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BELL TOLLS | 0:00:02 | 0:00:04 | |
It says here that the Renaissance | 0:00:13 | 0:00:15 | |
was a tremendously important period in European culture | 0:00:15 | 0:00:19 | |
that produced the beginnings of modern thought. | 0:00:19 | 0:00:23 | |
And this period, it says here, | 0:00:23 | 0:00:25 | |
was marked by the revival of the spirit of Greece and Rome, | 0:00:25 | 0:00:29 | |
and by an increasing preoccupation with secular life. | 0:00:29 | 0:00:34 | |
And, I suppose, some of the time that's what it was. | 0:00:34 | 0:00:38 | |
In some bits of the Italian Renaissance, | 0:00:44 | 0:00:47 | |
the Greeks and the Romans are definitely being remembered, | 0:00:47 | 0:00:51 | |
and modern thought is, perhaps, being invented. | 0:00:51 | 0:00:55 | |
And it's certainly getting more secular. | 0:00:55 | 0:00:58 | |
But that's only in some bits. | 0:01:01 | 0:01:03 | |
Over the years, I've been all around Italy | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
and I've seen an awful lot of Renaissance art. | 0:01:10 | 0:01:13 | |
And wonderful work, no arguments there, | 0:01:13 | 0:01:17 | |
but, you know, very few bits of it, | 0:01:17 | 0:01:20 | |
very few indeed, are actually trying to do what it says in the books. | 0:01:20 | 0:01:25 | |
I mean, this is a forgotten master of the Italian Renaissance, | 0:01:31 | 0:01:35 | |
Niccolo dell'Arca. | 0:01:35 | 0:01:37 | |
Have you heard of him? No. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:40 | |
Why? Because he doesn't fit this. | 0:01:40 | 0:01:43 | |
Yet this was made in around 1460, | 0:01:43 | 0:01:48 | |
so in the pioneering, early days of the Italian Renaissance. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:53 | |
Yet, are the Greeks and the Romans being revived here? | 0:01:53 | 0:01:58 | |
Is modern thought being invented? | 0:01:58 | 0:02:01 | |
Has this got secular ambitions? | 0:02:01 | 0:02:04 | |
I don't think so. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:06 | |
The fact is, a lot of what we've been told | 0:02:15 | 0:02:18 | |
about Italian Renaissance art | 0:02:18 | 0:02:20 | |
is thoroughly misleading. | 0:02:20 | 0:02:22 | |
It's just not what was going on. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:24 | |
Most of the time Italian art wasn't reviving the Greeks, | 0:02:24 | 0:02:29 | |
it wasn't inventing modern thought. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:32 | |
It was doing something far more important than that. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:35 | |
It was telling stories to people who couldn't read, | 0:02:35 | 0:02:40 | |
imagining the unimaginable, | 0:02:40 | 0:02:42 | |
and getting in touch with religious feelings | 0:02:42 | 0:02:46 | |
that were deep and Catholic. | 0:02:46 | 0:02:48 | |
I mean, come on. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:50 | |
This is Italy. | 0:02:50 | 0:02:53 | |
BELL TOLLS | 0:03:29 | 0:03:30 | |
Ah, here it is. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:43 | |
Zechariah 3:8. | 0:03:43 | 0:03:46 | |
Ecce enim ego adducam servum meum orientem. | 0:03:46 | 0:03:51 | |
"Behold, I will bring forth my servant, the Orient." | 0:03:51 | 0:03:55 | |
HE SIGHS | 0:03:56 | 0:03:58 | |
See that town up there on the hill? That's Assisi. | 0:04:01 | 0:04:05 | |
A town filled with Renaissance art. | 0:04:05 | 0:04:09 | |
But also with Renaissance complications. | 0:04:10 | 0:04:13 | |
Because that's where Francis of Assisi was born. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:19 | |
Francis was the founder of the Franciscan Order of monks, | 0:04:21 | 0:04:25 | |
the Greyfriars, as they were known in Robin Hood times. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:29 | |
And in Italy he pops up in more Renaissance art | 0:04:29 | 0:04:33 | |
than anyone except Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:37 | |
Now, why would the founder of an order of monks | 0:04:37 | 0:04:41 | |
get this much attention? | 0:04:41 | 0:04:42 | |
There it goes. The sun coming up over Assisi. | 0:04:47 | 0:04:50 | |
How beautiful is that? | 0:04:51 | 0:04:53 | |
Now, if you ever find yourself without a compass in Italy | 0:04:54 | 0:04:58 | |
and you want to know which way you're pointing, | 0:04:58 | 0:05:01 | |
the thing to do is to find the nearest Catholic church. | 0:05:01 | 0:05:06 | |
Because they all point to the east, | 0:05:06 | 0:05:08 | |
to the rising sun. | 0:05:08 | 0:05:10 | |
Interestingly, in the Tuscan dialect, | 0:05:15 | 0:05:19 | |
Assisi, or Assesi, actually means "rising up". | 0:05:19 | 0:05:24 | |
Like the sun rising in the east. | 0:05:25 | 0:05:27 | |
Or as we used to call it, the Orient. | 0:05:28 | 0:05:32 | |
So it's Zechariah again, 6:12. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:39 | |
HE READS IN LATIN | 0:05:39 | 0:05:42 | |
"Behold the man whose name is Orient. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:45 | |
"He shall build the Temple of the Lord." | 0:05:45 | 0:05:48 | |
Because Francis's story keeps appearing | 0:05:59 | 0:06:02 | |
in all this Renaissance art, | 0:06:02 | 0:06:04 | |
we know it really well. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:06 | |
We know that he was very rich, | 0:06:06 | 0:06:08 | |
but then he saw the light | 0:06:08 | 0:06:10 | |
and gave away all his possessions. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
We know that one day Francis was coming down from Assisi | 0:06:24 | 0:06:28 | |
when he came across a ruined chapel here at San Damiano | 0:06:28 | 0:06:33 | |
at the bottom of the hill. | 0:06:33 | 0:06:35 | |
And he went in. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:38 | |
Inside was a crucifix and, miracle of miracles, | 0:06:46 | 0:06:51 | |
it spoke to him. | 0:06:51 | 0:06:53 | |
"Francis," said the talking crucifix, | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
"my house is crumbling. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:00 | |
"Go and restore it." | 0:07:00 | 0:07:03 | |
So that's what he did. | 0:07:06 | 0:07:07 | |
Carrying the stones on his own back, | 0:07:07 | 0:07:10 | |
Francis of Assisi rebuilt the chapel here at San Damiano | 0:07:10 | 0:07:15 | |
and fulfilled the prophecy of Zechariah. | 0:07:15 | 0:07:18 | |
"Hang on a minute, Waldemar," | 0:07:22 | 0:07:24 | |
you might be thinking. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:26 | |
"You're sounding like Dan Brown here. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
"What are you implying?" | 0:07:29 | 0:07:31 | |
What I'm implying | 0:07:33 | 0:07:35 | |
is that Francis of Assisi was a messianic figure | 0:07:35 | 0:07:39 | |
who thought he'd been instructed to act by the Bible. | 0:07:39 | 0:07:42 | |
