The Tudors & Renaissance

Most Tudor drama is told from the throne. Wolf Hall tells it from the desk. The 2015 BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel's novels follows Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son who became Henry VIII's fixer, and it is quieter and far more dangerous than anything with a crown in it. Mark Rylance plays Cromwell as a man who never raises his voice because he never needs to. He remembers everything, forgives nothing, and waits. The camera works almost entirely in candlelight, which was a real decision about cost and a truer one about the period: most of these conversations happened in rooms where you could not see who else was listening.

What the series understands is that the Reformation was not theology, it was paperwork and property and fear. Anne Boleyn does not fall because of love or doctrine. She falls because the men around her decide it is safer if she does. Cromwell builds the case. That is the real engine of Tudor power, and no other production has rendered it this well.

No film has put you inside Renaissance Italy the way Ubisoft did. Assassin's Creed II drops you into the Florence of 1476 as Ezio Auditore, a young nobleman whose family is destroyed by a conspiracy reaching to the Pope. You climb the Duomo while Brunelleschi's dome is still the marvel of Europe. You run errands for Leonardo da Vinci, who upgrades your blades and, in one famous sequence, hands you a flying machine. The Pazzi conspiracy, the Medici, the rivalry between city-states: it is real history rebuilt as architecture you can scale.

Brotherhood moves Ezio to Rome and lets you tear down Borgia influence tower by tower. Revelations takes him to Constantinople as an old man closing the circle. Together, collected in The Ezio Collection, they are the most complete Renaissance ever rendered in a game, and the rare historical fiction that gets the buildings right because it had to build them.

Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth (1998) is the rare costume drama that plays like a thriller. It takes the young queen at her most vulnerable, surrounded by plots, and shows her deciding to become a symbol rather than a woman. The final scene, where she paints her face white and declares herself married to England, is the moment a person chooses to disappear into an icon. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is gaudier and less disciplined, but it gives you the Armada and a queen who has fully hardened into Gloriana.

What the films get that the long-form series sometimes miss is compression. Elizabeth's reign was forty-four years of patience and calculated indecision. A two-hour film has to find the three or four nights that defined her, and Blanchett's does, repeatedly. She never looks like she is acting a queen. She looks like a woman doing arithmetic with her own survival.

We remember the Renaissance for its beauty and forget that it was made by violent, desperate men. Derek Jarman's Caravaggio (1986) understands this better than any tidy biopic. It paints the artist as a brawler and a lover who used the people around him as models for saints, then watched his own life curdle into the crime he kept depicting. It is not a comfortable film. It is the right one.

The Agony and the Ecstasy takes the opposite tack, casting Charlton Heston as Michelangelo locked in a battle of wills with the Pope over the Sistine ceiling, and finds the drama in pure stubbornness: two enormous egos arguing about God for four years. Set these beside Dangerous Beauty, the story of a Venetian courtesan who used wit and verse as her only weapons, and you have the other half of this guide, the one where the knives are aesthetic and the stakes are reputation, faith and the favour of princes.