Nouvelles Nouvelles Podcast 20: Peter Weller on Italian Renaissance Art

Interviewer: Di Wang and Natalie Cline

Audio edited by Di Wang

Background music: Falconieri's Folias, performed by the Early Interval Ensemble (Thanks Early Interval Ensemble for permission to use this recording!)

Time: September 18, 2026

Di:

My name is Di Wang. I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of History and a graduate research associate for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies here at The Ohio State University. I'm here with Natalie Cline, an undergraduate student majoring in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Italian Studies. We are joined today by Dr. Peter Weller. Dr. Peter Weller is an Italian Renaissance art historian, actor and director. He received his PhD from UCLA in the History of Art with a specialization in Italian Renaissance art. He is also known as the star of the films Robocop and Robocop 2, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and Naked Lunch. His other appearances include Star Trek Into Darkness, and the TV series Dexter and 24. Dr. Weller also directed numerous episodes of Sons of Anarchy, Longmire and Hawaii Five-O.  

Dr. Weller recently published Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting. In this volume, Peter Weller challenges the popular notion that De Pictura's compendium on lines, points, mathematics, composition, narrative and portraiture is primarily the result of Alberti's return to Florence and his short exposure to its visual art. Weller argues that Rome, Padua, Bologna and Northern Europe, environments where Alberti studied, worked and lived during exile, empowered his paramount intellectual artistic gift. Scrutiny of Alberti's evolution before Florence illuminates how this original Renaissance man merged the two most conspicuous cultural developments of early modern Italy, visual art and humanism, to create De Pictura, our first modern book on painting. Dr. Weller, thank you so much for joining us. 

Dr. Weller: 

Di, that was really well put. It actually makes me want to go read my book again. When one reads a book, when one writes a book, and it's part of your dissertation and then you have to sell it. Once you sell it, you have to basically rewrite it for a particular sort of commercial entity as well as academic, and make it so that people want to buy it  - and not just the art history professors. You get tired of it. You don't want to read anything about Alberti. Friends will say, hey I just found this article on Alberti. And I go like, I don't care, man. Give me something on Paolo Uccello or somebody.  

But then when you just read that, there are certain things you pointed out that invigorated me as an adult about the scholastic move, the academic idea, the founding of what people say is true, what's not true. And that's what made me elope, if you will, out of the standard path of what Alberti represented to most people into my own ideas. And by the way, the thing of it is that the idea that Alberti learned all this stuff way before he returned to Florence or the family exile was lifted and then put it together is not new, it's been around. And I accosted several professors while I was getting my master's degree in Florence. And if I could say something aside about Florence...you know, Florence I have an ambivalence about because Florentines are about Florentines. You know, the Renaissance began, developed, and ended in Florence. I say, well, excuse me, Dante, you guys burned down his house and he ran off to Ravenna.   

So a lot of stuff happened in other places. Giotto's major feat is not in Florence. When I would ask professors this, because I'm a Johnny-come-lately to it  - I came to the Renaissance as an adult  - I say, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. He must have learned something. Well, why don't we teach that? I mean, why doesn't the academic realm deliver unto the student who's in Florence that the number one Renaissance man, Leon Battista Alberti, did not formulate all this stuff in Florence? And no one gave me a good answer.   

And finally, a really couple of hit people, Gary Radke and Rab Hatfield from Syracuse, where I was studying, after I think I was perturbing them enough, they said, you know, you got to go...it's Padua, man, look to Padua. I looked to Padua for everything. I looked to Padua for the beginning of pictorial ideas, for movies, for...and by the way, it's a movie guy that told me to go to Padua: Vittorio Storaro, possibly the OG color cinematographer of the world. Apocalypse Now, Last Emperor, Sheltering Sky, Reds, Last Tango in Paris. This is Vittorio. And Vittorio basically told me, if you don't go to Padua and you don't look at Giotto in Padua, you don't have any context at all for any of it, for any Renaissance or nothing.

