Gods, Myths and Oil Paints The Renaissance Unchained


Gods, Myths and Oil Paints

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This may look like an ordinary door in Florence.

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BELL RINGS But it isn't.

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The man who lived here invented the Renaissance.

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There he is. Giorgio Vasari.

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The one with the interested cherub looking on.

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Vasari was a painter, and as you can see,

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not a particularly good one.

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His work lacked elegance and grace.

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In a word, it was clunky.

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He was actually born just down the road from here in Arezzo.

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But when he was in his teens, very impressionable,

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he came here to Florence and wheedled his way into

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the company of the city's greatest artist, the divine Michelangelo.

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For the rest of his career, Vasari remained a Michelangelo groupie.

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It shows in his painting

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and more importantly for us,

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it shows in his writing.

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In 1550, Vasari published a book,

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a very special book,

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because it turned out to be the most influential art book ever written.

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It was called The Lives Of The Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors And Architects,

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though these days we usually shorten that to The Lives Of The Artists.

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As the first book of its kind,

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Vasari's Lives set the agenda for all the art books that followed.

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Inside, it was packed with biographies

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of the artists that Vasari admired.

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And in the preface, for the first time in art,

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Vasari uses the term "rinascita",

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to describe what was going on around him.

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"Rinascita" is Italian for "rebirth".

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Or, as we call it now, Renaissance.

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What Vasari says in his famous preface is that

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under the ancient Greeks and Romans,

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civilisation reached its greatest height

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and the arts achieved perfection.

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Then along came the barbarians who destroyed everything

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and the arts fell into ruin.

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Until we get to Vasari's own times,

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roughly between about 1400 and 1600 -

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the dates are a little vague -

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when there's this great "rinascita", this Renaissance.

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And civilisation returns to Italy.

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It's a rousing tale of cultural triumph.

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Unfortunately, it's just not true.

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Civilisation wasn't completely lost for a millennium and a half

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and it wasn't reborn suddenly in Renaissance Italy.

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Vasari's Renaissance is the creation of a jingoistic Florentine,

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who's cheering on his own team

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in the great football match of civilisation.

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But if the momentous rebirth didn't happen,

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what did?

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This is Padua,

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and that is the famous Equestrian Statue

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of the mercenary Gattamelata by Donatello.

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Now, this was made in around 1450 and according to Vasari,

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this was the first great equestrian statue of the Renaissance,

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the first time a Renaissance artist matched

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the achievements of the ancients.

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But was it?

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If we head north from Padua, out of Italy,

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a long way north into the land of the barbarians,

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or as we call them today, the Germans,

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we'll find a different storyline being enacted.

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The Germans, poor mites, they barely get a mention in Vasari.

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But in the real world, their artistic achievements were huge.

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This stone fellow here is called the Bamberg Horseman.

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He's life-sized and he was made here in Germany in around 1220.

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So that's two and a half centuries or so

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before Donatello's Gattamelata

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The Bamberg Horseman isn't mentioned in Vasari,

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and when you do come across him in books,

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he's invariably dismissed as a piece of Gothic art,

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something backward or primitive.

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But that's not what I see up there.

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I see a remarkable piece of equestrian carving.

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Look at the detail of the cloth, the hair,

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the musculature of the horse.

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This isn't some impossible bronze beast ridden by

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an impossible bronze warrior.

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This is something more modest, less heroic.

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And real horses, ridden by real people, have proportions like these.

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The fact is, when Vasari ignored the North in his story

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of the Renaissance, he ignored some of the key developments in art.

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So in this series, yes, we'll be looking at Leonardo da Vinci.

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And at Vasari's divine Michelangelo.

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And at Botticelli and his Venuses.

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All Vasari's Italian favourites will be looked at, but not yet.

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Not before their time.

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First, we need to catch up with the furious progress

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that was being made in this bubbling cauldron

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of Renaissance creativity...

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Bruges.

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BELLS CHIME

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Ah, Bruges!

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These days, it's so pretty and well-preserved.

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It's hard to imagine what a frantic, cutting-edge,

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Wild West of a town this was

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in the early days of the Renaissance.

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If you're ever in the Stadt Bibliothek in Berlin,

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ask to see the manuscript of Anthony of Burgundy

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and open it on Folio 244.

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WATER SPLASHES, WOMEN GIGGLE

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It shows you what went on in the bathhouses in Bruges

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in around 1400 when the businessmen were in town.

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On the right, the baths.

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On the left, the beds.

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WOMAN CHUCKLES COQUETTISHLY

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WATER SPLASHES

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All those fellows in the bathhouses,

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the travelling businessmen, were trading in cloth, fabrics.

