In my recent trip to Tuscany, my partner and I went searching for two sources of inspiration: Renaissance Florence, and Andrei Tarkosvsky’s movie Nostalghia. Neither disappointed.
Florence and Tuscany are heavy. So heavy, in fact, that I struggle to find the words to express myself. This is a landscape rich in the weight of dreams; not only the kaleidoscopic dreams of electric modernity, but older ones: passages of scripture, scenes from Ovid, divine arguments.
Tarkovsky’s protagonist wanders through this landscape in Nostalghia. A Russian professor of Italian renaissance architecture, he searches in vain for the world he has read about in books, and is confronted with another place — stranger, more impenetrable, alien. He muses on the futility of translating poetry, and becomes painfully homesick as Italy engulfs him.
In interviews about Nostalghia, Tarkovsky describes himself in Dostoevskian terms, concerned with the impossibilities of reconciling spiritual life with material life. He also writes of the importance of art of working in this void: as technology changes, man discovers new art forms, which he must then use to explore and express the cracks emerging in his being.
There is something profound and prophetic in Tarkovsky’s conception of his art. Readers familiar with Russian literature will have no difficulty situating Tarkovsky as a descendent of the great novelists, playwrights and poets. And yet, as a filmmaker, he remains absolutely an artist of the late 20th century. He is not a translator of the Dostoevskian hero into modern terms, but an artist concerned with the struggles of the soul, in his contemporary world.
In the context of Renaissance Florence, I find this highly inspiring.
Florence was famously one of the centres of the humanist culture that began to flourish in the 1300s. Empowered and wealthy beyond belief as a result of new trade routes and financial networks, the ruling elite had the vision to invest not merely in militaries and businesses, but in artists concerned with the study of humanity itself.
Renaissance art is striking for its syntheses. It is concerned not only with the dominant Christian culture, but also with the ancient world, with the myths and legends of classical Greece, Rome and further abroad. Side by side with crucifixion and resurrection are depicted rapes, banquets, wars, contests and visions. Sexuality is examined and celebrated, not merely in its matrimonial forms — homosexuality, perversity, anthropomorphism and androgyny are all studied and taken seriously. It is the art of a culture that is interested in itself — not moralistically, nor with reference to an absolute point of truth — but in how it exists, how it enjoys, how it suffers, and how it dreams.
We must remind ourselves, however, that the Renaissance is not a static thing. It is easy, and tempting, to deify it, as a high point, a golden age, and compare ourselves to it in disappointment and inadequacy. This serves a certain masochistic function, but it also blinds us to the possibilities of our own age — and our duties towards it.
Like Dostoevsky’s academic hero, we might go in search of a historic culture that we have read about in books. But we must be prepared to discover something else, that is breathing and possessed of a lifeforce of its own.
The past is never dead. We seek it in response to our own spiritual malaise; our own nostalgia for a time and a place that can speak to us. But the past was created by people like us — people equally homesick and adrift on the tides of history.
To step into the Renaissance is to step into a world that is alien even to itself. It is a world of dramatic political upheavals, of leading citizens plotting, imprisoning and murdering one another, of Papal authority clashing with material wealth, of ancient relics distorting the medieval Christian certainties about God’s creation and man’s place within it. It is a world of change and metamorphosis. It is a land of renewal; of becoming young, of childishness.
It is interesting in this light that the powerful Medici family often chose the Hercules myth as one close to themselves. Hercules is powerful and well-intentioned, but he is also clumsy and excessive. He drinks too much, he murders people, he humiliates himself. He makes friends and enemies. He is human, all too human, in distinction to a figure like Jesus, the Christian centre-point, who is irreproachable and alien to us in his purity.
One can imagine my surprise when, reading Kenneth Grant’s commentaries on Aleister Crowley while in Florence, I discovered his connection of Hercules with the Egyptian Horus, the crowned and conquering child who is placed at the centre of Thelemic religion and whom Crowley prophesies is the proper patron of a post-Christian age.
The aeon of Horus, is, like the mythological Hercules, one of violent innocence. One of human strength testing and discovering itself, capable of great good and great evil, without reference to a metaphysical standard and a divinely ordained moral code.
It leads me to think that the humanistic culture patronised by the Medicis shared a lot with our own. In retrospect, we idealise the Italian Renaissance. At its own time, it was a rich and flourishing chaos. Intense materialism clashed with a profoundly upturned spirituality. Medici Money, pagan passions, Christian aspirations and human ambition clashed violently and lustfully. It was a nouveau-riche world; an assault on the vestiges and institutions of high medievalism, an age of republican, human interests rather than high moralities and divine hierachies.
What relevance does this have for us today, then?
My provocation today is to the people I am calling Bitcoin Medicis — men and women of money, power and influence, who fall outside of the established institutions and hierarchies we have inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries. Many, if not most, of whom, are rich and powerful for the first time, who have not been born and bred for influence, and who feel a mixture of excitement and embarrassment about their relationship to the future.
My friends, you have it in you to be the patrons and the sponsors of a profound new spiritual culture, one that is ambitious and innocent and unashamed in its explorations into itself. Culture today is choked with original sins and medieval moralisms, preaching privilege and guilt where it could be teaching pride and lust for life. This is of course what we call a Dark Renaissance, a renewal of the human, all-to-human in all of us, unashamed and unabashed by standards of virtue designed by people who have little to contribute beyond their own bitterness.
I don’t know if anyone I would call Bitcoin Medici’s proper are reading this. I know for a fact that several of you reading this know people who fit this description. If this is you, you have a task. You need to give these people the confidence to view themselves not merely as successful entrepreneurs and investors, but as patrons of a renewed and revitalised culture. This culture is one that unashamedly embraces humanity, including its ugly, messy aspects, and which is not afraid to make colossal mistakes and false starts.
These Bitcoin Medicis, wealthy beyond imagination, have it within their power to build cathedrals to humanity, rich and resplendent with the best of 21st century art, drama, music, sculpture and ceremony. The underground is ripe with talent, young men and women, potential Michelangelo’s and Rafaeolo’s eager for chapels to paint and songs to write.
In a time when many are reaching back to Christianity and Islam in search of simple, predictable certainties and existential anaesthesia, we have it in us to offer an alternative, one that is fiery, passionate, soulful, and even more historically and spiritually rich than sermons muttered by stagnant and dying institutions. We can, like Tarkovsky, embrace our split souls, and claim today’s technology as our unique inheritance. We can discover ourselves as spiritual artists, who are tasked with reconciling the material and the ideal in a way that is true for our time and no other. And in doing so, raise ourselves to the status not of historical decadence and self-abasement, but of proud, child-like renewal and rediscovery, worthy of speaking to all the ages.