families come down, want to take over, says, nobody's running Sicily now, man. The Rogers are gone. The Constance can't really do it on her own. This kid is amazingly ferociously.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  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? And he was hiding out, he was 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. But what he goes on to be is this, he goes on to first tell the Pope, "Look, the Otto dynasty, the wealth, this is factions. Italy's gonna turn into Guelphs and Gibellines, people who support the Pope, people who support the Reich." I'm jumping out, this is about 1200s. Frederick's born in 1194, about 10 years after the Crusade. Then his mother dies, his mother tries to school him, his mother tries to give him tolerance.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  This is a one-off dude. You gotta learn stuff, you gotta learn languages, you gotta 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, kings.

• 16:21Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  And Frederick II is gonna spur a guy to death, you know, and tell a guy that you're gonna have your tongue cut out and so forth. So they're not nice guys at the end of the day. But in the realm of humanism, I'm reading about Franciscanism at Syracuse and I'm reading about how these certain cities hid the spiritual Franciscans, who 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 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II did. So I get deep dive into Frederick II. And I see that he's into science, see he's into literature. I see that this guy's obsessed with birds. I see he's obsessed with writing, that he's a vegetarian,

• 17:06Speaker 02

  that he weighs the same amount when he was 64 years old than when he died, that he did when he was 18. 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 gonna get your jam, man. I'm just gonna be the Holy Roman Emperor. You guys can continue your act, I don't wanna dominate you, stole you, complain. You guys gotta pay me the vig, but you guys can groove." And then within two months, they support him. Then he's ordered to go on a crusade and he tells the Pope, "Hey, I will. I gotta go back and make sure Sicily's mine." And he goes back to Sicily and he does the same thing.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  He essentially wins Sicily through diplomacy. Kent Wolowitz writes a book on the guy that lionized him. The great David Avulafia, who is, wrote, I think, the greatest book on him. Who was the mentor to my mentor, Pete Stacy at UCLA. Writes a book that like, say, "Wait a minute, you gotta put Frederick the Second." Because by now, data, everyone has pasted Frederick the Second on as like, something else. But it's like Cyrus the Great with the freedom of the Jews from Babylon. And the Cyrus Cylinder. The Cyrus Cylinder says, you know, "Hey, all you Jews can go back from Babylon and live in your home turf." Because our division from Azores has the vision that people want to live on the turf of their homeland. Nobody did this in 526 B.C.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  They killed you, dispersed you, or enslaved you.

• 18:40Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  But he did it. Once in a while, there's a dude or a woman who goes, "You know what? I see that the freedom of people is better than the domination of people." Like allowing people liberties, the way to control your sheep is give them 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 pisses off the Pope. They say, "We don't want 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 with Pope.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Starts the very first state endowed university, University of Naples. Which is called, they're called the Universidad Federico Secundo, named after him. He does so many things to essentially transform the idea of, and Avulafia, this guy ropes him in.

• 19:41Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  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 the 1800s. 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 acknowledgement aside, yeah, which everybody wanted.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  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, you look, he took all the Muslims in Sicily. He didn't tell them. He gave him a hundred thousand acres or 10,000 acres in Apulia.

• 20:24Dana Schwartz?

  But if I am correct, he does get excommunicated four times?

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:30Dana Schwartz?

  They forgive him. They bring him back. They say, just kidding.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  You know how they bring you back? Because he's diplomatic.

• 20:37Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  He's diplomatic with innocent. He's diplomatic with the Norias. Ironically, the guy that really hates him is Gregory the Knight. And Gregory the Knight is Ugolino, the guy who championed Francis of Assisi. He's the guy from Umbria who went with Francis to Innocent the Third and said, hey, man, the guy's preaching, but he's not a priest. I'm going to figure it away. Don't kill him. Let him walk around. And that's the guy who later becomes the Pope who hates Frederick. And he's a very humanist Pope, Ugolino, very humanist. But he just can't take it that Frederick is not bowing to him.

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• 22:20Dana Schwartz?