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That's what made the city rich.

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And they were doing it here, in the Cloth Hall in Bruges.

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At its peak, there'd be 400 stalls crammed into here,

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selling cloth from around the world.

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And if you want to know what these fabulous fabrics looked like,

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it's all recorded in spectacular close-up

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in the art of Renaissance Flanders.

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So all these merchants in here

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were from Spain, Poland, Russia, England and one of them, an Italian,

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we know very well,

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because his face is one of the most memorable in Renaissance art.

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Ah, yes. The Arnolfini Marriage, by Jan van Eyck.

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And there's Giovanni Arnolfini himself, wealthy cloth merchant

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from Lucca, pledging his fidelity to the lovely Mrs Arnolfini.

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Exactly what they're pledging

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has been the subject of much controversy,

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to which I'm not going to add here.

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What I want to discuss is something much more important -

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what the Arnolfinis are wearing.

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Let's start with Mrs Arnolfini.

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Now, she's wearing a bulky green dress

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that's made from a Bruges speciality, wool.

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Like this outfit, here.

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Now, this wool was mostly imported from England,

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then woven here by the famous Flemish weavers.

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In the painting, the dress looks rather bulky.

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That's because it's lined with fur.

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If you look carefully at the edges,

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you'll see this white fur poking out.

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Now, that is actually the fur...

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..of one of these,

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a red squirrel.

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And not just any bit of the fur, but this bit here.

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The white bit, the purest bit,

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what they used to call minever.

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It would have taken around 2,000 squirrels

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to line Mrs Arnolfini's dress.

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So when you look at her again, at the National Gallery in London,

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try to forget she's actually wearing 2,000 dead squirrels.

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As for her headdress, which looks so complicated, that's just a piece

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of white linen, like this, which has been folded over five times

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and is then worn on the head like so, kept in place with pins.

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So that's Mrs Arnolfini.

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But what about him? Well, he's wearing...

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..these. Pine martens,

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imported from the forests of Poland and Russia, hugely expensive,

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the second most expensive fur after sable,

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and Arnolfini's tunic would have required about 100 of these.

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So that's a lot of money, right there.

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On top of the fur, there's this dark purple velvet

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that's probably imported from Lucca, Arnolfini's home town,

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where the best velvet was made.

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But the most interesting thing he's wearing, I think, is his hat.

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That huge, wobbly top-hat affair,

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that looks several sizes too big for him.

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It's actually made of this, straw that's been dyed black

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and it's a kind of fashionable Renaissance boater

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that everyone was wearing in 1432.

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Very light, practical, and as you can see, flattering.

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Look closely at van Eyck's hat and all becomes clear

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in the microscopic, almost magical detail

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that was van Eyck's trademark.

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30 years before the birth of Leonardo...

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..50 years before Michelangelo was born,

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the artists of Bruges were already seeing as clearly as this.

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What was happening here in the early years of the 15th century

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was nothing less than a pictorial revolution.

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A completely new way of seeing and painting.

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And in its clarity, its precision,

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it was far ahead of anything that was happening in Italy at the time.

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But that's not how art history sees it.

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Ever since Vasari, until very recently,

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these early masters of Bruges and Flanders have been looked down on,

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patronised. Do you know what they call them in art history books?

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THIS is what they call them.

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At the back of the Arnolfini Marriage, high up on the wall,

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there is one of these - a convex mirror.

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These convex mirrors keep popping up in Flemish art

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in various ways and for various reasons.

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In the Arnolfini Marriage,

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van Eyck uses it to smuggle in a cunning self-portrait.

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Now, if I ask our handsome cameraman Matt to step up to the mirror

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and film it, you'll see his reflection in the glass.

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And in exactly the same way, van Eyck uses it to show himself

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and a mysterious second figure, rhyming, as it were,

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with the Arnolfinis at the front.

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But other Flemish artists use them in different ways.

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When Quentin Matsys put one on the table used by a money changer

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and his wife, it's there for their protection.

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In Flanders, the bankers used them to see round corners

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and make sure no-one was sneaking up on them.

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It's like those helpful mirrors you get on the London Underground

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in the corridors so you can see if anything is coming...

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..the other way.

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Interestingly, here in Bruges, the guild of the mirror makers

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was the same guild, the Guild of St Luke,

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to which painters also belonged.

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St Luke was actually the patron saint of painters

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so you often see him in Renaissance art, presented as an artist

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who's drawing the Madonna, imagining the unimaginable.

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With St Luke by their side,

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the painters of Bruges were changing what art does...

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..and how it does it.

