Silk, Sex and Sin The Renaissance Unchained

A-ha, so there it is.

As you can see, I'm in Venice.

This is film three of The Renaissance Unchained.

And in it, I'm hoping to discover

why Venetian art was so different from everyone else's.

How did they end up painting this?

Or this?

Or, God forbid, this?

To find out, I need to start where everyone starts,

when they come to Venice.

In St Mark's Square.

There's a painting of this square from exactly here,

by Gentile Bellini,

one of the famous family of painters who did so much for Venetian art.

It shows a procession passing in front of St Mark's Cathedral.

And they're carrying a famous relic.

The relic of the True Cross.

Part of the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified.

Or so they thought.

But the real subject of the picture

is the chap kneeling here in the crowd.

He's a merchant from Brescia called Jacopo de' Salis,

who's just found out that his son has fallen over,

and broken open his head.

The doctors say he's going to die

so Jacopo is praying to the True Cross to save him.

And when he goes home the next day to Brescia,

he finds that his son has made a miraculous recovery.

Apart from recording this great miracle, Bellini's painting

gives us a vivid insight into the social fabric of Renaissance Venice.

Standing over here are some merchants from Greece.

We know they're Greeks because of their hats.

Only the Greek merchants wore black, wide-rimmed hats.

Up in the windows,

there's a line of elegant ladies hanging out oriental carpets.

And a couple of them are veiled.

Mysterious travellers from the Islamic East.

Over here, two Arab traders have turned their backs on us.

And round about here, there's a trio of Turks,

merchants from Constantinople

come to do business with the infidel.

Turks, Greeks, Arabs,

nowhere else in Europe did the East meet the West

as intimately as it did in Venice.

In Venice, no-one cared where you came from,

as long as you were selling something.

Something else you can see clearly in the Bellini painting,

particularly when you get back here, is how the outline of all this,

the entire Piazza of San Marco,

was borrowed from the layout of an Islamic mosque.

St Mark's Square is a Venetian version

of the Great Mosque at Damascus.

The golden mosaics,

the colonnades...

..that clear sense of a rectangle.

It's all there.

Now, another of these paintings of the True Cross,

this one by Carpaccio,

is set around here, near the Rialto Bridge.

The Rialto, the market of Venice,

was an oriental bazaar transferred from Cairo to Italy.

Silk,

spices,

slaves,

they were all on sale in the Rialto.

And all these foreign presences

seeped into the art that was made here,

and changed it.

Something else they were importing here in Venice was pigment.

Bright new colours from around the world.

In Venice, the colours of the East arrived in art in quantities

and concentrations that had never been seen before.

From China, there was cinnabar,

ground down to make bright red vermillion.

Then, most precious of all, from Afghanistan, lapis lazuli,

which they used to make the colour they called ultramarine,

which comes from "oltremare", over the sea.

Because that's the other unique influence

working on Venetian art.

Its location.

Well, well, well.

You know, Venice is made out of 116 islands.

All of which have been connected up like a quilt,

to create this thin strip of solidity,

sandwiched between the sky and the sea.

There's nowhere else like Venice.

Floating off the coast of reality.

And these delicate, whispery, fragile moods

soaked into Venetian art...

..and made it unique.

There's a word for this mood you get in Venetian art,

"poesie".

It's sort of poetry

but with mystery thrown in,

so you're never sure what you're looking at.

The master of this poetic mood,

this delightful imprecision,

was the painter christened Giorgio Barbarelli,

better known to us now as Giorgione.

I can't show you a picture of him

because we don't know what he looked like.

He was born in Castel Franco in around 1477.

Revolutionised Venetian art and then died young in his early 30s,

probably killed by the plague.

And that is just about all we know about him.

Except of course what we learn from his art.

Which is always beautiful and always mysterious.

With Giorgione, there are many questions

and very few answers.

Fortunately, you're in good hands here,

because this series has been on his case,

and in this film we're going to solve

some of the mysteries of Giorgione.

In particular,

we're going to get to the bottom of his most famous painting.

The notoriously elusive Venetian masterpiece known as The Tempest.

Nine out of ten art historians will tell you

that The Tempest doesn't have a meaning.

But I think they're wrong.

So what you've got in The Tempest is three figures.

A man, a woman and a baby.

He's standing, she's sitting there naked,

and the baby has just been born.

Behind them, there's a walled city on one side

and some ancient ruins on the other.

