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This may look like an ordinary door in Florence. | 0:00:10 | 0:00:13 | |
BELL RINGS But it isn't. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:15 | |
The man who lived here invented the Renaissance. | 0:00:17 | 0:00:21 | |
There he is. Giorgio Vasari. | 0:00:23 | 0:00:26 | |
The one with the interested cherub looking on. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:30 | |
Vasari was a painter, and as you can see, | 0:00:33 | 0:00:36 | |
not a particularly good one. | 0:00:36 | 0:00:39 | |
His work lacked elegance and grace. | 0:00:39 | 0:00:43 | |
In a word, it was clunky. | 0:00:43 | 0:00:45 | |
He was actually born just down the road from here in Arezzo. | 0:00:50 | 0:00:54 | |
But when he was in his teens, very impressionable, | 0:00:54 | 0:00:59 | |
he came here to Florence and wheedled his way into | 0:00:59 | 0:01:02 | |
the company of the city's greatest artist, the divine Michelangelo. | 0:01:02 | 0:01:08 | |
For the rest of his career, Vasari remained a Michelangelo groupie. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:19 | |
It shows in his painting | 0:01:20 | 0:01:24 | |
and more importantly for us, | 0:01:24 | 0:01:27 | |
it shows in his writing. | 0:01:27 | 0:01:29 | |
In 1550, Vasari published a book, | 0:01:37 | 0:01:41 | |
a very special book, | 0:01:41 | 0:01:43 | |
because it turned out to be the most influential art book ever written. | 0:01:43 | 0:01:48 | |
It was called The Lives Of The Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors And Architects, | 0:01:55 | 0:02:02 | |
though these days we usually shorten that to The Lives Of The Artists. | 0:02:02 | 0:02:07 | |
As the first book of its kind, | 0:02:10 | 0:02:12 | |
Vasari's Lives set the agenda for all the art books that followed. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:17 | |
Inside, it was packed with biographies | 0:02:20 | 0:02:23 | |
of the artists that Vasari admired. | 0:02:23 | 0:02:25 | |
And in the preface, for the first time in art, | 0:02:27 | 0:02:31 | |
Vasari uses the term "rinascita", | 0:02:31 | 0:02:36 | |
to describe what was going on around him. | 0:02:36 | 0:02:39 | |
"Rinascita" is Italian for "rebirth". | 0:02:39 | 0:02:44 | |
Or, as we call it now, Renaissance. | 0:02:44 | 0:02:48 | |
What Vasari says in his famous preface is that | 0:02:49 | 0:02:52 | |
under the ancient Greeks and Romans, | 0:02:52 | 0:02:58 | |
civilisation reached its greatest height | 0:02:58 | 0:03:00 | |
and the arts achieved perfection. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:02 | |
Then along came the barbarians who destroyed everything | 0:03:05 | 0:03:13 | |
and the arts fell into ruin. | 0:03:13 | 0:03:16 | |
Until we get to Vasari's own times, | 0:03:16 | 0:03:20 | |
roughly between about 1400 and 1600 - | 0:03:20 | 0:03:25 | |
the dates are a little vague - | 0:03:25 | 0:03:28 | |
when there's this great "rinascita", this Renaissance. | 0:03:28 | 0:03:33 | |
And civilisation returns to Italy. | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
It's a rousing tale of cultural triumph. | 0:03:41 | 0:03:46 | |
Unfortunately, it's just not true. | 0:03:46 | 0:03:49 | |
Civilisation wasn't completely lost for a millennium and a half | 0:03:51 | 0:03:57 | |
and it wasn't reborn suddenly in Renaissance Italy. | 0:03:57 | 0:04:02 | |
Vasari's Renaissance is the creation of a jingoistic Florentine, | 0:04:05 | 0:04:10 | |
who's cheering on his own team | 0:04:10 | 0:04:13 | |
in the great football match of civilisation. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:16 | |
But if the momentous rebirth didn't happen, | 0:04:16 | 0:04:20 | |
what did? | 0:04:20 | 0:04:21 | |
This is Padua, | 0:05:12 | 0:05:15 | |
and that is the famous Equestrian Statue | 0:05:15 | 0:05:18 | |
of the mercenary Gattamelata by Donatello. | 0:05:18 | 0:05:21 | |
Now, this was made in around 1450 and according to Vasari, | 0:05:21 | 0:05:27 | |
this was the first great equestrian statue of the Renaissance, | 0:05:27 | 0:05:32 | |
the first time a Renaissance artist matched | 0:05:32 | 0:05:36 | |
the achievements of the ancients. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:39 | |
But was it? | 0:05:39 | 0:05:40 | |
If we head north from Padua, out of Italy, | 0:05:44 | 0:05:49 | |
a long way north into the land of the barbarians, | 0:05:49 | 0:05:55 | |
or as we call them today, the Germans, | 0:05:55 | 0:06:00 | |
we'll find a different storyline being enacted. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:05 | |
The Germans, poor mites, they barely get a mention in Vasari. | 0:06:08 | 0:06:13 | |
But in the real world, their artistic achievements were huge. | 0:06:17 | 0:06:23 | |
This stone fellow here is called the Bamberg Horseman. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:33 | |
He's life-sized and he was made here in Germany in around 1220. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:41 | |
So that's two and a half centuries or so | 0:06:43 | 0:06:46 | |
before Donatello's Gattamelata | 0:06:46 | 0:06:48 | |
The Bamberg Horseman isn't mentioned in Vasari, | 0:06:51 | 0:06:55 | |
and when you do come across him in books, | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
he's invariably dismissed as a piece of Gothic art, | 0:06:58 | 0:07:02 | |
something backward or primitive. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:05 | |
But that's not what I see up there. | 0:07:05 | 0:07:07 | |
I see a remarkable piece of equestrian carving. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:14 | |
Look at the detail of the cloth, the hair, | 0:07:16 | 0:07:18 | |
the musculature of the horse. | 0:07:21 | 0:07:24 | |
This isn't some impossible bronze beast ridden by | 0:07:28 | 0:07:31 | |
an impossible bronze warrior. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:34 | |
This is something more modest, less heroic. | 0:07:34 | 0:07:37 | |
And real horses, ridden by real people, have proportions like these. | 0:07:38 | 0:07:43 | |
The fact is, when Vasari ignored the North in his story | 0:07:46 | 0:07:51 | |
of the Renaissance, he ignored some of the key developments in art. | 0:07:51 | 0:07:57 | |
So in this series, yes, we'll be looking at Leonardo da Vinci. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:05 | |
And at Vasari's divine Michelangelo. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
