Episode 1 The Story of Scottish Art

Perhaps you already know the story of Scottish art -

the one with all those

bonny landscapes and Highland chieftains,

where Scottish Colourists clamber across the Western Isles

and a man named Charles Rennie Mackintosh

re-imagines the rose.

Perhaps you think that is the story of Scottish art, but think again.

This is Scottish art. So is this.

This, too, and this, and this, and this...

It's never just been about this.

Scotland's art is an epic thousands of years in the making.

It's been carved and hewn from stone, spun from metal, cast in bronze.

It's been drawn, stamped, painted and built.

Scottish art has never just been

a mirror in which Scots can see themselves.

Instead, it has always revealed the power of art to explore,

interrogate and celebrate, on behalf of us all,

what it means to be alive.

In this episode, we're travelling back thousands of years,

to a time when Scotland wasn't even an idea,

to a time when the work of the artists who lived here

was subject to the demands of power.

Power of religion, the power of politics,

the power of priests and kings.

It was an art that would adorn the walls of palaces

such as this one,

and would create an exquisite setting for the Scottish crown.

It was an art that Scotland's Protestant reformers

would seek to utterly destroy.

Scotland's art lived dangerously.

Come and see.

THUNDER RUMBLES

Come with me to one of the largest

and oldest art galleries anywhere in the world.

Under the sky, far to the west,

there's a valley filled with ancient art.

Kilmartin Glen...

..where, about 5,000 years ago,

the people of the Neolithic era made these.

And sometimes, when you see the earliest human art,

it seems so minimal

that it doesn't have anything to do with humans at all.

But don't doubt it - human hands made this.

We made this.

And when I see this, I get the feeling

that they're like a pulse -

the first pulse of a creative instinct

in our cultural history.

But what are they? What are they meant to mean?

What are they meant to look like?

Kilmartin Glen is full of questions and very few answers.

All we know is that Neolithic people lived here

from at least 5,000 years ago

and in all kinds of different ways,

they marked and claimed this landscape.

What they created remains, to this day, strange...complex.

Don't mistake this for a pile of old rubble.

I mean, I'm no mystic,

but these places really do provoke the most intense emotions.

There's a mood in this glen. There's a feeling.

You can feel the weight of the centuries bearing down on you.

It's old - dear me, it's old.

But all of this work...

..is it art?

There are stone circles all over Scotland.

This one, the Ring of Brodgar, is on Orkney.

It's been known for many years that these circles aligned themselves

with astronomical turning points.

They point to the moon or the sun on the longest or the shortest day.

But are we really saying

that these people would go to this much effort

just to build a clock?

Of course not.

They're so much more than that.

Neolithic man was really aesthetically aware.

He wanted to make a visual impact

and today, just as then, these stones around us,

they kind of proffer a sculptural point of contact with the stars.

They feel like they put us in context as humans -

we're just small players on a vast stage.

Is it a church? Perhaps they stood here and prayed to the sun.

Or is it a parliament? Perhaps they came to see their king or queen.

Or am I walking out of one of the largest works of art I've ever seen?

To me, it feels like all three -

a place of worship, reverence, wonder.

I don't have to walk far from the Ring of Brodgar

to find other sites - other stone circles,

places where, for the last 30 years and more,

archaeologists have been discovering evidence

of buildings built and used by people who weren't primitive at all.

This must have been a ceremonial centre for much -

maybe all - of the Orkney islands.

You have to transport yourself there in your imagination,

and don't imagine it as empty - imagine it as full.

Full of music, voices, fire and smoke.

And if we enter the only structure that still has a roof, Maeshowe,

and study the beautifully laid stone walls,

we must wonder if they were always as bare as they now seem to be.

'Archaeologist Hugo Anderson-Whymark

'has been digging in these sites near the Ring of Brodgar

'for the last four years

'and he knows for sure that these stones were highly decorated.'

What kind of stone are you working on?

This is a local Orcadian sandstone,

which comes in various different hardnesses.

This one is quite soft

and it's sort of ideal for cutting a design into.

And these are the kind of stones that would have been used

to build all the structures locally?

Yeah - it splits into nice slabs

and you can make nice, coarse buildings

and they've been doing it for thousands of years.

We find hundreds of carvings on the walls of the buildings,

on the outsides of the buildings,

in the passageways between the buildings.

They're scratching them into the walls.

As a kind of graffiti or as a conscious attempt to decorate?