But the big clue to The Tempest's meaning is up in the sky,

where a white bird sits on one of the roofs,

and a bolt of lightning is crashing down from the clouds.

There is one story and only one story that fits all these details.

And it's told in here, in Hesiod's Theogony.

A thunderous classical poem, about the origins of the gods.

Hesiod tells of a young man called Iasion

who meets the goddess Demeter at a wedding in Crete.

They have a fling in a nearby field and she gives birth to a baby.

That baby is Plutus, the god of wealth and good fortune.

Alas, Zeus, the father of the gods,

notices the mud on Demeter's backside,

and knows what she's been up to.

Angry and jealous,

he throws a thunderbolt at Iasion,

and kills him.

And that's what's happening in The Tempest.

The angry Zeus has thrown a lightning bolt from heaven,

and Iasion, the uppity mortal, the wedding crasher,

is about to be killed by the father of the gods.

And the baby the stork has brought them,

Plutus, the god of wealth,

is about to be left fatherless,

vulnerable, exposed to the vicissitudes of fortune.

So it's an allegory.

Not just about keeping your zipper zipped,

particularly at weddings,

but about the fragility of good fortune.

The fickleness of fate.

Look how easily the wealth of today can become the ruins of yesterday.

So, The Tempest is a fabulous piece of Venetian self-awareness.

A thin sliver of solidity,

sandwiched between the sky and the sea,

is reminding itself of its prodigious vulnerability.

The vulnerability of Venice made the city especially attentive, as well,

to the messages of religion.

One of the best things about Venice is that

so much of the art here is still in the place for which it was painted.

Not in a museum, not in a gallery, but still here,

hanging where it's supposed to hang.

Doing what it's supposed to do.

In the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto there's much to see.

And two of the biggest canvases painted by the marvellous Tintoretto

loom mightily over both sides of the altar.

On the left, the wayward Israelites are collecting gold

to make the false idol they plan to worship.

A golden calf.

This woman here is even giving away her earrings

to be melted down for the idol.

On the right, Tintoretto has painted the most thunderous scene

of divine retribution in Venetian art.

His Last Judgment.

If you make false gods, this is how you will be punished.

The waters of Venice will crash down around you,

and the end will come in a tsunami of death.

In the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto,

the art points a finger at you.

And warns you.

This, by the way, is where Tintoretto was born.

Just 100 feet away from the Madonna dell'Orto, his local church.

And that's why it meant so much to him.

And only in Venice can you find

such a revealing and intimate context for Renaissance art.

The Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa,

commonly known as the Frari,

is a huge religious space that does something powerful to your senses.

And it was in this tremendous context,

that another Venetian giant,

the great Titian,

painted his most awesome altarpiece.

There it is.

Titian's Assumption.

22 feet high, the biggest altarpiece in Venice.

And, of course, it had to be that big

to have the right kind of religious impact

on this huge and thrilling space.

The Assumption shows the Virgin Mary going up to heaven

at the end of her time on earth.

A feast celebrated annually in the Frari on August 15th.

So, Mary is being received in heaven.

The angels are greeting her with celestial music.

And God himself is welcoming her to his realm.

Down below meanwhile, back on earth,

the Apostles are filled with anxiety and awe at her departure.

In her glowing red robes, Titian's Mary is a pulse-quickening presence.

Until now, no-one in art had used colour

as excitingly and bravely as this.

So it's a great artistic moment.

But, more importantly, a great religious moment.

An interesting thing about the Frari is that the high altar here

is at the west of the church and not the east.

In most Catholic churches it's the other way round.

The high altar is at the east of the church

because that's where the Holy Land is,

and where the sun rises.

Now, when the Frari was first built, in 1338,

it also pointed to the east.

But when the Franciscans enlarged it in 1492,

they swapped round the orientation so it now pointed to the west.

Why they changed it is unclear.

What isn't unclear is the impact the change had on the art in here.

And particularly, on Titian's Assumption.

In the revelations of St John the Apostle -

he's the one in red -

we read that there appeared in heaven

a woman clothed with the sun.

And that woman, clothed with the sun, was Mary.

To evoke that moment,

Titian has silhouetted her against a glorious, golden background.

It is an effect called "contre-jour", against the light.

And its religious function is to separate the heavenly realm

that Mary has just entered,

from our world, the corporeal world where the Apostles still are.

But this golden light isn't just painted.

Because of the new orientation of the church,

the evening light now floods through the windows as well.

And combines with Titian's painted light

to bathe Mary in a miraculous golden glow.