  I think of Frederick II as sort of the quintessential Renaissance man. You know, this is someone tolerant, spoke multiple languages, a mathematician, a poet, a composer. Obviously, when he's excommunicated multiple times by the Pope, we're going to get some sources vilifying him, these pro-Papal chronicles. How would you define his legacy, looking at all of those sources and sort of weighing it all together?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  You know, I want to be David Abulafi and say, wait a minute, let's put the reins on the mysticism, you know, the mystic legend of this guy.

• 22:54Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  He did kill people, he did kill his best friend, you know, it's for treason.

• 22:59Dana Schwartz?

  But it was a brutal time.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  That's right, you can't take it out of context. But he did also give people right to civil courts over land distributions or what. I'm thinking that he is the forerunner. I mean, in spite of the fact that Dr. Abulafi wants to rein him in, I finished reading the Abulafi's book, and I go, you know what, man? The guy is still not like anybody else. And you acknowledge him so many times in there, well, come on, taking 3,000 people into Germany, I guess, an army of almost like, you know, 80,000 dudes, and like, talking your way diplomacy, diplomatically winning that whole thing back and doing the same thing in Sicily? This is gifted stuff. This is the art of rap. I think that's his great legacy.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:01Dana Schwartz?

  Well, I do have one question about Frederick's legacy. It looks like after he dies, we're going to get the great interregnum with the Holy Roman Emperor. There's not going to be a clear succession after him. Why is that?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  I don't think that Manfredi or Manfred or Conrad, Conrad Dean grandson, I don't think they had the talent.

• 24:22Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  If you're fatherless and then you're raised by this incredible mother who is like running a show and instills the temperance in you that you're gonna live through, that's inured. I mean, that's almost something that you can't be taught.

• 24:38Dana Schwartz?

  Hmm.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  So his jam, which is speaking and coming to terms and let's meet, let's do this, let's do that, is unique to him. And when he goes, I don't think that he's taught that to his kids or his grandkids. Bianca is a lover who basically they say he married, who even Avilaia acknowledges was the one sort of passion in his life. He probably did marry her before he died, but they never spent time with the kid. I gotta go, you know, this is right, this is wrong. Here's what you do. You go here, you do that. I don't know if Frederick had those people to school his kids. I don't think his kids knew international law. I don't think he spoke five languages. I'm sorry, I don't

• 25:20Speaker 02

  think they like traveled with him to all those places. His one kid, Henry, tried to revolt against him. He had to take the guy down. He had to imprison his own kid in Germany.

• 25:31Dana Schwartz?

  So he's a great Holy Roman Emperor, not a great father.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Not a great dad, no.

• 25:37Dana Schwartz?

  Well, nobody's perfect.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  I know, I know, but you know what? I gotta remember that. My kid and I went to Pompeii. My son is the attention span of all 13 year olds, which is about, you know, six feet until it gets too hot or the phones are gone or whatever. Hey, he's in Pompeii. He said, hey, Dad, over here. Look over here. This is where they had the sewage pipes. Now, I've done historiography on Pompeii. I had to present on Pompeii. I had to take tours, not tours, but school groups to Pompeii. And I've never seen these sewage pipes. And I say, how did you do that? He says, I found it on 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 so impressed.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  That he was showing me something. And two days ago, two scholars came up to me and they were talking about the sewage systems in Rome. I said, were they essentially discovered by Pompeii? He says, yeah, the sewage system Pompeii have taught us everything. He said, yeah, my kid taught me about them. He says, what do you mean your kid taught you about it? I said, about two weeks ago, my kid on TikTok found out where the sewage systems were in Pompeii and was showing me. And these guys are like, your 13 year old kid on TikTok was showing you where the sewage systems were. I said, yeah. And it's just stopped us dead, Dana. So, good dad, good leader. I don't know.

• 26:59Dana Schwartz?

  I was in Pompeii a few years ago, and the fun fact about the plumbing that stuck with me, maybe the listeners don't know, maybe it's incredibly obvious. But the elemental symbol for lead is P B, and that comes from the Latin word for plumbing, plumbum. P B, because their pipes were lead, their plumbing was lead. Who knew?