And at Botticelli and his Venuses. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:15 | |
All Vasari's Italian favourites will be looked at, but not yet. | 0:08:17 | 0:08:24 | |
Not before their time. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:26 | |
First, we need to catch up with the furious progress | 0:08:27 | 0:08:32 | |
that was being made in this bubbling cauldron | 0:08:32 | 0:08:37 | |
of Renaissance creativity... | 0:08:37 | 0:08:40 | |
Bruges. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:42 | |
BELLS CHIME | 0:08:42 | 0:08:44 | |
Ah, Bruges! | 0:08:47 | 0:08:49 | |
These days, it's so pretty and well-preserved. | 0:08:49 | 0:08:53 | |
It's hard to imagine what a frantic, cutting-edge, | 0:08:53 | 0:08:57 | |
Wild West of a town this was | 0:08:57 | 0:09:00 | |
in the early days of the Renaissance. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:03 | |
If you're ever in the Stadt Bibliothek in Berlin, | 0:09:07 | 0:09:11 | |
ask to see the manuscript of Anthony of Burgundy | 0:09:11 | 0:09:17 | |
and open it on Folio 244. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:21 | |
WATER SPLASHES, WOMEN GIGGLE | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
It shows you what went on in the bathhouses in Bruges | 0:09:24 | 0:09:28 | |
in around 1400 when the businessmen were in town. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:33 | |
On the right, the baths. | 0:09:35 | 0:09:37 | |
On the left, the beds. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:41 | |
WOMAN CHUCKLES COQUETTISHLY | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
WATER SPLASHES | 0:09:44 | 0:09:46 | |
All those fellows in the bathhouses, | 0:09:47 | 0:09:49 | |
the travelling businessmen, were trading in cloth, fabrics. | 0:09:49 | 0:09:55 | |
That's what made the city rich. | 0:09:55 | 0:09:58 | |
And they were doing it here, in the Cloth Hall in Bruges. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:02 | |
At its peak, there'd be 400 stalls crammed into here, | 0:10:06 | 0:10:11 | |
selling cloth from around the world. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:14 | |
And if you want to know what these fabulous fabrics looked like, | 0:10:15 | 0:10:20 | |
it's all recorded in spectacular close-up | 0:10:20 | 0:10:25 | |
in the art of Renaissance Flanders. | 0:10:25 | 0:10:27 | |
So all these merchants in here | 0:10:30 | 0:10:32 | |
were from Spain, Poland, Russia, England and one of them, an Italian, | 0:10:32 | 0:10:39 | |
we know very well, | 0:10:39 | 0:10:41 | |
because his face is one of the most memorable in Renaissance art. | 0:10:41 | 0:10:45 | |
Ah, yes. The Arnolfini Marriage, by Jan van Eyck. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:53 | |
And there's Giovanni Arnolfini himself, wealthy cloth merchant | 0:10:55 | 0:11:00 | |
from Lucca, pledging his fidelity to the lovely Mrs Arnolfini. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:08 | |
Exactly what they're pledging | 0:11:10 | 0:11:11 | |
has been the subject of much controversy, | 0:11:11 | 0:11:15 | |
to which I'm not going to add here. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:17 | |
What I want to discuss is something much more important - | 0:11:17 | 0:11:23 | |
what the Arnolfinis are wearing. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:25 | |
Let's start with Mrs Arnolfini. | 0:11:28 | 0:11:31 | |
Now, she's wearing a bulky green dress | 0:11:31 | 0:11:35 | |
that's made from a Bruges speciality, wool. | 0:11:35 | 0:11:40 | |
Like this outfit, here. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:44 | |
Now, this wool was mostly imported from England, | 0:11:45 | 0:11:49 | |
then woven here by the famous Flemish weavers. | 0:11:49 | 0:11:52 | |
In the painting, the dress looks rather bulky. | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
That's because it's lined with fur. | 0:11:57 | 0:11:59 | |
If you look carefully at the edges, | 0:12:01 | 0:12:03 | |
you'll see this white fur poking out. | 0:12:03 | 0:12:06 | |
Now, that is actually the fur... | 0:12:07 | 0:12:10 | |
..of one of these, | 0:12:13 | 0:12:15 | |
a red squirrel. | 0:12:15 | 0:12:16 | |
And not just any bit of the fur, but this bit here. | 0:12:16 | 0:12:20 | |
The white bit, the purest bit, | 0:12:21 | 0:12:24 | |
what they used to call minever. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:26 | |
It would have taken around 2,000 squirrels | 0:12:29 | 0:12:33 | |
to line Mrs Arnolfini's dress. | 0:12:33 | 0:12:36 | |
So when you look at her again, at the National Gallery in London, | 0:12:38 | 0:12:43 | |
try to forget she's actually wearing 2,000 dead squirrels. | 0:12:43 | 0:12:50 | |
As for her headdress, which looks so complicated, that's just a piece | 0:12:53 | 0:12:57 | |
of white linen, like this, which has been folded over five times | 0:12:57 | 0:13:03 | |
and is then worn on the head like so, kept in place with pins. | 0:13:03 | 0:13:09 | |
So that's Mrs Arnolfini. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:13 | |
But what about him? Well, he's wearing... | 0:13:13 | 0:13:16 | |
..these. Pine martens, | 0:13:18 | 0:13:21 | |
imported from the forests of Poland and Russia, hugely expensive, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:26 | |
the second most expensive fur after sable, | 0:13:26 | 0:13:30 | |
and Arnolfini's tunic would have required about 100 of these. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:35 | |
So that's a lot of money, right there. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:39 | |
On top of the fur, there's this dark purple velvet | 0:13:40 | 0:13:46 | |
that's probably imported from Lucca, Arnolfini's home town, | 0:13:46 | 0:13:50 | |
where the best velvet was made. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:52 | |
But the most interesting thing he's wearing, I think, is his hat. | 0:13:54 | 0:13:59 | |
That huge, wobbly top-hat affair, | 0:13:59 | 0:14:02 | |
that looks several sizes too big for him. | 0:14:02 | 0:14:05 | |
It's actually made of this, straw that's been dyed black | 0:14:08 | 0:14:12 | |
and it's a kind of fashionable Renaissance boater | 0:14:12 | 0:14:16 | |
that everyone was wearing in 1432. | 0:14:16 | 0:14:19 | |
Very light, practical, and as you can see, flattering. | 0:14:19 | 0:14:23 | |
Look closely at van Eyck's hat and all becomes clear | 0:14:27 | 0:14:32 | |