It's a stupendous religious moment.

High above the altar of the Frari, art and light have been

deliberately combined to create a visual miracle,

and every night here in Venice,

but especially on the night of August 15th,

it's as if the Assumption is really happening before us.

Given the mood of Venice, its relationship to light,

there's something very appropriate about the fact that

the city's most celebrated export was glass.

Glass is sort of there and sort of not there.

Just like Venice.

Until the 13th century,

the finest glass imported into Europe came from the Islamic world.

Notably from Syria.

But as Venice got richer and richer, with all that busy trading,

so more and more precious glass was needed for the dining table.

With its excellent contacts in the East,

Venice had a head start when it came to making Renaissance glass...

..and soon became famously good at it.

Since 1291, Venetian glass was made on that island there -

Murano.

The traditional explanation for this isolation

is that the dangerous fires of the glass furnaces

were safer on their own island.

But recent research has suggested that the real reason

the Venetians sent their glass-makers to Murano,

was because they wanted to keep their secrets secret.

So they locked them away on an island

where no-one could reach them.

Knowing how the Venetians are about money,

I'm inclined to believe the second version.

Anyway, this was where glass-making was concentrated

and where its secrets were kept.

By the time the Venetians turned their talents to it,

glass already had an exciting cultural history.

The Romans had made it, the Islamic world,

but it was in Venice that a taste developed

for glass that was particularly pure,

and see-through.

Glass, as you know, has this intimate relationship with light.

The two of them, light and glass,

play beautiful games with each other.

And here in Venice,

in the early days of the Renaissance,

this magical relationship was intensified

with the discovery of a new type of glass called "cristallo".

Cristallo was the invention, they say, of a famous glass-maker

called Angelo Barovier.

And what was unique about it

was that it was completely see-through and pure.

Like rock crystal itself.

And that's why they called it cristallo.

Now, I love all that mythic stuff about glass

and its relationship to light.

And of course, there's something particularly appropriate

about Venice becoming the capital of glass.

But the invention of cristallo by Barovier needs to be understood

as a scientific innovation, not a mythic one.

Off the top of my head,

I can't think of a single Renaissance product that pointed

more firmly to the technological future than cristallo.

To control the temperature of the furnaces,

they used this stuff called soda ash,

made from desert plants harvested by the Bedouins of Syria.

And the silica that was used wasn't your standard desert sand...

..but especially pure quartz crystals...

..found in mountain rivers.

Through these slow improvements

and careful technological refinements,

Barovier finally arrived at a glass

that was totally see-through and pure.

All that effort for something that was hardly there.

And because cristallo was so fragile,

very little of it has survived.

If you want to see how beautiful Venetian glass was,

you have to look for it in Venetian art.

See what Mary Magdalene is using to carry her oil

in Giovanni Bellini's gorgeous altarpiece in San Zaccaria.

Or look what the servants are serving

in Veronese's astounding Supper At The House Of Levi.

Even in paint, the delicate magic of Venetian glass

still speaks to us through the ages.

This is the Ponte de le Tette in Venice.

I am afraid Ponte de le Tette means "bridge of tits".

Sorry, but that's what it means.

The story goes that in an effort to straighten out the burgeoning gay

population of Renaissance Venice

the Venetian authorities instructed

the city's prostitutes to take their tops off on the bridge of tits,

in the forlorn hope that their feminine charms would

straighten out the wayward boys.

Sex really was an issue in this city.

They reckon there were 12,000 prostitutes

working in Renaissance Venice.

Out of a population of 100,000.

So one in ten inhabitants was on the game,

and many of the travellers who came here came for the sex.

It was Venice that invented the reclining Venus.

The goddess of love, stretched out naked on her bed.

Just so she can be ogled.

The first of these reclining Venuses was painted by Giorgione -

the great Sleeping Venus in Dresden.

As with all Giorgione's art, there's an air of mystery about her,

that fills your thoughts with endless speculation.

But the master of the Venetian Venus,

the keenest painter of the subject, was Titian,

the arch-sensualist of Venetian art.

Even in his religious pictures, Titian makes very little effort

to disguise his notorious passion for women.

In real life, he was the scourge of the studio,

notorious for pleasuring his models.

And in his mythologies, all that desire

and naughtiness comes pouring out like water from a fountain.

There is a room at the Prado Museum in Madrid that's filled entirely

with these sensual imaginings by Titian.

Most of the reclining nudes are Venuses.

But the one I'd like to focus on is Danae.

Why?