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This is the Madonna with Joris van der Paele, as it's called,

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painted by van Eyck again in 1436

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and it's another miraculous feat of observation.

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Look at the robes that St Donatian on the left is wearing,

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his cross, his mitre.

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Or, on the other side, the lovely reflections in St George's armour.

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And look!

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There's van Eyck again,

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haunting the picture with his secret presence.

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Now, to see as clearly as this,

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you either need eyesight that's miraculously good, or...

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..you need these.

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Joris van der Paele,

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who commissioned this great devotional picture from van Eyck,

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has been using his glasses to help him read his prayers.

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"Joris" is Dutch for "George"

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and that's why St George

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is presenting his patron to the Madonna

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and making sure he's read his prayers,

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even though his old eyes are going.

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Now, glasses weren't actually invented in Bruges in the 1400s.

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They were invented in Italy about a century earlier in Pisa.

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And if you examine the older faces in Renaissance art,

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you'll see a pair of specs popping up quite often.

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Sometimes in unexpected places.

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Some are painted, some are carved, some are for seeing God,

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others for seeing money.

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Hieronymus Bosch, the great Flemish doom merchant,

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even managed to find a pair being sported in hell.

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Now, although glasses had been around

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for the best part of a century,

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it was in Flanders at the time of van Eyck,

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early in the 15th century, that the art of lens making was perfected

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and great steps were taken in ways of seeing.

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Unfortunately, I can't tell you exactly how

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these newly precise lenses

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and this new magnification were used in Bruges.

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Flemish artists were very secretive about it.

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To this day, it's a controversial topic.

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But when you look into the minute details

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crammed into this miraculous Renaissance art,

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a bit of help was surely needed.

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Let me put it this way -

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either for the first few millennia of Western art,

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no artist anywhere was born with good enough eyesight

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to record reality as clearly as it was recorded here in Flanders,

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or after these first few millennia,

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something happened here that made it finally possible

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to see things more clearly.

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I know which version I believe.

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I don't know if you've seen that rather bad George Clooney movie,

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The Monuments Men.

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Well, this was the painting

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they were trying to steal back from the Nazis.

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It's van Eyck's greatest achievement - the Ghent Altar,

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a masterpiece of spectacular complexity and mysterious ambition,

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with so much going on in it and this strange God

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looming up in the centre, like an all-powerful Oriental potentate.

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Now, the mirror makes a secret appearance in here as well, sort of.

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You see the Virgin Mary sitting on the right hand of God?

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Look at the band of writing above her head. See what it says.

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It's in Latin, but you can just about make out the first bit -

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"speculum sine".

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And if you could see through that gorgeous bit of cloth below,

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it would continue "macula".

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"Speculum sine macula" - it means the immaculate mirror.

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It's a quote from the Bible, the Book of Wisdom.

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Mary, who was born without sin,

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is being compared to one of these - speculum sine macula.

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And that is how van Eyck paints her as well,

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as a vision of unblemished female perfection.

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As with so much Flemish art,

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the Ghent Altar is very confusing at first sight.

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This is just a handy replica they keep at Ghent Cathedral.

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But even this is a challenge.

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As for the real thing, that sits behind bulletproof glass

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in a dark chapel at the back, where even the Nazis can't steal it again

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and where it looms up before us

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like a daunting cliff face of dense Flemish symbolism.

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But that's only from a distance,

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because the real joy of the Ghent Altarpiece,

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the real joy of all of van Eyck's art

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is to get close and to see the details.

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-WOMAN SINGS:

-# Il dolcissimo Signore... #

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When you press your nose against a van Eyck,

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the confusion ceases and it all gets intoxicating.

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Botanists have identified 42 different species of plant

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painted accurately on the Ghent Altar.

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TRIO SINGS IN ITALIAN

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And see that delightful landscape at the back?

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It's supposed to be the New Jerusalem,

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as described in the Bible at the end of the world.

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But it looks an awful lot like Flanders, doesn't it?

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Bruges made biblical.

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SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

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All this perfectly recorded reality,

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this shiny truth that Flemish art invented,

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isn't reality for the sake of it.

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It's not trying to fool anybody.

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This is reality as a powerful new weapon of conviction.

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TRIO CONTINUES TO SING

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Van Eyck is smuggling big religious truths

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into the everyday life of Flanders,

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making them touchable, bringing them nearer.

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This is art that is having to envisage things

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that have never been envisaged before.

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And what a feast of invention it is.

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So how was it done? To see that, we have to get even closer.

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Normally, you can't get any closer than this to van Eyck's masterpiece.

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But this isn't any old arts programme.

