Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance

The Medici family dynasty ruled one little corner of Italy for over two centuries. How it came to define the course of western civilization is a story of immense complexity, and this series attempts to tell it in everyday language.

The production can't seem to make up its mind whether to be a history lesson or a well-told story, and that is both its strength and its weakness. Fortunately the characters in the story are of such overwhelming interest that it doesn't really matter which approach the production takes, the student of history will find here a treasure trove.

Any given fifteen-minute segment of the production could easily be produced as its own freestanding film, and this is as much a comment on the potency of this family and community as it is on the film that has been created to describe it. I found it all spellbinding, and am heading now to my public library to follow up with my own reading. That's a pretty good recommendation for a film of modest production values.

I was really excited to see this documentary. After all, some of what the Medici family did was truly awful and they are rather infamous for this. The family managed to gain the highest office on the planet (the Papacy) and yet they also managed to create the Reformation due to their Popes' excesses and public sins--though many of the worst behaviors of these popes are glossed over. One of their family members was instrumental in the murder of between 5000 and 30000 French Huguenots (though this wasn't mentioned). Instead, a lot of episode 1 is about the Renaissance and not so much about the Medicis. And, the same occurs in the final episode--it's mostly about Galileo and not the Medici family. The births, marriages, machinations and the dirt really aren't explored in detail--and a better title of the series might have been "Florence During the Reign of the Medicis". Worth seeing but not as salacious and interesting as I might have hoped!

For those interested in documentaries, history and art - specifically about the Renaissance, but without being a scholar in the subject, perhaps even if you are not sure what the Renaissance was all about, where Florence is, and with no knowledge about the House of Medici, then this documentary have a lot to teach, and should give a taste for further studies. For those that already know a lot about this subject will perhaps not be fully satisfied, as the other - more critical - reviews here have pointed out, but still I just can't imagine anyone that could regret watching it.

Even with 4 parts and 4 hours, it's not even barely scratching the surface of this complex story, but still manage to compress it into an amazing story of both the rise of the Medici dynasty (lasting almost a half millennium), the Renaissance and a mind boggling amount of the most well known and beloved artists of the era and how these appeared in the same time-period and place, in a climate of intense creativity and enlightenment, becoming the start of the end of the middle-ages.

Specially the soundtrack is beautiful, but sadly the composer sold the rights to the company that made the film (that went bankrupt), so any CD or similar of the music won't be likely to ever be published.

There were actors in this series, so I don't know why IMDb doesn't list the actors who played Giovanni di Medici(Peter Guiness) and his son Cosimo (Pip Torens) among others. I have to say most of the talking heads were extremely irritating especially Dale Kent whose idiotic allusions to the Medici as 'Godfathers' made me want to scream. Lauro Martines who wrote "April Blood" was credible and knowledgeable. The rest are just as irritating as Kent; they are so pompous. Someone should have told them that 'There is a limit to the profitable elaboration of the obvious'. The producers would have done better with captions. That said, 'The Medici' was a fair production, with good photography and could whet one's appetite for more research into the subject. There was a chant played at the death of Giovanni di Medici that I wish I could find, the only memorable music in this series.