in the microscopic, almost magical detail | 0:14:32 | 0:14:36 | |
that was van Eyck's trademark. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:38 | |
30 years before the birth of Leonardo... | 0:14:40 | 0:14:43 | |
..50 years before Michelangelo was born, | 0:14:44 | 0:14:49 | |
the artists of Bruges were already seeing as clearly as this. | 0:14:49 | 0:14:55 | |
What was happening here in the early years of the 15th century | 0:14:57 | 0:15:01 | |
was nothing less than a pictorial revolution. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:06 | |
A completely new way of seeing and painting. | 0:15:06 | 0:15:10 | |
And in its clarity, its precision, | 0:15:11 | 0:15:16 | |
it was far ahead of anything that was happening in Italy at the time. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:21 | |
But that's not how art history sees it. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:27 | |
Ever since Vasari, until very recently, | 0:15:27 | 0:15:30 | |
these early masters of Bruges and Flanders have been looked down on, | 0:15:30 | 0:15:35 | |
patronised. Do you know what they call them in art history books? | 0:15:35 | 0:15:40 | |
THIS is what they call them. | 0:15:41 | 0:15:43 | |
At the back of the Arnolfini Marriage, high up on the wall, | 0:16:01 | 0:16:05 | |
there is one of these - a convex mirror. | 0:16:05 | 0:16:08 | |
These convex mirrors keep popping up in Flemish art | 0:16:10 | 0:16:14 | |
in various ways and for various reasons. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:19 | |
In the Arnolfini Marriage, | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
van Eyck uses it to smuggle in a cunning self-portrait. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:26 | |
Now, if I ask our handsome cameraman Matt to step up to the mirror | 0:16:26 | 0:16:31 | |
and film it, you'll see his reflection in the glass. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:35 | |
And in exactly the same way, van Eyck uses it to show himself | 0:16:35 | 0:16:41 | |
and a mysterious second figure, rhyming, as it were, | 0:16:41 | 0:16:44 | |
with the Arnolfinis at the front. | 0:16:44 | 0:16:47 | |
But other Flemish artists use them in different ways. | 0:16:47 | 0:16:52 | |
When Quentin Matsys put one on the table used by a money changer | 0:16:55 | 0:17:00 | |
and his wife, it's there for their protection. | 0:17:00 | 0:17:05 | |
In Flanders, the bankers used them to see round corners | 0:17:06 | 0:17:11 | |
and make sure no-one was sneaking up on them. | 0:17:11 | 0:17:15 | |
It's like those helpful mirrors you get on the London Underground | 0:17:18 | 0:17:22 | |
in the corridors so you can see if anything is coming... | 0:17:22 | 0:17:25 | |
..the other way. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:28 | |
Interestingly, here in Bruges, the guild of the mirror makers | 0:17:31 | 0:17:37 | |
was the same guild, the Guild of St Luke, | 0:17:37 | 0:17:40 | |
to which painters also belonged. | 0:17:40 | 0:17:43 | |
St Luke was actually the patron saint of painters | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
so you often see him in Renaissance art, presented as an artist | 0:17:50 | 0:17:55 | |
who's drawing the Madonna, imagining the unimaginable. | 0:17:55 | 0:18:00 | |
With St Luke by their side, | 0:18:03 | 0:18:06 | |
the painters of Bruges were changing what art does... | 0:18:06 | 0:18:10 | |
..and how it does it. | 0:18:12 | 0:18:14 | |
This is the Madonna with Joris van der Paele, as it's called, | 0:18:21 | 0:18:25 | |
painted by van Eyck again in 1436 | 0:18:25 | 0:18:29 | |
and it's another miraculous feat of observation. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:33 | |
Look at the robes that St Donatian on the left is wearing, | 0:18:36 | 0:18:41 | |
his cross, his mitre. | 0:18:41 | 0:18:44 | |
Or, on the other side, the lovely reflections in St George's armour. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:53 | |
And look! | 0:18:53 | 0:18:55 | |
There's van Eyck again, | 0:18:55 | 0:18:58 | |
haunting the picture with his secret presence. | 0:18:58 | 0:19:01 | |
Now, to see as clearly as this, | 0:19:04 | 0:19:07 | |
you either need eyesight that's miraculously good, or... | 0:19:07 | 0:19:11 | |
..you need these. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:15 | |
Joris van der Paele, | 0:19:17 | 0:19:19 | |
who commissioned this great devotional picture from van Eyck, | 0:19:19 | 0:19:24 | |
has been using his glasses to help him read his prayers. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:29 | |
"Joris" is Dutch for "George" | 0:19:30 | 0:19:34 | |
and that's why St George | 0:19:34 | 0:19:36 | |
is presenting his patron to the Madonna | 0:19:36 | 0:19:40 | |
and making sure he's read his prayers, | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
even though his old eyes are going. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:47 | |
Now, glasses weren't actually invented in Bruges in the 1400s. | 0:19:49 | 0:19:53 | |
They were invented in Italy about a century earlier in Pisa. | 0:19:53 | 0:19:59 | |
And if you examine the older faces in Renaissance art, | 0:20:03 | 0:20:07 | |
you'll see a pair of specs popping up quite often. | 0:20:07 | 0:20:12 | |
Sometimes in unexpected places. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:16 | |
Some are painted, some are carved, some are for seeing God, | 0:20:18 | 0:20:24 | |
others for seeing money. | 0:20:24 | 0:20:26 | |
Hieronymus Bosch, the great Flemish doom merchant, | 0:20:29 | 0:20:34 | |
even managed to find a pair being sported in hell. | 0:20:34 | 0:20:39 | |
Now, although glasses had been around | 0:20:42 | 0:20:44 | |
for the best part of a century, | 0:20:44 | 0:20:46 | |
it was in Flanders at the time of van Eyck, | 0:20:46 | 0:20:48 | |
early in the 15th century, that the art of lens making was perfected | 0:20:48 | 0:20:53 | |
and great steps were taken in ways of seeing. | 0:20:53 | 0:20:58 | |
Unfortunately, I can't tell you exactly how | 0:21:00 | 0:21:04 | |
these newly precise lenses | 0:21:04 | 0:21:06 | |
and this new magnification were used in Bruges. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:11 | |
Flemish artists were very secretive about it. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:17 | |
To this day, it's a controversial topic. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:22 | |
But when you look into the minute details | 0:21:22 | 0:21:25 | |
