Inventing the Renaissance comes out in one month in the UK (2 months USA), so I’m going to try to post daily this month on social media to share cool pictures and stories of things related to the book. I thought I would also gather them here, posting them sometimes as individual posts, sometimes gathering a few together when they’re shorter. So to start here are some notes on Benvenuto Cellini’s stunning Perseus, my pick for a cover illustration (thank you, editors!)

For me, this statue personifies the Renaissance because, by standing opposite Michelangelo’s David by the Palazzo Vecchio, it’s part of a suite of famous statues every one of which commemorates some big & often violent tumult. When we meet famous Renaissance art we often hear about the artist but not the context. The severed head is there for a reason!

Cellini lived in the rocky decades when (after the death of the famous Lorenzo de Medici) the Medici family had been kicked out and strove to return and seize control of the city by force. Duke Cosimo I took over in the 1530s, and commissioned the Perseus in the 1540s right after a bloody revolt.

Perseus’s face deliberately resembled the then-teenaged duke, and Florence had long displayed corpses of traitors that square, often hung from battlements, sometimes as heads on pikes. When the statue was unveiled Medusa’s head in the duke’s hand represented very real & recent rebel heads!

To increase the gore factor, the statue is positioned at the edge of a roof, so when it rains Perseus remains dry, but water drips down the gore streaming from her head, from the sword point, and from her severed neck!

To hammer the message home, a relief at the bottom shows Perseus rescuing Andromeda (a personified Florence). In the top right corner a cavalry battle (which does not appear in the Perseus story!) shows the defeat of the rebels, as Perseus “rescues” Florence from the “dragon” of republican rule.

In the base, Jupiter, Perseus’s father, threatens to strike anyone who harms his son, a warning of reprisals from Cosimo’s allies, especially the Emperor whose Landsknecht knights Cosimo quartered under the very roof where the statue stood! Giving it its current name “Loggia dei Lanzi.”

When we celebrate Renaissance art w/o acknowledging the terror & violence that shaped it, we repeat the myth of a bad “Dark Ages” & Renaissance “golden age” a very potent piece of propaganda, which is what Inventing the Renaissance is about, and it has plenty more Cellini anecdotes, he was a wild man who lived a wild life, documented by his book which I will always call “The Implausibly Interesting Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.”

I hope you’ll enjoy more tidbits like this in coming days!

Share

Let’s talk about resistance after a conqueror takes power. Specifically let’s talk about this bendy yellow building, and what it shows us about the moment the Florentine Republic finally fell to its kleptocratic/proto-capitalist banking-fortune Medici conquerors.

(Originally a Bluesky thread, part of my countdown to the release of Inventing the Renaissance)

In a post last week, I talked about how Renaissance towns used to be full of tall stone towers, built by rich families as mini-fortresses, & Florence got sick of people hiding in their fireproof towers while setting fire to rivals’ houses & letting things burn, so they made everyone knock the tops off.

Centuries later, the stubs of former towers were still conspicuous, and owning one was a mark of prestige, that you were rich & powerful *before* the tower ban. Tower nubs symbolized patrimony and stability. With which we can now recognize our yellow thing going around one of these nubs. Why?

The stone building at center above is one of the distinctive rough stone tower nubs, originally much, much taller.

Our yellow architectural feature wrapping around another such tower nub.

The iconic Vasari Corridor was built by a conqueror who feared his people. This lovely yellow walkway over the bridge connected the old seat of government (which he symbolically had to occupy) to the new palace where he lived, keeping him from assassination behind solid walls.

It was an architectural show of force, as all the families with property in the way were pressured to submit to the new duke’s demand to let him build his walkway over their roofs or even through their homes. It was also a show of fear, perhaps best personified by the fact that

around the same time that Duke Cosimo built this fortified commuter lane to avoid his people, his neighbor Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara used to walk around his city buck naked (with his dick in one hand & a sword in the other) to show off his confidence that no one dared touch a d’Este.

Duke Cosimo I de Medici

Duke Alfonso d’Este

The d’Este were a *very* blue blooded old family, stably in power for generations, propped up by Venice, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the papacy who all wanted stability in the duchy that was the buffer zone between their three empires, minimizing direct war.

In contrast, the Medici were mere merchant scum, commoner equals of their neighbors who, back when everyone important in Florence had a tower, hadn’t had an impressive one. Bowing before a noble-blooded prince made sense to people at the time, before that family down the street?