I got to give a paper tomorrow about a guy who stood in front of Lee Krasner...woodcut painting  - it's sort of watercolor on paper, but it's cut out of wood. And I was standing with him and he was teaching. He said, I just got finished teaching a class on Giotto. I said, what did Giotto give you? I'm going to start with this thing tomorrow. And he said, not much. And I said, what do you mean, not much? He said, well, it's not my thing. He said, I know everybody talks about how narrative-like it is, how movie-like he is, how he's the granddaddy of realism. And I said to him  - and he's a pretty noted dude in contemporary art  - I said, have you ever gone to Padua and stood in the Capella Scrovegni? Because I'm giving a paper at RSA, Renaissance Society of America, in February  - thank you, Daniel Mays  - about how you cannot, one cannot...and this is what angers me. You can come to OSU all you want or UCLA all you want and talk until it blows out your ears, but you're not going to get it until you stand in front of that painting, until you stand in front of that art.  

I'm doing a paper on Antonello. He's my favorite guy, but there's a thing about whether or not this, you know, the unknown sailor with the smile is smiling or smirking or whatever. And I go, you know what, man, I'm not going to get this unless I go to Cefalù and I go to that museum and I stand in front of that thing for about an hour and absorb it and see what it says to me. Yeah, you can talk about anything you want, about the makeup of art or the construction of art or the deferential articles of art  - lines, points, whatever, la la la  - but you're not going to get it until you stand in front of it. That's my two cents.  

You're not going to get the Mona Lisa, man, until you stand in front of the Mona Lisa. People talk, if you go to Egypt and you see, and you go to Abu Simbel and see Rameses of Tum, you can look at all the pictures of the world. Until you stand there, it's not going to blow your mind. And so that's my thing with Padua, when I'm talking to a guy who says, I don't get it. Okay, you're not going to get it. You're not going to get it out of a book. You're going to get a sense of it and maybe the facility to teach parts of it and so forth, but you're not going to get it until you go there and you stand in front of it and absorb it. Because it's Antonello. Is he drawing and painting this thing? But by the way, I think Antonello is the forerunner. It's not my idea of Leonardo and all sorts of people because of his veneer and his whole thing about finishing after the painting is 5 times instead of 15 times. This is the whole thing about Raffaello, the paper I just did. But I look at Antonello da Messina. People say, Antonello da Messina, I don't know who he is. Okay, he is maybe the granddaddy of Raffaello and Leonardo and modern portrait painting.   

But man, when you stand in front of Antonello, when you stand in front of the Virgin  - and that's in Palermo  - and you look at that, it's only like one foot by one-and-a-half feet. You look at the detail of that. If you go to London and you see St. Jerome in his study, it's a different deal. It's a different deal. So when I went to Padua and I stood in front of this, I think, oh no...Alberti, Alberti, what was going on in this cappella? Well, it was free. You could go in anytime you want. And he's studying with the number one humanist in the world, Gasparino Barzizza. He's studying all the way through high school and middle school with this guy. And this guy says in his notes, Gasparino Barzizza says, take your students on field trips. Take them out to see art. He's the first guy to really write that down. So we're saying that this guy did not take Alberti out to see Giotto in the Capella Scrovegni? Yeah, he did. And you can bet it blew his mind. And you can also bet that it, like, sent him on the way, like it sends so many people on the way, like it sent me on the way. 

Natalie: 

We should also mention that Dr. Weller is wearing a Naked Lunch shirt, which is incredible. 

Dr. Weller: 

Yeah, I wore it just for you guys. 

Natalie: 

Thank you. 

Dr. Weller: 

And for Judy Davis also. 

Natalie: 

I was curious because in prior interviews, when  - you just touched on this a little bit  - you discussed how, with the history of design, how it connects cinematography to the frescoes of Giotto. I was curious if you could elaborate a little more about your reaction seeing it, how that influenced you in your studies and in filmmaking? Did you have a similar reaction that you think Alberti had, seeing the kind of...the narrative power of it?