Well, some of them are very conscious designs

and others are more, sort of, scratched, sort of, slight designs.

But some of them are very deeply carved as well.

But there's not a signature style or a kind of...you know, you think,

"This might be the same person that did that hut."

Well, we do see this butterfly,

what's known as the Brodgar Butterfly motif,

which is a design we find particularly on just this one site.

-Ah...can you do us one?

-Yes.

We start with a cross.

-Wonderful - like an early Saltire.

-Yes.

And so you've seen this particular design repeated loads round here?

Hundreds of times on the Ness of Brodgar.

It's not only butterflies and repeated geometric patterns

that have been discovered here and at the Ness of Brodgar.

The archaeologists have also found conclusive evidence

that these stones, at least in part - possibly completely -

were covered in pigments and paints.

The iron ores that we now call hematites

gave the Neolithic people of Orkney strong reds,

lead ores gave them blues,

and there were yellows, too, and blacks.

I'm going to try and simulate what you're doing,

but in the modern way.

So I'm going to use some Indian red, which is...

Oh, it's pretty almost there. Isn't that weird?

But with two different stones,

I can create a slightly...

You can grade it.

The different rocks

just have different colours.

Different intensity.

On one structure

at the Ness of Brodgar,

we have a corner of the building

which seems to have little pots of different coloured pigments.

Oh, really? So this was the Dulux store.

This was where you went and found your Neolithic range.

It could well have been, yeah.

It would have been a bright, colourful, highly decorated world.

The people of Neolithic Scotland cared deeply about the objects

and decorations that they surrounded themselves with.

They worked with

difficult materials and difficult tools -

round pecking stones, knapped flints.

Their art was all about patterns, patience, repetition.

An art that comes to life as the light moves,

as it would have as the firelight flickered.

So there were ornamented walls and there were ornaments as well.

On the island of Westray,

archaeologists have found something rather rare...and rather wonderful.

5,000 years ago,

a man, a woman - a child, perhaps - made this.

And once they were satisfied

with this lovely, smooth oval shape for a head,

they began to scratch in some details.

Eyebrows...

There's even a hairline.

And then they put in a little pair of eyes.

And when I meet with the eyes, it is like a portal in time.

It's like a TARDIS - I'm time-travelling to the moment

where I can shake hands with the ancient craftsman

who made this.

This little figurine is a gatekeeper

to the wonders of Neolithic art in Scotland

and she's the oldest sculpted representation of a human form

ever found in the British isles.

The Westray Wife was found in a building

that was in use for generations.

When it was at last abandoned,

the wife was placed there as a sort of delicate farewell.

She might seem simple to you - rough and unfinished.

Of course, you could say that of all the ancient art we've seen.

But then you come across these, and you have to think again.

Some of the earliest examples of art from this time before history

are these carved stone balls,

and you can use superlatives too flippantly,

but I genuinely find these to be awesome.

They are hypnotic examples - entrancing, beguiling examples -

of Neolithic art.

Hundreds have been found in the isles to the north and west

and on the eastern side of mainland Scotland.

We have no idea how a Neolithic artist

could make something so close to a perfect sphere

or ornament it so symmetrically,

and no idea what they were for.

It's possible that holding one of these conferred the right

to speak at social gatherings.

I really do find these objects far more compelling

than any number of priapic stone circles -

perhaps because I can imagine in the dark,

or with your eyes closed,

you can still feel the extraordinary craftsmanship.

And the message that I feel coming to me across the 5,000 years

that separates me from the person that sculpted this object

is that the inhabitants of Neolithic Scotland

were not anonymous barbarians, hurling rocks at one another.

This wasn't some chaotic wilderness tumbling into the Atlantic.

From the very start, this society reserved a place

and a role for art.

These were developing networks of communities,

people like you and me,

who had complex belief systems,

who valued objects like this as status symbols,

and who had an ability to create and to craft great beauty that,

to some extent, eludes us today.

Time passed and history began - written history.

The Romans came.

They conquered the tribes of what we now call England.

But what we now call Scotland was more...difficult -

possibly rather less attractive.

To be honest, it's hardly Tuscany,

so as far as Scotland is concerned, the Romans came, they saw,

and they left as rapidly as possible,

leaving behind a few traces of their material culture -

a couple of coins, some fortresses, some sculptures,

to which the elements were unkind.

Nothing personal -

the Scottish elements are unkind to everything.

