Whose Renaissance? A Very British Renaissance

By the early 1600s, Britain had undergone a cultural revolution.

The medieval world had been left behind as new ideas

from Renaissance Europe transformed the houses

we built, the pictures we painted,

and the literature we wrote.

But we had done more than import a foreign Renaissance.

We had also created our own - one that in many ways

reflected the British character - inquisitive, down-to-earth,

often eccentric, and usually a bit rough around the edges.

A Renaissance rooted not only in art, but in ideas and discovery.

But now came the inevitable - a battle.

A battle between the foreign Renaissance which had achieved

so much and the British Renaissance which promised so much.

Now, this battle would not just be about the future of British art -

it became part of a battle about the future of Britain itself.

Where would we stand?

Who would we stand with and what, ultimately, would we stand for?

On one side, a royal court in love with an elegant,

luxurious foreign style.

On the other, a group of British artists, poets and scientists

who were making their own attempts to unlock the secrets of the world.

I'm waiting for a very special book to arrive.

The library that owns it has agreed to bring it out just for me.

Inside that box is a defining work of the Renaissance,

and I've wanted to see it for years.

It's a treatise written by the Italian architect

Andrea Palladio, but I'm more interested in who owned it.

At the beginning of the 17th century, this book was bought

by a young British carpenter and he became instantly infatuated with it.

He read it countless times

and scribbled his thoughts all over its pages.

But the young man's most remarkable and revealing annotations are here.

This, for me, is one of the most evocative

pages in the British Renaissance, because here,

the book's young owner practises his own signature

over and over again,

like some kind of anxious, excitable schoolboy.

But it's not any old name he's signing.

This man's name was Inigo Jones

and Inigo Jones went on to become the first great British architect.

But this page has another surprise.

He's not only signed his own name.

Jones has also, it seems,

attempted to forge the signature of Palladio himself.

It's almost as though he's trying to emulate Palladio

and, in fact, these two faces up here

may well represent the two men -

the great old Italian architect and the young British carpenter.

So why is this so revealing?

Well, I think this is the moment

when Inigo Jones decided to give up carpentry, to become

the British Palladio,

and to bring pure, classical architecture to Britain.

In Renaissance Italy, the buildings of ancient Rome had inspired

a revival of classical architecture.

An architecture of columns, domes, and pediments - symmetrical

and perfectly proportioned.

A style with which the British had only ever flirted.

Inigo Jones was determined to change that, to make British

architecture as wholeheartedly classical as anything in Italy.

And he got his big break as the result of an unfortunate accident.

The new king, James I, was out hunting with the queen.

One of the party fired a shot into the trees

and by a stroke of luck, it hit a deer.

The hunting party was delighted

until it was discovered that the victim

was not in fact a deer, but actually the king's favourite dog, Jewel.

When James saw the body, he went berserk and then

he was informed that the culprit was in fact his wife, the queen.

The queen was publicly humiliated.

James was desperate to make amends

and she saw her opportunity to make some demands.

What she really wanted was a brand-new house in Greenwich.

The king immediately agreed to build her one

and that's when she made a final demand.

Only one man could possibly design her house - Inigo Jones.

In October 1616,

the queen's favourite architect began work on a brand-new house.

When he'd finished, he had produced one of the most radical buildings

in the history of British architecture.

This is the first completely classical building in Britain,

and, above all, it's radical for what it rejects.

No half timber, no gargoyles, no spires, no clock towers,

no fancy gothic carvings.

The whole history of native architecture has been

thrown into the dustbin.

This is instead a pure white chunk of Italy that has somehow

found itself on the banks of the River Thames.

And at the time, it was so alien, so unusual,

that many people thought it was a practical joke.

But if the exterior was a surprise, nothing could prepare them

for what lay inside.

So this is the Great Hall, right in the centre of the building,

and this is really the epicentre of this structure

and it's really a revolutionary room, because gone are all

the sort of rambling, wonky, higgledy-piggledy,

woodeny-panelledy rooms of the Tudor age.

This space is a mathematically perfect cube,

40 feet by 40 feet by 40 feet.