Zechariah 6:12, | 0:07:42 | 0:07:44 | |
"My servant the Orient will rebuild the Temple of the Lord." | 0:07:44 | 0:07:50 | |
Francis of Assisi thought he was the Orient. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:55 | |
BELL TOLLS | 0:07:55 | 0:07:57 | |
His followers thought it too. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:01 | |
Up on the balcony of the Franciscan headquarters in Assisi, | 0:08:01 | 0:08:05 | |
looking out across the world, | 0:08:05 | 0:08:09 | |
they've put the words of the great Tuscan poet Dante, | 0:08:09 | 0:08:13 | |
which make the connection with the Orient explicit. | 0:08:13 | 0:08:17 | |
Francis wasn't just living a life, | 0:08:19 | 0:08:22 | |
he was fulfilling a huge biblical prophecy. | 0:08:22 | 0:08:26 | |
You don't have to take my word for it. | 0:08:31 | 0:08:33 | |
Take the word of Renaissance art, | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
and particularly of the marvellous Giotto. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:40 | |
This is the great Basilica in Assisi, | 0:08:46 | 0:08:49 | |
built in memory of St Francis in the 13th century. | 0:08:49 | 0:08:54 | |
And in around 1300, | 0:08:55 | 0:08:57 | |
Giotto was commissioned to paint Francis' story. | 0:08:57 | 0:09:03 | |
Now, 1300 - that's early. | 0:09:07 | 0:09:10 | |
And this is one of the defining frescoes | 0:09:10 | 0:09:13 | |
at the very beginning of the Renaissance. | 0:09:13 | 0:09:16 | |
It's all up there. | 0:09:16 | 0:09:18 | |
There's Francis giving away all his clothes | 0:09:22 | 0:09:26 | |
and renouncing his inheritance. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:29 | |
There he is talking to the animals | 0:09:31 | 0:09:34 | |
in a famous miracle of divine communication. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:38 | |
And there he is holding up the church, | 0:09:40 | 0:09:44 | |
rebuilding it exactly as Zechariah predicted. | 0:09:44 | 0:09:48 | |
It's all here, laid out with the clarity of a comic book, | 0:09:51 | 0:09:56 | |
in this vivid explosion | 0:09:56 | 0:09:58 | |
of imaginative Renaissance storytelling. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:02 | |
When people go on about the pioneering art of Giotto, | 0:10:07 | 0:10:11 | |
they talk about the new solidity of his figures, | 0:10:11 | 0:10:16 | |
the classical influences at work on his anatomies, | 0:10:16 | 0:10:20 | |
this new naturalism of his landscapes. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:23 | |
And all that is true, | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
but it misses the point. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:28 | |
What's really remarkable here - | 0:10:32 | 0:10:34 | |
astonishing, amazing - | 0:10:34 | 0:10:37 | |
is that Giotto has found a way | 0:10:37 | 0:10:40 | |
to imagine the unimaginable. | 0:10:40 | 0:10:43 | |
I mean, look at this stigmata scene. | 0:10:44 | 0:10:47 | |
Christ as an angel | 0:10:48 | 0:10:50 | |
sending lines of pain from heaven. | 0:10:50 | 0:10:53 | |
Transferring his wounds to Francis. | 0:10:53 | 0:10:57 | |
What a strange storyline that is. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:00 | |
In the real world, none of this could happen. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:07 | |
Francis couldn't hoist the church up on his back, | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
or talk to the pigeons, | 0:11:10 | 0:11:12 | |
or receive the wounds of Christ. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
In the real world, it can't happen. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:18 | |
But in art, it can. | 0:11:18 | 0:11:21 | |
That's what's so telling and exciting | 0:11:25 | 0:11:28 | |
about the art of the Renaissance. | 0:11:28 | 0:11:30 | |
It's not about regaining the civilisation of the Greeks | 0:11:32 | 0:11:37 | |
or quoting the classical world. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:40 | |
It's about making the impossible feel vivid and real. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:45 | |
And if you can do that, | 0:11:47 | 0:11:49 | |
that's an enormous power. | 0:11:49 | 0:11:52 | |
It's the power of Renaissance art. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:56 | |
BELL TOLLS | 0:12:03 | 0:12:05 | |
Now, I don't know how familiar you are with the concept of purgatory. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:17 | |
These are godless times, | 0:12:18 | 0:12:21 | |
so the chances are you don't know as much about it as people used to. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:27 | |
Purgatory is somewhere between earth and heaven. | 0:12:33 | 0:12:36 | |
It's where you go if you haven't been bad enough to go to hell | 0:12:36 | 0:12:40 | |
but you haven't been good enough to go to heaven either. | 0:12:40 | 0:12:44 | |
Not straightaway at least. | 0:12:44 | 0:12:45 | |
In purgatory your penance continues. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:53 | |
And your soul gets scrubbed up | 0:12:54 | 0:12:57 | |
until it's clean enough to enter paradise. | 0:12:57 | 0:13:01 | |
That's Dante, the great Tuscan poet, | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
who's quoted so pointedly on that balcony in Assisi | 0:13:06 | 0:13:11 | |
with that line about the Orient. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:13 | |
In this inventive fresco by Domenico di Michelino, | 0:13:16 | 0:13:21 | |
painted in 1465, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:24 | |
the giant Dante looms over Florence. | 0:13:24 | 0:13:28 | |
Surrounded by the scary and painful future | 0:13:30 | 0:13:34 | |
that all we sinners must face. | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
On the left of him that's hell, | 0:13:41 | 0:13:45 | |
with all those poor sinners being stung by bees... | 0:13:45 | 0:13:47 | |
..and burned by the eternal fires. | 0:13:48 | 0:13:51 | |
Behind him, see that mountain? | 0:13:55 | 0:13:57 | |
That's purgatory, | 0:13:57 | 0:13:59 | |
where the world's lesser sinners run off their sins, | 0:13:59 | 0:14:03 | |
like naughty schoolboys running round the football pitch. | 0:14:03 | 0:14:06 | |
When I was at school and I was naughty, | 0:14:13 | 0:14:16 | |
which happened a lot I'm afraid, | 0:14:16 | 0:14:18 | |
I was given lines to write. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:20 | |
The same thing over and over again - | 0:14:20 | 0:14:23 | |
"I will not flick ink at my geography teacher," | 0:14:23 | 0:14:27 | |
that kind of thing. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:28 | |
But in Renaissance Italy, | 0:14:28 | 0:14:31 | |
if you wanted to atone for your sins | 0:14:31 | 0:14:33 | |