Dr. Weller: 

Once Vittorio Storaro embarrassed me literally, at a film festival in Japan, in Kyoto, to go there. He said, if you don't go see Giotto, then you have no context. You can't really talk about art. You can just talk about ideas, but it's like Ernst Gombrich said, you know, it's not the art, it's the artist, and if you're not experiencing the artist, then you're never going to get the art. So I went there eight months later, I think it was 1991, with my friend Brian Hamill, who is arguably one of the greatest movie poster photographers ever. He photographed De Niro for Raging Bull, and Redford in The Natural, and the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan  - he's an amazing photographer and a dear friend.

We went to that place when you could still go in there with a cigar and a cappuccino. Now it's all hermetically sealed, and you have to wait until it's been restored. So we went in there, and the second we walked in...you know, it's only about 20 yards long. And not only that, they've got Giovanni Pisano statues at the end of it that nobody pays attention to because they're just so mind-blown by Giotto. Giovanni Pisano and his daddy-o, Nicola Pisano, are two of my favorites, and I think they're forerunners of the Renaissance. But when you walk into that place, you look at the book. Ok, it's the story of Mary. And then you walk around the story of Mary, and then there's the story of Jesus  - you know, you've got the Annunciation and the story of Jesus. So you think, oh, big deal, I've seen this in so many churches. No, you haven't. You haven't. This is the one. This is the one where a guy, as Vittorio said, in one-by-one foot frames like a movie, tells you a narrative of depth, light, feeling, and composition. And this is before single-point perspective, you know. This guy's guessing at it. Listen, every time I go, and I've probably been there about 45 times, I see something new. 

I go every December 24th with a bunch of people who spend every Christmas in Venice. We all get on a train and go there. This last year, I took 30 people there to see it. One of my friends had seen it about five times. At the Lamentation, everybody looks at Mary crying over the dead body of Christ. It's a beautiful color scheme, and everybody in contortion with sadness over his death. But my friend Luke Henderson said, look at the angels, and the individuality of these tiny angels. And actually he's foreshortening, with angels flying at you, angels twisting, angels in sadness, angels in joy, and angels in...little, bitty things. I had never really looked at the angels.

I've been looking at this thing for I don't know how many decades, and somebody's got to point something out to me all the time. My kid, who's now 15, two years ago pointed out, that before the Annunciation, there's the shadow of death, the devil, which I'd never seen. He said, is that the devil, Dad? I said, man, I've missed it again. So people listening to this who have been there may think, well, why didn't you see it? Because I go there, and I look at it, and I study it, and I've written about it, then I go there again, and there are things one misses. One misses the significance of the monochromatic ideals underneath it, justice and so forth. So I've got to keep going.

Di: 

Natalie this summer also went on a study abroad trip to Italy.

Dr. Weller: 

Did you see it? 

Natalie:

I didn't see it. I was in Siena.

Dr. Weller:

Yes, I forgive you. 

Natalie: 

What's your opinion on Siena? 

Dr. Weller: 

No, I love Siena. I go to the Palio, and I'm a guest of the Drago Contrada, yeah. 

Natalie: 

Oh, really? Okay, okay. They didn't win this year.

Dr. Weller: 

No. So, you went to Siena, but you didn't go to Padua? 

Natalie: 

No, unfortunately. 

Dr. Weller: 

How long did you stay in Siena? 

Natalie: 

I was there for six weeks. I did Florence and Rome. I should have gone to some more smaller cities, I think, but...

Dr. Weller: 

Yeah, you cannot go to Italy and say you're going to look at art, nowadays in my mind, without saying I'm going to Padua. When I send people there, people have no interest in art. People are just tourists and friends of mine. Where should I go? I say, go see this. They come back mind-blown by standing in that room. You can't conceive of it until you're there  - like I said, if you're in front of it. So that's your homework. 

