Renaissance Man (with Peter Weller)

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0:43Listener discretion advised. 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 II. 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? So I knew nothing about art. My mother tried to introduce me to art.

1:22I didn't really get it. There's a wonderful actress. Most people know her as an actress model. She's actually an art history design degree from Wellesley, was a girl of the year under Diana Vreeland, was a stylist for Vogue and a lot of other stuff, Allie McGraw. And Allie 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 to Angela Lansbury. I went to see it on St. Patrick's Day. I'll never forget it.

1:53And then we started up this affair and then we turned it into a long time 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 coming out, Cambridge University Press, about a Renaissance guy. But Ali is the person that took me by the hand, introduced me to Picasso. Picasso's Guernica was going to 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.

2:30But if you were Allie, you could get in. Because Allie's friends were, people think that she ran with Mooney. No, no, she ran with the literata, glitterata. She ran with 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 took me 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 Canelli, who's a great friend and head of FIT and American Folk Art Museum, one of the people got me to the Renaissance after this happened.

3:06I am at the National Film Festival of Japan with the great Jean Moreau, one of the greatest actors ever, Mike Metaboy, one of the great producers ever, produced RoboCop, 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 Storau 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 Angle in Paris or The Sheltering Sky or Last Emperor or Vic Tracy, can I go on and on and on?

3:41Vittorio is a very elite dude and was Versace all the time. And he had this Versace scarf on. And I'm playing Mr. Hortico. Because I know. I could talk about Cy Twombly. And I could talk about Frankenthaler or whatever. So I say, Vittorio, qui è il favorito per tu? This is 1992. I say, who's your favorite painter? 1991. They were Kyoto. And he goes, have you been to Padua to see Giotto in the very first one by one floor frames of narrative of light, color, perception, dark, emotion, negative space, narrative? I go, what? He says, Giotto. I don't know who you're talking about, man. And he takes his Versace scarf and he flips it.

4:25Look, Francis Coppola said, Vittorio Sorolla is the only guy who could spend two years in the Philippines in a white suit. And he did. And that's Vittorio. So he flips his scarf and he says, well, Peter, we cannot talk about it. And he walks away. And 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 Giotto. You have no context. You have no context. He's the one person that's indemnified in contemporary art. Carlo Carra, father of Cubism, talks about it. Precisionism talks about it.

4:59Rothko 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 Cappella Scravinia, 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 that is like solidified as a cornerstone and all the art that comes after it in the western world doesn't matter what you're talking about you know post-cubism abstract depressionism pete mondrian whatever they're all going to go back to jolto they're all going to go back to that i call up ali i go look why didn't you talk about jolto 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 contemporary art 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 this on 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 look at the coliseum's or but never did a deep deep dive into it.

6:12It 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 flip it to second orange stop. I don't 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 in Syracuse University, where they only take about four or six people a year, is I get fascinated with the Franciscan movement, which is, by the way, contemporary to Frederick II, who we're going to talk about today, Owen Stauffen.

6:48So Francis of Assisi, we've all heard of him. Big saints, statues in gardens all the time. Yeah, big deal. Okay, you connect Giotto. Francis is the guy who preaches, never is a priest, never does a marriage, Never holds a mask, 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 say the influence of Francis is a quarter million people following him within eight years without a fax machine. But here's what he's saying. He's saying, look, man, walk the walk of the human Jesus.

7:33you don't have to do the seven steps to heaven 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've got to do and people have been listening to this pulpit crap God wins and you don't man you're the loser and he's the winner and all of a sudden Francis comes I don't follow the dude I mean yeah I don't go 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 all of his movement and says no no no we got to build churches make money and that's too bad 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 some who sympathize with the pope and want to make money so dig this history of the world simply rome falls in Rome.

8:34Around 450. They burned the books. You got nothing. You got tribes coming in. We used to call them barbarians. Physicists, Ostergauss, Vandals, et cetera. 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? Let's see. Is it because it's sort of a strategic stronghold before the crusades 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 because rome's down hey man let's go conquer the dude got it yeah 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 ceres and in 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 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 follow no emperor nowhere man we are venetian venetian venetian they you know they go off and do their own thing yeah 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 the late 10 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 you're joe blow out there thinking of what islam is now with reactionary fundamentalism so as opposed to modern and so forth.

10:17Islam 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 science. They brought back science, brought back medicine, brought back everything. Whatever you may think of any religion when it goes into its crusade stage, Islam at that point was really sophisticated. The Moors are Islamic. They fought against the Arabs to keep Spain. 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 the only land and the Western world wants it.

10:55We don't want to do business with it. They want to own it. It's the place of Jesus and Moses and Joshua and whatever, man. And so they send a crusade to send another crusade, another new crusade. Right. Okay. 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. Right. Same time as Francis, by the way. And Frederick II was involved in the Sixth Crusades, right? Yeah. It's a dicey deal because the First Crusade they get stuff and that's essentially ends the feudal system because people leave the land and go, hey, man, they need numbers, guys, and accountants and so forth.

11:38That goes to former university, the former university of Bologna and so forth. and the University of Padua, and they start a council. 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. 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? Well, I think he was kidnapped by Germans at some point. 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.

12:21And by the way, you owe me some money because you went on this crusade and we financed you. Someone to keep you here. So who's this guy? Is it Frederick? It's his dad, Henry VI. And his dad, the Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne's the first one. And there's several of them. There's autos and so forth. And then it breaks down. France says we don't want to be a Holy Roman Empire. We're going to be France. Germany continues this idea of the Holy Roman Empire. So you've got to 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.