And it is built on top of a mathematically generated

floor design in Belgian and, of course, Italian marble.

You know, this room is around 400 years old and at the same time,

I feel like I'm standing in a modernist, minimalist space.

Yet perhaps the biggest treat lies just beyond the hall.

This is the first self-supporting spiral staircase in the country

and, for my money, it's the most beautiful staircase in Britain.

In fact, the whole building is like a stairway to heaven -

an ideal home constructed out of harmony, proportion,

and impeccable Italian taste.

I absolutely love this place.

And you know what amazes me most about it?

The Italian Renaissance took hundreds of years to get classical architecture just right.

And Jones, Jones went and did it in just a few months,

with his very first building

Jones didn't intend to stop there.

He drew up plans to rebuild

the whole of the royal palace at Whitehall,

creating the grandest Renaissance complex in Europe.

Only one part of it was ever built,

an Italianate chamber known as the Banqueting House.

King James liked Jones' grand vision.

It suited his insanely-grand idea of himself.

On the ceiling, here he is, being lifted up to heaven

by a cluster of angels and transformed into his very own god.

For the extravagant Stuart court,

there was only one kind of Renaissance worth having...

the Italian one.

James and Jones fantasised about rebuilding Britain

in the image of Renaissance Italy.

But in doing so, they were turning their backs

on a whole other Renaissance,

one that was flourishing far away from the court in the real world.

Britain, and especially London, in the early 1600s

was a dynamic place.

The city's population had quadrupled in less than 100 years.

It attracted craftsmen and innovators and radicals,

fertile ground for a very different kind of culture

than the one dreamed of by Jones and his king.

One of these innovators was William Harvey.

The son of a sheep farmer from Kent, Harvey went on to make

one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time.

In 1604, Harvey arrived in London to work as a doctor.

Every morning, while commuting to St Bartholomew's Hospital,

he passed the meat market at Smithfield...

..where every morning the butchers of London

would slaughter their animals.

Harvey watched closely how the butchers killed,

hung and sliced up their animals and how the blood dripped

and drained out of the carcasses.

It wasn't exactly cutting-edge scientific research,

but it sowed a seed in his mind,

a seed from which his own Renaissance revelation would grow.

Harvey became obsessed with how blood moved around the body

and he began to doubt the traditional explanation.

Since antiquity, the theory of one man had been all but unchallenged.

The ancient Greek philosopher Galen claimed that blood was manufactured

by the heart and the liver

and then consumed by the other organs.

Harvey decided it was time to put this theory to the test.

William Harvey was a workaholic,

an insomniac and a coffee addict.

So, after dinner, when his wife and almost everyone else in the city

went to sleep,

he went to work.

He equipped a scientific chamber in a private corner of his house

and it was here that he experimented through the nights.

Harvey's chamber must have been a sight to behold.

It was filled with virtually every single animal

he could get his hands on. There were cages rattling away with birds,

rabbits and rodents

and running all over the place were sheep and pigs and goats.

Now, every evening, Harvey would select just one of these

unfortunate creatures and then he would begin to experiment on it.

As he examined the animals' organs,

Harvey became convinced that Galen was wrong.

Blood wasn't constantly made by the body,

it was recycled. It circulated.

I'm going to offer myself to a modern doctor

to recreate Harvey's most famous experiment.

-Roll your sleeve up for me.

-Sounds ominous.

-It does, doesn't it?

Always makes people nervous when they come to the doctor's

and they're asked to roll their sleeve up.

Good. And I'm going to put a tourniquet around it. OK?

-Harvey would have called this a ligature.

-Seems even more ominous.

Absolutely. So, we're tightening this up and you can see already

what's happening is that the veins are starting to become

much more visible in your arm.

-They are, aren't they?

-Absolutely.

So, if we take this vein here, for example.

-That's a big one, that one.

-That's a big one.

So, what he did was that he emptied the vein completely of blood

and then by releasing the finger nearest to the heart,

the vein didn't refill.

-But when he released the finger furthest away from the heart...

-Whoa.

