HeyJaredFlorence: The city that changed the World
Sometime between the 13th and 16th centuries, a small city on the banks of the Arno River decided—without knowing it was deciding—to change the world.Florence produced Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dante, and Machiavelli.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 8
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- Aug 14, 2026
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- Aug 9, 2026
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Andrea del Verrocchio: The Master History Defamed (opens the original)
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There's a story everyone tells about him: a master saw his student's angel, dropped his brush, and never painted again. It's a great story. It's also probably not true. Andrea del Verrocchio ran the busiest workshop in Florence, mixing bronze, marble, paint, and goldwork under one roof, and used it to train not one genius but several. Leonardo da Vinci learned there. So did Domenico Ghirlandaio, who later taught Michelangelo. So did Pietro Perugino, who later taught Raphael. A single workshop, o
Raphael Sanzio: The Genius Florence Helped Create (opens the original)
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He arrived in Florence at twenty-one, an outsider from a small city, carrying nothing but a letter asking the head of the government to be kind to him. Leonardo da Vinci was already a legend. Michelangelo had just unveiled the David. There didn't seem to be room for a third genius in the room. Raphael made room. In four years, he absorbed everything Florence had to teach, Leonardo's shadow, Michelangelo's muscle, a full century of tradition, and turned it into something that belonged entirely to
Botticelli: The Painter The Renaissance Forgot (opens the original)
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He painted the most reproduced image in art history, and spent his final years convinced it was a sin. Sandro Botticelli went from painting the hanged bodies of traitors on a government wall to painting a goddess rising from the sea, sometimes for the same family. The Birth of Venus and the Primavera made him the most celebrated painter in Florence, full of pagan gods, secret botany, and neoplatonic philosophy disguised as myth. Then a fanatical friar took over the city, his own brother became o
Michelangelo: The Man Who Never Signed His Own Words (opens the original)
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He signed only one work in his entire career, a marble Pietà finished at twenty-four. He spent forty years on a tomb that shrank from a monument with dozens of statues down to a single wall panel. He was forced onto his back for four years to paint a ceiling he never wanted to paint, in a job he took only because a Pope refused to take no for an answer. Michelangelo controlled almost everything about how the world would remember him, down to hand-picking a biographer to correct the record after
Donatello: The Master Michelangelo Never Met (opens the original)
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Everyone has heard the name. Almost no one stops long enough to actually learn the story behind it. Donatello never had the fame Michelangelo, Leonardo and the generation that came after him would go on to enjoy, and it never seems to have bothered him. What he had was something rarer: the recognition of Cosimo de' Medici, the most powerful man in Florence, who understood exactly what he was looking at, the foundation on which everything else in Florentine art would be built. This is the story o
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