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This is the Renaissance Unchained on the BBC, so I've managed

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to arrange some exclusive access to the Ghent Altarpiece.

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Not even George Clooney could get as close as we are going to get.

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In just a moment, we're going to be going in there,

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where they're restoring some of the panels of the Ghent Altar

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and we're going to get really close to van Eyck

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and see exactly how he does it.

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But first, I want to show you something.

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This is by Filippo Lippi, a painter from Florence much loved by Vasari,

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and it's a scene from the life of St Benedict, painted in around 1450.

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So that's 20 or so years after the Ghent Altarpiece.

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Now, this wasn't painted in oil paints, which is what van Eyck used.

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It was painted in egg tempera,

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the medium they preferred in early Renaissance Italy.

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It's basically watercolour with a binding of egg yolks

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to hold the pigments together

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and it dries very quickly into these fabulous glowing colours.

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What a gorgeous pink that is!

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So that's tempera over here...

0:29:270:29:28

..but over here is van Eyck's Annunciation.

0:29:330:29:37

So that's the Angel Gabriel telling the Virgin Mary

0:29:370:29:41

that she's going to give birth to Jesus

0:29:410:29:44

and this was painted about 20 years before the Filippo Lippi,

0:29:440:29:50

but look how van Eyck's captured the fabrics.

0:29:500:29:54

Look at what the angel's wearing.

0:29:540:29:57

And compare this...

0:29:570:29:59

..with this.

0:30:020:30:04

See how the cloth is done in the Filippo Lippi

0:30:040:30:08

or these plants over here.

0:30:080:30:10

Compare those...

0:30:110:30:12

..with the plants in the van Eyck,

0:30:170:30:20

these beautiful white lilies,

0:30:200:30:22

which, like the immaculate mirror,

0:30:220:30:24

symbolise the purity of the Virgin Mary.

0:30:240:30:28

It's a different world, isn't it?

0:30:300:30:32

And, critically, a different technique.

0:30:320:30:36

Now, Vasari tells us that van Eyck invented oil paints

0:30:440:30:49

and that's just not true.

0:30:490:30:51

They were already in use in Afghanistan in the seventh century,

0:30:510:30:55

in Buddhist art.

0:30:550:30:58

But he did master them in ways that no-one had mastered them before

0:30:580:31:03

and used them with extraordinary skill

0:31:030:31:07

and it's these oil paints,

0:31:070:31:09

along with the lenses and the glasses,

0:31:090:31:12

that made Flemish art possible.

0:31:120:31:15

And inside here, they've been restoring van Eyck panel by panel,

0:31:230:31:27

so it's a wonderful opportunity to see exactly how it's all done.

0:31:270:31:33

The whole restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece

0:31:430:31:45

is a very big project and the first step is the outside wing panels,

0:31:450:31:50

which we're currently working on and we're already quite far.

0:31:500:31:54

We took already all the vanishes off, the discoloured varnishes,

0:31:540:31:58

and now we're actually in the process

0:31:580:32:00

of removing all the overpaints,

0:32:000:32:01

so we're actually scraping away the later additions

0:32:010:32:04

to reveal the original intention of the artist.

0:32:040:32:06

And you can see it really well there, all those dark brown,

0:32:060:32:11

greens here are actually dirty varnishes that we left on

0:32:110:32:14

to show people and this is the original colour that's underneath.

0:32:140:32:17

So there's a bright white underneath those dark,

0:32:170:32:20

-discoloured varnishes.

-It's very vivid.

0:32:200:32:23

You do see very, very clearly there.

0:32:230:32:26

The white now has come out a Persil white, beautiful.

0:32:260:32:29

Looking at the angel, what strikes me is this, as you said,

0:32:300:32:35

the colours are brighter,

0:32:350:32:37

this beautiful green that's come out of the angel's wings.

0:32:370:32:40

Yeah, after the cleaning, they are a bit brighter and especially,

0:32:400:32:44

yes, indeed, the green does jump at you.

0:32:440:32:47

But I think, most importantly, it has an effect

0:32:470:32:50

on the depth of field because not only the colours,

0:32:500:32:53

I think the colours are, as I said, a bit muted,

0:32:530:32:55

but once we start taking off the first varnish

0:32:550:32:59

and then the overpaint, you feel like you're in a room again.

0:32:590:33:03

You get drawn into the picture and the whole 3-D effect.

0:33:050:33:08

I think it's the experience of being there in the room.

0:33:100:33:14

So, what else could you do with these exciting new paints?

0:33:290:33:32

One of the things you could record more clearly was people.

0:33:340:33:39

In Flanders, the great artists of the Northern Renaissance

0:33:420:33:47

began making their contemporaries immortal.