Well, that's pretty obvious, isn't it?

I think Titian's Danae

is the most outrageously sensuous picture in Renaissance art.

Danae was the beautiful daughter of the King of Argos,

and one day a prophet tells the king that he is going to be

killed by his daughter's son.

So he locks Danae up in a vault, where no-one can reach her.

Oh, yes, they can.

Zeus, the randiest of the gods,

sees Danae in her cell,

and desires her.

And handily disguised as a shower of gold,

he comes down to her and impregnates her.

Later on, outside the picture, as it were, she has a son, Perseus.

And the son kills her father, the King.

So the prophecy comes true.

Sex, gold, a beautiful princess,

the Danae story was popular all round the Renaissance.

But what I want to focus on here is Zeus.

The master of disguise with the morals of a dog.

Now, a large chunk of Greek mythology is devoted

to the sexual conquests of Zeus.

The Venetians couldn't get enough of them.

And another story painted by Titian was Europa and the bull.

Europa, who gave her name to Europe,

was a highborn Venetian princess.

But Zeus decided he wanted her.

So he disguised himself as a bull,

and when she got up on his back,

the bull thundered into the sea and abducted her.

And it wasn't just Titian and the Venetians who enjoyed all this

donning of disguises by the randy Zeus.

The entire Renaissance seemed much taken with the possibilities.

Here's Michelangelo's Leda And The Swan.

The original's lost, so this is a copy by Rosso Fiorentino.

Zeus has come down to Leda disguised as a swan.

Why a swan?

Well, this is a family film so you'll just have to imagine it.

But the most cunning of Zeus's many disguises

is the one he adopted to seduce the lovely Io,

painted here by Correggio.

To get to Io, Zeus transformed himself into a cloud,

and took her when she didn't even know she was being taken.

Now, the Renaissance was supposed to be this great

rebirth of civilisation.

A triumph of knowledge and all that.

So how come it was so interested in the bed-hopping antics of Zeus?

Well, one answer, the obvious answer,

is that it wasn't really a rebirth of civilisation at all.

And that the forces coursing through the Renaissance

were the same old darknesses

that have always coursed through us humans.

Something else that Venice was importing from the East

in immodest quantities

was cloth.

Silks,

satins,

damasks.

The textiles of the East brought

a glistening gorgeousness to Venetian art,

that was exciting and new.

The silk was imported mostly from Persia,

and then woven here in Venice into these famously sumptuous designs.

And sent off around Europe to dazzle everyone lucky enough to see it.

We know this because it is recorded superbly in Venetian art.

Look at the snazzy robes in which Titian dresses

Joseph of Arimathea in his great Entombment, at the Prado.

Is that really the right gear for an entombment?

But the cloth-painter supreme among the Venetians

was Paolo Veronese,

whose gorgeous fabrics

look as if they've been woven not just from silk,

but from light itself.

Veronese's art is like an advert for Venetian textiles.

He painted all sorts of pictures.

Mythologies, dining scenes,

portraits,

and in all of them,

what's going on seems less important

than what everyone's wearing.

In Veronese, every stretch of silk plays its part.

Whether you're St George going to his martyrdom,

or the lovely Andromeda chained up for the monsters,

what you're wearing needs to shimmer and shine,

and single you out.

It's even true of Veronese's contribution

to the most boring genre in art,

the political allegory.

What is it about big buildings that makes our rulers insist

on filling them with so many yards of jingoistic guff?

This is the Ducale Palace, from which Venice is run,

and it's packed with political pictures and wonderful dresses.

This oval painting here is Veronese's Apotheosis Of Venice.

And there's Venice herself, imagined as a beautiful blonde

who's going up to heaven dressed in virgin white.

Back on earth meanwhile, on the balcony below,

the citizens of Venice have turned up to cheer.

And look what they've thrown on for the occasion.

No wonder they're all so happy to be living in Venice.

Who wouldn't be, if you could wear dresses like that?

On the catwalk of Venetian politics, Veronese had no equals.

Veronese could paint all kinds of cloth.

But a particular favourite of his is through here.

It's Europa and the Bull again.

Zeus is up to his old tricks.

He's absconding with Europa,

and look at the sly way he's licking her foot.

A bull with a foot fetish.

How very Venetian.

But the star of the picture isn't Zeus or the cherubs or Europa.

It's that dress she's modelling.

See how it's pink and yellow at the same time?

That's a Venetian speciality.

Here, I'll show you.

This is shot silk, what they call in Italian "cangiante".