and spend less time in purgatory, | 0:14:33 | 0:14:36 | |
you had to pray for forgiveness. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:39 | |
And the best person to pray to was the Virgin Mary. | 0:14:39 | 0:14:43 | |
Why are there so many beautiful Madonnas in Renaissance art? | 0:14:46 | 0:14:51 | |
Because so many Renaissance sinners | 0:14:53 | 0:14:57 | |
had so much praying to do. | 0:14:57 | 0:14:59 | |
These fascinating battles to imagine the Virgin Mary | 0:15:10 | 0:15:15 | |
and capture her perfection | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
resulted in some of the Renaissance's greatest pictures. | 0:15:18 | 0:15:22 | |
When I say great, I mean GREAT. | 0:15:25 | 0:15:29 | |
Look at the size of that. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:31 | |
The enthroned Virgin Mary. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:35 | |
Painted in the very early days of the Renaissance, | 0:15:35 | 0:15:39 | |
in around 1315, by Simone Martini. | 0:15:39 | 0:15:42 | |
Now, that's what you call an enthroned Madonna. | 0:15:44 | 0:15:47 | |
I don't know about you, | 0:15:51 | 0:15:53 | |
but when I look at Renaissance pictures | 0:15:53 | 0:15:56 | |
I need to know what I'm looking at. | 0:15:56 | 0:15:59 | |
Otherwise even the best Renaissance art | 0:16:01 | 0:16:04 | |
can blur into an impenetrable wall of religiosity. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:09 | |
And that's particularly true of all these Renaissance Madonnas. | 0:16:12 | 0:16:17 | |
There's so many of them, | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
and they can all feel the same. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:24 | |
So in this film I'm going to guide you | 0:16:24 | 0:16:26 | |
through the main types of Madonna | 0:16:26 | 0:16:29 | |
that you find in Renaissance art. | 0:16:29 | 0:16:31 | |
So when you go into a museum, | 0:16:31 | 0:16:33 | |
you'll know exactly what you're looking at. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:35 | |
This big one, the enthroned Madonna, | 0:16:37 | 0:16:41 | |
sits above us, surrounded by saints. | 0:16:41 | 0:16:46 | |
How do we know they're saints? | 0:16:47 | 0:16:50 | |
Because they've all got halos. | 0:16:50 | 0:16:53 | |
That is St Peter, Jesus' trusty apostle. | 0:16:55 | 0:16:59 | |
You can always spot him in art | 0:17:00 | 0:17:02 | |
because he's always carrying a big key... | 0:17:02 | 0:17:05 | |
..the key to heaven. | 0:17:06 | 0:17:08 | |
And there is St John the Baptist. | 0:17:10 | 0:17:13 | |
He's always wearing an animal skin, | 0:17:13 | 0:17:17 | |
because he lived in the wilderness. | 0:17:17 | 0:17:19 | |
So, John the Baptist is here, St Peter is here, | 0:17:22 | 0:17:27 | |
the Virgin Mary is here. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:30 | |
And where is the only place | 0:17:30 | 0:17:32 | |
where they could all be together like this? | 0:17:32 | 0:17:35 | |
That's right, heaven. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:38 | |
They're all in heaven. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:41 | |
That Simone Martini has done here | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena | 0:17:48 | 0:17:51 | |
is to imagine that this wall | 0:17:51 | 0:17:53 | |
is an opening in the side of the building... | 0:17:53 | 0:17:56 | |
..that looks out onto heaven... | 0:17:58 | 0:18:00 | |
..where the Madonna and her saints have gathered | 0:18:02 | 0:18:06 | |
so that we, over here in the corporeal world... | 0:18:06 | 0:18:09 | |
..can see her and worship her. | 0:18:11 | 0:18:15 | |
The enthroned Madonna is particularly popular. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:28 | |
But there are many other Renaissance Madonnas to pray to. | 0:18:28 | 0:18:33 | |
And a man could go mad deciding which to pick. | 0:18:34 | 0:18:37 | |
So, to narrow them down, | 0:18:39 | 0:18:41 | |
I've done what any sensible admirer of Renaissance art should do. | 0:18:41 | 0:18:46 | |
I'm focusing on the Madonnas painted by Piero della Francesca. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:53 | |
Between 1445 and 1474, | 0:18:56 | 0:19:01 | |
along this stretch of road on the borders between Tuscany and Umbria, | 0:19:01 | 0:19:06 | |
right at the heart of the Italian Renaissance, | 0:19:06 | 0:19:09 | |
Piero painted a cluster of Madonnas | 0:19:09 | 0:19:13 | |
that can all be visited in a day. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:16 | |
And the one to start with is up there, | 0:19:16 | 0:19:19 | |
in the little Tuscan hill town of Monterchi. | 0:19:19 | 0:19:22 | |
It was painted for the town church | 0:19:26 | 0:19:29 | |
but an earthquake knocked it down. | 0:19:29 | 0:19:31 | |
So it's now got its own museum. | 0:19:32 | 0:19:35 | |
She's called the Madonna del Parto, | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
that's in Italian. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:47 | |
In English, she's the Madonna of Parturition. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:51 | |
So if you know what parturition means | 0:19:52 | 0:19:55 | |
you'll know why she's so special. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:58 | |
Parturition is childbirth. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:05 | |
So what this is is an image of the Holy Madonna... | 0:20:05 | 0:20:09 | |
pregnant with baby Jesus. | 0:20:09 | 0:20:12 | |
It's very rare in art to see Mary pregnant. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
Not just in the Renaissance, but any time. | 0:20:18 | 0:20:22 | |
It's as if pregnancy is just too real, too biological, | 0:20:22 | 0:20:27 | |
to fit with the image of the Virgin Mary. | 0:20:27 | 0:20:30 | |
But Piero pulls it off here with such grace. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:35 | |
The next Piero Madonna is here, | 0:20:46 | 0:20:49 | |
in his hometown of Sansepolcro in the town museum, | 0:20:49 | 0:20:55 | |
where you will find her | 0:20:55 | 0:20:57 | |
at the centre of a complex religious arrangement. | 0:20:57 | 0:21:01 | |
It's a polyptych - | 0:21:05 | 0:21:07 | |
an altarpiece made of many parts. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:10 | |
Piero was originally commissioned to paint it in 1445, | 0:21:10 | 0:21:17 | |
so that's right at the start of his career. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
But he dillied and he dallied | 0:21:21 | 0:21:25 | |
and he did all these side panels first. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:28 | |
And the Madonna herself, | 0:21:28 | 0:21:31 | |
she was only finished in 1462 | 0:21:31 | 0:21:36 | |
when, as you can see, he was at his peak. | 0:21:36 | 0:21:40 | |
