A Fresh Guide to Florence With Fab 5 Freddy airs on 主播大秀 Two this Saturday. So we caught up with the man himself to give us a new look at the Renaissance.
Where did you get the idea for the show?
The director of A Fresh Guide To Florence, David Shulman, directed a film about my good friend Jean-Michel Basquiat called Basquiat: Rage To Riches. In that film, my scene was recreating something me and Jean-Michel would do called Museum Club. We'd go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and spend a day looking at art and talking about it.
From that film, which won a Bafta for best documentary, they came back and asked if there was something I'd want to do on the Renaissance. I said what I would want to do is look at the fact that there were black folks in the Renaissance at that time and there's very little history on it.
What was the most intersting thing you found out during filming?
One of the many intersting things was the fact that we got to go into this room that the public doesn't get to see. It's under the place where Michelangelo carved the Medici tombs.
He was caught up in a conflict. People were going to war against the Medici. Michelangelo was working with the people going to war with the Medici - the republicans. When the republicans lost, Michelangelo was scared. He found a secret room underneath the Medici tomb where he hid.
They discovered this room in the 70s, cleaned it up and found that while in this room, Michelangelo did all these drawings on the wall. We get to go into this room and see all this amazing drawings and I'm like, "Michelangelo was doing graffiti down here on these walls, baby!" it's so cool and it's something I'm going to get to show people.
And there's lots of other cool things we found out throughout this film, but you'll have to watch to see them all!
What do you think was the most interesting piece from the Renaissance?
One piece is the dome that Brunelleschi architected.
For hundreds of years it would rain in this basilica until they took a radical chance and let a goldsmith, Brunelleschi, come up with a plan for a dome, which was the largest dome in the world. We went up into this dome and went on top of it, so that was a pretty remarkable work.
When did you first get interested in Renaissance art?
I've been interested in art my whole life.
I was a kid that used to go to museums, that's the thing that made Jean-Michel and I friends, so that's a lifelong interest. But I didn't really know a great deal about the Renaissance until this process. So with the research that we did, and of course, being able to be in Florence and also in Venice, brought me close to the source of a lot of these masterworks.
I got a more comprehensive understanding of the Renaissance, which we put together in the Fresh Guide To Florence. I think people are going to be really excited to see us deal with this stuff in a fun, cool, educational way.
What's the one thing people should know about the Renaissance?
I think people should know that there was a diverse Florence, a diverse Venice, a diverse Italy.
Black folks lived, worked and walked the streets like they do now in many places in the world and historians have forgotten to share that fact with us. So we're bringing that fact to the people.
It's something that we should've known more about and this is the beginning of a broader understanding of the fact there was a diversity in the Renaissance that's not talked about.
A Fresh Guide to Florence With Fab 5 Freddy airing on 主播大秀 Two and 主播大秀 iPlayer this Saturday at 9pm.