..the vein did refill.

So, what that shows is that the blood travels

only in the direction of the heart through the veins.

-So, it's one way?

-Exactly. And that's really important.

It's not going in both directions.

And what does that mean for Galen's theory?

It's the opposite to what Galen thought.

Blood wasn't just going in one direction.

It wasn't just going away from the heart, it was returning,

so it meant there was a circulation system in place.

There was a recycling of the blood.

It was returning through the veins back to the heart.

Harvey's experiments confirmed that Galen was wrong

and he showcased his conclusions in a series of dramatic

public performances.

One of them started with a live dog

being brought into a packed lecture theatre.

When everything was ready, Harvey stepped forward.

He picked up a knife, he paused,

he looked about the room

and then he plunged his knife

into the dog's chest.

Now, the dog writhed in agony, as Harvey exposed its heart

and he made sure that everyone here saw that heart beating,

pumping, pulsating inside its body.

And then he picked up his knife again

and then very delicately,

he cut the artery next to it.

Now, as soon as he did this, blood spurted across the room.

People in the front row were showered with it.

Everyone was astonished by the ferocity of the pulsations.

Chaos ensued.

And then finally, when everyone calmed down, Harvey said this.

"I am obliged to conclude that in animals, the blood is driven round

"in a circuit, with an unceasing circular movement.

"And that this is a function of the heart which it

"carries out by virtue of its pulsation."

Harvey's discovery changed medical history.

No modern operation would be possible without it.

But at the time his rejection of ancient wisdom

almost amounted to blasphemy.

William Harvey had done the opposite of many of his Renaissance peers.

He had rejected rather than embraced antiquity.

But that rejection is what makes him such a pillar of the Renaissance.

Because the Renaissance was also about experimenting,

it was about looking at the world afresh,

and having courage in your own convictions.

At the Stuart Court, however, this cultural and intellectual revolution

was largely ignored.

For they were too busy enjoying themselves!

One night, the audience of the court of King James I were treated to

an astonishing spectacle.

In front of them appeared an expanse of sea, with moving waves on which

rode six sea-gods, half man, half fish, astride giant sea-horses.

All contained within a vast shell of mother of pearl.

And, if that wasn't enough, beside them, huge sea monsters carried

12 torch-bearers, whose lights flamed with burning seashells.

And everyone was wearing coral, sea grass, silver and pearls.

It was incredible!

And, of course, utterly ridiculous!

All this to amuse and flatter the King, who himself often took

a starring role.

These masques, as they were called, were often based, in the Italian

style, on classical mythology.

The costumes were gorgeous, the special effects extraordinary,

the sets more elaborate than anything seen before.

And the man who designed them and drew these sketches was Inigo Jones.

What a waste of his talents,

to be masterminding such sycophantic drivel.

What a betrayal of the native theatrical renaissance that had,

of course, given us Shakespeare.

From the magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream

to the pathos of King Lear,

Shakespeare's theatre had reached out to a mass audience.

The new court masques weren't progress, they were empty pageantry

for a profligate elite.

This extravagant theatre, much of it paid for by the public purse,

had absolutely nothing to do with

the lives of people outside the court.

The only time they got a look in was when, in one masque,

their justifiable grumblings were dismissed as giddy fury.

It would be a few years yet before that "giddy fury" would boil over

into revolution.

With the great minds employed by the court to make fripperies like this,

it's no surprise that the creative heart of Britain lay elsewhere.

Far away in the Suffolk countryside lived one of the great eccentrics

and one of the most brilliant figures of the British Renaissance.

Chances are, you've never heard of him.

Nathaniel Bacon was born near Bury St Edmunds in 1585,

the son of a baronet.

He enjoyed a privileged start in life, and things got even easier

when he married a wealthy widow.

Bacon became something of a playboy.

He had so much money and so much time

that he basically did whatever took his fancy.

He had dozens of different hobbies and one of them was painting.

Now, he didn't paint much but when he did, he was brilliant at it.

In fact, to my mind, Nathaniel Bacon was one of the most

original artists of his generation.

