Raphael

He can't finish a project for the life of him.

He's the only painter in his contemporary with Raphael and Michelangelo and all that.

He's the only one who has been contracted by the Vatican, but has At some point, there was the Duke of Milan that has started putting him under contract because he didn't want to finish whatever he was commissioned to do.

one of his most famous paintings, he was saying, well, I can't finish it because I can't find anyone who looks enough like Judas.

But it was redone.

in 1516 or 1517 by Raphael.

Not Raphael, not the Ninja Turtle.

Raphael, that painter.

He redid this, the whole thing.

Right now, the Zodiac surrounds the Stufetta di Babiana, which means that the Pope and everybody in there understands the Zodiac in the sky and the astrotheology.

But if you strip that away from what Raphael added to it, you'll find that there was a bunch of Greek gods and goddesses plastered all over the place that they covered up.

Now, there's a town in Israel called Megiddo, which a third century church was found under another church.

It was a whole family, the Medici family.

And the one who was the banker and who gave out most of the money to support Michelangelo and Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci and others, he said that in art, no matter what the art is, it should have balance, symmetry, and beauty.

And a lot of people hadn't thought about that, a lot of artists.

So he brought a whole different understanding of what all of us can benefit, because we all benefit when we walk into a beautiful community garden where everyone's donating something to make sure that everything works.

We will be covering the Borgias and Pope Alexander's papacy in future episodes.

He moved his living quarters up to the floor above, and to decorate them, his chief architect, Donato Bramante, recommended a brilliant 25-year-old prodigy from his home region of Marche, from the town of Urbino, the one and only Rafael Sanzio.

Before we get into this, we have to talk about the high-stakes rivalry between Rafael and Michelangelo, and quite frankly, Bramante.

Now, Bramante wasn't just helping a talented kid from Urbino.

Michelangelo is going to be born soonish.

And Raphael is going to be born a little bit after that.

Got you.

And just for context, Martin Luther and Martin

from Volterra and raised them in his house and gave him the same costly education that he did his children.

And they are being raised as the same social station as Machiavelli, right? The kids who will be the secretaries who will attend upon the Medici kids when they grow up.

Tommaso Inghirami is the best known of them because he has a portrait by Raphael and anybody with a portrait by Raphael gets to be famous.

But he had a brother and a sister and they all had cool, interesting careers.

Picture Talk For this, I took the miraculous strut of fishes as being the picture which I thought most of the children would not yet have done.

I first asked for some information about Raphael, and managed to get from the children that he was born in Italy, and that since his father was a painter, Raphael used to paint when he was a little boy.

Next, I told them of the history of the picture, how it had been designed for a tapestry, and how after finding it and six others in Brussels cut into strips, Rubens brought them over to England, where they were bought by Charles I and were afterwards repaired.

Then, so that the children should have the events of the picture before their minds, I read them the account of the draught of fishes from St. Luke's Gospel.

But the prompts that I used would largely be, I would create the design, the image, and then I would say, I want this.

this design in the style of Rembrandt or Van Gogh or Raphael or Caravaggio, like all of the masters, the classical artists, I would use them as my prompts.

and it would become a pretty involved conversation with ai you know because i would say give me a prompt that is going to empower you to create art that resembles you know the dutch masters or rembrandt etc and then i would take those prompts and apply it it became a very involved process but i really enjoyed it from an artistic perspective so many of you have been enjoying Gospel of the Skull Crusher.

Not only did I fill it with art, I wrapped it with linen, the covers wrapped with, you know, this is real linen, with the gold foil stamping.