You can see it better outside.

It's woven from two colours that change before your eyes,

and this can cangiante silk is all over Renaissance art.

Here's Bellini's beautiful Feast Of The Gods in Washington.

A divine barbecue to which all the deities have been invited.

So they've all dressed up for the occasion.

Especially Mercury,

who sits at the front, getting noticed in his

blue-and-purple tunic and his splendid cangiante socks.

But it wasn't only Venetian artists who enjoyed

painting the miracle cloth.

The most prodigious cangiante painter of all was Michelangelo.

Look up at the Sistine ceiling in Rome and you'll be amazed

how many of the prophets and ancestors up there have turned up

for the end of the world in their best cangiante clobber.

In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo paints a world

where nothing is solid.

A cangiante world of shifting hues and changing colours.

In previous films in this series,

we've seen how various saints were depicted in the Renaissance and why.

In Venice, though,

the saint who seemed best to capture the city's sensuous tone

was that alluring Biblical concoction, Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene has never been real.

She's always been a plaything of the Renaissance imagination,

invented specifically to press some naughty Renaissance buttons.

And that's something she's done really well.

The Bible tells us practically nothing about her.

Just a few brief mentions in the New Testament

informing us that she was there when Jesus died on the Cross

and that it was Mary Magdalene who first encountered Jesus

when he came back from the dead and she mistook him for a gardener.

With so little actual information to go on,

everything else had to be imagined.

And, of course, art loves nothing better than to fill big gaps...

..with big fantasies.

Fortunately, there are lots of other Marys in the Bible

whose identities the Magdalene could steal.

Like the Mary who washed Jesus' feet with oil

and dried it with her hair.

It wasn't Mary Magdalene, But, hey, a Mary is a Mary.

And if you want to spot the Magdalene in a painting,

look out for the jar, the vase, the pot in which she keeps her oil.

In Renaissance art, the Magdalene and her pot are rarely separated.

It also does not say in the Bible that she was a prostitute.

That was another Mary as well.

But, hey, a Mary is a Mary

and having turned her into a scarlet woman, the Renaissance began

fantasising eagerly about the fatal attraction of the Magdalene.

The giveaway is her hair.

It's always the hair.

In art, loose hair is a sure sign of loose morals.

And from the time of Giotto,

the Magdalene's hair has signalled her dangerous sexuality.

Here she is in the Franciscan Basilica in Assisi,

hiding her nudity in a cave...

..until the hermit Zosimus gives her his cloak.

It was actually Mary of Egypt that Zosimus gave his cloak to.

But, hey, a Mary is a Mary.

And how about this for a rampant display

of dangerous female hairiness,

enjoyed and carved by the German Renaissance master

Tillman Riemann Schneider.

In Riemann Schneider's demented northern imaginings, Mary Magdalene,

covered in body hair, reconnects the Renaissance to its caveman roots.

So the hair, the nudity, the former life as a prostitute,

the hanging about at Christ's feet, all of it had to be invented,

because Mary Magdalene isn't just a character in a Renaissance art,

she's an archetypal masculine projection.

A simpering female fantasy figure, given a saintly form

and that, of course, made her especially appealing

to the Venetians.

In Bellini's great altarpiece in San Zaccaria,

look how beautiful he makes her.

And what a lovely pot of Venetian glass she holds!

Savoldo, meanwhile, encounters her in the dark

under a dangerous moon...

..her hair hidden under a cloth,

as the prostitutes of Venice were instructed to do.

But, you know, desire wouldn't be desire

if it wasn't accompanied by regret.

So Renaissance art also came up with this.

The penitent Magdalene.

Ashamed of her past, ashamed of her sins.

So ashamed of herself is Titian's penitent Magdalene,

that she covers herself up with her hair.

And forgets, in typical Venetian fashion,

that hair isn't very good at covering things up.

Is it?

CHURCH BELLS CHIME

This is the Church of San Rocco, Saint Roch, as we call him.

Now, I'm going to give you a whistle-stop tour of Venetian churches

and I want you to tell me what they've all got in common.

So this is the first one, San Rocco.

Number two, San Giobbe.

Three, Il Redontore.

Four, Santa Maria della Salute, a church we all know.

Five, San Sebastiano, where Veronese is buried.

And then, back again to San Rocco.

So that's five Venetian churches.

What have they got in common?

Well, the answer is that they were all built to ward off

the Black Death.

They are what they call "plague churches",

the five plague churches of Venice.