crammed into this miraculous Renaissance art, | 0:21:25 | 0:21:29 | |
a bit of help was surely needed. | 0:21:29 | 0:21:33 | |
Let me put it this way - | 0:21:36 | 0:21:37 | |
either for the first few millennia of Western art, | 0:21:37 | 0:21:41 | |
no artist anywhere was born with good enough eyesight | 0:21:41 | 0:21:45 | |
to record reality as clearly as it was recorded here in Flanders, | 0:21:45 | 0:21:51 | |
or after these first few millennia, | 0:21:51 | 0:21:55 | |
something happened here that made it finally possible | 0:21:55 | 0:21:58 | |
to see things more clearly. | 0:21:58 | 0:22:01 | |
I know which version I believe. | 0:22:04 | 0:22:08 | |
I don't know if you've seen that rather bad George Clooney movie, | 0:22:44 | 0:22:48 | |
The Monuments Men. | 0:22:48 | 0:22:50 | |
Well, this was the painting | 0:22:50 | 0:22:52 | |
they were trying to steal back from the Nazis. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:56 | |
It's van Eyck's greatest achievement - the Ghent Altar, | 0:22:59 | 0:23:04 | |
a masterpiece of spectacular complexity and mysterious ambition, | 0:23:04 | 0:23:11 | |
with so much going on in it and this strange God | 0:23:11 | 0:23:18 | |
looming up in the centre, like an all-powerful Oriental potentate. | 0:23:18 | 0:23:24 | |
Now, the mirror makes a secret appearance in here as well, sort of. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:32 | |
You see the Virgin Mary sitting on the right hand of God? | 0:23:32 | 0:23:37 | |
Look at the band of writing above her head. See what it says. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:43 | |
It's in Latin, but you can just about make out the first bit - | 0:23:45 | 0:23:51 | |
"speculum sine". | 0:23:51 | 0:23:55 | |
And if you could see through that gorgeous bit of cloth below, | 0:23:55 | 0:24:00 | |
it would continue "macula". | 0:24:00 | 0:24:02 | |
"Speculum sine macula" - it means the immaculate mirror. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:10 | |
It's a quote from the Bible, the Book of Wisdom. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:13 | |
Mary, who was born without sin, | 0:24:13 | 0:24:16 | |
is being compared to one of these - speculum sine macula. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:23 | |
And that is how van Eyck paints her as well, | 0:24:23 | 0:24:25 | |
as a vision of unblemished female perfection. | 0:24:25 | 0:24:30 | |
As with so much Flemish art, | 0:24:36 | 0:24:39 | |
the Ghent Altar is very confusing at first sight. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:43 | |
This is just a handy replica they keep at Ghent Cathedral. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:49 | |
But even this is a challenge. | 0:24:51 | 0:24:53 | |
As for the real thing, that sits behind bulletproof glass | 0:24:55 | 0:25:01 | |
in a dark chapel at the back, where even the Nazis can't steal it again | 0:25:01 | 0:25:08 | |
and where it looms up before us | 0:25:08 | 0:25:12 | |
like a daunting cliff face of dense Flemish symbolism. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:18 | |
But that's only from a distance, | 0:25:26 | 0:25:29 | |
because the real joy of the Ghent Altarpiece, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:32 | |
the real joy of all of van Eyck's art | 0:25:32 | 0:25:36 | |
is to get close and to see the details. | 0:25:36 | 0:25:39 | |
-WOMAN SINGS: -# Il dolcissimo Signore... # | 0:25:40 | 0:25:46 | |
When you press your nose against a van Eyck, | 0:25:47 | 0:25:51 | |
the confusion ceases and it all gets intoxicating. | 0:25:51 | 0:25:55 | |
Botanists have identified 42 different species of plant | 0:25:57 | 0:26:02 | |
painted accurately on the Ghent Altar. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:06 | |
TRIO SINGS IN ITALIAN | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
And see that delightful landscape at the back? | 0:26:11 | 0:26:14 | |
It's supposed to be the New Jerusalem, | 0:26:14 | 0:26:18 | |
as described in the Bible at the end of the world. | 0:26:18 | 0:26:22 | |
But it looks an awful lot like Flanders, doesn't it? | 0:26:23 | 0:26:28 | |
Bruges made biblical. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:30 | |
SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN | 0:26:30 | 0:26:35 | |
All this perfectly recorded reality, | 0:26:41 | 0:26:45 | |
this shiny truth that Flemish art invented, | 0:26:45 | 0:26:48 | |
isn't reality for the sake of it. | 0:26:48 | 0:26:51 | |
It's not trying to fool anybody. | 0:26:51 | 0:26:53 | |
This is reality as a powerful new weapon of conviction. | 0:26:53 | 0:26:59 | |
TRIO CONTINUES TO SING | 0:26:59 | 0:27:05 | |
Van Eyck is smuggling big religious truths | 0:27:10 | 0:27:14 | |
into the everyday life of Flanders, | 0:27:14 | 0:27:17 | |
making them touchable, bringing them nearer. | 0:27:17 | 0:27:21 | |
This is art that is having to envisage things | 0:27:24 | 0:27:26 | |
that have never been envisaged before. | 0:27:26 | 0:27:29 | |
And what a feast of invention it is. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:33 | |
So how was it done? To see that, we have to get even closer. | 0:27:34 | 0:27:40 | |
Normally, you can't get any closer than this to van Eyck's masterpiece. | 0:27:40 | 0:27:46 | |
But this isn't any old arts programme. | 0:27:46 | 0:27:49 | |
This is the Renaissance Unchained on the BBC, so I've managed | 0:27:49 | 0:27:55 | |
to arrange some exclusive access to the Ghent Altarpiece. | 0:27:55 | 0:27:59 | |
Not even George Clooney could get as close as we are going to get. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:04 | |
In just a moment, we're going to be going in there, | 0:28:14 | 0:28:16 | |
where they're restoring some of the panels of the Ghent Altar | 0:28:16 | 0:28:19 | |
and we're going to get really close to van Eyck | 0:28:19 | 0:28:23 | |
and see exactly how he does it. | 0:28:23 | 0:28:26 | |
But first, I want to show you something. | 0:28:26 | 0:28:28 | |
This is by Filippo Lippi, a painter from Florence much loved by Vasari, | 0:28:33 | 0:28:40 | |
and it's a scene from the life of St Benedict, painted in around 1450. | 0:28:40 | 0:28:47 | |
So that's 20 or so years after the Ghent Altarpiece. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:51 | |
Now, this wasn't painted in oil paints, which is what van Eyck used. | 0:28:53 | 0:28:59 | |
It was painted in egg tempera, | 0:29:01 | 0:29:04 | |