Machiavelli said if people are deeply invested in an institution they fight for it, so places used to monarchy (like Milan) if they became republics yield to new conquerors easily (Milan did in 1450) but peoples who truly love their would never stop fighting for their ancient liberty.

Florence did fight the ducal takeover. Cellini’s Perseus statue, the topic of my first thread in this series, commemorated Duke Cosimo crushing of one violent uprising, & his desire to cast the severed heads of his enemies in eternal bronze was a show of force, but also fear.

When Duke Cosimo wanted to build his elevated private commuter tunnel, those heads on pikes were fresh memories. Most neighbors yielded to his architectural conquest, but there in his way was one old tower nub, cramped, unfashionable, cold, but patrimony of the Mannelli family who… were descended from the Roman Manlii family who’d had a consul as early as 480 BC, peers of Cicero and Caesar, who’d already owned the tower a century when Boccaccio’s friend Francesco Mannelli lived in it during the Black Death, 200 years before Duke Cosimo took power.

So when the duke unveiled his plans to blast a hole through it, the Mannelli told the young conqueror to get stuffed. Cosimo knew if he violated this symbol of ancient patrimony, every *other* propertied family would turn on him. The conqueror didn’t dare cross that line.

This wasn’t idealistic resistance; it came from one of the most oligarchic and entrenched of social forces: property rights. But it was resistance, and it worked. Around the tower the corridor went. Every generation thereafter pointed to it as a place the people drew the line, and won.

This is not a story of the kind of resistance that groundswells and overthrows the tyrants. The Medici stayed in power until the family died out, they were never overthrown. But they were *kept in check.* A line the conqueror doesn’t dare cross is a powerful line, that protects much behind it.

Stories of revolution are dramatic and cathartic, but we also need stories like this, of resistance *under tyranny* that drew a line, *reducing harm* even while tyrant stayed. Nor was this the only time Florence drew such a line.

Rewinding a century, the Medici rose to power around 1430 through a combination of cunning, cash & cultural soft power under Cosimo the Elder the great-great-great-grandfather of the Duke Cosimo. Many times in that century Florence drew the line.

Portrait of the original Cosimo de Medici the elder, dressed in merchant-appropriate red robes, lined with fur which shows they were extremely expensive, but very much not what a duke would wear.

Portrait of Duke Cosimo I, wearing very warlike and splendid armor, looking very ducal exactly as his merchant-class descendants didn’t dare look in portraits. (Despite Cosimo’s grandsons in fact owning armor and jousting, but what you choose to look like in a *portrait* is different.

They drew it violently with uprisings or assassination attempts in 1433, 1466, 1478, 1494, 1430, 1437 etc., and more quietly many times between through moments of resistance like the Mannelli telling the conqueror he and his corridor to (literally) get bent (around their tower).

The tale of resistance told by the Mannelli Tower isn’t one of revolution, it’s one of slowing down the shifting baseline. The baseline did keep shifting, less liberty for all and more power for the conquerors, but it shifted * slowly*, and many lives and rights sheltered behind that line. If we define victory as preserving the republic, there’s no happy ending, the Medici won. But if their conquest started in 1430 and they still didn’t dare pierce a symbolic tower 130 years later, that is a lot of slowing the baseline compared to what Florence’s conquered neighbors endured. Slowing the baseline shift meant many generations of Medici being careful, respecting core rights, while Alfonso d’Este didn’t just parade around Ferrara buck naked, he had his artists thrown in the dungeon if he thought they weren’t painting fast enough.

Machiavelli said peoples who treasure their liberties can preserve them even through long stretches of tyranny. That it’s peoples like 1450 Milan who yield quickly to the tyrant and don’t try to hold the line who lose their liberty completely. He wasn’t wrong.

We don’t like resistance stories without a cathartic revolution, they don’t feel like blowing up the Death Star. They feel like loss. They’re not. We need to revisit these worst case scenarios to see that, even when resistance didn’t *win* it did *work*. It saved lives & livelihoods.

Florence’s republic didn’t fall to the Medici only once, it kicked them out in 1433, in 1494, in 1512, in 1530, it took many conquests. But even when it *was* the worst case, the final fall, resistance kept Florence a place that with noticeably more liberty than its neighbors.

