Historian Answers Burning Questions About The Renaissance

in Art, History | March 6th, 2025

Cour­tesy of Wired, his­to­ri­an Alexan­der Bevilac­qua (Williams Col­lege) answers the inter­net’s burn­ing ques­tions about the cul­tur­al rebirth that came to be known as The Renais­sance. In 30+ min­utes, Bevilac­qua cov­ers an array of ques­tions, includ­ing: When did The Renais­sance begin? What exact­ly was the Renais­sance? Why do paint­ings like the Mona Lisa and The Birth of Venus remain so famous cen­turies lat­er? What did peo­ple’s diets con­sist of dur­ing The Renais­sance? How was their hygiene? How did Brunelleschi build a dome in Flo­rence that defied grav­i­ty? What is inside Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s note­books? And the ques­tions go on…

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

Michelangelo’s David: The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry Behind the Renais­sance Mar­ble Cre­ation

How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing?: An Expla­na­tion in 15 Min­utes

How to Build Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inge­nious Self-Sup­port­ing Bridge: Renais­sance Inno­va­tions You Can Still Enjoy Today

Renais­sance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the Songs Per­formed by Mod­ern Singers

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books Get Dig­i­tized: Where to Read the Renais­sance Man’s Man­u­scripts Online

Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illus­trat­ed Film

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How the Nazis Waged War on Modern Art: Inside the “Degenerate Art” Exhibition of 1937

in Art, History | March 4th, 2025

Before his fate­ful entry into pol­i­tics, Adolf Hitler want­ed to be an artist. Even to the most neu­tral imag­in­able observ­er, the known exam­ples of the esti­mat­ed 2,000 to 3,000 paint­ings and oth­er works of art he pro­duced in his ear­ly adult­hood would hard­ly evi­dence aston­ish­ing genius. They do show a cer­tain tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence, espe­cial­ly where build­ings are con­cerned. (Twice reject­ed from the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts Vien­na, the young Hitler was advised to apply instead to the School of Archi­tec­ture, a sub­ject for which he also pro­fessed a pas­sion.) But their lack of imag­i­na­tion and inter­est in human­i­ty were too plain to ignore.

Could Hitler’s fail­ure to gain entry to the art world explain any­thing about the cul­tur­al pol­i­cy of the Nazi Par­ty he went on to lead? Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured that pol­i­cy’s sin­gle defin­ing event: Die Ausstel­lung “Entartete Kun­st,” or the Degen­er­ate Art exhi­bi­tion, staged in 1937 at the Insti­tute of Archae­ol­o­gy in Munich’s Hof­garten.

Pre­sent­ing 650 con­fis­cat­ed works of art pur­port­ed to “insult Ger­man feel­ing, or destroy or con­fuse nat­ur­al form or sim­ply reveal an absence of ade­quate man­u­al and artis­tic skill,” it soon became a great hit, attract­ing one mil­lion atten­dees in its first six weeks.

That may not come as much of a sur­prise when you con­sid­er the artists whose work was on dis­play: Paul Klee, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Hen­ri Matisse, Pablo Picas­so, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an, Marc Cha­gall, and even Grant Wood, to name just a few. It seems that the Nazis could come up with noth­ing quite so fas­ci­nat­ing for the planned first Große Deutsche Kun­stausstel­lung, or “Great Ger­man Art Exhi­bi­tion,” whose col­lapse inspired Hitler’s chief pro­pa­gan­dist Joseph Goebbels to sug­gest putting on a show not of the work that the Nazis approved, but of the work they didn’t.

An admir­er of cer­tain Expres­sion­ists, Goebbels dis­played more cul­tur­al open-mind­ed­ness than the Führer, who prac­ti­cal­ly declared a war on mod­ern art itself. You can learn more about it from David Gru­bin’s doc­u­men­tary Degen­er­ate Art, which is avail­able to watch online. The Nazis con­fis­cat­ed more than 5,000 works of art, and even main­tained files on no few­er than 16,000 that they’d labeled “degen­er­ate,” a his­toric inven­to­ry that has been made avail­able to the pub­lic. Sur­pris­ing­ly, their black­list did not include the oeu­vre of Gus­tav Klimt, which they attempt­ed to use for their own ends. It could be that, deep down, Hitler, the failed artist, knew good art when he saw it — and that it just made him all the more resent­ful.