What the Romans mostly left behind was names.

It was a Roman who called the land north of the Forth "Caledonia",

which according to some people means "land of the hard men".

Talk about typecasting!

And it was a Roman who named the two tribes

that were particularly troublesome - the Picti and the Scoti.

The Scoti had come from Ireland.

They dominated the Western Isles and the western mainland,

and they spoke Gaelic.

They were the Gaels.

The Picti spoke something more like Welsh.

Their lands were in the north and east,

and the name the Romans chose for them meant something.

"The Picts" - "the painted people".

I mean, the Picts WERE art.

They were art in the flesh, art on the move.

The Romans described them as barbarians, naked apart from

the patterns that covered their bodies, the tattoos,

and in many ways, apart from all that colour and dazzle,

that's the reputation that's stuck.

The Picts came to epitomise this idea of a dark-age brutality

and backwardness.

That idea lasted.

For centuries, the Picts were seen as savage,

tattooed, moustachioed maniacs

who saw your head as a desirable accessory.

Part of that myth was a mystery.

The fact that at some time around 900 AD,

the Picts simply seemed to disappear from history.

We've always been sure that we know much more about the Gaels.

We've always thought of THEM as the people who did most

to bring the message of Christian peace

to a chaotically violent Scotland.

St Columba arrived from Ireland in 563.

The king of the Gaels gave him land on Iona,

where he founded a monastery,

and he and his missionaries lit the West of Scotland

with the fire of Christian belief.

And slowly, it spread.

Fuelling that fire, undoubtedly, was art.

The Celtic cross was the central icon of the Columban church.

At one point there were said to have been 1,000 such crosses

on the island of Iona.

And it's a symbol which powerfully combines

simplicity with ornament.

You've got this elegant, slender shaft

and then the small arms of the cross

which are gathered together elegantly in a circle.

It's a geometrical form that you could read from a long way away,

but the closer you get, the more you'll discover

the intricate Celtic knotwork

and the patterns inscribed onto the stone.

And then there was the Book of Kells,

which many believe was created on Iona

around the year 800.

There's nothing simple about this.

The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript

of the four Christian gospels drawn on vellum -

the heavily treated skins of calves.

Whether you believe in God or not,

its beauty is impossible to deny.

What you have is a kind of Christian magic,

where beasts and symbols

come to life on the page.

They call this "manuscript illumination",

but it feels to me as if the pages of the Book of Kells

have absorbed all that candlelight from the scriptorium on Iona,

and they beam it back to us through a prism of exotic pigments.

Gold...

ultramarine...

indigo.

You can lose yourself in the Book of Kells.

Which is how I sometimes imagine the people,

the artist monks, the scribes who worked on it.

We aren't exactly sure how many scribes there were,

but there weren't many.

At the moment the consensus is about five.

It actually surprises me that there were so few.

It means that years, many, many years,

must have gone into its production.

Entire lives.

By the time of Kells, the church of St Columba

and the kings of the Gaels had formed a strong partnership.

And for a long time, that's been the story about how Christianity

and Christian art came to Scotland.

It's a peaceful story.

But it is incomplete, because these weren't peaceful times.

These were times of great conflict.

And the truth about the art of these centuries is this.

We're lucky to have whatever has survived.

When you look at the Book of Kells, you think it's complete.

But the monastery in which we believe Kells was created

was raided many times in the ninth century, by Vikings and others.

The Book of Kells ended up in Ireland,

where it lost its binding and several pages.

We're lucky to have it at all,

and other manuscripts will have been destroyed and lost forever.

The art of these centuries bears the traces of violence.

It was coveted, sometimes even feared.

Today, it sits quietly in museums,

but if you listen carefully...

it growls.

This small, battered silver church,

the Monymusk Reliquary,

was once believed to have contained relics -

parts of the body of St Columba himself.

Columba's name means "dove",

but there's very little that's peaceful

about the Monymusk Reliquary.

When this object was created,

many years after he had died,

Columba had become a kind of god to victory.

This object was carried at the head of armies,

and Columba's prayer book was known as the Cathach -

the Battler.

And here is the exquisite Hunterston Brooch,

late seventh century.

It belongs to the culture of

the Gaels of the islands and the western mainland.

Look at this. It's a real statement object,

and it's covered in fine filigree decoration,

Celtic knotwork,

beautiful inlays,

and one tiny detail - it's called a Glory,

and it's a representation of the Christian cross.