No one in Florence knew which republic was the last republic, not in 1430, 1478, 1494, 1512, or 1530, but they did know *all* resistance held the line and preserved liberties. Partial victory is powerful. We must remember that.

(To learn more “Inventing the Renaissance” comes out in a few weeks!)

Share

Early in the 11th century, a young Benedictine monk named Eilmer jumped from the 150-foot tower of his abbey in the small English town of Malmesbury, wearing a pair of crude wings he’d fashioned from willow wood and cloth. Eilmer managed to glide a good 600 feet, passing over the city wall before crash-landing in a small valley near the river Avon. The fall broke both his legs, crippling him. Malmesbury Abbey still boasts a stained-glass window in honor of Brother Eilmer.

This legendary experiment in medieval aviation comes to us via 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury in an account written circa 1125, although William neglected to provide future historians with an exact date for the feat. But William does mention another key episode in Eilmer's life when the monk was "advanced in years": Eilmer witnessed Halley's comet in 1066, commenting, "It is long since I saw you." Some historians have interpreted this to mean that Eilmer saw Halley's comet on an earlier fly-by in 989, when he would have been a young boy.

Assuming Eilmer was at least five years would in 989, he would have been born no later than 984. This would make Eilmer in his 80s in 1066, with his attempt at flight—which occurred when he was "in his first youth"—likely falling between 1000 and 1010. However, it's an estimate that is based on a lot of assumption, according to James Aitcheson of the University of Leicester, who argues in a paper published in the journal Notes and Queries that Eilmer may have seen a different comet altogether in his youth—the comet of 1018. If so, he would have been born much later and the date of his flight would have occurred between the 1020s and 1040s.

The comet of 1018 would have been visible in the British isles for about two weeks in the fall, per Aitcheson, and Eilmer may have merely assumed that it was the same as his 1066 observation of Halley's comet, which left him "crouching in terror at the gleaming star." Aitcheson suggests Eilmer could have been born in the early 1010s, making him over 50 in 1066, technically still consistent with William of Malmesbury's description of Eilmer as being advanced in years.

This would also challenge recent speculation that Eilmer understood the periodicity of Halley's comet centuries before the late 17th century astronomer Edmund Halley. So should it really be Eilmer's Comet? Aitcheson thinks not. He acknowledges that Eilmer could have had access to historical records of comet sightings in Britain and Europe, and thus could have spotted the pattern of its cycle among all the other records of comet appearances.

But the only record we have of Eilmer is through William of Malmesbury, who doesn't say anything about whether Eilmer was an amateur astronomer. "Indeed, it is not clear that sky-watchers in the Early Middle Ages were able to tell one comet apart from another," Aitcheseon writes in his paper. A later date for Eilmer's birth also makes it just possible that the monk lived long enough (to age 90) to meet William in person and "directly passed on the story of his pioneering feats of aviation."

DOI: Notes and Queries, 2026. 10.1093/notesj/gjag066  (About DOIs).

Read full article

Comments

It’s probably worth noting before reading this piece that Switzerland enacted women’s suffrage in….1971.

About 9.1 million people live in Switzerland — approaching too many, for many Swiss people. On Sunday, the country will vote on whether to take measures to cap its growing population at 10 million.

The result could have huge implications for the Swiss economy — and for the composition of the country for decades to come.

If voters approve the initiative, it could reshape a rapidly aging country that depends heavily on talented foreign workers. Business leaders warn it could cause critical labor shortages over the next 15 years, when as many as half of Swiss workers are set to retire.

The right-wing party that proposed the cap, the Swiss People’s Party, predicts it will help clear traffic jams and soothe high housing costs, while preserving the country’s language traditions and agrarian roots.

Switzerland’s seven-member governing council, which includes two representatives from the People’s Party, officially opposes the measure. It commissioned a Swiss consulting firm, Demografik, to predict how a population cap would change the country. The firm modeled a scenario in which Switzerland’s population reached 10 million in 15 years, and its government was then required to make drastic moves to bring it back down.

The firm found those measures could have wrenching effects on Switzerland’s society and its economy, and on the country’s relationship with its neighbors in Europe. The measure’s sponsors reject those findings, claiming most migrants are not actually filling high-demand, specialist jobs.

Now, you might say, “oh well, the Swiss are like other Europeans and hate Muslims.” Well, yes, but that’s not really the issue here.