0:33:470:33:50

We simply haven't seen faces as tangible as these in art before.

0:33:520:33:58

This fierce-looking chappy and Vladimir Putin lookalike

0:34:000:34:04

is Chancellor Rolin, staring with scary determination

0:34:040:34:10

across one of van Eyck's finest landscapes.

0:34:100:34:14

And they say this is van Eyck himself in a big red turban

0:34:160:34:22

and the touching crow's feet around his eyes.

0:34:220:34:25

There was so much invention, too,

0:34:310:34:34

about this thrilling Flemish portraiture.

0:34:340:34:37

This is the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges

0:34:370:34:41

and it's full of the work of Hans Memling,

0:34:410:34:43

a Bruges master who was particularly good at portraits.

0:34:430:34:49

This fellow here is Maarten van Nieuwenhove

0:34:520:34:55

and this is a two-part painting, or diptych,

0:34:550:34:59

painted in 1487 and it's very clever.

0:34:590:35:05

Maarten van Nieuwenhove is at a table praying.

0:35:080:35:13

Look at that beautiful purple velvet jerkin he's wearing,

0:35:130:35:18

bought from the Arnolfinis, perhaps.

0:35:180:35:22

And in the other half, the Virgin Mary and Jesus,

0:35:220:35:27

noticeably less realistic and the objects of Maarten's prayer.

0:35:270:35:34

So he's praying to them,

0:35:380:35:40

but - and this is so brilliant - they're both in the same room.

0:35:400:35:44

This space and that space are next to each other.

0:35:440:35:48

Look at the table here.

0:35:480:35:50

That goes across both pictures as well.

0:35:500:35:52

And see Mary's robe - it flows to the bottom,

0:35:520:35:57

goes over into Maarten van Nieuwenhove's bit

0:35:570:36:00

and even overlaps a bit of the frame.

0:36:000:36:04

So it's a wondrous blending of realities and, at the back,

0:36:050:36:10

there's a typical Flemish payoff.

0:36:100:36:13

Look - a convex mirror and reflected in it, Mary and Maarten

0:36:130:36:20

from the back and from the side, sitting around the same table.

0:36:200:36:25

This is art that can paint miracles.

0:36:280:36:31

In the hands of the Flemish,

0:36:330:36:35

reality became such a powerful weapon in the artist's armoury.

0:36:350:36:41

Yet look what they call it.

0:36:410:36:45

When Vasari wrote the north out of the story of the Renaissance,

0:36:450:36:50

he planted 500 years of prejudice in the annals of art.

0:36:500:36:58

Another thing oil paints were especially good at capturing

0:37:130:37:17

was textures. Oh, my God, they were good at textures!

0:37:170:37:23

In particular, the artists of the Northern Renaissance

0:37:240:37:28

had a lot of fun with armour.

0:37:280:37:30

And that's handy because one of the saints

0:37:320:37:35

who pops up most often in their art

0:37:350:37:37

was the armour painter's delight, St George.

0:37:370:37:43

You know, whenever I see St George adopted as a nationalist symbol

0:37:460:37:51

by right-wing factions in England, for instance,

0:37:510:37:55

it always makes me laugh, because he was actually a Turk of Greek origin

0:37:550:38:00

who was born in Palestine near Tel Aviv

0:38:000:38:04

and who served in the Roman army.

0:38:040:38:06

So all those skinheads

0:38:060:38:08

who've got St George tattooed on their foreheads,

0:38:080:38:11

they're actively promoting

0:38:110:38:13

Turkish, Greek, Palestinian, Roman and Jewish unity.

0:38:130:38:19

Well done, lads!

0:38:190:38:20

St George was popular because he saved a princess from a dragon

0:38:310:38:35

and that made him a ready-made symbol of Christian salvation

0:38:350:38:41

and an exciting challenge for the new oil paints.

0:38:410:38:46

The new paints transformed armour into a delicate metal mirror

0:38:480:38:54

on which sophisticated games could be played with light.

0:38:540:38:58

Apart from encouraging all this exciting investigation of light

0:39:010:39:05

and its symbolism, something else the St George story did

0:39:050:39:09

was to pull Renaissance art out of its comfort zone

0:39:090:39:14

and to send it slithering into dark new areas of the imagination.

0:39:140:39:19

Forced to imagine the terrible beasties

0:39:210:39:24

that St George had to slay,

0:39:240:39:28

Renaissance art took a step into dark new territories.

0:39:280:39:32

So the St George story pushed Renaissance art

0:39:350:39:38

into these dark new areas.