But stamped across the back of this brooch is another message,

and it's written in Viking runes -

"Melbrigda owns this brooch".

But the name Melbrigda is a Gaelic name.

Is it a warning to Viking thieves and raiders?

"Hands off!"?

This is the treasure of St Ninian's Isle,

from the Shetlands.

And this item here, with its dragon heads at either end,

looks at first glance like another piece of jewellery to be worn.

But in fact, it's a decoration for a sword scabbard.

And there's an inscription on it,

and it says, "In the name of God the Highest."

This is a weapon dedicated to God's service,

and these were centuries in which everybody was taking sides.

And everyone was insisting that God just happened to be on THEIR side.

I'm pretty certain that God was never consulted on the matter.

And here's another truth about the art of these centuries.

Once you realise that what we're looking at is only what survived,

you understand the picture is incomplete.

There are pieces missing.

And in the last 20 years,

the big story in the art of Scotland's dark ages

has been what we've learnt about what we thought never existed.

The art of the supposedly savage, illiterate Picts.

In the fifth and sixth centuries,

stones like these began to appear all over the Pictish dominions,

covered in symbols that we've never understood.

They're mysterious, like the Picts themselves.

There are serpents.

Linked discs.

A mirror.

Some straight lines.

Z-shapes. V-shapes.

But mostly, it's all about curves,

and particular creatures.

It's recently been realised that this is almost certainly

the Pictish script that we were told the Picts never possessed -

used for writing names and nothing else,

but a script nevertheless.

And if we go to one of the many places

where Pictish stones have been gathered together,

we can get an even greater sense

of the sheer variety of Pictish stone carving,

of how they went beyond that simple alphabet

into a world of art.

I feel like an explorer entering an Egyptian tomb.

These people were undoubtedly violent,

but they were poets too, when it came to carving stone.

It's astonishing.

It's already clear that the Picts weren't savages,

and on the other side of these stones

there's another big surprise.

By the time these stones were made,

the Picts weren't just wonderful artists -

they were Christians, too.

Archaeologist Sally Foster is one of the many scholars

who have been rethinking what we know about the Picts,

and she's taking me to see one of her favourite examples of Pictish art.

So Sally, describe to me, what have we got in front of us here?

Well, we're looking at one of the most wonderful,

beautiful, exquisite Pictish sculptures.

Effectively it's a cross-slab.

You can see that we're looking at

a large slab of stone that's been shaped

and the main decorative theme on this stone is clearly a cross.

That's why we call it a cross-slab.

Every surface of the stone has been decorated, around the cross.

And at the very top we've got a scene showing two saints.

In effect, it looks like a manuscript, doesn't it?

If you're familiar with manuscripts of this period,

every inch of the surface has been covered

with different sorts of designs...

We haven't seen any Pictish manuscripts, have we?

No, none survive.

So this is our equivalent of what a Pictish manuscript

-could have looked like?

-Yes, absolutely.

And I think when we look at the sculpture,

it's a reminder of what we're missing,

because we also don't have much metalwork

surviving from the period either,

but we can see, for example, in these boss forms,

you can readily imagine what they'd look like in metal.

And there are a few bits of metalwork

that have similar sort of boss-like forms on them.

So we can use the stone to imagine Pictish manuscripts

-and Pictish jewellery, Pictish metalwork?

-Absolutely.

Here we are talking about Pictish manuscripts,

and the reason we can with confidence

is that just a few miles from this little church

in the town of Portmahomack in the heart of Pictland,

archaeologists have found the remnants of a Pictish monastery.

Just like Iona.

There are fragments of other cross-slabs,

carvings of Christ and the apostles,

and all of the equipment required for making vellum.

The Picts must have had manuscripts.

But we've lost them all.

Since Roman times, we've thought the Picts were violent savages.

In fact, they were literate, Christian fine artists.

They had a partnership with a church, just like the Gaels did

with the Church of St Columba.

The Pictish cross-slabs were the work of priests or monks

who supported Pictish kings,

and they travelled the country sculpting stones

that projected the power of the Christian god

and the kings of the Picts.

Those Pictish aristos weren't just trying to tart up the lay-by.

For them, these were advertising hoardings,

and the message that they were pushing was clear.

The Pictish nobility and the Church

were two halves to the same slab of life.

They were the power.

As we reach the eighth century,

the artistic arms race between Picts and Gaels becomes fiercer.