Based on historical trends, most of the people barred from moving to Switzerland would be other Europeans — as opposed to asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa or elsewhere, against whom many European countries saw a backlash. That’s the nature of Swiss migration: It has largely come from neighboring countries, like Italy and Germany.

Some residents complain migration has threatened their way of life by, for example, replacing the sounds of Swiss German in town squares with the “high German” that is spoken in Germany. And the Swiss People’s Party has complained that Muslim immigrants threaten “our Western values,” even though the number of newcomers from Muslim-majority countries is outstripped by those from other parts of Europe.

Switzerland currently has an agreement with the European Union that allows for free movement between Switzerland and its neighbors. The cap could force it to terminate that deal if the population exceeds 10 million, which would in turn endanger its other pacts with the E.U.

I mean, keeping the Prussians out of your pure German….now that’s some cultural conservatism.

The post How to Destroy Your Own Economy: Switzerland Version appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Most sun safety products for kids follow the same playbook: bright colors, cartoon prints, maybe a fun shape. They’re designed to appeal to parents, not children, which is probably why half of them end up abandoned in school bags by 10 a.m. Studio torinoko, a Japanese design studio, took a very different approach.

Their latest project is called Kage no Otomodachi, which translates to Shadow Friends, and it’s a children’s umbrella that projects illustrated characters onto the ground when held open in direct sunlight. That’s the entire premise, and it’s so elegantly simple that you wonder why no one thought of it before.

Designer: studio torinoko

The way it works is almost effortlessly clever. The umbrella’s canopy features illustrated cutouts that cast playful, character-like figures onto the pavement below. When a child opens it on a sunny day, a little shadow companion appears at their feet, inviting them to follow, chase, and walk alongside it. The child stays under the umbrella. The umbrella keeps them out of the sun. Nobody had to argue about it.

This is behavioral design doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: shifting behavior not through enforcement but through genuine appeal. The studio describes it as a move away from “forcing protective behaviors” toward creating the conditions that make children want to protect themselves. It’s a subtle but important distinction, and it matters a lot in the context of where we’re heading with summer temperatures globally. We’re not just dealing with a UV index inconvenience anymore. We’re dealing with heat that poses real risk, especially to kids who are outside walking to school or playing during peak sun hours.

What stands out most about this design is that it respects the child as a user, not just a passive recipient of adult decisions. Children have a near-universal fascination with shadows. They stomp on them, race them, try to escape them. Studio torinoko didn’t just understand that; they built an entire product philosophy around it. The result is an umbrella a kid will actually want to carry, which is arguably the hardest design problem of all.

The umbrella debuts in a single turquoise-blue colorway, chosen specifically for visibility and ease of recognition outdoors. It also features reflective details for added safety during rainy weather and evening walks, which shows the team was thinking beyond the obvious use case. It’s a considered, holistic design rather than a one-trick novelty.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I love how restrained it is. The magic isn’t in the umbrella itself but in what it casts below, which means the object doesn’t need to work hard visually. It doesn’t scream at you. It just quietly does something wonderful when the sun hits it right. That kind of understated design intelligence doesn’t come around often, especially in the children’s products market, where “louder” almost always wins.

Studio torinoko has also stated that they hope future production runs will expand into additional colors and further refinements, with a broader goal of normalizing parasol use among children in general. That cultural angle is worth noting. Parasol culture is well-established in Japan and parts of East Asia as a practical, everyday sun protection habit, but it remains far less common in Western markets for kids specifically. If Shadow Friends helps shift that, even slightly, it’s doing something well beyond its immediate design brief.

It’s rare to come across a product that feels genuinely joyful without being gimmicky. Shadow Friends manages that balance. It’s not trying to be a toy. It’s not trying to be a collectable. It’s trying to be a useful, protective everyday object that a child will actually form a relationship with, and the shadow play is the bridge that makes that relationship possible. If good design is about solving real problems beautifully, this is a near-perfect example. The problem is real, the solution is beautiful, and the mechanism is pure delight. That doesn’t happen as often as it should.

The post The Umbrella That Makes Kids Chase Their Own Shadow first appeared on Yanko Design.

Known for his puffy hair, oversized handlebar mustache and a love for puns, Gene Shalit joined Today in 1970 and became arts editor in 1973. He was a middle-of-the-road critic, known for his wit and intelligence.

(Image credit: Richard Drew)