0:39:380:39:41

And that wasn't all - it also made it necessary

0:39:410:39:45

to tackle combat and movement

0:39:450:39:47

and that had an especially powerful impact on sculpture.

0:39:470:39:53

This is what I think is the finest of the northern St Georges.

0:39:560:40:02

He's certainly the most spectacular.

0:40:020:40:05

You probably haven't heard of him because he's in Stockholm in Sweden

0:40:070:40:13

in the Church of St Nicholas.

0:40:130:40:17

What a thing!

0:40:210:40:23

Bigger than life-size and carved out of wood

0:40:230:40:27

with breathtaking skill and drama and the details are horrific.

0:40:270:40:33

Bits of dismembered body are strewn across the plinth.

0:40:360:40:41

And little baby dragons poke their heads out of the ground,

0:40:430:40:47

waiting to be murdered.

0:40:470:40:51

And then, in a very un-Renaissance detail,

0:40:520:40:56

this bisexual dragon is so traumatised

0:40:560:41:01

by St George's mighty spearing that it's emptied its bowels with fear.

0:41:010:41:08

This was made by a German sculptor called Bernt Notke in around 1487

0:41:100:41:18

when Michelangelo was still a teenager.

0:41:180:41:21

Now, Bernt Notke isn't in Vasari, of course,

0:41:210:41:25

because this is a Renaissance

0:41:250:41:28

that obviously isn't trying to quote the Greeks or the Romans.

0:41:280:41:33

It's a Renaissance that's slapping you about the face

0:41:330:41:37

with action, drama and darkness.

0:41:370:41:41

There's nothing Italian about it, that's true.

0:41:430:41:48

But why does that make it a lesser achievement?

0:41:480:41:52

The mad imaginings of the Northern Renaissance

0:42:010:42:04

didn't stop with dragons.

0:42:040:42:06

When art armed itself with oil paints,

0:42:080:42:11

it armed itself with the power to make anything real.

0:42:110:42:16

This really is supposed to be it -

0:42:210:42:24

the mythical Fountain of Youth,

0:42:240:42:26

where you go in old and you come out young.

0:42:260:42:30

Now, you may not believe in the Fountain of Youth,

0:42:350:42:38

but plenty of Renaissance folk did.

0:42:380:42:41

This is how Lucas Cranach, prickly genius of the German Renaissance,

0:42:410:42:49

envisaged its wondrous effects.

0:42:490:42:51

Legend has it that a Spanish conquistador called Ponce de Leon,

0:42:540:42:59

who'd been sent to the Americas to find it,

0:42:590:43:02

landed here in Florida in 1513

0:43:020:43:05

and discovered that it wasn't a myth -

0:43:050:43:09

the Fountain of Youth really existed.

0:43:090:43:13

In Cranach's delirious masterpiece,

0:43:170:43:20

all the Joan Collinses in the village have been rounded up,

0:43:200:43:25

dipped in the special waters

0:43:250:43:28

and turned again into St Trinian's girls.

0:43:280:43:33

It may have stopped working.

0:43:460:43:47

Anyway, here we are in the Renaissance,

0:43:490:43:52

this great rebirth of ancient knowledge,

0:43:520:43:56

but all the old legends, superstitions and myths

0:43:560:44:00

are exerting just as powerful a hold

0:44:000:44:03

on the artistic imagination as they ever did.

0:44:030:44:06

Enjoying Lucas Cranach is like visiting a German nature camp.

0:44:110:44:17

What a lot of nudes there are romping about his pictures.

0:44:170:44:21

Some of them are Lucretias.

0:44:230:44:26

Others are Venuses.

0:44:260:44:30

But all of them, you feel, are here

0:44:300:44:34

because Cranach understood temptation

0:44:340:44:37

and had personal reasons to warn us of its dangers.

0:44:370:44:42

Perhaps that's why he's so unusually keen to paint Adam and Eve.

0:44:460:44:52

Now, the Adam and Eve story,

0:44:520:44:54

about the first man and the first woman committing the first sin,

0:44:540:44:59

was the only story in the Bible that forced painters to paint nudes.

0:44:590:45:05

There's no other way to do it.

0:45:050:45:07

Clothes, after all, hadn't been invented yet.

0:45:070:45:10

Set free in Paradise in their birthday suits,

0:45:150:45:18

Adam and Eve gave Renaissance art a perfect biblical excuse

0:45:180:45:25

to depict tempting human nudity.

0:45:250:45:28

According to the Bible,

0:45:310:45:33

Eve's crime was to pick forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge...

0:45:330:45:37

..and to tempt Adam with it.