The St Andrews Sarcophagus is Pictish,

and it belongs to the second half of that century,

when monks on Iona may well have begun work on the Book of Kells.

By this point in history,

Scottish art was no longer just about outlines.

It had colour, depth...

it had complexity.

And as I'm drawing this magnificent relief,

I'm really having to get into the shading,

and I'm going to pull out the highlights,

the recesses, the areas of shadow

that help make these forms feel...naturalistic, real.

3D.

And for certain, by this point in history,

the relationship between the Church and politics in Scotland

was very far from two-dimensional.

As the tension between Pict and Gael grew,

the message of the partnership between the Picts and THEIR church

homed in on one particular figure.

A biblical figure.

Now, this might just look like another Pictish hunting scene,

but to an audience who was really well-versed in understanding

and identifying symbols,

they'd have recognised that this dominant figure

on the right-hand side is actually King David,

the righteous king of Israel,

composer of the Psalms, emblem of courageous leadership.

And here he's shown protecting his flock from attack by a lion.

According to the Bible, the Psalms were all David's own work,

and they aren't just prayers - they're boasts of military might.

They're threats.

And you have to remember that King David

was a pretty merciless character.

He won his battles, and as he said in Psalm 18,

"I have pursued mine enemies and overtaken them.

"Neither did I turn until they were consumed.

"I have wounded them that they were not able to rise.

"They are fallen under my feet."

That's like Braveheart.

And that should be borne in mind

when we contemplate the luxuriant Book of Kells.

Its very beauty and artistry

was a direct threat to the power of the Pictish kings -

and this was how the Picts responded.

"I have pursued mine enemies."

And after centuries of thrust and counter-thrust,

during the ninth century, something happened.

By the year 900, there was one king, of a land called Alba.

A land which covered most of what we now call Scotland.

A king who spoke Gaelic,

but claimed descent from the kings of the Picts.

The two identities had merged somehow -

but not painlessly. Not without the spilling of blood.

This is one last glorious example of conflict art -

a unique and in some ways hilarious eruption of might.

I mean, even the Romans would have struggled to pack

quite this much weaponry,

soldiers, decapitations,

ostentatious sense of triumph,

into 21 feet of carved stone.

And although they would probably

have done a much more elaborate and exquisite job,

they could never have told you a more gripping tale.

This stone, to the east of Inverness,

may represent the final victory of the Gaels over the Picts -

but might be about a different victory altogether.

So it's somehow very right that it has weathered so badly

that its lines are blurred and indistinct.

Now, although this stone

appears to have been wounded by centuries of Scottish weather,

what we've actually got here is a carved picture book.

And it's telling us about a battle, a moment when two armies come together.

You can see them gathering here

and you can imagine the sunlight glinting on the axes and the swords.

In the second chapter, the conflict begins.

The swords are flying, the blood is splattering,

and there's a pile of growing bodies.

The further up we move, we have retribution -

the victors decapitating their enemies.

And at the top, that great triumphal parade.

I mean, if this was made of flesh, not stone,

the blood would be oozing through the pores.

And on the back, of course, the Christian cross.

Whatever else had happened, the partnership between crown and church

was still in place,

and art was still projecting that message.

Time passed. Dynasties came and went.

By and large, Scotland stopped fighting with itself,

and started fighting with the English instead.

King after Scottish king, and a couple of queens,

sat on the Scottish throne,

and art did the same job for them all -

projecting power, confirming authority.

And it was still doing it for the Stuart dynasty in the 1500s.

James Stuart, the fifth Scottish monarch to bear that name,

was not a lucky king.

His life and his short reign

were defined by two defeats to the English.

Born in 1512, he was crowned king by the age of two

after his father was killed at the Battle of Flodden.

And then in 1542, he himself died

after his forces were defeated at Solway Moss.

It all sounds rather inauspicious.

But in fact, James V was part of a Stuart dynasty of kings

who understood and exploited the power of art.

He was born here at Linlithgow Palace,

and by the time of his birth, this building represented

the artistic patronage and vision of four successive Stuart kings.

They built a magnificent hall, a chapel,

and suites of elegant rooms.

Art was a vital part of the picture.

And as art historian Bendor Grosvenor knows,

that was true for anyone who had the necessary cash.

So Bendor, tell me, what are we standing in front of here?

These are the surviving parts

of a picture which I think is one of the most important

in the story of Scottish art.