Despite only being an amateur, Bacon made some of the most ambitious

self-portraits in British art.

Here he is, surrounded by some of his many interests.

Bacon didn't just flirt with traditional things like portraiture.

He was always looking to invent new things too, and as it happened,

he may well have invented an entirely new kind of British art.

Bacon's remarkable invention is a small picture, locked away in

the back-rooms of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

And this is it.

A tiny little picture of some trees in a field.

And we're pretty sure it's by Nathaniel Bacon

because right in the middle of this tree, are his initials, NB.

Now, I'll be honest, it's a strange little thing

and not the most beautiful.

But, I think, it may well be one of the most important paintings

in the history of British art.

Because this, I think, is the very first landscape painting ever

made by an Englishman.

And if it is, it is the ancestor of

Gainsborough and Constable and Turner and Nash.

This little object is the beginning of an incredible tradition.

Bacon's innovative painting found inspiration in what would become,

perhaps, the ultimate British obsession...gardening.

This is the annual county fair at Oxted, in Surrey.

Nathaniel Bacon would have absolutely loved this place.

It is just filled with incredible produce.

I mean, look at the size of that cabbage!

Bacon himself pioneered new ways of growing produce

and managed to grow things like no-one else in England.

Bacon was famous for his pears,

which, apparently, were to die for.

He also produced extremely rare White Milan Turnips

but, without doubt, Nathaniel Bacon's pride and joy

were his melons...cantaloupe melons.

In fact, Nathaniel Bacon was so inspired by what came out of his

garden that it became the basis of what I think is his masterpiece.

This painting now hangs in Tate Britain.

Like the landscape before it, it has no precedent in this country.

It is, perhaps, the first still life in British art.

Now, this painting depicts an almost uncontrollably buxom cook maid,

surrounded by a smorgasbord of fruit and veg.

And amid this cornucopia of produce

are some of Nathaniel Bacon's very favourite specimens.

So, over here, his world-class pears, his famous white turnips.

And, of course, his really famous cantaloupe melons.

One of which is shown cut open,

so we don't mistake it for anything less impressive.

And in the background you can even

make out the way that Nathaniel Bacon grew his melons.

These are his hot-beds and this woman over here,

she's probably his cook,

bringing one of the melons back for lunch.

The spread continues, we have runner beans, turnips, squashes,

pumpkins, cucumbers...but the piece de resistance is surely this array

of gigantic cabbages that seem to

overtake the room like a kind of science fiction monster.

I think, partly, he's just showing off.

He's saying, "Look what I can grow!"

But I think it's more than that.

I think, by painting melons and

cabbages and worldly things like bosoms on such a monumental scale,

Nathaniel Bacon is making a statement.

He's saying, these things are

just as important as the gods and heroes of the Mediterranean.

That the Renaissance may well be found in Roman ruins but it can

also be found in your own back garden!

And that was the point about the home-grown renaissance. It was less

about fantasies of ideal beauty and

more about looking in new ways at reality.

Bacon had found a heroism in nature.

Harvey had revealed the mechanics of the human body.

And one remarkable man would explore

nothing less than the secrets of the soul.

Robert Burton was a private, unassuming and unworldly man.

Robert Burton spent all of his career

and most of his life here, in Oxford.

He never travelled, never married, he never really had much fun.

Yet he did something far more interesting.

Burton devoted his entire career to just one Herculean labour.

Burton wanted to produce a definitive account of

the human condition itself.

And he chose to focus on one particular emotion, melancholy.

For Burton, melancholy meant all forms of sadness,

from feeling a bit glum to severe depression.

Not one for short cuts,

Burton amassed an enormous personal library of almost 2,000 books

and began reading.

Many of these books are kept here in his old college, Christchurch,

where Burton was himself a librarian.

They contributed to his life's achievement,

one huge best seller, The Anatomy Of Melancholy.

So, this is it, all 723 pages of it.

And I want to begin with the frontispiece

because even Burton's frontispiece is comprehensive.

Up here, are two different features of melancholy.