0:45:390:45:41

But I think we all know what really went on in Paradise

0:45:440:45:48

when the first naked man met the first naked woman.

0:45:480:45:54

But all these Adams and Eves of the Renaissance

0:45:580:46:01

weren't just there for erotic reasons.

0:46:010:46:04

There were other forces at work on the art of the times

0:46:040:46:08

and the one that's always forgotten but shouldn't be is geography.

0:46:080:46:15

It wasn't just the Fountain of Youth

0:46:170:46:19

that was discovered around about now.

0:46:190:46:22

So, too, was Paradise itself.

0:46:220:46:26

It's a story told gloriously in a Renaissance art form

0:46:290:46:33

that's been unfairly ignored -

0:46:330:46:36

the great art form of the map.

0:46:360:46:41

These days, we're blase about maps, but in Renaissance times,

0:46:430:46:48

maps were extraordinary creations with a huge cosmic significance.

0:46:480:46:56

I can't think of many things

0:46:590:47:01

that would have been harder to make than this -

0:47:010:47:04

the so-called Fra Mauro Map,

0:47:040:47:08

made in Venice in around 1450 by a Venetian monk.

0:47:080:47:14

In those days, north was south and south was north

0:47:150:47:21

so the world was upside down.

0:47:210:47:24

It's exquisite, isn't it?

0:47:260:47:28

The glorious imagining of a glorious new world.

0:47:280:47:32

But, interestingly, round about here, there's something missing -

0:47:340:47:39

a little place called America, which hadn't been discovered yet.

0:47:390:47:46

So the first Renaissance map with the Americas actually on it

0:47:480:47:52

is this one - the Waldseemuller World Map of 1507.

0:47:520:48:00

There's America there,

0:48:000:48:03

or as they called most of it in those days, "terra incognita".

0:48:030:48:07

When Columbus discovered America in 1492,

0:48:220:48:25

he didn't just change history -

0:48:250:48:28

he changed art and particularly the story of Adam and Eve.

0:48:280:48:33

Their depiction has always triggered powerful guilts and worries.

0:48:390:48:44

Some of the most anxious paintings of the Renaissance

0:48:440:48:48

are representations of the first man and the first woman.

0:48:480:48:52

And up on the Sistine ceiling,

0:48:550:48:58

Michelangelo has left us in no doubt whatsoever

0:48:580:49:02

as to the terrible consequences of the first sin.

0:49:020:49:07

But these were still theoretical anxieties,

0:49:100:49:13

distant imaginings of distant biblical events.

0:49:130:49:17

When Columbus discovered America, that changed.

0:49:170:49:21

It wasn't just the Fountain of Youth that turned up in Florida.

0:49:260:49:30

As news began to filter through Europe

0:49:320:49:35

of the strange new world discovered by Columbus,

0:49:350:49:39

the Renaissance mind began putting two and two together

0:49:390:49:44

and Paradise itself suddenly had a location.

0:49:440:49:50

This is Hieronymus Bosch's famous Garden of Earthly Delights,

0:49:570:50:02

a painting about sin and its terrible consequences

0:50:020:50:07

and look what Adam and Eve are sinning under -

0:50:070:50:12

a dragon tree, Satan's tropical succulent of choice.

0:50:120:50:19

Paradise was no longer theoretical.

0:50:230:50:26

Columbus had found it and that was bad news,

0:50:260:50:30

because according to the scriptures,

0:50:300:50:33

man and woman would only return to Paradise

0:50:330:50:37

after the Day of Judgment, the last day of all.

0:50:370:50:41

When Columbus discovered America,

0:50:440:50:47

he set in motion a countdown to the end of the world.

0:50:470:50:52

A less superstitious era might have laughed it off,

0:50:550:51:01

but the Renaissance really wasn't one of those.

0:51:010:51:05

Later in this series,

0:51:060:51:08

we'll be dealing in depth with Hieronymus Bosch.

0:51:080:51:12

For now, all I ask is that you feel his anxiety -

0:51:120:51:19

the anxiety of his times.

0:51:190:51:22

At times like this, times of deep Renaissance despair,

0:51:350:51:41

turning to the era's greatest talent ought to be a relief.

0:51:410:51:47

But in this instance, it isn't,

0:51:470:51:51

because Albrecht Durer, the greatest German painter of the Renaissance,

0:51:510:51:57

was a stoker up of anxieties, not a reliever of them.

0:51:570:52:03

Durer lived here in his house in Nuremberg.

0:52:050:52:08

It's been kept exactly as he left it as a kind of shrine to him

0:52:080:52:13

because one thing Durer made sure of from the start

0:52:130:52:17

is that everyone knew how great he was.