It's called the Trinity Altarpiece.

Painted in the 1470s by a Flemish painter called Hugo van der Goes.

It was painted in Flanders in modern-day Belgium,

in what we call the Northern Renaissance,

when artists were perfecting a whole range of new techniques.

Indeed, painting in a new medium, oil paint,

recently invented in Flanders, which allows them for the first time

to paint the human form in this amazingly faithful way.

It was designed to go above the altar

in Trinity Church here in Edinburgh,

and it was commissioned by this chap we see here on the right,

Sir Edward Bonkle. He was evidently a rather wealthy chap,

I think, if we look at his luxuriously painted fur cloak.

And Bonkle, was he a kind of oligarch of the time?

Is he going to have this painting created

in order to prove he had the resources,

to big himself up in the eyes of others?

It's quite blingy, isn't it, with all that gold paint there?

He's wanting to show that he's wealthy.

But I think it's only if we open this picture up

and look at the other side of it

that we'll actually find out what this painting is all about.

Fantastic. So who have we got here, Bendor, what's going on?

The first thing you'll notice is we're looking at a gap.

There would have been a Madonna in the middle here,

which is sadly destroyed,

but actually I think the interesting thing is on the sides here.

Cos we've got these really quite incredible portraits, for the time,

of King James III of Scotland,

there with his son behind him, James IV,

and above them in a sort of protective way

is St Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland,

and on the right here we've got James's queen, Margaret of Denmark,

supported by another saint.

And I think what the picture is all about

is that Bonkle is not only showing that he's a religious fellow,

devoted to God, but he's saying, "Look how close I am

"to the king and the queen", the royal family.

So you can imagine the situation where Bonkle is in the church

with the king, they're all looking at their own portraits,

thinking, "Goodness me, aren't we important and looking lovely?"

Without a doubt, James II will have been very pleased with

this very courtly, very godly compliment.

And his son, James IV, paid serious money for this

as a present for his wife -

a book of hours to help her with her daily prayers.

Every queen should have one!

Once again, it was from the Netherlands.

And James V kept the tradition going.

He visited France in 1536 seeking the hand of the king of France's daughter

and he must have dug very deep indeed

to pay for this wonderful portrait

by yet another Dutchman, Corneille de Lyon.

James was playing with the big boys.

This was high-stakes art.

Up until now, most portraits of Scottish monarchs

have felt a little awkward,

as if the artist was stumbling around in the shadows,

grasping for a likeness.

But now we emerge into the light of the Renaissance.

Never have we been introduced to a Scottish monarch more intimately.

This - this is a real person.

You expect him to blink at any moment.

This is a real Scot.

And he's ginger, too!

The portrait worked.

James married the king of France's daughter

in January of 1537.

It's unfortunate, then, that a matter of a few months later,

she died of consumption.

As I said, he was unlucky.

James had to make do instead with the daughter of a French duke,

Mary of Guise,

and here at Linlithgow he made the very best of a bad job

by blowing over £5,000 on this fountain.

Such water features were all the rage across Europe.

Henry VIII had two of them, but his were only made of wood.

With its carved ornamental buttresses,

its naturalistic sculpture,

the elegant crown upon the top, this was going to be a multicoloured,

thrusting, squirting statement of intent.

Just what he needed, James thought,

to impress his new, sophisticated French wife.

It's a wonderful Renaissance blend of reality and fantasy.

Here are people that we might expect to meet at court

and some that are fresh from a fairytale.

Mermaids. Unicorns.

Little quotes from the world of architecture.

And when you add it all together, you project an image -

an image of enlightened patronage, of confidence, of splendour.

Scottish splendour.

James V carried on carving. He had works done at Holyrood in Edinburgh,

at Falkland Palace in Fife.

And at Stirling Castle, he picked up where his father had left off.

James IV built the great hall. His son, the palace block.

No-one coming here was going to be allowed

to mistake the Scottish crown for a minor monarchy.

Stirling Castle had the misfortune to become an army barracks.

It all suffered.

The palace block suffered particularly badly.

But there's something about these sculptures still,

however damaged they are.

Something fleshy, something wicked.

Something gleeful, cartoonish and earthy.

Inside, the palace has been recently restored.

And what it's revealed is that Scottish splendour wasn't drab,

it wasn't dreich.

Just because the walls at Linlithgow have been dulled by the years,

don't be mistaken.