Relat­ed con­tent:

When the Nazis Declared War on Expres­sion­ist Art (1937)

The 16,000 Art­works the Nazis Cen­sored and Labeled “Degen­er­ate Art”: The Com­plete His­toric Inven­to­ry Is Now Online

How the Avant-Garde Art of Gus­tav Klimt Got Per­verse­ly Appro­pri­at­ed by the Nazis

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

When Ger­man Per­for­mance Artist Ulay Stole Hitler’s Favorite Paint­ing & Hung it in the Liv­ing Room of a Turk­ish Immi­grant Fam­i­ly (1976)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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What Makes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas One of the Most Fascinating Paintings in Art History

in Art, History | February 26th, 2025

Diego Velázquez paint­ed Las Meni­nas almost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scruti­ny ever since. If the pub­lic’s appetite to know more about it has dimin­ished over time, that cer­tain­ly isn’t reflect­ed in the view count of the analy­sis from YouTube chan­nel Rab­bit Hole above, which as of this writ­ing has crossed the 2.5 mil­lion mark. So has this video on Las Meni­nas from Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer. What ele­ment of this par­tic­u­lar paint­ing has stoked such fas­ci­na­tion, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion? Eas­i­er, per­haps, to ask what ele­ment has­n’t.

“Through the 36 years he worked for King Philip IV, Velázquez pro­duced dozens of paint­ings of the Span­ish roy­al fam­i­ly,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Rab­bit Hole video. But the large-scale Las Meni­nas is dif­fer­ent: “the paint­ing appears more like a snap­shot of dai­ly life than a typ­i­cal vis­age of roy­als pos­ing to be paint­ed.”

The fig­ures it depicts include Philip’s five-year-old daugh­ter Infan­ta Mar­garet There­sa and her entourage, as well as Velázquez him­self, at work on a paint­ing — which may be a por­trait of the king and queen, reflect­ed as they are on the mir­ror in the back wall, or per­haps the very image we’re look­ing at. Or could we pos­si­bly be Philip and Mar­i­ana our­selves?

On the rear­most plane of Las Meni­nas stands the queen’s cham­ber­lain Don José Nieto Velázquez (pos­si­bly a rela­tion of the artist), on whom it can hard­ly be a coin­ci­dence that all of the paint­ing’s lines con­verge, like a van­ish­ing point on the hori­zon. Diego Velázquez’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion of him­self bears an even more con­spic­u­ous detail: the knight­hood-sym­bol­iz­ing red cross called the Order of San­ti­a­go. Born a com­mon­er, Velázquez worked for most of his life in close prox­im­i­ty to the roy­als, and seems to have made no big secret of his aspi­ra­tions to join their ranks. Pre­sum­ably, the Order of San­ti­a­go was added after the paint­ing was com­plete, since Las Meni­nas is dat­ed to 1656, but Velázquez was­n’t final­ly knight­ed until 1659, close to the end of his life.

Dif­fer­ent the­o­ries exist to explain who exact­ly added that red cross to the paint­ing, as cov­ered by YouTu­ber-gal­lerist James Payne in the Great Art Explained video just above. Like most works of art that have endured through the cen­turies, Las Meni­nas has its unsolv­able his­tor­i­cal mys­ter­ies, despite its unusu­al­ly well-doc­u­ment­ed cre­ation. But for seri­ous art enthu­si­asts, the most com­pelling ques­tion remains that of just how Velázquez pulled it all off. “Las Meni­nas, with all its splen­did effects, is a vig­or­ous argu­ment for the virtue of paint­ing,” says Puschak. “This gets at the heart of the mir­ror, the van­ish­ing point, and the mul­ti­ple cen­ters of focus. ‘See what my art can do,’ Velázquez is say­ing to the view­er” — whether that view­er is King Philip, or some­one across the world near­ly four cen­turies lat­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Short Intro­duc­tion to Car­avag­gio, the Mas­ter Of Light

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

The Pra­do Muse­um Cre­ates the First Art Exhi­bi­tion for the Visu­al­ly Impaired, Using 3D Print­ing

Sal­vador Dalí Sketch­es Five Span­ish Immor­tals: Cer­vantes, Don Quixote, El Cid, El Gre­co & Velázquez

