Verso: An Art History Podcast

Michelangelo's David was commissioned for a cathedral buttress 150 feet off the ground. But it quickly became one of the most potent political symbols in all of art history.

In this episode, we trace the full political life of the most famous sculpture in the Western world: from the abandoned block of marble that sat in a Florentine courtyard for thirty-five years, to the placement debate that turned a religious commission into a republican statement, to the riot that shattered its arm and the sixteen years Florence spent walking past the damage without fixing it. We look at how the Medici, the very family the David was built to oppose, ended up absorbing it, repairing it, and paying for Michelangelo's funeral. And we look at what happened after the statue moved indoors in 1882 and became available to every era that needed it: the AIDS crisis, post-9/11 New York, Banksy, Warhol and Basquiat, and a man with a hammer who said it was just too beautiful.

This is a story about how political symbols get made, stolen, and remade. About who gets to write the history of a masterpiece, and what five hundred years of being everybody's symbol does to a piece of marble.

TW: Discussions of suicide

In Part Two of our deep dive into the Bernini and Borromini rivalry, the stakes get personal. With a new pope in power and Bernini in disgrace, Borromini finally had what he'd spent a decade working toward: the commissions, the recognition, and the satisfaction of having been right all along. It didn't last. What followed was a slow, painful unraveling — a series of ruptures with patrons, a knighthood delivered by proxy because nobody could stand to be in the room with him, and a rival who kept winning even when he was supposed to have lost. Meanwhile, Bernini was building the colonnades of St. Peter's Square, entertaining Louis XIV in Paris, and accumulating a fortune that would dwarf Borromini's estate by a factor of forty.

This episode covers the Fountain of the Four Rivers, the greatest commission of Borromini's life, the Baroque architecture scandal that defined 17th century Rome, and the question that the whole story leaves you with: is it better to be celebrated in your time, or vindicated by history? And is there any version of this art history story where you get to have both?

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In 17th century Rome, architecture wasn't just art, it was power. The Catholic Church was fighting to reassert its authority over a changing world, and the artists who could build something transcendent enough to make people believe were the most valuable people in the city. Two men defined that moment more than anyone else: Gianlorenzo Bernini, the charming, theatrical papal favorite who understood the game instinctively, and Francesco Borromini, the brooding geometric genius who refused to play it. They worked together, fell apart, and spent the next four decades locked in one of the most consequential rivalries in art history, one that would shape the Rome we know today and raise a question that still doesn't have a clean answer: does it matter how good you are, if you don't know how to work the room?

Part One covers their origins, their years together at St. Peter's, and the moment the Baldacchino — one of the most celebrated works of art in the world — became the fault line between them. It also covers a crowbar, a razor, and the kind of papal favor that makes attempted murder disappear.

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You know Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers. Starry nights. The guy who cut off his ear. One of the most famous artists in history.
But you probably don't know Jo van Gogh-Bonger, the woman who made him famous.
When Jo's husband Theo died in 1891 after just twenty-one months of marriage, she was left with a baby, no income, and hundreds of paintings that critics called "nearly vulgar." She had zero art world experience. Male dealers dismissed her as a grieving amateur. Her own brother was embarrassed to ask her permission to sell paintings.
So Jo did what the experts told her was impossible: She spent the next thirty-five years turning Vincent van Gogh into the most famous artist in the world. Not by pretending to be an expert, but by trusting instincts the art world didn't have, and creating a template for the modern "struggling" artist in the process.

In February 1974, a young artist named Tony Shafrazi walked into the Museum of Modern Art, pulled out a can of cherry-red spray paint, and wrote "KILL LIES ALL" across Picasso's Guernica—the most famous antiwar painting in the world.
His act made headlines, exactly as he'd planned. But was it protest or publicity stunt? Political intervention or narcissistic vandalism? And how did the man who defaced a masterpiece go on to become one of the most powerful art dealers of the 1980s, launching the careers of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat?
This episode tells the story of Tony Shafrazi's impossible comeback and asks: can political art survive institutionalization? What happens when protest becomes a museum artifact? And fifty years later, as climate activists throw soup at van Gogh, what can Shafrazi's act teach us about the limits—and endurance—of art that tries to change the world?