The royal palaces of Scotland were explosively,

alarmingly saturated with colour.

How very tasteful.

The ceiling of the king's presence chamber was covered in carved

and painted wooden panels.

Upstairs you can see the originals, kept under glass.

No paint remains and they look even weirder.

Eyes bulge. It's boisterously bizarre.

It's hard to imagine these heads looking down on a Scottish court

where serious business was done, but James worked very hard

to maintain his kingdom with those noisy English neighbours.

He used anything he could to keep his regime strong.

And that included the church.

Henry VIII had gone so far as to split with Rome

for the sake of securing a divorce.

But James V was a very good and a very Catholic king.

And if he'd embarked on a tour of all of his kingdoms and its kirks,

he'd have found them full of rich imagery -

paintings, stained glass, sculpture -

all of which celebrated Christ, the Holy Family and all of the saints.

Rosslyn Chapel, south of Edinburgh, is a 15th-century gem.

It took 40 years to build.

An army of craftsmen and masons were brought from France,

where, for a century, artisans had already been mastering

the principles of gothic architecture.

But this is gothic art with an earthy, Scottish accent.

I mean, the walls of this church interior are so heavily ornamented,

it's like walking through a three-dimensional Book of Kells.

There are carvings of oak leaves, of flowers,

of a cast of thousands of folkloric green men.

The green men, vines sprouting from their mouths,

hint at ancient pagan beliefs.

They creep through the stonework of this Christian place of worship

like a particularly tenacious ivy.

Rosslyn has become famous for its contradictions.

Some people believe that Rosslyn has connections with the Templars

or a Christ who survived the Crucifixion.

They're sure there's more here than meets the eye.

But what meets the eyes is more than enough.

This building speaks clearly to me.

And it says, "Scottish Renaissance was a glorious barn dance

"to which everyone was welcome."

It incites you to sing loudly and with passion,

decorate your walls with Celtic lacework and naturalistic sculpture,

bring along the green man and let Christ in too.

To the glory is art, ornament and beauty.

Look at the angels, the saints, honest and human.

The eye that sculpted these figures was kind.

The fingers are fat, the faces are benign, the bodies well-provided.

There's almost nothing in this chapel that's been left unornamented.

And when you get tired of this adornment overload,

the best thing to do at Rosslyn is lie down and look up.

There are the heavens, the stars, flowers...

And in that corner,

Christ,

one hand raised in blessing.

Isn't it wonderful?

Rhythms, patterns... I feel like I'm tumbling into the stars.

This is more than a chapel, it's architecture in motion.

It's a clockwork, Catholic universe.

But interiors like this are rare in Scotland.

James V was about to lose the Catholic church

on which his power, in part, depended.

Hammers were poised to descend.

This little church in a village near Dundee, Fowlis Easter,

contains a unique treasure in the story of Scottish art.

It's a panel painting of the Crucifixion,

completed some time around 1480.

What a huge spectacle for a tiny kirk.

We'll discuss why it's so unique in a moment, but I think we should

just contemplate it for a while and study its wonder.

The star of this show, undoubtedly, is pain.

This image of the Crucifixion doesn't keep us at arm's-length.

This isn't trying to be clever.

This is a painting that presses you into the armpit of a visceral,

twisting tragedy.

Can you feel it? I bloody well can.

I can feel the drama, I can feel the might,

I can feel the human quality to this story.

This is Medieval folk art from the 15th century

and it gets you in the gut.

Can you see in that sagging stomach? Can you see in those fat feet?

Can you feel the honesty of that depiction?

What a clumsy depiction of a Christ that you're used to seeing

in the Renaissance elegantly poised.

We've got no Renaissance elegance here.

We've got no sugaring of the pill.

Across the whole of that image, I can feel the tenderness of his body

and there's no mistaking his suffering.

There's no mistaking that gash for something that is...

endurable.

This is exactly the kind of painting that James V would have seen,

had he visited the kirks of his kingdom.

And this is exactly the kind of painting the Reformation

was about to destroy.

And that's why we're so lucky to still have this treasure,

this relic of Scottish art.

The church of Fowlis Easter is full of traces of the damage

that the Protestant Reformation would inflict upon religious art.

This painting only survived

because it was hidden under a layer of whitewash.

There are pieces missing at either side.

A few have been found and hung on the opposite wall.

Other paintings were hidden or used as partitions.

You can see the holes left by nails.