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Architectural History of the Louvre: 800 Years in Three Minutes

in Architecture, History | February 20th, 2025

Set­ting aside just one day for the Lou­vre is a clas­sic first-time Paris vis­i­tor’s mis­take. The place is sim­ply too big to com­pre­hend on one vis­it, or indeed on ten vis­its. To grow so vast has tak­en eight cen­turies, a process explained in under three min­utes by the offi­cial video ani­mat­ed above. First con­struct­ed around the turn of the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry as a defen­sive fortress, it was con­vert­ed into a roy­al res­i­dence a cen­tu­ry and a half lat­er. It gained its first mod­ern wing in 1559, under Hen­ri II; lat­er, his wid­ow Cather­ine de’ Medici com­mis­sioned the Tui­leries palace and gar­dens, which Hen­ri IV had joined up to the Lou­vre with the Grande Galerie in 1610.

In the sev­en­teen-tens, Louis XVI com­plet­ed the Cour Car­rée, the Lou­vre’s main court­yard, before decamp­ing to Ver­sailles. It was only dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, toward the end of that cen­tu­ry, that the Nation­al Assem­bly declared it a muse­um.

The project of unit­ing it into an archi­tec­tur­al whole con­tin­ued under Napoleon I and III, the lat­ter of whom final­ly com­plet­ed it (and in the process dou­bled its size). The Tui­leries Palace was torched dur­ing the unpleas­ant­ness over the Paris Com­mune, but the rest of the Lou­vre sur­vived. Since then, its most notable alter­ation has been the addi­tion of I. M. Pei’s glass pyra­mid in 1989.

The pyra­mid may still have an air of con­tro­ver­sy these three and a half decades lat­er, but you can hard­ly deny that it at least improves upon the Cour Car­rée’s years as a park­ing lot. It stands, in any case, as just one of the count­less fea­tures that make the Lou­vre an archi­tec­tur­al palimpsest of French his­to­ry prac­ti­cal­ly as com­pelling as the col­lec­tion of art it con­tains. (Fran­coph­o­nes can learn much more about it from the longer-form doc­u­men­taries post­ed by Des Racines et des Ailes and Notre His­toire.) And how did I approach this most famous of all French insti­tu­tions on my own first trip to Paris, you ask? By not going at all. On my next trip to Paris, how­ev­er, I plan to go nowhere else.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Louvre’s Entire Col­lec­tion Goes Online: View and Down­load 480,00 Works of Art

A 3D Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Paris: Take a Visu­al Jour­ney from Ancient Times to 1900

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

Take Immer­sive Vir­tu­al Tours of the World’s Great Muse­ums: The Lou­vre, Her­mitage, Van Gogh Muse­um & Much More

Japan­ese Guid­ed Tours of the Lou­vre, Ver­sailles, the Marais & Oth­er Famous French Places (Eng­lish Sub­ti­tles Includ­ed)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney

in Animation, Art, History | February 19th, 2025

At a time when much of ani­ma­tion was con­sumed with lit­tle anthro­po­mor­phized ani­mals sport­ing white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. His work is all about danc­ing geo­met­ric shapes and abstract forms spin­ning around a flat fea­ture­less back­ground. Think of a Mon­dri­an or Male­vich paint­ing that moves, often in time to the music. Fischinger’s movies have a mes­mer­iz­ing ele­gance to them. Check out his 1938 short An Opti­cal Poem above. Cir­cles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hun­gar­i­an Rhap­sody. This is, of course, well before the days of dig­i­tal. While it might be rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple to manip­u­late a shape in a com­put­er, Fischinger’s tech­nique was decid­ed­ly more low tech. Using bits of paper and fish­ing line, he indi­vid­u­al­ly pho­tographed each frame, some­how doing it all in sync with Liszt’s com­po­si­tion. Think of the hours of mind-numb­ing work that must have entailed.

(Note: The copy of the film above has become fad­ed, dis­tort­ing some of the orig­i­nal vibrant col­ors used in Fischinger’s films. Nonethe­less it gives you a taste of his cre­ative work–of how he mix­es ani­ma­tion with music. The clips below give you a more accu­rate sense of Fischinger’s orig­i­nal col­ors.)