Natalie: 

Okay. 

Dr. Weller: 

You ain't going back to Italy. If you do, if you go back to Italy without seeing it again, don't ever call me this number again. 

Natalie:

I promise. I will go. 

Di: 

Could you tell us more about your experience discussing Renaissance art with a broader audience through your documentaries and social media platforms? 

Dr. Weller: 

Yes, I can. One of the things I'm going to talk about tomorrow  - and I've changed it several times, so you're going to get yet another version of it  - but at RSA, Renaissance Society of America, some years ago  - I think it was in St. Louis, though I'm not certain  - there was a thing about why the Renaissance matters. Here's the problem with academia and art history: it's that you can jump into contemporary and modern art without ever touching the Renaissance now. It didn't use to be you couldn't. It used to be, you had to study medieval "this," antique "this," and Renaissance "this" before you could enter into your field of modern, postmodern, contemporary, or whatever.

Nowadays...bang, they jump in, they don't care. And by "they," I mean students, I mean just like the guy standing in front of the Lee Krasner. Lee Krasner was married to Jackson Pollock. She was the first woman indemnified in the Museum of Modern Art  - a cornerstone. But to study Lee Krasner's Cubist lines, you've got to go back to Cézanne, and Cézanne was looking at Piero della Francesca. Cézanne was the guy who said, wait a minute, this guy is about mathematics. He's about shape, and shape is nature, whether it's a leaf, a tree, or whatever  - a rock. And that is God, essentially, is what Piero was talking about. So, if I sound angry, it's because I meet so many contemporary people who have no clue about or interest in it, yet everything they love about Mondrian goes back to Piero della Francesca and before that.

So I've got to bring up this thing. When I was going to give this paper, I thought, okay, here's the most beautiful thing the Renaissance gives us: modern film. That's what it is. So I do a talk  - and I just want to say that it's an entertainment, it's not a lecture...it's not a classroom thing. It's basically an entertainment about the influence of Renaissance art on modern film. So many people like Vittorio and other cinematographers, other great directors - I mean, the people who influenced me  - were looking at art, looking at paintings, and understanding paintings for framing. I mean, Federico Fellini, when he was at work, we'd buy art magazines or fashion magazines and look at framing, just for ideas. So the best thing that can happen in modern media is that, if you walk backwards from modern film into the Renaissance, you've done yourself a big favor.

Look, I'm going to be frank. I was turned on to art  - contemporary art, modern art  - by the wonderful, gorgeous, and smart Ali MacGraw, who was a famous movie star in the '60s and '70s, but most people don't know she has a degree from Wellesley in design and her running buddies were the mavens and dozens, the literati and glitterati of New York. She threw me headfirst into the biggest Picasso exhibit ever, when the Guernica was going to Spain for the first time, because Picasso had wanted it to go to Spain if Spain ever became a democracy. 

So, they had five floors of Picasso, around 1981 or 1982  - I think it was 1981. And I remember thinking, I don't want to look at this thing. Picasso? A bunch of curlicue nonsense. You see, I didn't know the longevity of Picasso. I didn't know the origin of Picasso. So when she takes me to see Picasso by the hand, you could see Picasso's figurative realism that leads into his Blue Period, etc. etc. etc., and onward into Cubism, and who he's looking at to get into that, and where that goes into abstract Cubism. And you think, oh my gosh  - oh, wait: the guy could actually draw! It wasn't just like...they weren't a bunch of sticks.

Once you get into that, then you want to go, okay, where do I go next? And so you go backwards from Picasso. From Picasso you go into Cézanne, and then you go to the Neo-Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Impressionists, and Expressionists, etc. etc. etc. You go back to the French school, Rococo. It's fantastic. My favorite guy is Corot, but then you go back farther than that and get into the Baroque, or post-Baroque, to where Caravaggio leads into Rembrandt. And then you keep going before that, and you hit the Renaissance. But the Renaissance, man, ain't just art. It's poetry, politics, theater, land management, money, and intellectual history. And I thought, that's just too much, man. I'm not doing this. I'm not diving into the Renaissance. I might look at a Raffaello or two, but I'm not studying the Renaissance. And then I did. So, there you go. Tomorrow night, I'm going to talk about Giotto to Spider-Man, all right? You're just nodding your head like, is he out of his freakin' mind?