She is what they call the Madonna Misericordia - | 0:21:44 | 0:21:48 | |
the Virgin of Mercy, | 0:21:48 | 0:21:51 | |
who is always shown with her cloak outstretched, | 0:21:51 | 0:21:55 | |
offering mercy and protection to those who shelter under it. | 0:21:55 | 0:22:00 | |
These giant Madonnas of Mercy | 0:22:03 | 0:22:06 | |
are a kind of stand-in for the church itself - | 0:22:06 | 0:22:09 | |
a human building in which the congregation can gather. | 0:22:09 | 0:22:14 | |
All these kneeling figures at the front, these are the donors, | 0:22:14 | 0:22:19 | |
the people who actually paid for the picture. | 0:22:19 | 0:22:22 | |
Because that's the other way you earned time off from purgatory | 0:22:26 | 0:22:30 | |
in the Renaissance - | 0:22:30 | 0:22:32 | |
by commissioning works of art for the church. | 0:22:32 | 0:22:36 | |
Why is there is so much great Renaissance art? | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
Because so many great Renaissance sinners | 0:22:43 | 0:22:46 | |
were trying to get into God's good books. | 0:22:46 | 0:22:50 | |
WHIPPING | 0:23:02 | 0:23:05 | |
This is the Ducal Palace in Urbino, | 0:23:09 | 0:23:12 | |
and that is Piero's Flagellation. | 0:23:12 | 0:23:16 | |
Such a mysterious little picture. | 0:23:16 | 0:23:18 | |
And, very unusually, he signed it with the name of his hometown. | 0:23:18 | 0:23:23 | |
But this is what we've come here to look at - | 0:23:33 | 0:23:36 | |
Piero's Madonna of Senigallia. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:40 | |
She's so tranquil, | 0:23:40 | 0:23:42 | |
so still, so lovely. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:45 | |
And as with all these Madonnas, | 0:23:45 | 0:23:48 | |
Piero is faced here with the fiendishly difficult task | 0:23:48 | 0:23:52 | |
of painting a Madonna who is both a mother and a virgin. | 0:23:52 | 0:23:58 | |
That is the big challenge facing the Renaissance imagination. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:03 | |
So up on the shelf, | 0:24:07 | 0:24:09 | |
he has painted a basket of crisp, white linen - | 0:24:09 | 0:24:14 | |
a deliberate echo of the Madonna's purity. | 0:24:14 | 0:24:16 | |
But this is Piero della Francesca, | 0:24:19 | 0:24:22 | |
the master of light. | 0:24:22 | 0:24:24 | |
So he doesn't just do it with linen, | 0:24:26 | 0:24:29 | |
he does it with sunbeams as well. | 0:24:29 | 0:24:32 | |
Look here - how the light coming in so gently through the window | 0:24:35 | 0:24:39 | |
makes a beeline for Christ. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
In the subtle symbolism of this wonderful picture, | 0:24:46 | 0:24:50 | |
Jesus is the product of a magic penetration... | 0:24:50 | 0:24:55 | |
..a penetration by light. | 0:24:56 | 0:24:58 | |
Now I think we're all agreed | 0:25:01 | 0:25:03 | |
that Piero's Madonnas are serenely beautiful, | 0:25:03 | 0:25:07 | |
but I think we can also all agree that his baby Jesuses, | 0:25:07 | 0:25:11 | |
to put it charitably, | 0:25:11 | 0:25:13 | |
are a touch unconvincing. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
No, let's go further than that. | 0:25:18 | 0:25:21 | |
They're pretty ugly. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:24 | |
And the same can be said | 0:25:24 | 0:25:26 | |
of a lot of Renaissance babies. | 0:25:26 | 0:25:28 | |
How can an era that gets the Madonna so right... | 0:25:30 | 0:25:34 | |
get the baby Jesus so wrong? | 0:25:34 | 0:25:38 | |
Well, actually, it doesn't get him wrong. | 0:25:40 | 0:25:43 | |
At least, not on its own terms, | 0:25:43 | 0:25:45 | |
because you have to remember | 0:25:45 | 0:25:47 | |
what they're trying to paint here isn't just a baby, | 0:25:47 | 0:25:52 | |
this is a God who's come down to Earth as a man. | 0:25:52 | 0:25:57 | |
When the painted the baby Jesus, | 0:25:59 | 0:26:02 | |
the artists of the Renaissance | 0:26:02 | 0:26:05 | |
were trying to imagine a baby who is also a God. | 0:26:05 | 0:26:10 | |
A newborn who has been there since the beginning of time. | 0:26:10 | 0:26:15 | |
Two very different concepts | 0:26:16 | 0:26:19 | |
are trying to squeeze themselves into one tiny body. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:25 | |
No wonder so many of them are so ugly. | 0:26:26 | 0:26:31 | |
Because Piero's Madonnas are so noble and lovely, | 0:26:38 | 0:26:43 | |
I worry that I may be painting too sunny a picture for you here | 0:26:43 | 0:26:49 | |
of the essential drives of the Italian Renaissance. | 0:26:49 | 0:26:52 | |
Yes, Italy, a land of mama's boys, | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
was especially fond of Madonnas. | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
But it was also a land full of sinners who needed purging. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:06 | |
This is the convent of San Marco in Florence. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:16 | |
And as you can see... | 0:27:16 | 0:27:17 | |
it's full of wonders. | 0:27:17 | 0:27:20 | |
It was taken over in 1435 | 0:27:20 | 0:27:24 | |
by a religious order called the Dominicans. | 0:27:24 | 0:27:29 | |
The Dominicans were founded by St Dominic of Guzman | 0:27:38 | 0:27:43 | |
at the beginning of the 13th century. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:45 | |
And the self-appointed task of this fierce religious order | 0:27:47 | 0:27:52 | |
was to rid the church of heretics. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:56 | |
You can always spot the Dominicans in art. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:02 | |
They're the ones wearing the white robes with the black cowls. | 0:28:02 | 0:28:07 | |
And that's why they came to be called the Black Friars. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:15 | |
The other nickname of the Dominicans | 0:28:22 | 0:28:25 | |
was the Hounds of the Lord. | 0:28:25 | 0:28:27 | |
It was based on a pun. | 0:28:27 | 0:28:29 | |
Dominican sounds a little like "Domini canes", | 0:28:29 | 0:28:32 | |
which is Latin for "God's dogs". | 0:28:32 | 0:28:36 | |
This terrifying nickname, | 0:28:36 | 0:28:39 | |
the Hounds of the Lord, | 0:28:39 | 0:28:41 | |
seemed to suit their spirit. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:43 | |
The Dominicans were notoriously keen on flagellation. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:52 | |
They had a relationship to pain. | 0:28:53 | 0:28:57 | |
And when the Pope in Rome set up the Inquisition in 1229 | 0:28:58 | 0:29:04 | |
to rid the church of its heretics, | 0:29:04 | 0:29:07 | |
the Dominicans were entrusted to lead it. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:11 | |
So the Dominicans where the dogs of God, religiously fierce, | 0:29:18 | 0:29:23 | |
taking on the heretics, | 0:29:23 | 0:29:26 | |