Born in 1900 near Frank­furt, Fischinger trained as a musi­cian and an archi­tect before dis­cov­er­ing film. In the 1930s, he moved to Berlin and start­ed pro­duc­ing more and more abstract ani­ma­tions that ran before fea­ture films. They proved to be pop­u­lar too, at least until the Nation­al Social­ists came to pow­er. The Nazis were some of the most fanat­i­cal art crit­ics of the 20th Cen­tu­ry, and they hat­ed any­thing non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al. The likes of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokosch­ka and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky among oth­ers were writ­ten off as “degen­er­ate.” (By stark con­trast, the CIA report­ed­ly loved Abstract Expres­sion­ism, but that’s a dif­fer­ent sto­ry.) Fischinger fled Ger­many in 1936 for the sun and glam­our of Hol­ly­wood.

The prob­lem was that Hol­ly­wood was real­ly not ready for Fischinger. Pro­duc­ers saw the obvi­ous tal­ent in his work, and they feared that it was too ahead of its time for broad audi­ences. “[Fischinger] was going in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion than any oth­er ani­ma­tor at the time,” said famed graph­ic design­er Chip Kidd in an inter­view with NPR. “He was real­ly explor­ing abstract pat­terns, but with a pur­pose to them — pio­neer­ing what tech­ni­cal­ly is the music video.”

Fischinger’s most wide­ly seen Amer­i­can work was his short con­tri­bu­tion to Walt Disney’s Fan­ta­sia. Fischinger cre­at­ed con­cept draw­ings for Fan­ta­sia, but most were not used, and only one short scene fea­tures his actu­al draw­ings. “The film is not real­ly my work,” he lat­er recalled. “Rather, it is the most inartis­tic prod­uct of a fac­to­ry. …One thing I def­i­nite­ly found out: that no true work of art can be made with that pro­ce­dure used in the Dis­ney stu­dio.” Fischinger didn’t work with Dis­ney again and instead retreat­ed into the art world.

There he found admir­ers who were recep­tive to his vision. John Cage, for one, con­sid­ered the Ger­man animator’s exper­i­ments to be a major influ­ence on his own work. Cage recalled his first meet­ing with Fischinger in an inter­view with Daniel Charles in 1968.

One day I was intro­duced to Oscar Fischinger who made abstract films quite pre­cise­ly artic­u­lat­ed on pieces of tra­di­tion­al music. When I was intro­duced to him, he began to talk with me about the spir­it, which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to lib­er­ate that spir­it is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to per­cus­sion.

You can find excerpts of oth­er Fischinger films over at Vimeo.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Sep­tem­ber, 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Avant-Garde Ani­mat­ed Films of Wal­ter Ruttmann, Still Strik­ing­ly Fresh a Cen­tu­ry Lat­er (1921–1925)

Night on Bald Moun­tain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pin­screen Ani­ma­tion Based on Mussorgsky’s Mas­ter­piece (1933)

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

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Why Are the Names of British Towns & Cities So Hard to Pronounce?: A Humorous But Informative Primer

in History, Language, Travel | February 18th, 2025

When they make their first transocean­ic voy­age, more than a few Amer­i­cans choose to go to Eng­land, on the assump­tion that, what­ev­er cul­ture shock they might expe­ri­ence, at least none of the dif­fi­cul­ties will be lin­guis­tic. Only when it’s too late do they dis­cov­er the true mean­ing of the old line about being sep­a­rat­ed by a com­mon lan­guage. Take place names, not just in Eng­land but even more so across the whole of Great Britain. How would you pro­nounce, for instance, Beaulieu, Ramp­isham, Mouse­hole, Tow­ces­ter, Gotham, Quern­more, Alnwick, or Frome?

There’s a good chance that you got most of those wrong, even if you’re not Amer­i­can. But as explained in the Map Men video above, bona fide Brits also have trou­ble with some of them: a few years ago, the decep­tive­ly straight­for­ward-look­ing Frome came out on top of a domes­tic sur­vey of the most mis­pro­nounced names. If you’re keen on mak­ing your expe­ri­ence in Great Britain some­what less embar­rass­ing, what­ev­er your nation­al­i­ty, the Map Men have put togeth­er a humor­ous guide to the rules of “prop­er” place-name pro­nun­ci­a­tion — such as they exist — as well as an expla­na­tion of the his­tor­i­cal fac­tors that orig­i­nal­ly made it so coun­ter­in­tu­itive.

