The Renaissance Times Cameron Reilly & Ray Harris

Our guest today, Toby Lester, has worked as a refugee affairs officer for the United Nations, helped with programmes in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, undertaken Peace Corps work in Yemen. He has written also extensively for national publications, including the Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, The Wilson Quarterly, BBC Magazine, and the London Times. He also worked at The Atlantic in a variety of editorial capacities: including as the managing editor. Today he serves part-time as a senior editor for Harvard Business Review and edits books for writers, but he is himself a writer of two wonderful history books, The Fourth Part of the World (2009) and Da Vinci’s Ghost (2011) which is about Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.

Taking a short break from Leonardo, our guest today is Julia Charity, an official Vatican tour guide! Julia, who originally hails from the UK, tells us how she ended up as a Vatican tour guide and about some of her favourite art on display in the Pope’s fortress, including “The Last Judgment” by Michelangelo, the “Transfiguration” by her “Renaissance husband”, Raphael, and the Borgia Apartments. If you want to book a Vatican tour with Julia, you can email here at theacharity[at]gmail.com.

Curtis Wong has had an incredible career. He has produced critically acclaimed educational CD-ROMs at Corbis and the Voyager Co., as well as the definitive editions of feature films for the Criterion Collection. He ran the Content Group at Intel, and was granted many patents at Microsoft Research. Today he joins us to tell some stories from his career, including his groundbreaking work with Bill Gates to produce the digital version of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester.

We chat with one of the world’s leading authorities on Leonardo da Vinci – Matthew Landrus from Oxford University, author of Leonardo da Vinci’s Giant Crossbow.



 

If you’re wondering “where are rest of the episodes?”, they are on our website as part of our membership program.

Leonardo’s earliest surviving work of art is a landscape sketch of Vinci in his notebook dating from 1473 when he was 21 years old.



The earliest surviving painting is BAPTISM OF CHRIST, a collaboration with his old master, Verrocchio (as seen in Marketing The Messiah).



On this episode, we go deep on both works of art, looking at what made Leonardo da Vinci different from his contemporaries.