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Did somebody teach you that?

• 27:20Dana Schwartz?

  I think our tour guide said that. It must have been in the back of my mind when I studied chemistry in college.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  I only learned P B, meaning lead, in Rome with the pipes in Rome. You know, coming out of places like the Colosseum and down with the History Channel. I was at the History Channel learning this stuff. I wasn't walking around Pompeii with a 13 year old. But that's great that you know that. And isn't Pompeii extraordinary?

• 27:42Dana Schwartz?

  I will say it was one of the historical sites that truly floored me, that exceeded all expectations for me.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  You have to go back. I've been 29 times now. And, but look, 29 times, and now I find out from my kid where the plumbing is.

• 27:57Dana Schwartz?

  Dr. Peter Weller with your brand new book, Leon Battista Alberti in Exile by Peter Weller.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  And the subtitle is?

• 28:06Dana Schwartz?

  Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Yes, and in it are a ton of photographs and images and so forth. Not to mention, at the beginning of it, is Giotto in the Capella Scuveni. That Victoria Storrell told me that I was an idiot because I hadn't seen it.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Which is figures hugely in this thing. And I just want to say this to wrap this up is that, you know, the beginning of this in 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.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Maria Canelli of the Brooklyn Academy and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.

• 28:52Dana Schwartz?

  That's amazing.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  This book really quickly, this I tell you what is a very famous Renaissance guy, he's a polymath, he's an architect, writer, he's like the fallout of Frederick II. He's everything that Frederick II wanted to be. Frederick II also is an amazing architect. You gotta go to right northern Bari and see his castle, which is a circle with steps only this big, so you can actually run up them. You know, instead of these big clunky deals, you can run up and down them so that knights can run with armor and so forth, right? And these eight turrets around it, it's astounding piece of architecture that he supervised himself. So, look, in the notice of Frederick II wanting to be this polymath, which is what he was, a language guy, scientist guy, a bird guy, you know, biologist, architect, everything.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  You've got this dude here, Leon Battista Alberti, which I'm sure, whom I'm sure knew everything about Frederick II. Because Frederick II is like a one-off. And he, they say, so many scholars said in the 20th century, oh, you know what? His family was exiled and then he came to Florence and in eight months wrote the first modern book on painting in tripartite Latin, Ciceronian ideas and so what. And I'm asking, when I was getting my master's degree, I'm asking all these, 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 lines, points, like art of a... They said, yeah, he did.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  And one guy, Rab Hatfield, bless his heart, great scholar, said, no, everybody knows he came from Cadua, he came from Giotto, he came from Bologna, he came through all this stuff. I said, what did he teach that? They said, because Florence is the apex of all things Renaissance, which is horse shit. It's just horse shit. You know, Florence is the apex of all things Renaissance, but it's not the seed of all things Renaissance.

• 30:45Dana Schwartz?

  Dr. Peter Weller, this has been such a joy. Next time I'm in Italy, I want you to be my tour guide. This was extraordinary.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  All you gotta do is let us know when you're going. Because even if we can't be there with you, we could turn you on, save you a lot of time and money and saving you essentially a whole lot of energy that you don't need to spend.

• 31:05Dana Schwartz?

  Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. This is Dr. Weller, author of Leon Batiste, Alberti in Exile. Thank you so much for joining us. This was such a pleasure.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Okay, listen, I want to last thing. I just want to say this. Frederick the Second by David Abalatia is really the book to read on the thing. There's a lot of great books, but this is the book that really takes you, walks you through the good and the bad news about Frederick the Second. And by the way, the one with the bad news is about Frederick the Second. You come away thinking, hey, once in a while, there's a hero.

• 31:33Dana Schwartz?

  Absolutely. Thank you so much.

• 31:44Dana Schwartz?

  Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Height, and Julia Milani. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk with supervising producer Reema Ilkayali and 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.

• 32:24Speaker 03

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• 32:54Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.