Jealousy on the left and solitude on the right

and down here we have the love-sick man surrounded by his love letters,

the man made miserable by religion and superstition, and over here,

right in the centre, is Robert Burton himself, holding his book,

holding this book, in fact.

And then, inside, Burton anatomises

every possible cause, symptom and even cure of the many

different kinds of melancholy.

All of this material is organised in

members and then those members are divided into subsections,

into sub-subsections

into sub-sub-subsections

and, of course, into sub-sub-sub-subsections.

And some of it is extremely complicated.

He talks over here about the causes of melancholy.

So, he talks about supernatural causes, so, God causing melancholy.

And he talks about natural causes.

So, things coming from the body, from the emotions, from the humours.

He talks about melancholy of the head,

melancholy of the body and melancholy of the emotions.

And he talks about symptoms of melancholy.

So, we have body problems, wind,

dry brains, hard belly, thick blood...whatever thick blood is.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that

this vast book is just a bit bonkers!

It is...but only a bit.

It's also witty, wise and written with real human empathy.

His passage on marriage is one of my favourites.

"Every lover admires his mistress,

"Though she may be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled,

"Pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned,

"Tallow faced, have a swollen juggler's platter face..."

And he goes on for the whole page,

describing how ugly this woman might be and then, at the end,

he writes this.

"If he love her once, he admires her for all this,

"he takes no notice of any such errors

"or imperfections of body or mind."

What an amazing thing, 400 years ago, and Robert Burton saying,

"It doesn't matter how ugly your wife is,

"If you love her, you love her."

There's something particularly poignant

about this whole vast endeavour.

Burton himself suffered from melancholy,

so in some ways it's an autobiography.

I think this man must be the nearest

character we have to Robert Burton today.

He's devoted his own life to producing a multi-volume commentary

on The Anatomy, which now

threatens to be even longer than Burton's enormous tome!

Martin, why was melancholy such a big thing in the 17th century?

Well, I think it was partly to do

with increasing self consciousness.

And that people became

more aware of themselves

and therefore of their own feelings.

In some ways, in the 17th century, then, melancholy had some cache?

Oh, yes, yes, particularly if you were a lover.

Of course, if you were a lover you really needed

to be miserable about the woman you loved.

It was quite important, cos it showed you had feelings.

In some ways, could we think of him as the ultimate Renaissance man?

Yes, not just because he had read everything, that would be

a medieval trait as well, but because he was so on the ball.

He was interested in new thinking, very much so.

He was interested in the voyages of discovery,

interested in America, what was going on in Peru...

His mind was everywhere and I think that was quite unusual.

Throughout this book there's a great sense of humanity, through every

single page. Do you get that feeling as well?

Yes, I think that he wanted to console, he wanted to amuse,

he wanted to give the melancholy person

the sense of what a wide world it was.

In some ways, Martin, you seem like a modern day Robert Burton.

Oh, I try not to. I think I'm grumpier!

Grumpier than Burton?

HE LAUGHS

This is what the melancholy man wrote about his own life,

"I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life.

"I never travelled but in map or cart. I have no wife, no children

"to provide for. I have little. I want nothing.

"All my treasure is in wisdom's tower."

I find those words so humbling.

Because the modest man who wrote them had quietly

and selflessly produced one of

the greatest books in the English language.

A mood of melancholy hovered over the artists and scientists of this

increasingly introspective age.

And in its dark shadows, poets found inspiration.

One of its most famous victims was one of the greatest poets of this

or any time.

His picture hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, in London.

We do not know its artist but it is one of the first paintings of

a writer in British history.

This is John Donne, he's only 23.

He's so young he can't even grow a full moustache yet.

Yet, despite his youth, he's already suffering from melancholy.

All the symptoms are there. He's crossing his arms in a morose way,

he's pouting his lips, he's wearing all black, and even his collar

is in an anxious state of disarray.

But there's another clue here, another symptom, one that

almost no-one ever notices.

Here, between the collar is a little stream of smoke.

And that, believe it or not, is actually the vapour of melancholy,

rising from his abdomen, where it's produced, all the way to his head.