The evo­lu­tion of the Eng­lish lan­guage itself has some­thing to do with it, involv­ing as it does “a base of Ger­man­ic Anglo-Sax­on,” a “healthy dash of Old Norse,” a “huge dol­lop of Nor­man French,” and “just a fair­ly detectable hint of Celtic.” British place names reflect its his­to­ry of set­tle­ment and inva­sion, the old­est of them being Celtic in ori­gin (the dread­ed Frome, for exam­ple), fol­lowed by Latin, then Ger­man­ic Anglo-Sax­on (result­ing in cities with names like Nor­wich, whose silent W I nev­er seem to pro­nounce silent­ly enough to sat­is­fy an Eng­lish­man), then Norse.

After cen­turies and cen­turies of sub­se­quent shifts in pro­nun­ci­a­tion with­out cor­re­spond­ing changes in spelling, you arrive in a coun­try “lit­tered with pho­net­ic boo­by traps.” It could all seem like a reflec­tion of the char­ac­ter­is­tic British anti-log­ic diag­nosed, not with­out a note of pride, by George Orwell. But trav­el­ing Amer­i­cans gassed up on their per­cep­tions of their own rel­a­tive prac­ti­cal­i­ty should take a long, hard look at a map of the Unit­ed States some time. Hav­ing grown up in Wash­ing­ton State, I ask this: who among you dares to pro­nounce the names of towns like Marysville, Puyallup, Yaki­ma, or Sequim?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wel­come to Llan­fair­p­wll­gwyn­gyll­gogerych­wyrn­drob­wl­l­l­lan­tysil­i­o­gogogoc, the Town with the Longest Name in Europe

The Growth of Lon­don, from the Romans to the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Visu­al­ized in a Time-Lapse Ani­mat­ed Map

How Lon­dini­um Became Lon­don, Lute­tia Became Paris, and Oth­er Roman Cities Got Their Mod­ern Names

Hear the Evo­lu­tion of the Lon­don Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

The Entire His­to­ry of the British Isles Ani­mat­ed: 42,000 BCE to Today

The Atlas of True Names Restores Mod­ern Cities to Their Mid­dle Earth-ish Roots

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

in History, Music, Technology | February 13th, 2025

In the cred­its of Phil Collins’ No Jack­et Required appears the dis­claimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryp­tic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buy­ers, tech­nol­o­gy-mind­ed musi­cians would’ve got it. In the half-decades since its intro­duc­tion, the Fairlight Com­put­er Musi­cal Instru­ment, or CMI, had reshaped the sound of pop music — or at least the pop music cre­at­ed by acts who could afford one. The device may have cost as much as a house, but for those who under­stood the poten­tial of play­ing and manip­u­lat­ing the sounds of real-life instru­ments (or of any­thing else besides) dig­i­tal­ly, mon­ey was no object.

The his­to­ry of the Fairlight CMI is told in the video above from the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald and The Age, incor­po­rat­ing inter­views from its Aus­tralian inven­tors Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. Accord­ing to Ryrie, No Jack­et Required actu­al­ly did use the Fairlight, in the sense that one of its musi­cians sam­pled a sound from the Fairlight’s library. To musi­cians, using the tech­nol­o­gy not yet wide­ly known as dig­i­tal sam­pling would have felt like mag­ic; to lis­ten­ers, it meant a whole range of sounds they’d nev­er heard before, or at least nev­er used in that way. Take the “orches­tra hit” orig­i­nal­ly sam­pled from a record of Stravin­sky’s The Fire­bird (and whose sto­ry is told in the Vox video just above), which soon became prac­ti­cal­ly inescapable.

We might call the orches­tra hit the Fairlight’s “killer app,” though its breathy, faint­ly vocal sam­ple known as “ARR1” also saw a lot of action across gen­res. A desire for those par­tic­u­lar effects brought a lot of musi­cians and pro­duc­ers onto the band­wag­on through­out the eight­ies, but it was the ear­ly adopters who used the Fairlight most cre­ative­ly. The ear­li­est among them was Peter Gabriel, who appears in the clip from the French doc­u­men­tary above gath­er­ing sounds to sam­ple, blow­ing wind through pipes and smash­ing up tele­vi­sions in a junk­yard. Kate Bush embraced the Fairlight with a spe­cial fer­vor, using not just its sam­pling capa­bil­i­ties but also its ground­break­ing sequenc­ing soft­ware (includ­ed from the Series II onward) to cre­ate her 1985 hit “Run­ning Up That Hill,” which made a sur­prise return to pop­u­lar­i­ty just a few years ago.