0:52:170:52:20

If they handed out medals for arrogance,

0:52:250:52:28

Durer would have a shelf load.

0:52:280:52:32

Born in Nuremberg in 1471,

0:52:320:52:37

he was so good so quickly

0:52:370:52:41

that, by the age of 13, he drew this -

0:52:410:52:46

a self-portrait as a teenage genius.

0:52:460:52:50

Durer invented the artistic self-portrait.

0:52:530:53:00

Other artists had put themselves in their pictures before,

0:53:000:53:05

but no-one had made themselves the stars of their own art as Durer did.

0:53:050:53:11

Here he is at 22,

0:53:130:53:16

enjoying mightily his own Renaissance handsomeness.

0:53:160:53:22

And look, at 26, he's put on his best dandy ware

0:53:220:53:29

and loves himself even more.

0:53:290:53:32

And then, in 1500,

0:53:350:53:37

in a momentous Renaissance slippage of human modesty,

0:53:370:53:42

the 29-year-old Albrecht Durer

0:53:420:53:46

compares himself unmissably with Christ.

0:53:460:53:52

All over Durer's art,

0:53:580:54:00

we find him interjecting himself into the storylines.

0:54:000:54:05

You even see it in his altarpieces.

0:54:050:54:09

In this busy crucifixion in Vienna,

0:54:110:54:14

who is that standing at the back of the crowd?

0:54:140:54:19

Oh, look, it's Durer.

0:54:190:54:23

And who's invited himself along to join the Virgin Mary

0:54:250:54:29

and Christ in this ruined masterpiece in Prague?

0:54:290:54:34

Who do you think?

0:54:360:54:37

To my eyes, Durer's altarpieces are not as successful

0:54:400:54:45

as he'd like us to believe.

0:54:450:54:48

He couldn't do grandeur or emotional bigness.

0:54:480:54:53

Durer gets better as he gets smaller.

0:54:560:54:59

His portraits, for instance, are often transfixing,

0:54:590:55:05

as with this divine portrayal of a girl from Venice.

0:55:050:55:10

It's as if he couldn't work with a big brush, only a small one.

0:55:160:55:22

Lots of little things combining to create the final image.

0:55:220:55:27

It's a talent which came in particularly useful

0:55:270:55:30

here in his printing studio.

0:55:300:55:33

It's a belief widely held in art

0:55:360:55:39

that Durer was the greatest printmaker of all.

0:55:390:55:44

He was certainly one of the busiest

0:55:440:55:48

and so successfully did his prints spread his fame

0:55:480:55:52

that even Vasari heard of him and gave him a chapter in his book.

0:55:520:55:58

Everyone knows Durer's Melencolia.

0:56:020:56:05

It's probably the most famous print ever made,

0:56:050:56:09

a mysterious figure surrounded

0:56:090:56:12

by all this scattered Renaissance knowledge and made anxious by it.

0:56:120:56:20

Lots of people have suggested that Melencolia

0:56:230:56:27

is another disguised self-portrait

0:56:270:56:30

and I'm certainly prepared to believe that.

0:56:300:56:34

Because, as far as I can see,

0:56:350:56:37

Durer never passed up an opportunity to put himself in his art.

0:56:370:56:44

But, you know, it wasn't actually Durer's prints

0:56:580:57:02

that finally convinced me of his genius

0:57:020:57:05

or his altarpieces or even those extraordinary portraits of his.

0:57:050:57:10

The day that took my breath away and finally blew away all the doubts...

0:57:100:57:15

..was the day I saw his watercolours.

0:57:190:57:23

The Albertina in Vienna has a collection of them

0:57:270:57:30

that only goes on show every couple of decades.

0:57:300:57:34

If you're alive for such an occasion, go there.

0:57:350:57:39

This is Durer's famous Hare, twitching timidly before us.

0:57:420:57:48

And the wings of a roller, coloured so freshly and brightly,

0:57:500:57:56

they might have flown through yesterday sky.

0:57:560:58:00

He thought he was divinely chosen

0:58:030:58:06

and at moments like this,

0:58:060:58:09

you find yourself believing him.

0:58:090:58:12

So, that's the Northern Renaissance, an epoch of startling invention.

0:58:150:58:22

It gave us oil paints.

0:58:220:58:25

It gave us optics.

0:58:250:58:28

It gave us the truth.

0:58:280:58:30

In the next film, I'm heading south again.

0:58:350:58:39

If Vasari got the Northern Renaissance so wrong,

0:58:400:58:45

what did he also get wrong about the Renaissance in Italy?

0:58:450:58:50

WHIPPING

0:58:500:58:54

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