I'll be honest, it doesn't look promising for young John Donne.

But he does see a way out through the gloom.

Above his head, there is an inscription in Latin,

that translates as, "Illuminate the darkness, oh, lady."

And I think he's saying, the only cure for melancholy is women!

As a young law student, John Donne

pursued his self-prescribed cure with enthusiasm.

He was a notorious womaniser.

And some of his poems read as witty, elaborate seductions.

Take "The Flea" for example.

Donne's with a woman.

He wants to have sex with her.

She's not interested. So, he points to a flea.

Now, this flea has already bitten both of them,

already sucked both of their blood.

"Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

"How little that which thou deny'st me is,

"It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

"And in this flea our two bloods mingled be..."

Donne's tactic is to say, "Look, our body fluids

"have already been mixed. So, in one way, we've already had sex.

"So we may as well do it for real."

Suffice to say, the young lady's not

convinced by his reasoning.

She squashes the flea and with it Donne's hopes...

but it was a clever try.

When Donne finally married, he settled with his wife in a tranquil

spot in the Surrey countryside.

They lived together in this tiny summer house on the riverbank.

It was a blissful time.

But his poetry kept its wit and energy and directness.

This is how he begins his poem The Good Morrow,

"I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did, till we loved?

"Were we not weaned till then?

"But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

"If ever any beauty I did see,

"Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

"And now good-morrow to our waking souls,

"Which watch not one another out of fear,

"For love, all love of other sights controls,

"And makes one little room an everywhere."

God, I love that poem.

It feels so direct, so intimate, so modern.

It begins with Donne waking up next to his lover and you can just

imagine him turning over to her in bed, stretching his limbs,

and saying, "I wonder by my troth, what thou and I did till we loved."

He's saying, what the hell

were we doing before now?

What a waste of time life was before we met.

And that is such a universal sentiment.

Everyone who's been in love has surely felt that way.

But the poem also embraces the excitement of its age,

the great Renaissance era that produced it.

The Good Morrow was written amid

the great age of discovery and John Donne knew about

all those voyages around the world.

But here he rejects them. He's saying, "They can discover new

"countries, they can discover new continents,

"they can discover new worlds,

"but the only world that matters is our little world,

"with the two of us inside it."

But John Donne's honeymoon did not last long.

In 1617, his wife Anne died.

She was only 33 years old.

Donne was virtually destroyed by Anne's death.

The love of his life was gone, and decades before her time.

He was grief-stricken, but he felt guilty, too.

He knew that he had given her a life of hardship and poverty,

and he promised that he would never be with another woman ever again,

and as far as we know, he kept that promise.

After his wife's death,

Donne's restless spirit found a new consolation -

religion.

In 1621, this former libertine became Dean of St Paul's Cathedral.

But his melancholy came back to haunt him,

and prompted a new obsession - death, particularly his own death.

In fact, Donne's poetry became saturated with it.

John Donne wrote so much poetry about death,

but his attitude towards it became increasingly odd.

How about this for the start of a poem?

"When I am dead, and doctors know not why

"And my friends' curiosity will have me cut up to survey each part."

He's imagining his own autopsy.

I'm convinced on reading these, that, after his wife's death,

all John Donne really wanted to do was to die himself,

and I think he wanted to die in order to be reunited with her.

Lonely, heartbroken, and increasingly ill,

Donne would not wait long for his wish to be fulfilled.

In his late 50s, he developed cancer.

But he had one last artistic gesture to make.

On his death bed, Donne wrapped himself in a shroud.

He closed his eyes, turned to the east, to the rising sun,

and then asked an artist to draw him.

The drawing showed Donne as if already dead.

And when it was completed, he hung it beside his bed,

and gazed at it through the last days of his life.

As Donne finally died, he did something extraordinary.

He took up the very same pose,

and in doing so, his real death became identical to the drawing.

The drawing was later passed to the great English sculptor

Nicholas Stone,

who used it as the basis for a mesmerising statue.

It is now in St Paul's Cathedral.

Here is Donne, posed exactly as he was

when he was drawn, and pretty much just as he was when he died.