but you wouldn't know it from the art they made. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
Not here, at least, in San Marco, | 0:29:29 | 0:29:32 | |
where the entire convent is filled with the paintings | 0:29:32 | 0:29:36 | |
of a Dominican genius they called Fra Giovanni Angelico - | 0:29:36 | 0:29:42 | |
the Angelic Brother John. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:44 | |
Fra Angelico was a friar here at San Marco. | 0:29:49 | 0:29:53 | |
And in each of the cells in the convent, | 0:29:53 | 0:29:56 | |
he painted the story of Christ, | 0:29:56 | 0:30:00 | |
so the friars could contemplate it 24/7. | 0:30:00 | 0:30:05 | |
There is nothing else like this in the world. | 0:30:10 | 0:30:13 | |
As a feat of stamina, | 0:30:13 | 0:30:16 | |
it's a mind-boggling achievement. | 0:30:16 | 0:30:19 | |
But it's also extraordinary | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
because Fra Angelico fully deserved his name. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:26 | |
He really was such a sweet and gentle painter. | 0:30:32 | 0:30:36 | |
All the frantic flagellation that went on here | 0:30:38 | 0:30:42 | |
seems so far away from the delicate moods of Fra Angelico. | 0:30:42 | 0:30:47 | |
Here is his Annunciation - | 0:30:49 | 0:30:52 | |
the Angel Gabriel telling Mary | 0:30:52 | 0:30:54 | |
she is going to give birth to Jesus. | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
And here's another Annunciation, | 0:31:00 | 0:31:03 | |
also in San Marco. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:05 | |
A painting of such sparse and simple beauty. | 0:31:05 | 0:31:09 | |
Apparently he would always pray before he began a painting, | 0:31:13 | 0:31:17 | |
and once he started a picture | 0:31:17 | 0:31:19 | |
he would never retouch it or change it | 0:31:19 | 0:31:22 | |
because he believed that his art was divinely inspired. | 0:31:22 | 0:31:27 | |
And if the word of God flows through you, | 0:31:27 | 0:31:30 | |
you're not allowed to alter it. | 0:31:30 | 0:31:33 | |
The sweetness of Fra Angelico drifts through the monastery of San Marco | 0:31:36 | 0:31:43 | |
like a beautiful scent. | 0:31:43 | 0:31:45 | |
But at the end of the corridor, darkness lurks. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:53 | |
This is the cell occupied by a Dominican | 0:31:53 | 0:31:58 | |
whose name still strikes terror | 0:31:58 | 0:32:01 | |
in the hearts of us unworthy types - | 0:32:01 | 0:32:05 | |
Savonarola. | 0:32:05 | 0:32:07 | |
It isn't time yet to deal with him, | 0:32:08 | 0:32:12 | |
but I need to warn you, he's coming up. | 0:32:12 | 0:32:17 | |
See that snow on the top of that mountain? | 0:32:23 | 0:32:27 | |
That's not snow at all. | 0:32:27 | 0:32:30 | |
It's gleaming white marble. | 0:32:31 | 0:32:34 | |
Which means I'm in Carrara, | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
whose famous quarries supplied the stone | 0:32:39 | 0:32:43 | |
for one of the giants of the Renaissance. | 0:32:43 | 0:32:47 | |
So far in this series, we've talked mostly about paintings. | 0:32:48 | 0:32:53 | |
But, of course, it was also a tremendous era for sculpture. | 0:32:53 | 0:32:58 | |
When you talk about sculpture in the Renaissance, | 0:32:58 | 0:33:01 | |
you come here to Carrara | 0:33:01 | 0:33:04 | |
and you talk about Michelangelo. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:07 | |
Michelangelo's battles with the white marble of Carrara | 0:33:12 | 0:33:16 | |
have come to define Renaissance sculpture. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:20 | |
And the way he carved that marble | 0:33:21 | 0:33:24 | |
has come to be seen as the Renaissance way of carving. | 0:33:24 | 0:33:29 | |
You know the stories, | 0:33:32 | 0:33:33 | |
they've gone down in the folklore of art - | 0:33:33 | 0:33:36 | |
how Michelangelo saw the figures hidden inside | 0:33:36 | 0:33:40 | |
the huge blocks of Carrara marble, | 0:33:40 | 0:33:43 | |
how he struggled with the stone to set them free. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:47 | |
But it wasn't just the stones of Carrara | 0:33:50 | 0:33:54 | |
that Michelangelo was taking on | 0:33:54 | 0:33:56 | |
in these famous sculptural struggles of his. | 0:33:56 | 0:34:00 | |
He was also taking on the past. | 0:34:00 | 0:34:04 | |
Buried beneath Renaissance Italy | 0:34:05 | 0:34:08 | |
was the ancient world of the Romans and the Greeks, | 0:34:08 | 0:34:13 | |
which was now being dug up again, | 0:34:13 | 0:34:16 | |
inspiring the Renaissance to compete with it and match it. | 0:34:16 | 0:34:22 | |
The trouble is, all these wonderful ancient marbles | 0:34:26 | 0:34:30 | |
that were being dug out of the ground in Renaissance times, | 0:34:30 | 0:34:34 | |
inspiring Michelangelo and co, were fundamentally misleading. | 0:34:34 | 0:34:40 | |
When they came out of the ground they were pure and white, | 0:34:40 | 0:34:44 | |
but that wasn't how they went into the ground. | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
We now know that the sculptures of the ancients were never white. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:56 | |
They were always highly coloured and gaudy. | 0:34:56 | 0:35:00 | |
But paint doesn't last as long as stone, | 0:35:02 | 0:35:06 | |
so when these ancient sculptures were dug up again... | 0:35:06 | 0:35:10 | |
they came out white | 0:35:10 | 0:35:13 | |
and misled an entire civilisation. | 0:35:13 | 0:35:17 | |
Poor old Michelangelo. | 0:35:23 | 0:35:25 | |
There he was, competing with a mythic white past | 0:35:25 | 0:35:29 | |
that never actually existed. | 0:35:29 | 0:35:31 | |
But in this film, we're not going to make the same mistake, | 0:35:31 | 0:35:35 | |
because what we're going to do | 0:35:35 | 0:35:36 | |
is to follow another Renaissance storyline - | 0:35:36 | 0:35:40 | |
not the myth but the truth. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:42 | |
So the first thing we need to do | 0:35:42 | 0:35:46 | |
is to find out who broke Michelangelo's nose. | 0:35:46 | 0:35:50 | |
The Brancacci Chapel in Florence. | 0:35:55 | 0:35:58 | |
A Renaissance hotspot | 0:35:59 | 0:36:01 | |
that's on every art-lover's bucket list. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
Two things of note happened in here. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:13 | |
The first was that in around 1425 | 0:36:13 | 0:36:18 | |
Masaccio painted these famous frescoes, | 0:36:18 | 0:36:22 | |
telling the story of how we were expelled from Paradise and why. | 0:36:22 | 0:36:27 | |
But there's another reason to come here - | 0:36:29 | 0:36:31 | |
because it was in here, in the Brancacci Chapel, | 0:36:31 | 0:36:35 | |
that Michelangelo's nose was broken | 0:36:35 | 0:36:39 | |