The Black Death, bubonic plague, brought terror to all of Europe.

But it hit Venice with special severity.

The first great outbreak, in 1348,

killed 70,000 Venetians out of a population of 100,000.

And in the next 300 years, there were 70 more of these epidemics.

Whatever the Venetians did, the plague kept returning.

They say it originated in China

and that the rats which carried it

were particularly fond of spice ships.

And, thus, Venice became the world's leading importer of plague rats.

The epidemic of 1576 was another particularly bad one.

It killed a quarter of Venice's population.

Among them, the great painter Titian.

And here, at the Scuola San Rocco,

Tintoretto, plague painter extraordinaire,

redoubled his remarkable efforts

to paint Venice to safety.

San Rocco, St Roch,

was the saint you prayed to to ward off the Black Death.

And this scuola here,

the Scuola San Rocco,

quickly became the richest charity institution in Venice.

That is St Roch there.

You can always tell him in art

because he is always showing you a naked leg,

so you can see the puss-filled boil on his thigh

that's the first sign of the Black Death.

If you had money, you gave it to the Scuola San Rocco to protect you.

And Tintoretto gave not only money

but a huge slab of his working life as well,

as he filled the darkness of San Rocco with so much of his art.

He got paid occasionally, bits and pieces,

but never what it would really have cost to do all this.

And there was a story doing the rounds in the Renaissance

that Tintoretto himself had been saved from the plague

and that to thank God,

he undertook to finish this great project.

Now, I don't know if that's true,

but I do know,

because you can feel it in here,

that all this was personal.

There are 52 paintings by Tintoretto in the Scuola San Rocco.

That's right, 52.

And the first one he painted shows St Roch in pink

going up to heaven.

The second was this,

Tintoretto's Crucifixion.

This has been described as the greatest Renaissance painting

and you can see why.

What scale.

What drama.

What power.

The second room he painted was this one,

the Great Hall,

which he began in the deadly year of 1576.

To get the commission,

Tintoretto promised the scuola

that he'd paint them three pictures a year

for as long as he was alive

just for the cost of the materials

and that he would donate them to the institution annually

on 16 August, the Feast Day of St Roch.

On the walls, he shows Jesus saving us from our sins

with his miracles and his sacrifice.

On the ceiling,

there's a history of our sinning

that goes right back to the beginning.

How we brought the plague down on our heads.

This is the key image,

the worship of the brazen serpent.

The Israelites had been disobeying God again,

so God sends a plague of poisonous snakes to punish them.

And Moses pleads with him to save his people.

So God tells him to put a bronze serpent up on a pole

and that this bronze serpent will protect the people from the snakes.

And, as you can see,

it looks suspiciously like the Crucifixion.

Having painted all that,

Tintoretto, still producing his three pictures a year,

came down here and began painting these,

the story of the Virgin Mary.

Here she is finding out she is going to give birth to Jesus.

And there are the Three Kings turning up at Jesus' Nativity.

So this was the last room to be painted,

but it's the first room of the story,

as it unfolds up the building.

So here, Mary gives birth to Jesus.

There's Jesus performing extraordinary miracles,

saving the paralytic,

and all these other people who got the plague.

His miracles find an echo in the Old Testament,

where a brazen serpent protects the Israelites from a plague of snakes.

And then, finally, going back to the future,

you come in here and there's Jesus dying on the cross to save us

and, in this instance,

specifically to save Venice from the Black Death.

This isn't just art.

This is theatre, drama,

salvation in three dark dimensions.

And it's here because the Renaissance believed

that art had talismanic power.

That it could save Venice,

combat the plague

and change the future.

And that's what the Renaissance is really about,

the power of art.

You know I said how St Mark's Square

is modelled on the outline of an Islamic mosque?

Well, there's another painting by Gentile Bellini

of a space exactly like this.

But this time it really is a mosque.

This is St Mark preaching to the locals in Alexandria in Egypt.

But it's an Alexandria that looks an awful lot like Venice.

In fact, it looks exactly like St Mark's Square.

The same layout, same proportions, same mood.

So much so, that it's difficult to tell one from the other.

In the mind of Gentile Bellini,

the East and the West had become interchangeable.

Venice, an artistic powerhouse, created out of sky,

sea and dreams,

never had a firm outline.

But then, never was it quite as magnificently blurred

as it was in Renaissance times,

when the East and the West became one.

In the next film,

things get very strange

as the Renaissance loses its inhibitions

and hurtles to its end.