And, you know, I find this such a moving piece of sculpture.

Because here one of the heroic figures in British culture

is shown at his most vulnerable.

His hands are clutching his stomach - that's where his cancer started.

His little knock-knees buckled under his own weight,

and his entire body is tensed with the cold.

This piece is so well-carved, that if you look at it long enough,

you become almost certain that it's actually moving,

that the fabric is wrinkling, that the chest is breathing.

And that's what this sculpture is about.

It's about his death, of course,

but it's also about John Donne's new life.

I mean, just look at his face.

Look how calm he looks, look how content.

And look at those eyes. I know they're closed,

but I'm convinced they are just about to open.

This is death as a new beginning.

Like Harvey and Bacon and Burton before him,

John Donne had brought a new spirit of energy and innovation

to British culture.

I think by the 1630s, we had created something very special indeed.

A bold, beautiful and humane Renaissance

that was inescapably, stubbornly British.

Yet once again, the Stuart Court wasn't convinced.

Once again, and for the final time, it looked abroad for inspiration.

In March 1632, a Flemish man called Antoon arrived in London.

He was only 33 years old,

but he was already the most fashionable artist in Europe.

This painter was not really like any painter

the British had seen before.

He was urbane and multilingual.

He was wearing extremely expensive clothes,

and he brought with him a large team of servants

and a huge train of luggage.

Antoon Van Dyck immediately achieved celebrity status.

The King gave him a substantial house on the river in Blackfriars,

where he threw lavish parties for the great and the good.

Within a year, he was knighted.

Sir Anthony Van Dyck had been born in Antwerp in 1599.

He had natural talent, and painted this remarkable self portrait

when he was just 15.

Raised as a Catholic, Van Dyck absorbed all the lessons

of the European Renaissance.

His painting was more dramatic, more fleshy,

and more sensuous than anything we had seen in Britain.

The English upper classes were desperate to get a slice of this foreign sophistication,

and flocked to his London studio.

Yet if you think that great art is the result of one man's imagination,

Van Dyck might surprise you.

If you asked Van Dyck to paint your portrait,

the first thing you'd get was a price list.

£50-60 for a full-length portrait,

£30 for a mid, £20 for head and shoulders.

As soon as you were in position, Van Dyck would start the clock.

He'd rapidly sketch your face onto a canvas,

and then, when exactly one hour was up, he'd kick you out.

And then the next one would be brought in for the same treatment.

Now, if Van Dyck's method reminds you of your dentist,

you're probably about right.

And this was just stage one.

Van Dyck would then hand over the sketch to his assistants

who started painting his picture for him in another room.

Now, by this stage, the real sitter had long gone.

But the assistants got round this easily -

they had a team of body doubles in their studio.

Over several days, and sometimes weeks,

the assistants painted up the portrait.

When the painting was virtually complete,

it was brought back to Van Dyck.

And then, with a few flashes of his paintbrush,

he gave it his own signature flair.

Over the next few years,

Van Dyck's studio knocked out dozens of such portraits.

In Van Dyck's hands, his wealthy sitters were transformed.

Haughty poses, magnificent outfits -

the British had never looked quite so stylish.

Not for nothing are these known as swagger portraits.

As for my own more modest portrait, the artist who kindly agreed

to sketch me just now in a mere 20 minutes is Nicky Philips.

Like Van Dyck, she paints society figures,

and she's a passionate admirer of his.

Nicky, Van Dyck really is the sort of prince of portraiture, isn't he?

What do you think makes him such a special and brilliant portraitist?

There's a sort of clarity about it.

You don't feel that the paint has been over mixed or he's taken

several brushstrokes to put it on.

It's just there, in one stroke usually,

saying everything that needs to be said.

For me, when I look at a Van Dyck painting, I just want to touch it.

I want to touch the flesh, I want to touch the silk, the velvet,

I want to touch every single part of it.

In three brushstrokes you can tell it's silk. And that's what's clever.

The translucency of the skin is extraordinary.