by a rival sculptor called Pietro Torrigiano. | 0:36:39 | 0:36:43 | |
Michelangelo had been taking the mickey out of Torrigiano, | 0:36:48 | 0:36:53 | |
and Torrigiano snapped and punched him in the nose. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:57 | |
"I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit," | 0:36:58 | 0:37:02 | |
he later remembered. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:04 | |
So this Torrigiano was obviously violent and arrogant, | 0:37:06 | 0:37:10 | |
but he was also highly gifted. | 0:37:10 | 0:37:13 | |
And while Michelangelo, with his broken nose, | 0:37:13 | 0:37:17 | |
went on to dominate Renaissance sculpture, | 0:37:17 | 0:37:20 | |
Torrigiano had to flee from Florence | 0:37:20 | 0:37:24 | |
and he found himself written out of the story of the Renaissance. | 0:37:24 | 0:37:28 | |
He spent the rest of his career floating around Europe, | 0:37:31 | 0:37:36 | |
making weirdly vivid sculpture | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
that's been largely forgotten. | 0:37:39 | 0:37:42 | |
This is also by him. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
It's actually Henry VII, King of England, | 0:37:49 | 0:37:52 | |
because, amazingly, Torrigiano came to London too, | 0:37:52 | 0:37:57 | |
where he worked for the Tudor Court. | 0:37:57 | 0:38:00 | |
But England didn't work out for him either, | 0:38:04 | 0:38:08 | |
and he ended up in Spain, | 0:38:08 | 0:38:10 | |
where he died in prison, destitute and forgotten. | 0:38:10 | 0:38:14 | |
But look what he left behind - | 0:38:14 | 0:38:17 | |
a thoroughly different sculptural tradition. | 0:38:17 | 0:38:21 | |
Just as Renaissance as the gleaming white marbles of Michelangelo, | 0:38:21 | 0:38:27 | |
but thrillingly realistic and alive. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:31 | |
Just look at the details of the anatomy. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:38 | |
This wonderfully stringy and wiry body | 0:38:38 | 0:38:42 | |
of the old St Jerome | 0:38:42 | 0:38:45 | |
as he beats himself penitentially with a rock. | 0:38:45 | 0:38:49 | |
This is the Renaissance that history forgot - | 0:38:51 | 0:38:55 | |
intense, neurotic, realistic. | 0:38:55 | 0:38:59 | |
And the reason Torrigiano can be as convincing as this | 0:38:59 | 0:39:04 | |
is because this isn't made out of marble, | 0:39:04 | 0:39:07 | |
it is made out of terracotta, clay, | 0:39:07 | 0:39:11 | |
which you can mould and shape and paint | 0:39:11 | 0:39:15 | |
with so much more detail. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:18 | |
Yes, it's less macho than stone carving, | 0:39:20 | 0:39:25 | |
but that doesn't make it less Renaissance. | 0:39:25 | 0:39:30 | |
And it's a tradition that doesn't deserve to be forgotten. | 0:39:30 | 0:39:34 | |
This is what they call a compianto, | 0:39:39 | 0:39:42 | |
a lamentation over the dead Christ, | 0:39:42 | 0:39:45 | |
by an artist from Bologna called Niccolo dell'Arca. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:50 | |
This was made in around 1460. | 0:39:52 | 0:39:57 | |
That's right, 1460. | 0:39:57 | 0:40:01 | |
It's way ahead of its time. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:04 | |
One of the most dynamic and exciting masterpieces | 0:40:04 | 0:40:08 | |
of Renaissance sculpture. | 0:40:08 | 0:40:11 | |
Even Michelangelo, when he came here to Bologna, | 0:40:13 | 0:40:16 | |
admired Niccolo dell'Arca. | 0:40:16 | 0:40:19 | |
But since then, he's been written out of the story of the Renaissance. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:24 | |
You just don't hear about Niccolo dell'Arca. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:31 | |
Why? | 0:40:31 | 0:40:32 | |
Because terracotta - burnt clay - | 0:40:32 | 0:40:36 | |
is such unglamorous stuff. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:40 | |
You don't have to go to Carrara to find it, | 0:40:40 | 0:40:44 | |
you just look down at the ground under your feet, | 0:40:44 | 0:40:48 | |
and there it is. | 0:40:48 | 0:40:50 | |
And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah | 0:41:00 | 0:41:04 | |
brimstone and fire from out of heaven. | 0:41:04 | 0:41:07 | |
You remember earlier in the film | 0:41:18 | 0:41:21 | |
how I mentioned Girolamo Savonarola | 0:41:21 | 0:41:24 | |
and how we'd be coming back to him? | 0:41:24 | 0:41:27 | |
Well, now's that time. | 0:41:27 | 0:41:30 | |
That's him, painted by Fra Bartolomeo, | 0:41:32 | 0:41:37 | |
another of the artistic Dominicans working here at San Marco. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:42 | |
Savonarola was not the kind of monk | 0:41:44 | 0:41:47 | |
you'd like to meet down a dark Florentine alley. | 0:41:47 | 0:41:51 | |
Swarthy, hook-nosed, intense - | 0:41:51 | 0:41:55 | |
he entered the Dominican Order in 1475. | 0:41:55 | 0:42:01 | |
Apparently, he just knocked on the door | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
of the Dominican convent in Bologna | 0:42:03 | 0:42:06 | |
and announced that he was going to be a knight of Christ, | 0:42:06 | 0:42:11 | |
so they let him in. | 0:42:11 | 0:42:12 | |
In 1482, he moved to Florence, | 0:42:15 | 0:42:19 | |
where his first task was to teach logic and ethics | 0:42:19 | 0:42:23 | |
to the San Marco novices. | 0:42:23 | 0:42:27 | |
Judging by what happened next, | 0:42:27 | 0:42:30 | |
logic and ethics were not things he knew much about. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:35 | |
At some point in his early days in Florence, | 0:42:38 | 0:42:42 | |
Savonarola had a vision. | 0:42:42 | 0:42:44 | |
He saw that the Catholic church was in need of purging | 0:42:44 | 0:42:50 | |
and he began to suspect that he might be the one | 0:42:50 | 0:42:53 | |
who had been chosen to do it. | 0:42:53 | 0:42:56 | |
According to Savonarola, | 0:42:58 | 0:43:01 | |
the Renaissance world had grown sinful and corrupt. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:05 | |
The rich had grown corrupt. | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
Art had grown corrupt. | 0:43:10 | 0:43:13 | |
As these sermons of Savonarola's grew more and more fiery, | 0:43:19 | 0:43:24 | |
so more and more people wanted to hear them. | 0:43:24 | 0:43:27 | |
Soon there wasn't enough room in San Marco | 0:43:27 | 0:43:30 | |
and he began preaching here in the Duomo in Florence | 0:43:30 | 0:43:35 | |
to ever-larger crowds. | 0:43:35 | 0:43:37 | |
Savonarola preached against make-up and immodest behaviour. | 0:43:39 | 0:43:45 | |
Against music, dancing | 0:43:47 | 0:43:50 | |
and licentiousness. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:52 | |
And he began preaching, as well, against art, | 0:43:52 | 0:43:57 | |