the medium they preferred in early Renaissance Italy. | 0:29:04 | 0:29:08 | |
It's basically watercolour with a binding of egg yolks | 0:29:11 | 0:29:15 | |
to hold the pigments together | 0:29:15 | 0:29:17 | |
and it dries very quickly into these fabulous glowing colours. | 0:29:17 | 0:29:24 | |
What a gorgeous pink that is! | 0:29:24 | 0:29:27 | |
So that's tempera over here... | 0:29:27 | 0:29:28 | |
..but over here is van Eyck's Annunciation. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:37 | |
So that's the Angel Gabriel telling the Virgin Mary | 0:29:37 | 0:29:41 | |
that she's going to give birth to Jesus | 0:29:41 | 0:29:44 | |
and this was painted about 20 years before the Filippo Lippi, | 0:29:44 | 0:29:50 | |
but look how van Eyck's captured the fabrics. | 0:29:50 | 0:29:54 | |
Look at what the angel's wearing. | 0:29:54 | 0:29:57 | |
And compare this... | 0:29:57 | 0:29:59 | |
..with this. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:04 | |
See how the cloth is done in the Filippo Lippi | 0:30:04 | 0:30:08 | |
or these plants over here. | 0:30:08 | 0:30:10 | |
Compare those... | 0:30:11 | 0:30:12 | |
..with the plants in the van Eyck, | 0:30:17 | 0:30:20 | |
these beautiful white lilies, | 0:30:20 | 0:30:22 | |
which, like the immaculate mirror, | 0:30:22 | 0:30:24 | |
symbolise the purity of the Virgin Mary. | 0:30:24 | 0:30:28 | |
It's a different world, isn't it? | 0:30:30 | 0:30:32 | |
And, critically, a different technique. | 0:30:32 | 0:30:36 | |
Now, Vasari tells us that van Eyck invented oil paints | 0:30:44 | 0:30:49 | |
and that's just not true. | 0:30:49 | 0:30:51 | |
They were already in use in Afghanistan in the seventh century, | 0:30:51 | 0:30:55 | |
in Buddhist art. | 0:30:55 | 0:30:58 | |
But he did master them in ways that no-one had mastered them before | 0:30:58 | 0:31:03 | |
and used them with extraordinary skill | 0:31:03 | 0:31:07 | |
and it's these oil paints, | 0:31:07 | 0:31:09 | |
along with the lenses and the glasses, | 0:31:09 | 0:31:12 | |
that made Flemish art possible. | 0:31:12 | 0:31:15 | |
And inside here, they've been restoring van Eyck panel by panel, | 0:31:23 | 0:31:27 | |
so it's a wonderful opportunity to see exactly how it's all done. | 0:31:27 | 0:31:33 | |
The whole restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece | 0:31:43 | 0:31:45 | |
is a very big project and the first step is the outside wing panels, | 0:31:45 | 0:31:50 | |
which we're currently working on and we're already quite far. | 0:31:50 | 0:31:54 | |
We took already all the vanishes off, the discoloured varnishes, | 0:31:54 | 0:31:58 | |
and now we're actually in the process | 0:31:58 | 0:32:00 | |
of removing all the overpaints, | 0:32:00 | 0:32:01 | |
so we're actually scraping away the later additions | 0:32:01 | 0:32:04 | |
to reveal the original intention of the artist. | 0:32:04 | 0:32:06 | |
And you can see it really well there, all those dark brown, | 0:32:06 | 0:32:11 | |
greens here are actually dirty varnishes that we left on | 0:32:11 | 0:32:14 | |
to show people and this is the original colour that's underneath. | 0:32:14 | 0:32:17 | |
So there's a bright white underneath those dark, | 0:32:17 | 0:32:20 | |
-discoloured varnishes. -It's very vivid. | 0:32:20 | 0:32:23 | |
You do see very, very clearly there. | 0:32:23 | 0:32:26 | |
The white now has come out a Persil white, beautiful. | 0:32:26 | 0:32:29 | |
Looking at the angel, what strikes me is this, as you said, | 0:32:30 | 0:32:35 | |
the colours are brighter, | 0:32:35 | 0:32:37 | |
this beautiful green that's come out of the angel's wings. | 0:32:37 | 0:32:40 | |
Yeah, after the cleaning, they are a bit brighter and especially, | 0:32:40 | 0:32:44 | |
yes, indeed, the green does jump at you. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
But I think, most importantly, it has an effect | 0:32:47 | 0:32:50 | |
on the depth of field because not only the colours, | 0:32:50 | 0:32:53 | |
I think the colours are, as I said, a bit muted, | 0:32:53 | 0:32:55 | |
but once we start taking off the first varnish | 0:32:55 | 0:32:59 | |
and then the overpaint, you feel like you're in a room again. | 0:32:59 | 0:33:03 | |
You get drawn into the picture and the whole 3-D effect. | 0:33:05 | 0:33:08 | |
I think it's the experience of being there in the room. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:14 | |
So, what else could you do with these exciting new paints? | 0:33:29 | 0:33:32 | |
One of the things you could record more clearly was people. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:39 | |
In Flanders, the great artists of the Northern Renaissance | 0:33:42 | 0:33:47 | |
began making their contemporaries immortal. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:50 | |
We simply haven't seen faces as tangible as these in art before. | 0:33:52 | 0:33:58 | |
This fierce-looking chappy and Vladimir Putin lookalike | 0:34:00 | 0:34:04 | |
is Chancellor Rolin, staring with scary determination | 0:34:04 | 0:34:10 | |
across one of van Eyck's finest landscapes. | 0:34:10 | 0:34:14 | |
And they say this is van Eyck himself in a big red turban | 0:34:16 | 0:34:22 | |
and the touching crow's feet around his eyes. | 0:34:22 | 0:34:25 | |
There was so much invention, too, | 0:34:31 | 0:34:34 | |
about this thrilling Flemish portraiture. | 0:34:34 | 0:34:37 | |
This is the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges | 0:34:37 | 0:34:41 | |
and it's full of the work of Hans Memling, | 0:34:41 | 0:34:43 | |
a Bruges master who was particularly good at portraits. | 0:34:43 | 0:34:49 | |
This fellow here is Maarten van Nieuwenhove | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
and this is a two-part painting, or diptych, | 0:34:55 | 0:34:59 | |
painted in 1487 and it's very clever. | 0:34:59 | 0:35:05 | |
Maarten van Nieuwenhove is at a table praying. | 0:35:08 | 0:35:13 | |
Look at that beautiful purple velvet jerkin he's wearing, | 0:35:13 | 0:35:18 | |
bought from the Arnolfinis, perhaps. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:22 | |
And in the other half, the Virgin Mary and Jesus, | 0:35:22 | 0:35:27 | |
noticeably less realistic and the objects of Maarten's prayer. | 0:35:27 | 0:35:34 | |
So he's praying to them, | 0:35:38 | 0:35:40 | |
but - and this is so brilliant - they're both in the same room. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:44 | |