Natalie: 

No! I'm trying to think of a good question to ask you because you have so many interesting perspectives and thoughts, and I'd like to ask more about everything you're saying, but I want to choose something good.

Dr. Weller:

Go ahead!

Natalie:

Well, I guess you started out talking about preservation, and Italy kind of famously does pretty well with that. 

Dr. Weller: 

Well, they do it better. Let me put it that way. And we have a lot to thank the Japanese for because the Japanese have come in and thrown a lot of money at the preservation of Italy, particularly antique Italy. 

Natalie: 

Okay. I was just curious because I don't know if you're interested in manuscripts at all, but OSU has a kind of famous scandal of someone who I believe worked here who cut up manuscripts and sold them.

Dr. Weller: 

Who was that guy? 

Natalie: 

Otto Ege.

Dr. Weller: 

Yes! When was that, the 70s? 

Natalie:

I believe earlier. I think even, maybe even '20s, 1920s. But his purpose was kind of noble because he wanted...he sold them to public libraries in small towns, and he wanted more people to be able to interact directly with manuscripts. But, of course, the idea of cutting them up is very, very controversial. So, yeah, I was just curious if you're interested in manuscripts at all.

Dr. Weller: 

I'm interested in manuscript illustration and illumination and did a talk on Giotto as a matter of fact for the Getty some years ago, narrated the walkthrough for a big thing my friend Christine Sciacca did there. And so manuscript illumination is amazing to me because it is the only source for visualization of stuff that you're reading. This is before the printing press  - people don't have the money to buy manuscripts, and one of the reasons is because of the amount of time it took to illuminate them. So that's my interest in them, but if somebody says...I had to take a course in manuscripts at UCLA, and it was fantastic in reading late Latin and early Italian, but if you ask me if it's my jam, it ain't. Are you into that? Is that your thing?

Natalie: 

Yes! 

Dr. Weller: 

You're into manuscripts? 

Natalie: 

Yes.

Dr. Weller: 

Okay, like what period? 

Natalie: 

Well, I've been doing a project on a manuscript from 1438 from Ferrara. 

Dr. Weller: 

Wow. 

Natalie: 

During the Council of Ferrara that was there. So there's no illumination, really. There're some illuminated capitals, but there's no illustration and it's a manual for confessors. And the author is basically saying we are accidentally sending people to hell because we're being too lenient with confession. And so we need to be stricter and give harsher penances out to people, because if we don't, and they don't properly give penance, then they're going to go to hell, so it's very...

Dr. Weller: 

Who wrote this thing? 

Natalie: 

Andres de Escobar. 

Dr. Weller: 

Okay. Because one of my guys in my book, Albergati, Archbishop of Bologna, goes to that. 

Natalie: 

Oh, really? I have studied Cardinal Orsini, Giorgiano Orsini.

Dr. Weller: 

Yeah!

Natalie:

Yeah, that's who I've looked at mostly, because there are some questions if...because the manuscript is dedicated to him. 

Dr. Weller: 

That was a big deal, 1438. 

Natalie: 

Yes! 

Dr. Weller: 

That Council of Ferrara. You know, let's all get together and decide who's the real deal and who isn't. 

Natalie: 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and the translation, that they didn't trust each other, the two sides.

Dr. Weller: 

No, they didn't! You know, the funny thing is, is that, to me anyway, whenever there's a reformist let's-all-get-together-and-have-a-council, it always ends up worse on the other side of it. It always ends up like, we're going to take this apart, liberalize it and take it and make it accessible. And then finally at the end of the day, it's more incriminating than it ever was. More shame-based, more finger-pointing than... 