and those examples of it that were not Christian enough for him. | 0:43:57 | 0:44:02 | |
Things reached a head in 1493, | 0:44:06 | 0:44:09 | |
when he had an especially apocalyptic vision | 0:44:09 | 0:44:12 | |
that the sword of the Lord was about to fall on the city. | 0:44:12 | 0:44:16 | |
Now, as it happened, at exactly the same time, | 0:44:16 | 0:44:20 | |
the French were about to invade Italy. | 0:44:20 | 0:44:23 | |
And when they turned up outside Florence in 1494, | 0:44:23 | 0:44:28 | |
it was as if Savonarola's prophecies | 0:44:28 | 0:44:32 | |
were about to become uncannily true. | 0:44:32 | 0:44:35 | |
God, it seemed, had decided to back Savonarola to the hilt. | 0:44:38 | 0:44:45 | |
Every one of his mad prophecies was coming true. | 0:44:45 | 0:44:50 | |
If this had been a genuinely enlightened era, | 0:44:55 | 0:44:58 | |
the kind of Renaissance we've all been taught about, | 0:44:58 | 0:45:01 | |
then Savonarola's prophecies would have been recognised | 0:45:01 | 0:45:05 | |
as the rantings of a lunatic. | 0:45:05 | 0:45:07 | |
But the Renaissance never was as enlightened or progressive | 0:45:07 | 0:45:11 | |
as we've been taught | 0:45:11 | 0:45:13 | |
and, instead of locking him up, | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
Renaissance Florence turned herself over to him. | 0:45:16 | 0:45:19 | |
Gangs of young men began to patrol the city | 0:45:23 | 0:45:27 | |
to ensure that women were wearing suitably modest dress. | 0:45:27 | 0:45:32 | |
New laws were issued | 0:45:34 | 0:45:37 | |
against sodomy, adultery, drunkenness. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:41 | |
And a series of bonfires were started - | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
the Bonfire of the Vanities... | 0:45:46 | 0:45:49 | |
..and all that was sinful was thrown on them. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:55 | |
Botticelli, who had painted such gorgeous re-imaginings | 0:45:59 | 0:46:02 | |
of the classical world, | 0:46:02 | 0:46:04 | |
was one of several Florentine painters | 0:46:04 | 0:46:07 | |
who fell under Savonarola's spell | 0:46:07 | 0:46:10 | |
and who were persuaded to throw their pagan art | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
onto the Bonfire of the Vanities. | 0:46:13 | 0:46:15 | |
It's also said - with good reason, I think - | 0:46:18 | 0:46:22 | |
that this strange painting, | 0:46:22 | 0:46:25 | |
Botticelli's Mystic Nativity, | 0:46:25 | 0:46:28 | |
was inspired directly by one of Savonarola's Christmas sermons. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:34 | |
"Christ will come again," said Savonarola, | 0:46:35 | 0:46:40 | |
"and when he does, the countdown will begin | 0:46:40 | 0:46:45 | |
"to the end of the world." | 0:46:45 | 0:46:47 | |
Savonarola's reign of terror didn't last long. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:52 | |
In 1498, he was challenged by the Franciscans to a trial by fire | 0:46:52 | 0:46:59 | |
to prove that his Dominican prophecies were true. | 0:46:59 | 0:47:02 | |
Savonarola refused, and the mood in Florence | 0:47:02 | 0:47:06 | |
turned quickly against him. | 0:47:06 | 0:47:09 | |
Imprisoned and tortured by the Papal Inquisition, | 0:47:12 | 0:47:17 | |
he confessed that his visions and prophecies had all been made up. | 0:47:17 | 0:47:23 | |
And a few weeks later, | 0:47:24 | 0:47:26 | |
they hanged him in the Piazza Signoria in Florence, | 0:47:26 | 0:47:30 | |
and then burned his broken body | 0:47:30 | 0:47:34 | |
to keep it from the relic-hunters. | 0:47:34 | 0:47:37 | |
Remember earlier in the film | 0:47:43 | 0:47:45 | |
we were looking at baby Jesuses in art | 0:47:45 | 0:47:47 | |
and why they are so ugly? | 0:47:47 | 0:47:49 | |
Well, this is the other end of the story. | 0:47:49 | 0:47:52 | |
Jesus was 33 when he died on the cross, | 0:47:56 | 0:48:00 | |
a fully-grown man. | 0:48:00 | 0:48:02 | |
But in Renaissance pietas, | 0:48:04 | 0:48:06 | |
Mary cradles him on her lap as if he was still a baby. | 0:48:06 | 0:48:11 | |
It's one of the most awkward poses in art, | 0:48:13 | 0:48:17 | |
and only the best artists could pull it off. | 0:48:17 | 0:48:20 | |
Imagine me stretched across the lap of my mother, | 0:48:24 | 0:48:27 | |
and she's holding me up as if I were weightless. | 0:48:27 | 0:48:31 | |
That's so hard to get right. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:35 | |
And what all these pietas are trying to do | 0:48:35 | 0:48:39 | |
is to link the death of Jesus with his birth, | 0:48:39 | 0:48:43 | |
because Jesus was born to die, | 0:48:43 | 0:48:47 | |
and by dying save the rest of us. | 0:48:47 | 0:48:50 | |
That's why the baby Jesus looks forward to the man | 0:48:50 | 0:48:56 | |
and the manly Jesus looks back to the baby. | 0:48:56 | 0:49:01 | |
It's a very problematic scenario. | 0:49:02 | 0:49:05 | |
Not surprisingly, most Renaissance artists | 0:49:08 | 0:49:13 | |
tied themselves into ugly knots trying to imagine it. | 0:49:13 | 0:49:17 | |
Here's Cosimo Tura from Ferrara - | 0:49:19 | 0:49:23 | |
different as ever, | 0:49:23 | 0:49:25 | |
and describing the impossible scene | 0:49:25 | 0:49:28 | |
with a wild-eyed and wired intensity. | 0:49:28 | 0:49:31 | |
Even the great Perugino, | 0:49:36 | 0:49:39 | |
usually so poised, | 0:49:39 | 0:49:41 | |
struggles mightily with the terrible dynamics | 0:49:41 | 0:49:46 | |
of this terrible pose. | 0:49:46 | 0:49:48 | |
This particular pieta | 0:49:51 | 0:49:53 | |
is by an artist called Sodoma. | 0:49:53 | 0:49:56 | |
I'm sure I don't need to tell you why he was called that, | 0:49:56 | 0:49:59 | |
this is the Renaissance after all. | 0:49:59 | 0:50:02 | |
Anyway, it's a decent stab at this fiendishly difficult subject. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:08 | |
What Sodoma's pieta gets wrong | 0:50:10 | 0:50:14 | |
isn't the anatomy but the mood. | 0:50:14 | 0:50:17 | |
There's a tenderness missing. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:22 | |
Sodoma gives us a decent Jesus. | 0:50:22 | 0:50:27 | |
It's the Mary he can't manage. | 0:50:27 | 0:50:30 | |
If Jesus was 33 when he died, | 0:50:33 | 0:50:36 | |
Mary would have been around 50, | 0:50:36 | 0:50:39 | |
so she has to be middle-aged | 0:50:39 | 0:50:42 | |
yet also emblematically beautiful and innocent. | 0:50:42 | 0:50:47 | |
Now, how do you paint that? | 0:50:47 | 0:50:49 | |
It's an enormous challenge for any artist. | 0:50:49 | 0:50:53 | |
One of my favourite pietas is this one in the Louvre, | 0:50:57 | 0:51:01 | |
painted in around 1450 in Avignon. | 0:51:01 | 0:51:06 | |
This is pioneering French realism. | 0:51:07 | 0:51:11 | |
Feel the emotional depth | 0:51:11 | 0:51:13 | |
of this forgotten French Renaissance. | 0:51:13 | 0:51:16 | |