Here, Christ's body has been roughly chiselled out.

Behind the alter, two angels and a saint lost their faces.

Only the saint was lucky enough to have anything left to restore.

The Protestant Reformers had translated the Bible from Latin

and in the Old Testament, they found the second commandment,

which Christian artists, Christian worshippers

and the Roman Catholic church had been ignoring

for more than 1,000 years.

"Thou shalt not make unto thee

"any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in Heaven above,

"or that is in the Earth beneath,

"or that is in the water under the Earth.

"Thou shall not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.

"For I, the Lord thy God, I am a jealous God."

Now, for an artist, that is still a terrifying,

and a terrifyingly comprehensive declaration.

There are no loopholes. Put away your pencils and your brushes.

Pack up your canvases.

There's going to be no more colour, no more imagery.

Switch out the light.

We're back at Rosslyn.

Privately owned by an aristocratic family, its interior,

as we've seen, largely survived.

But look at the outside walls.

They were harder to protect.

With hammers, with whatever came to hand,

the iconoclasts contrived to wipe 700 years from our cultural hard drive.

Across this whole facade, in every single niche,

there would have been a sculpture of a saint.

Up to 40 sculptures, 40 faces, smashed. Irretrievably lost.

Gone forever.

The destruction of religious imagery was known as iconoclasm,

and it was inspired by the same commandment currently used

by Isis to justify acts of wanton destruction across the Middle East.

Because, just like Christianity, Islam adopted the Hebrew Bible

when it was founded.

All across Northern Europe, wherever the Reformation took hold,

we did this too.

And in Scotland, we did this with particular ruthlessness.

Paintings, stained glass, statues, alter pieces,

anything showing Christ,

the saints, the Holy Family or angels was destroyed.

Isis follows the second commandment to the letter.

It bans not just images of divinity, but images of any living thing.

And we too could have gone this far.

The damage grew so persistent, so extreme,

that the king himself stepped in.

In 1541, an act was passed at his own orders

prohibiting the destruction of images.

And the iconoclasts paid absolutely no attention at all.

James died a year later, a defeated man, and the iconoclasm continued.

On the other side of 30-odd years of history,

Scottish kirks looked like this.

You didn't come to look. You came to listen.

For art, the future did look as bleak and unforgiving as these pews,

these blank walls,

its prospects crushed under the weight of a second commandment

that did prohibit the creation of any images of any living thing.

But the Protestant iconoclasts

stopped short of banning figurative art entirely.

There could be no images of God, no angels, no saints, no images

that could stand in for God himself or be worshipped in his place,

but pictures of people? Pictures of ordinary human beings?

Who could possibly worship those?

And so, from under the rubble of their cultural earthquake,

the iconoclasts allowed one form of figurative art

to emerge still breathing...

portraiture.

So let me introduce you to King James VI,

the first Protestant king of Scotland,

crowned at the age of only one.

A monarch in miniature.

In around 1574, this picture was painted by Arnold Bronckorst,

a Dutchman who had come to work in Scotland's royal court.

The king was about six years old, a lonely little boy.

Son to a murdered father, his mother forced to abdicate and imprisoned.

And the artist doesn't stint from revealing that vulnerability.

Bronckorst drains the blood from his face, he hollows out his eyes,

he gives them a rawness, as if fresh from weeping.

As a child, James was regularly beaten by his tutors.

They were determined to flog him into the shape of a God-fearing king.

A monarch who understood the limits of his power

and his duty towards his people.

And when they contemplated this particular portrait,

those tutors must have smiled grimly and said to themselves,

"Here is a king who will do what he's told."

And hence, this haunting portrait of a haunted boy.

But a realistic portrait isn't just a picture.

It's a meeting, an encounter. We look into someone's eyes.

We look behind them.

We come to know their owner.

This was the work that artists after the Reformation were allowed to do.

And it was more than enough.

So, no. Our story doesn't end here.

Not in the dark. This is the candle that leads us out of the woods.

Generations of future Scottish portrait painters would emulate

what makes this great.

The clarity of its observation,

the extraordinary empathy for its subject.

The willingness to speak truth unto power.

This is the candle that leads us out of the woods.

The portrait.

Next time, we'll encounter a whole new generation of Scottish artists

who were set to dazzle their compatriots.

I'll follow them to Rome, where they were inspired by the art

and architecture of the ancient world,

heralding the emergence of a bold and distinct new identity for Scotland.