The Fairlight’s high-pro­file Amer­i­can users includ­ed Ste­vie Won­der, Todd Rund­gren, and Her­bie Han­cock, who demon­strates his own mod­el along­side the late Quin­cy Jones in the doc­u­men­tary clip above. With its green-on-black mon­i­tor, its gigan­tic flop­py disks, and its futur­is­tic-look­ing “light pen” (as nat­ur­al a point­ing device as any in an era when most of human­i­ty had nev­er laid eyes on a mouse), it resem­bles less a musi­cal instru­ment than an ear­ly per­son­al com­put­er with a piano key­board attached. It had its cum­ber­some qual­i­ties, and some leaned rather too heav­i­ly on its packed-in sounds, but as Han­cock points out, a tool is a tool, and it’s all down to the human being in con­trol to get pleas­ing results out of it: “It does­n’t plug itself in. It does­n’t pro­gram itself… yet.” To which the always-pre­scient Jones adds: “It’s on the way, though.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Her­bie Han­cock Demo a Fairlight CMI Syn­the­siz­er on Sesame Street (1983)

How the Yama­ha DX7 Dig­i­tal Syn­the­siz­er Defined the Sound of 1980s Music

Thomas Dol­by Explains How a Syn­the­siz­er Works on a Jim Hen­son Kids Show (1989)

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Every­thing Thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Syn­the­siz­er: A Vin­tage Three-Hour Crash Course

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavern

in Food & Drink, History | February 12th, 2025

At least since The Can­ter­bury Tales, the set­ting of the medieval tav­ern has held out the promise of adven­ture. For their cus­tomer base dur­ing the actu­al Mid­dle Ages, how­ev­er, they had more util­i­tar­i­an virtues. “If you ever find your­self in the late medieval peri­od, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d bet­ter find your­self an inn, tav­ern, or ale­house,” says Tast­ing His­to­ry host Max Miller in the video above. The dif­fer­ences between them had to do with qual­i­ty: the tav­erns were nicer than the ale­hous­es, and the inns were nicer than the tav­erns, hav­ing begun as full-ser­vice estab­lish­ments where cus­tomers could stay the night.

As for what inn‑, tavern‑, or ale­house-goers would actu­al­ly con­sume, Miller men­tions that the local avail­abil­i­ty of ingre­di­ents would always be a fac­tor. “You might just get a veg­etable potage; in some places it would just be beans and cab­bage.”

Else­where, though, it could be “a fish stew, or some­thing with real­ly qual­i­ty meat in it.” For the recipe of the episode — this being a cook­ing show, after all — Miller choos­es a com­mon medieval meat stew called buke­nade or bok­nade. The actu­al instruc­tions he reads con­tain words reveal­ing of their time peri­od: the Bib­li­cal sound­ing smyte for cut, for instance, or eyroun, the Mid­dle Eng­lish term that ulti­mate­ly lost favor to eggs.

The cus­tomers of tav­erns would orig­i­nal­ly have drunk wine, which in Eng­land was import­ed from France at some expense. As they grew more pop­u­lar, these busi­ness­es diver­si­fied their menus, offer­ing “cider from apples and per­ry from pears,” as well as the pre­mi­um option of mead made with hon­ey. Ale­hous­es, as their name would sug­gest, began as pri­vate homes whose wives sold ale, at least the excess that the fam­i­ly itself could­n’t drink. How­ev­er infor­mal they sound, they were still sub­ject to the same reg­u­la­tions as oth­er drink­ing spots, and alewives found to be sell­ing an infe­ri­or prod­uct were sub­ject to the same kind of pub­lic humil­i­a­tions inflict­ed upon any medieval mis­cre­ant — the likes of whom we might rec­og­nize from any num­ber of the high-fan­ta­sy tales we read today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Medieval Tav­erns: Learn the His­to­ry of These Rough-and-Tum­ble Ances­tors of the Mod­ern Pub

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

How to Make Ancient Mesopotami­an Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brew­ing Method Put to the Test

The Entire Man­u­script Col­lec­tion of Geof­frey Chaucer Gets Dig­i­tized: A New Archive Fea­tures 25,000 Images of The Can­ter­bury Tales & Oth­er Illus­trat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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