So the pieta was a test | 0:51:21 | 0:51:23 | |
that only the greatest could pass. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:26 | |
And here in St Peter's in Rome, | 0:51:26 | 0:51:30 | |
Michelangelo finally gives us the perfect example. | 0:51:30 | 0:51:35 | |
He makes his Mary a little bigger | 0:51:36 | 0:51:40 | |
and his Jesus a little smaller | 0:51:40 | 0:51:43 | |
so they fit together gracefully. | 0:51:43 | 0:51:47 | |
And, yes, Mary is a bit young for her age, | 0:51:49 | 0:51:53 | |
but this extra youth | 0:51:53 | 0:51:56 | |
adds a note of fragility to the moment | 0:51:56 | 0:52:00 | |
and stokes up the tenderness | 0:52:00 | 0:52:03 | |
of the mother-son relationship. | 0:52:03 | 0:52:06 | |
So that's Zechariah, 14:1. | 0:52:18 | 0:52:22 | |
"Behold, a day of the Lord cometh." | 0:52:22 | 0:52:25 | |
This is another Michelangelo, | 0:52:36 | 0:52:39 | |
the Risen Christ. | 0:52:39 | 0:52:41 | |
It's the moment when Jesus, risen from the dead, | 0:52:41 | 0:52:44 | |
comes back to earth after the crucifixion. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:48 | |
According to the scriptures, | 0:52:48 | 0:52:50 | |
he's supposed to be completely naked, | 0:52:50 | 0:52:53 | |
because he left his shroud in the sepulchre when they buried him. | 0:52:53 | 0:52:57 | |
And that's how Michelangelo originally sculpted him. | 0:52:57 | 0:53:02 | |
But, as you can see, | 0:53:02 | 0:53:04 | |
someone has added this discreet loincloth. | 0:53:04 | 0:53:08 | |
Happily, it's removable. | 0:53:11 | 0:53:14 | |
In the past, when the famously liberal John XXIII was Pope, | 0:53:14 | 0:53:20 | |
Jesus was allowed to be fully naked, | 0:53:20 | 0:53:23 | |
as Michelangelo sculpted him. | 0:53:23 | 0:53:27 | |
But these days, he's not. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:30 | |
You can always tell the papal mood | 0:53:32 | 0:53:35 | |
by coming here to Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome | 0:53:35 | 0:53:39 | |
and seeing if Michelangelo's Christ is naked, | 0:53:39 | 0:53:43 | |
as he's supposed to be, | 0:53:43 | 0:53:45 | |
or covered up, as the authorities have decided he should be. | 0:53:45 | 0:53:49 | |
So far in this film, | 0:53:51 | 0:53:53 | |
I've only nibbled at the edges of Michelangelo. | 0:53:53 | 0:53:57 | |
He's such a huge Renaissance presence | 0:53:58 | 0:54:02 | |
you'd need a 24-part series | 0:54:02 | 0:54:04 | |
to tackle him properly on the telly, | 0:54:04 | 0:54:08 | |
and not the few minutes I have left in this film. | 0:54:08 | 0:54:12 | |
So there's only time to focus on one aspect of him. | 0:54:12 | 0:54:17 | |
But it's the key aspect - | 0:54:17 | 0:54:19 | |
his religious fierceness. | 0:54:19 | 0:54:22 | |
With some Renaissance artists, | 0:54:24 | 0:54:26 | |
it's never entirely clear what they believe in. | 0:54:26 | 0:54:30 | |
But, with Michelangelo, there's never any doubt | 0:54:30 | 0:54:34 | |
that he's an old-fashioned, tub-thumping Italian Catholic - | 0:54:34 | 0:54:39 | |
guilty, angsty and devoted. | 0:54:39 | 0:54:43 | |
It's true of everything he made, | 0:54:49 | 0:54:51 | |
but it's particularly true of his masterpiece - | 0:54:51 | 0:54:55 | |
the Sistine Chapel. | 0:54:55 | 0:54:57 | |
It's the greatest room of art in the world, | 0:54:59 | 0:55:02 | |
a banquet of tremendous religious storytelling... | 0:55:02 | 0:55:06 | |
..and not just by Michelangelo. | 0:55:07 | 0:55:10 | |
Botticelli is in here too, | 0:55:11 | 0:55:13 | |
showing the Punishment of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, | 0:55:13 | 0:55:18 | |
when God burns them up with invisible fire. | 0:55:18 | 0:55:22 | |
And here's Perugino again, | 0:55:26 | 0:55:29 | |
with Christ handing the keys of heaven to St Peter, | 0:55:29 | 0:55:34 | |
and doing it so gracefully. | 0:55:34 | 0:55:37 | |
So, on the lower level, | 0:55:42 | 0:55:43 | |
there are all these impressive frescoes by other artists. | 0:55:43 | 0:55:48 | |
And then, up above, there's Michelangelo. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
Together, they act as one space | 0:55:52 | 0:55:56 | |
that encircles you with art | 0:55:56 | 0:56:00 | |
and engulfs you in a dark religious storyline. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:04 | |
There is no angrier God in art than the God of the Sistine Chapel. | 0:56:07 | 0:56:13 | |
He presides over a room filled with trepidation and guilt. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:21 | |
Up on high, God creates Adam, | 0:56:24 | 0:56:27 | |
and Adam lets him down. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
God creates Noah, | 0:56:33 | 0:56:36 | |
and Noah lets him down. | 0:56:36 | 0:56:38 | |
God creates the prophets, | 0:56:41 | 0:56:44 | |
and the prophets let him down. | 0:56:44 | 0:56:47 | |
And because they are prophets, | 0:56:49 | 0:56:51 | |
they know what is coming. | 0:56:51 | 0:56:53 | |
It's like a steam roller of fear passing over you, | 0:56:56 | 0:57:01 | |
a typhoon of guilt, trepidation and anxiety | 0:57:01 | 0:57:05 | |
blowing through the Vatican. | 0:57:05 | 0:57:08 | |
And because it's happening all around you, | 0:57:09 | 0:57:12 | |
it pulls you into it, | 0:57:12 | 0:57:15 | |
it soaks into you. | 0:57:15 | 0:57:17 | |
And the reason why everyone up there is so frightened | 0:57:23 | 0:57:28 | |
is made clear by Michelangelo | 0:57:28 | 0:57:31 | |
on the far wall. | 0:57:31 | 0:57:33 | |
This isn't any old day we've walked into. | 0:57:35 | 0:57:39 | |
This is the last day of all, | 0:57:39 | 0:57:42 | |
the Day of Judgment. | 0:57:42 | 0:57:44 | |
Just as Zechariah predicted, | 0:57:46 | 0:57:49 | |
the end of the world is upon us | 0:57:49 | 0:57:52 | |
and everyone up there knows it. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:56 | |
And, of course, it isn't just the saints and the prophets | 0:58:00 | 0:58:03 | |
painted by Michelangelo who are being judged, | 0:58:03 | 0:58:07 | |
everyone who walks into the Sistine Chapel | 0:58:07 | 0:58:11 | |
walks into the day of reckoning. | 0:58:11 | 0:58:14 | |
We're all being judged. | 0:58:14 | 0:58:15 | |
The whole room is judging us | 0:58:17 | 0:58:21 | |
and terrifying us with the consequences of our sins. | 0:58:21 | 0:58:25 | |
Who's going to be saved | 0:58:29 | 0:58:31 | |
and who's going to be doomed? | 0:58:31 | 0:58:34 | |
That's what the walls are asking us. | 0:58:35 | 0:58:38 | |
It's not a very Greek question, | 0:58:38 | 0:58:41 | |
but it is a very Renaissance one. | 0:58:41 | 0:58:45 | |
In the next film, things cheer up again | 0:58:57 | 0:59:00 | |
when we go to Venice. | 0:59:00 | 0:59:03 | |
We'll be eating, we'll be drinking, | 0:59:03 | 0:59:07 | |
and we'll be doing a bit of this... | 0:59:07 | 0:59:10 |