This space and that space are next to each other. | 0:35:44 | 0:35:48 | |
Look at the table here. | 0:35:48 | 0:35:50 | |
That goes across both pictures as well. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:52 | |
And see Mary's robe - it flows to the bottom, | 0:35:52 | 0:35:57 | |
goes over into Maarten van Nieuwenhove's bit | 0:35:57 | 0:36:00 | |
and even overlaps a bit of the frame. | 0:36:00 | 0:36:04 | |
So it's a wondrous blending of realities and, at the back, | 0:36:05 | 0:36:10 | |
there's a typical Flemish payoff. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:13 | |
Look - a convex mirror and reflected in it, Mary and Maarten | 0:36:13 | 0:36:20 | |
from the back and from the side, sitting around the same table. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:25 | |
This is art that can paint miracles. | 0:36:28 | 0:36:31 | |
In the hands of the Flemish, | 0:36:33 | 0:36:35 | |
reality became such a powerful weapon in the artist's armoury. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:41 | |
Yet look what they call it. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:45 | |
When Vasari wrote the north out of the story of the Renaissance, | 0:36:45 | 0:36:50 | |
he planted 500 years of prejudice in the annals of art. | 0:36:50 | 0:36:58 | |
Another thing oil paints were especially good at capturing | 0:37:13 | 0:37:17 | |
was textures. Oh, my God, they were good at textures! | 0:37:17 | 0:37:23 | |
In particular, the artists of the Northern Renaissance | 0:37:24 | 0:37:28 | |
had a lot of fun with armour. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:30 | |
And that's handy because one of the saints | 0:37:32 | 0:37:35 | |
who pops up most often in their art | 0:37:35 | 0:37:37 | |
was the armour painter's delight, St George. | 0:37:37 | 0:37:43 | |
You know, whenever I see St George adopted as a nationalist symbol | 0:37:46 | 0:37:51 | |
by right-wing factions in England, for instance, | 0:37:51 | 0:37:55 | |
it always makes me laugh, because he was actually a Turk of Greek origin | 0:37:55 | 0:38:00 | |
who was born in Palestine near Tel Aviv | 0:38:00 | 0:38:04 | |
and who served in the Roman army. | 0:38:04 | 0:38:06 | |
So all those skinheads | 0:38:06 | 0:38:08 | |
who've got St George tattooed on their foreheads, | 0:38:08 | 0:38:11 | |
they're actively promoting | 0:38:11 | 0:38:13 | |
Turkish, Greek, Palestinian, Roman and Jewish unity. | 0:38:13 | 0:38:19 | |
Well done, lads! | 0:38:19 | 0:38:20 | |
St George was popular because he saved a princess from a dragon | 0:38:31 | 0:38:35 | |
and that made him a ready-made symbol of Christian salvation | 0:38:35 | 0:38:41 | |
and an exciting challenge for the new oil paints. | 0:38:41 | 0:38:46 | |
The new paints transformed armour into a delicate metal mirror | 0:38:48 | 0:38:54 | |
on which sophisticated games could be played with light. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:58 | |
Apart from encouraging all this exciting investigation of light | 0:39:01 | 0:39:05 | |
and its symbolism, something else the St George story did | 0:39:05 | 0:39:09 | |
was to pull Renaissance art out of its comfort zone | 0:39:09 | 0:39:14 | |
and to send it slithering into dark new areas of the imagination. | 0:39:14 | 0:39:19 | |
Forced to imagine the terrible beasties | 0:39:21 | 0:39:24 | |
that St George had to slay, | 0:39:24 | 0:39:28 | |
Renaissance art took a step into dark new territories. | 0:39:28 | 0:39:32 | |
So the St George story pushed Renaissance art | 0:39:35 | 0:39:38 | |
into these dark new areas. | 0:39:38 | 0:39:41 | |
And that wasn't all - it also made it necessary | 0:39:41 | 0:39:45 | |
to tackle combat and movement | 0:39:45 | 0:39:47 | |
and that had an especially powerful impact on sculpture. | 0:39:47 | 0:39:53 | |
This is what I think is the finest of the northern St Georges. | 0:39:56 | 0:40:02 | |
He's certainly the most spectacular. | 0:40:02 | 0:40:05 | |
You probably haven't heard of him because he's in Stockholm in Sweden | 0:40:07 | 0:40:13 | |
in the Church of St Nicholas. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:17 | |
What a thing! | 0:40:21 | 0:40:23 | |
Bigger than life-size and carved out of wood | 0:40:23 | 0:40:27 | |
with breathtaking skill and drama and the details are horrific. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:33 | |
Bits of dismembered body are strewn across the plinth. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:41 | |
And little baby dragons poke their heads out of the ground, | 0:40:43 | 0:40:47 | |
waiting to be murdered. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:51 | |
And then, in a very un-Renaissance detail, | 0:40:52 | 0:40:56 | |
this bisexual dragon is so traumatised | 0:40:56 | 0:41:01 | |
by St George's mighty spearing that it's emptied its bowels with fear. | 0:41:01 | 0:41:08 | |
This was made by a German sculptor called Bernt Notke in around 1487 | 0:41:10 | 0:41:18 | |
when Michelangelo was still a teenager. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:21 | |
Now, Bernt Notke isn't in Vasari, of course, | 0:41:21 | 0:41:25 | |
because this is a Renaissance | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
that obviously isn't trying to quote the Greeks or the Romans. | 0:41:28 | 0:41:33 | |
It's a Renaissance that's slapping you about the face | 0:41:33 | 0:41:37 | |
with action, drama and darkness. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:41 | |
There's nothing Italian about it, that's true. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:48 | |
But why does that make it a lesser achievement? | 0:41:48 | 0:41:52 | |
The mad imaginings of the Northern Renaissance | 0:42:01 | 0:42:04 | |
didn't stop with dragons. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:06 | |
When art armed itself with oil paints, | 0:42:08 | 0:42:11 | |
it armed itself with the power to make anything real. | 0:42:11 | 0:42:16 | |
This really is supposed to be it - | 0:42:21 | 0:42:24 | |
the mythical Fountain of Youth, | 0:42:24 | 0:42:26 | |
where you go in old and you come out young. | 0:42:26 | 0:42:30 | |
Now, you may not believe in the Fountain of Youth, | 0:42:35 | 0:42:38 | |
but plenty of Renaissance folk did. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:41 | |
This is how Lucas Cranach, prickly genius of the German Renaissance, | 0:42:41 | 0:42:49 | |
envisaged its wondrous effects. | 0:42:49 | 0:42:51 | |