All this under painting gets built up and built up

and that's why I feel as though he was painting more realistically

than anyone has ever done.

Ever, really. You truly feel there is flesh there.

This is the thing that is wonderful about Van Dyck, is that it's both

extremely realistic

and yet it's clearly not how those people looked, on the street.

But I do still feel that it's a living being.

If you take the earlier Renaissance pictures,

they were much more two-dimensional,

and you take painting today, which has gone back to being quite

two-dimensional - that was like the peak of realism.

It was exactly how you see somebody.

He brings this sophistication, this elegance, this grace, this swagger.

I mean, they don't really look English, do they?

I think his pictures show sophistication that perhaps

hadn't arrived here.

Would you like to have Van Dyck paint your portrait?

-What do you think?

-I think you would!

Van Dyck's greatest painting hangs here, at Wilton House in Wiltshire.

It's an Italianate palace

that reflected the courtly taste of the day.

And no wonder.

It was in part designed by the man who brought Renaissance Italy

to England.

Inigo Jones.

This is Inigo Jones's double cube room.

So-called because it has the dimensions of two 30-feet cubes

laid end-to-end.

Now, it is a fabulous space,

and one of the reasons it was designed was to showcase

all of these paintings by Van Dyck.

The room is lined with them. There is one of Van Dyck's many

portraits of Charles himself.

And there's his French queen, Henrietta Maria.

But one of these paintings dwarfs all the others.

It's the largest painting he ever produced.

A portrait of the Earl of Pembroke with his entire family.

This has to be the most swaggery of all swagger portraits.

It actually celebrates a marriage, between the Earl's son,

this dapper young man in red, who is only about 15 years old,

to this heiress in silver, who is barely 13 years old.

If that doesn't sound ideal to us,

it was ideal to the Pembrokes,

because she was going to bring a huge dowry to the Pembroke family

and thus to secure their already promising future.

It's therefore, I think, a painting of triumph,

a painting about a rich family becoming even richer.

And Van Dyck has even included, up in the top left corner,

a bunch of cherubs, as if they're blessing the family from on high.

But look closer, and that swagger begins to seem rather hollow.

I think there's something very strange about that family.

None of them are looking at each other.

The Earl and his wife in the centre, they look downright miserable.

She's crossing her arms morosely,

almost as though she resents even being painted.

And, in fact, when Van Dyck made this picture,

their marriage was all but over.

They were actually living in different houses.

And the cherubs?

They're not cherubs.

Some people think they are the ghosts of three Pembroke boys

who died as children.

And if they are, they're not blessing this painting,

they're haunting it.

But tragedy lay ahead not only for the Pembroke family.

Dark clouds were gathering above the British aristocracy.

Many of the people Van Dyck had made look so confident,

so invincible, would end up perishing in battle.

Their glamorous Renaissance was about to end.

For some years,

a powerful and subversive movement had been building. Puritanism.

The Puritans had one aim in mind,

to return the country to a land of Christian simplicity.

There was no place for the luxury and extravagance

of court favourites like Jones and Van Dyck.

"There is no welcome on these shores for the sinful,

"the idolatrous, the abominable.

"All images, be they molten, carved or painted, are to God deceits.

"Forsake the Devil and all his works.

"The sinful lusts of the flesh."

Their radical ideas fuelled

a revolt against an arrogant and extravagant king.

In 1642, king and parliament went to war against each other.

Seven years later, a defeated King Charles was led to the scaffold.

Here, he was executed outside the palace

that Inigo Jones had designed for his father.

What followed would be a new age,

an age of austerity, hostile to any kind of Renaissance,

native or foreign.

It was the end of more than 100 extraordinary years.

From foreign artists and craftsmen we had learnt the language

of the Renaissance and we had gone on

to build a Renaissance of our own.

In little more than a century, we had ceased to be medieval

and become modern.

I think we've forgotten too many of the British painters

and sculptors, poets and scientists who brought about that revolution.

The Renaissance didn't only happen abroad.

This series has shown that the British had a renaissance too.

It may have been different from the continent

but it was a renaissance all right.

And it changed British culture forever.