Natalie: 

Right, because they didn't end up addressing the conciliarism, so then it just kind of led to the Reformation because none of the concerns were actually addressed. 

Dr. Weller: 

No, they weren't. It leads to the Reformation, and then the Counter-Reformation goes, you know what? We're going to compete with you, and we're going to make it so easy for people to become Catholic, and it becomes so hard. The Counter-Reformation. And, you know, out of the Counter-Reformation...I think the greatest thing out of the Counter-Reformation we get is the Jesuits, really, who go...you know, I mean, they're usually going to be the doctors of the church. Wait a minute. We don't need for you to teach Chinese, Muslims, Protestants. Come on, guys! And Ignatius, I think, saw the writing on the wall that this is going nowhere. These councils are, like, more binding than they are freeing. Boy, there's a whole thing right there. Analyze the council, the Catholic councils, from...yeah, from Florence to Ferrara all the way to Udine and Trent, whatever, and see what good came out of them. 

Natalie: 

Right. We got a lot of manuscripts. I think that's maybe the main thing. 

Dr. Weller: 

Yeah. You got a lot of manuscripts, yeah.

Di: 

I wonder if you have any advice for students in the field of medieval and Renaissance studies and in adjacent fields in the current environment?

Dr. Weller: 

I have one piece of advice. I have an endowment at UCLA right now, and I also have one at  - I want to say, I can't believe they did this - at the University of Texas. Bad thing to bring up the University of Texas at OSU this week! In any case, what they're for is, the one at the University of Texas is antique. It's from the Villa Blanca, where some people want to study ancient Rome in the south of Italy. The one at UCLA is important because the best thing a student can do is to go to the place that they're studying, to go see it and stand in front of it. 

Many times, there's not...particularly with grad students, there's no money. There's a lot of undergrad money. You know, you can turn a rock over and find $4,000 or $2,000 for that. I knew a guy at the University of Texas who scraped up  - he was an undergrad  in Italian Renaissance art  - he would scrape up $25,000 a year just by this and that, la la la. But when you're a graduate student, they don't care. They figure you're on your own. And graduate students need to live. So my wife, my kid, and I have set up an endowment at Syracuse University for their particular, unbelievable program, which is hard  - there's only six people they choose every year to do the entire M.A. in Italy. 

I did that, and a Ph.D. was water off a duck's back compared to doing that, because you're in front of the art every single day, every single weekend with undergrads, and you have to teach them that that's Donatello. Let's see the contortion in this, and the naturalism in this, and the space in this. So many times, when I go back to UCLA to talk to [people in] medieval studies, so many medievalists and Renaissance scholars have not gone to see it, and many times it's because they don't have the loot, sadly. It takes money to go to Europe. It takes money to go stand in front of the Last Supper of Leonardo, and you've got to buy the ticket in Milan. So that's the most important thing I can recommend to any student who wants to study the visual idea in any capacity, from antiquity all the way through the Baroque  - doesn't matter, even into post-Columbian. Go see the place. Go to the place. Get the vibe of the place. And if you've got to save up your money and get a backpack and do it, you've got to do it. That's number one. Does that help? 

Natalie and Di: 

Yes!

Di: 

Thank you very much.

Di: 

I'm Di Wang. I have been here with Natalie Cline, my fellow Ohio State University student, interviewing Dr. Peter Weller. We are looking forward to the screening of your film Robocop and Q&A tonight and your talk tomorrow. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Weller.

Dr. Weller:

I just also want to say The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth comes out on IMAX on November the 25th. Okay? The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth with Brad Pitt and me. I play the dad. That's where he gets his good looks.

Natalie: 

I'm excited for it! 

Dr. Weller: 

Good!

Natalie: 

Thank you so much.

Dr. Weller: 

My pleasure. 

Di: 

Thank you so much.