Legend has it that a Spanish conquistador called Ponce de Leon, | 0:42:54 | 0:42:59 | |
who'd been sent to the Americas to find it, | 0:42:59 | 0:43:02 | |
landed here in Florida in 1513 | 0:43:02 | 0:43:05 | |
and discovered that it wasn't a myth - | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
the Fountain of Youth really existed. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:13 | |
In Cranach's delirious masterpiece, | 0:43:17 | 0:43:20 | |
all the Joan Collinses in the village have been rounded up, | 0:43:20 | 0:43:25 | |
dipped in the special waters | 0:43:25 | 0:43:28 | |
and turned again into St Trinian's girls. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:33 | |
It may have stopped working. | 0:43:46 | 0:43:47 | |
Anyway, here we are in the Renaissance, | 0:43:49 | 0:43:52 | |
this great rebirth of ancient knowledge, | 0:43:52 | 0:43:56 | |
but all the old legends, superstitions and myths | 0:43:56 | 0:44:00 | |
are exerting just as powerful a hold | 0:44:00 | 0:44:03 | |
on the artistic imagination as they ever did. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:06 | |
Enjoying Lucas Cranach is like visiting a German nature camp. | 0:44:11 | 0:44:17 | |
What a lot of nudes there are romping about his pictures. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:21 | |
Some of them are Lucretias. | 0:44:23 | 0:44:26 | |
Others are Venuses. | 0:44:26 | 0:44:30 | |
But all of them, you feel, are here | 0:44:30 | 0:44:34 | |
because Cranach understood temptation | 0:44:34 | 0:44:37 | |
and had personal reasons to warn us of its dangers. | 0:44:37 | 0:44:42 | |
Perhaps that's why he's so unusually keen to paint Adam and Eve. | 0:44:46 | 0:44:52 | |
Now, the Adam and Eve story, | 0:44:52 | 0:44:54 | |
about the first man and the first woman committing the first sin, | 0:44:54 | 0:44:59 | |
was the only story in the Bible that forced painters to paint nudes. | 0:44:59 | 0:45:05 | |
There's no other way to do it. | 0:45:05 | 0:45:07 | |
Clothes, after all, hadn't been invented yet. | 0:45:07 | 0:45:10 | |
Set free in Paradise in their birthday suits, | 0:45:15 | 0:45:18 | |
Adam and Eve gave Renaissance art a perfect biblical excuse | 0:45:18 | 0:45:25 | |
to depict tempting human nudity. | 0:45:25 | 0:45:28 | |
According to the Bible, | 0:45:31 | 0:45:33 | |
Eve's crime was to pick forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge... | 0:45:33 | 0:45:37 | |
..and to tempt Adam with it. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:41 | |
But I think we all know what really went on in Paradise | 0:45:44 | 0:45:48 | |
when the first naked man met the first naked woman. | 0:45:48 | 0:45:54 | |
But all these Adams and Eves of the Renaissance | 0:45:58 | 0:46:01 | |
weren't just there for erotic reasons. | 0:46:01 | 0:46:04 | |
There were other forces at work on the art of the times | 0:46:04 | 0:46:08 | |
and the one that's always forgotten but shouldn't be is geography. | 0:46:08 | 0:46:15 | |
It wasn't just the Fountain of Youth | 0:46:17 | 0:46:19 | |
that was discovered around about now. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:22 | |
So, too, was Paradise itself. | 0:46:22 | 0:46:26 | |
It's a story told gloriously in a Renaissance art form | 0:46:29 | 0:46:33 | |
that's been unfairly ignored - | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
the great art form of the map. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:41 | |
These days, we're blase about maps, but in Renaissance times, | 0:46:43 | 0:46:48 | |
maps were extraordinary creations with a huge cosmic significance. | 0:46:48 | 0:46:56 | |
I can't think of many things | 0:46:59 | 0:47:01 | |
that would have been harder to make than this - | 0:47:01 | 0:47:04 | |
the so-called Fra Mauro Map, | 0:47:04 | 0:47:08 | |
made in Venice in around 1450 by a Venetian monk. | 0:47:08 | 0:47:14 | |
In those days, north was south and south was north | 0:47:15 | 0:47:21 | |
so the world was upside down. | 0:47:21 | 0:47:24 | |
It's exquisite, isn't it? | 0:47:26 | 0:47:28 | |
The glorious imagining of a glorious new world. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:32 | |
But, interestingly, round about here, there's something missing - | 0:47:34 | 0:47:39 | |
a little place called America, which hadn't been discovered yet. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:46 | |
So the first Renaissance map with the Americas actually on it | 0:47:48 | 0:47:52 | |
is this one - the Waldseemuller World Map of 1507. | 0:47:52 | 0:48:00 | |
There's America there, | 0:48:00 | 0:48:03 | |
or as they called most of it in those days, "terra incognita". | 0:48:03 | 0:48:07 | |
When Columbus discovered America in 1492, | 0:48:22 | 0:48:25 | |
he didn't just change history - | 0:48:25 | 0:48:28 | |
he changed art and particularly the story of Adam and Eve. | 0:48:28 | 0:48:33 | |
Their depiction has always triggered powerful guilts and worries. | 0:48:39 | 0:48:44 | |
Some of the most anxious paintings of the Renaissance | 0:48:44 | 0:48:48 | |
are representations of the first man and the first woman. | 0:48:48 | 0:48:52 | |
And up on the Sistine ceiling, | 0:48:55 | 0:48:58 | |
Michelangelo has left us in no doubt whatsoever | 0:48:58 | 0:49:02 | |
as to the terrible consequences of the first sin. | 0:49:02 | 0:49:07 | |
But these were still theoretical anxieties, | 0:49:10 | 0:49:13 | |
distant imaginings of distant biblical events. | 0:49:13 | 0:49:17 | |
When Columbus discovered America, that changed. | 0:49:17 | 0:49:21 | |
It wasn't just the Fountain of Youth that turned up in Florida. | 0:49:26 | 0:49:30 | |
As news began to filter through Europe | 0:49:32 | 0:49:35 | |
of the strange new world discovered by Columbus, | 0:49:35 | 0:49:39 | |
the Renaissance mind began putting two and two together | 0:49:39 | 0:49:44 | |
and Paradise itself suddenly had a location. | 0:49:44 | 0:49:50 | |
This is Hieronymus Bosch's famous Garden of Earthly Delights, | 0:49:57 | 0:50:02 | |
a painting about sin and its terrible consequences | 0:50:02 | 0:50:07 | |
and look what Adam and Eve are sinning under - | 0:50:07 | 0:50:12 | |
a dragon tree, Satan's tropical succulent of choice. | 0:50:12 | 0:50:19 | |
Paradise was no longer theoretical. | 0:50:23 | 0:50:26 | |
Columbus had found it and that was bad news, | 0:50:26 | 0:50:30 | |
because according to the scriptures, | 0:50:30 | 0:50:33 | |
man and woman would only return to Paradise | 0:50:33 | 0:50:37 | |