12:58And this period we're talking about, the famous Normans that invaded England. Normans are not just Normandy knights anymore from Norway or whatever. They are essentially guns for hire. And they really take over Sicily. The Norman inclusion of Sicily is amazing. And these kings, these Tancred Norman kings, Roger I, Roger II, these are the guys that bring sovereignty to Sicily. By what? By tolerance. This is unheard of. You don't do tolerance in the Middle Ages, man. You cut out people's eyes and tongues and so forth. but roger ii 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 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 of the world You can't smash this together.

14:07Henry VI, the guy who's kidnapped Richard the Leiter, gets this great idea. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to marry Roger the Norman's daughter. Yes, Constance. I'm going to marry her, and that way, the Queen of Sicily and me, the King of Germany, will own the world together. It's a pretty good plan. I can't imagine the rest of the world is happy about it. but no they're not Fulis goes wait a minute you know the pimp's going hey man I gotta handle this guy Francis man what are you doing now you're squeezing me so long story short Henry of the Six dies and they have a kid and they have a kid in a play 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.

15:03Those are up by Milan. French warrior families come down, want to take over. 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. 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 at his five years old that he jumped on Marquard 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.

15:48Italy's going to turn into Guelphs and Ghibellines, people who support the Pope, people who support the Reich. 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. This is a one-off dude. You got to learn stuff. You got to learn languages. You got to learn Hebrew. You got to learn Arabic. You got to learn Greek. You got to learn these people. Man, these people are around you and you better be talking their lingo if you want something to do with them. Because you can't just win by domination.

16:18Even though, you got to remember, despots do live and they are kings. And Frederick II is going to spur a guy to death. and tell a guy that you're going to 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. 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 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II did.

16:56So I get deep dive into Frederick II. And I see that he's into science. I see that 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, that he weighs the same amount when he was 64 years old and then 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 and 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.

17:37You guys got to 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. He tells the Pope, hey, I will. I got to go back and make sure Sicily's mine. And he goes back to Sicily, and he does the same thing. He essentially wins Sicily through diplomacy. Kent Twalowitz writes a book on the guy that lionizes him. The great David Avalafia, who wrote, I think, the greatest book on him, who was the mentor to my mentor, Pete Stacey at UCLA, writes a book that, like, said, wait a minute, you've got to put Frederick II, because by now, Bina, everyone, has pasted Frederick II on as like something else.

18:20But 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 I had a vision, I had a vision that people want to live on the turf of their homeland. Nobody did this in 526 BC. They killed you or dispersed you or enslaved you. Yeah. 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.

18:58And 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 starts the very first state endowed university university of naples which is called called the university of federico secundo named after him he does so many things to essentially transformed the idea of and abelafia 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 the 1800s cannot take him out of the context of the dude who wanted to be acknowledged as you know the dude of it all but the acknowledgement aside yeah which everybody wanted how he went about it in so many ways it was so deferential to human rights in many ways you know and people say yeah okay man okay he look he took all the muslims in sicily he didn't kill him he gave him a hundred thousand acres or ten thousand acres in Apulia.

20:26But if I am correct, he does get excommunicated four times? Yes. They forgive him. They bring him back. They say, just kidding. You know how they bring him back? Because he's diplomatic. Yeah. He's diplomatic with innocent. He's diplomatic with honoris. 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 III and said, hey man, the guy's preaching, but he's not a priest. I'm going to take anything away. Don't kill him. Let him walk around. And that's the guy who later becomes the Pope who hates Frederick.

21:05And 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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23:30I 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? You know, I want to be David Abolafian and say, wait a minute, let's put the reins on the mysticism, you know, the mystic legend of this guy. Right. Yeah. He did kill people. He did kill his best friend.

24:07You know, it's for treason. But it was a brutal time. 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. Abelofia wants to rein him in, I finished reading Abelofia'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 3000 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.

24:49This 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. If somebody tries to kill you, you kill them. That's the way it goes. 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? I don't think that Manfredi or Manfred or Conrad, Conradine, the grandson, I don't think they had the talent.

25:32If you're fatherless and then you're raised by this incredible mother who's like running a show and instills the temperance in you that you're going to live through, that's inured. I mean, that's almost something that you can't be taught. 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 Avalafia 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.

26:16I got to go, 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 think they traveled with him in all his 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. so he's a great holy roman emperor not a great father not a great dad no nobody's perfect i know i know but you know what i gotta remember that my kid and i with the pompeii my son is uh 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 to tours but school groups to pompeii and i've never seen these sewage pipes and i said 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 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.

27:40I said, were they essentially discovered by Pompeii? He says, yeah, the sewage systems in Pompeii have taught us everything. I 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, the 13-year-old kid on TikTok was showing you where the sewage systems were. I said, yeah. And it just stopped us dead, Dana. So good dad, good leader. I don't know. 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.

28:15Maybe it's incredibly obvious. But the elemental symbol for lead is PB. And that comes from the Latin word for plumbing, plumbum, PB, because their pipes were lead. Their plumbing was lead. Who knew? Did somebody teach you that? I think our tour guide said that. It must have been the back of my mind when I studied chemistry in college. I only learned PB, meaning lead, and 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.

28:50And isn't Pompeii extraordinary? I will say it was one of the historical sites that truly floored me, that exceeded all expectations for me. You have to go back. I've been 29 times now. But look, 29 times, and now I find out from my kid where the plumbing is. Dr. Peter Weller with your brand new book, Leon Battista Alberti in Exile by Peter Weller. And the subtitle is? Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting. 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 Scuovegni that Vittorio Storero told me that I was an idiot because I hadn't seen it, which is figures hugely in this thing.

29:41And 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. Maria Connelly of the Brooklyn Academy and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro that's amazing this book really quickly he's 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 north of 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.