after the Day of Judgment, the last day of all. | 0:50:37 | 0:50:41 | |
When Columbus discovered America, | 0:50:44 | 0:50:47 | |
he set in motion a countdown to the end of the world. | 0:50:47 | 0:50:52 | |
A less superstitious era might have laughed it off, | 0:50:55 | 0:51:01 | |
but the Renaissance really wasn't one of those. | 0:51:01 | 0:51:05 | |
Later in this series, | 0:51:06 | 0:51:08 | |
we'll be dealing in depth with Hieronymus Bosch. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:12 | |
For now, all I ask is that you feel his anxiety - | 0:51:12 | 0:51:19 | |
the anxiety of his times. | 0:51:19 | 0:51:22 | |
At times like this, times of deep Renaissance despair, | 0:51:35 | 0:51:41 | |
turning to the era's greatest talent ought to be a relief. | 0:51:41 | 0:51:47 | |
But in this instance, it isn't, | 0:51:47 | 0:51:51 | |
because Albrecht Durer, the greatest German painter of the Renaissance, | 0:51:51 | 0:51:57 | |
was a stoker up of anxieties, not a reliever of them. | 0:51:57 | 0:52:03 | |
Durer lived here in his house in Nuremberg. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:08 | |
It's been kept exactly as he left it as a kind of shrine to him | 0:52:08 | 0:52:13 | |
because one thing Durer made sure of from the start | 0:52:13 | 0:52:17 | |
is that everyone knew how great he was. | 0:52:17 | 0:52:20 | |
If they handed out medals for arrogance, | 0:52:25 | 0:52:28 | |
Durer would have a shelf load. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:32 | |
Born in Nuremberg in 1471, | 0:52:32 | 0:52:37 | |
he was so good so quickly | 0:52:37 | 0:52:41 | |
that, by the age of 13, he drew this - | 0:52:41 | 0:52:46 | |
a self-portrait as a teenage genius. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:50 | |
Durer invented the artistic self-portrait. | 0:52:53 | 0:53:00 | |
Other artists had put themselves in their pictures before, | 0:53:00 | 0:53:05 | |
but no-one had made themselves the stars of their own art as Durer did. | 0:53:05 | 0:53:11 | |
Here he is at 22, | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
enjoying mightily his own Renaissance handsomeness. | 0:53:16 | 0:53:22 | |
And look, at 26, he's put on his best dandy ware | 0:53:22 | 0:53:29 | |
and loves himself even more. | 0:53:29 | 0:53:32 | |
And then, in 1500, | 0:53:35 | 0:53:37 | |
in a momentous Renaissance slippage of human modesty, | 0:53:37 | 0:53:42 | |
the 29-year-old Albrecht Durer | 0:53:42 | 0:53:46 | |
compares himself unmissably with Christ. | 0:53:46 | 0:53:52 | |
All over Durer's art, | 0:53:58 | 0:54:00 | |
we find him interjecting himself into the storylines. | 0:54:00 | 0:54:05 | |
You even see it in his altarpieces. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:09 | |
In this busy crucifixion in Vienna, | 0:54:11 | 0:54:14 | |
who is that standing at the back of the crowd? | 0:54:14 | 0:54:19 | |
Oh, look, it's Durer. | 0:54:19 | 0:54:23 | |
And who's invited himself along to join the Virgin Mary | 0:54:25 | 0:54:29 | |
and Christ in this ruined masterpiece in Prague? | 0:54:29 | 0:54:34 | |
Who do you think? | 0:54:36 | 0:54:37 | |
To my eyes, Durer's altarpieces are not as successful | 0:54:40 | 0:54:45 | |
as he'd like us to believe. | 0:54:45 | 0:54:48 | |
He couldn't do grandeur or emotional bigness. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:53 | |
Durer gets better as he gets smaller. | 0:54:56 | 0:54:59 | |
His portraits, for instance, are often transfixing, | 0:54:59 | 0:55:05 | |
as with this divine portrayal of a girl from Venice. | 0:55:05 | 0:55:10 | |
It's as if he couldn't work with a big brush, only a small one. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:22 | |
Lots of little things combining to create the final image. | 0:55:22 | 0:55:27 | |
It's a talent which came in particularly useful | 0:55:27 | 0:55:30 | |
here in his printing studio. | 0:55:30 | 0:55:33 | |
It's a belief widely held in art | 0:55:36 | 0:55:39 | |
that Durer was the greatest printmaker of all. | 0:55:39 | 0:55:44 | |
He was certainly one of the busiest | 0:55:44 | 0:55:48 | |
and so successfully did his prints spread his fame | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
that even Vasari heard of him and gave him a chapter in his book. | 0:55:52 | 0:55:58 | |
Everyone knows Durer's Melencolia. | 0:56:02 | 0:56:05 | |
It's probably the most famous print ever made, | 0:56:05 | 0:56:09 | |
a mysterious figure surrounded | 0:56:09 | 0:56:12 | |
by all this scattered Renaissance knowledge and made anxious by it. | 0:56:12 | 0:56:20 | |
Lots of people have suggested that Melencolia | 0:56:23 | 0:56:27 | |
is another disguised self-portrait | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
and I'm certainly prepared to believe that. | 0:56:30 | 0:56:34 | |
Because, as far as I can see, | 0:56:35 | 0:56:37 | |
Durer never passed up an opportunity to put himself in his art. | 0:56:37 | 0:56:44 | |
But, you know, it wasn't actually Durer's prints | 0:56:58 | 0:57:02 | |
that finally convinced me of his genius | 0:57:02 | 0:57:05 | |
or his altarpieces or even those extraordinary portraits of his. | 0:57:05 | 0:57:10 | |
The day that took my breath away and finally blew away all the doubts... | 0:57:10 | 0:57:15 | |
..was the day I saw his watercolours. | 0:57:19 | 0:57:23 | |
The Albertina in Vienna has a collection of them | 0:57:27 | 0:57:30 | |
that only goes on show every couple of decades. | 0:57:30 | 0:57:34 | |
If you're alive for such an occasion, go there. | 0:57:35 | 0:57:39 | |
This is Durer's famous Hare, twitching timidly before us. | 0:57:42 | 0:57:48 | |
And the wings of a roller, coloured so freshly and brightly, | 0:57:50 | 0:57:56 | |
they might have flown through yesterday sky. | 0:57:56 | 0:58:00 | |
He thought he was divinely chosen | 0:58:03 | 0:58:06 | |
and at moments like this, | 0:58:06 | 0:58:09 | |
you find yourself believing him. | 0:58:09 | 0:58:12 | |
So, that's the Northern Renaissance, an epoch of startling invention. | 0:58:15 | 0:58:22 | |
It gave us oil paints. | 0:58:22 | 0:58:25 | |
It gave us optics. | 0:58:25 | 0:58:28 | |
It gave us the truth. | 0:58:28 | 0:58:30 | |
In the next film, I'm heading south again. | 0:58:35 | 0:58:39 | |
If Vasari got the Northern Renaissance so wrong, | 0:58:40 | 0:58:45 | |
what did he also get wrong about the Renaissance in Italy? | 0:58:45 | 0:58:50 | |
WHIPPING | 0:58:50 | 0:58:54 |