Pleasure Rococo: Travel, Pleasure, Madness

Ah, Versailles, mighty palace of the French kings.

And a crucial Rococo hot spot.

I wanted to come to Versailles to read you this -

it's an important Rococo document

and it sums up what this film is about.

Now, if you're an American, you might be thinking -

that's not a Rococo document, that's the Declaration of Independence.

And of course, you're right.

This is the document with which America

declared its independence from Britain

on the 4th July 1776.

But this is a Rococo document, not just because of its date,

but because of what's in it.

What Thomas Jefferson wrote in here embodies what this film

is about, particularly the famous second sentence,

the one about all those unalienable rights that we all hold.

According to the Declaration of Independence, all of us have an

unalienable right to life, liberty

and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, life and liberty, of course. They're obvious.

But the pursuit of happiness?

When did that become an unalienable human right?

When were we put on Earth to be happy?

I'll tell you when - in the Rococo era, that's when.

This isn't just the Declaration of Independence.

This is a Rococo manifesto.

Ooh-la-la!

Ah!

HINGE CREAKS Hey!

Argh!

Eek!

RUNNING WATER AND LAUGHTER

The Rococo pursued happiness in various ways and various places,

as you'll see in this film.

But of course, the first thing you need to get right

when you pursue happiness is love.

The pursuit of love fuelled the Rococo Age,

like petrol fuelling a fire.

LAUGHTER

Love ought to be so uncomplicated, oughtn't it?

A meets B, they like each other and live happily ever after.

But of course, it hardly ever works out that way.

The pleasures of love shouldn't be complicated, but they are.

Love shouldn't be a battleground, but it is.

And to its credit, the Rococo Age knew this.

The Rococo recognised love for what it really was -

a powerful intoxicant,

that left you weak and helpless, like an illness.

No-one knew this better than the most wistful of the Rococo's many

observers of love - the genius of

painted flirtation, Antoine Watteau.

Watteau, or "Vatteau" as they called him in Paris,

was from northern France, Valenciennes, on the Belgian border.

So his origins were actually Flemish.

We know that his father was a humble roof tiler

and that Watteau arrived in Paris in about 1702.

And that's about all we know.

Watteau is usually credited with inventing a new

genre of painting, called the fetes gallantes.

There's no exact English translation of "fetes gallantes".

It's a kind of garden fete devoted to love.

A festival of outdoor flirtation.

LAUGHTER

In a fetes gallantes,

dreamy couples stroll across a dreamy landscape of parks and trees.

Music's playing, hearts are fluttering,

secrets are being swapped.

In the background, there's often a playful statue of some Greek

or Roman god, ready to come to life.

And booming in the distance, unheard by anyone in the picture,

but ringing out clear as a bell

to us, is a loud warning.

Beware! Love is on the loose!

This is Watteau's masterpiece. It's one of the key images of the Rococo.

It used to be called The Embarkation For Cythera,

but these days, there are arguments about what it actually shows.

Cythera was the Mediterranean island on which Venus,

the Goddess of Love, was supposed to have been born.

The legend goes that Kronos, the Titan, castrated his father,

Uranus, Ruler of the Universe, and threw his testicles into the sea.

The sperm from Uranus' testis gave birth to Aphrodite, or Venus,

as the Romans called her, who rose up out of the waters

and floated to Cythera.

That famous painting by Botticelli, The Birth Of Venus,

shows exactly this moment.

Venus, the Goddess of Love, floating to Cythera in a seashell.

In the Watteau painting, Venus is over here,

and typically, he's turned her into this rather ambiguous statue.

Is she real or isn't she? Stone or flesh?

We know it's Venus because of all these Cupids buzzing around her.

Cupid was Venus's son, the God of Desire.

If he fired one of his arrows at you, well, that was it,

you had to fall in love.

So that's why all these pilgrims are here.

Most pilgrims go in search of God, but not this lot.

Watteau's pilgrims are searching for love.

The question is, are they coming or going?

It used to be thought that these pilgrims of love were

setting off for Cythera.

That's why the painting was called The Embarkation.

But that doesn't really make sense, does it?

Why would they be setting off for the island of love,

when they're already in love?

I mean, look at these two here.

So the latest thinking is that this is a departure, not an arrival.

Venus has presided over an intoxicating visit to her

island by a boatload of pilgrims.

And now, the visit's over, the boat is waiting, it's time to go home.

So despite all the Venuses and the cherubs,

this is actually a rather gloomy picture.

According to legend,

Cythera was the only place on Earth where perfect love could be found.

So what Watteau is actually showing us is the end of perfect happiness.

That's why she's looking back so wistfully at where she's just been.

She knows she'll never have all this again.

For me, there's almost a religious dimension to Watteau's gloom.

All these sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, fated never to find

the perfect happiness they're looking for.

And that's what's so interesting about Rococo art.

It goes on and on about happiness and pleasure,

but deep inside, it seems instinctively to know

that in the twinkling of an eye, it could all be over.

In the garden of love, the pursuit of happiness took place

outdoors, against the beautiful backdrop of nature.

What happened therefore to the Rococo when it went indoors?

To achieve indoor happiness,

the Rococo had to invent a new kind of architecture,

a new way of living in comfortable new spaces, created

specifically for the pursuit of pleasure, and places like this.

Sanssouci in Potsdam, Prussia,

the pleasure palace of Frederick II.

Or, as he's most usually called, Frederick the Great.

Now, I'm Polish,

so I'm deeply prejudiced against Frederick the Great.

He's the Prussian king who organised the partitioning of Poland,

tore up my country and shared it out with the Russians.

In war and politics, Frederick was ruthless.

But in private, he was more complicated, more interesting.

It was actually Frederick who designed this palace,

the Palace of Sanssouci.

This is the original design he sketched out for it

and as you can see, it's all on one level - a palace with the

ease of access of a bungalow.

No stairs to climb up, direct access to the gardens,

an architecture of ease and pleasure.

Frederick named his palace Sanssouci,

a French name which means without worry.

At the foot of the great bungalow, there's a handy vineyard.

All this pleasure at his doorstep.

Frederick designed the decoration as well.

Those figures up there, the big ones, those are Bacchantes,

followers of Bacchus, the God of Wine.

And look, he's put the name of the palace, Sanssouci,

right in the middle, between two of them.

But it's written rather strangely.

It actually says "Sans, Souci."

So, why the comma, why the full stop?

It's very puzzling,

but also very typical because Frederick loved playing word games.

It was his Rococo way of having fun.

Written up on the front of his palace was

a message to the world that no-one could understand.

Forget Bletchley Park, forget the Enigma machine.

This is a German code that's really tough to crack.

Hundreds of great brains have had a go at it,

but I think the secret is not to aim too high.

OK, "Sans" is French for "without",

that bit's easy, but the French word for "comma", "virgule",

that comes from the Latin "virgula",

which means "little rod" or "little stick".

And of course, a little stick, a little rod,

can have a sexual connotation.

So, "Sans virgule" has a naughty twist to it.

I told you not to aim too high. Now...

.."Souci", that means "worry". So that's straightforward again.

But the French word for "full stop", "point", that is also used

in literary French, posh French, as a way of suggesting a negative.

So instead of saying "ne pas",

something isn't something, you say "ne point", in posh literary French.

Something is not something else.

There's one other bit of information that's important.

Frederick is thought to have been gay.

He had no children, his marriage was sexless,

and a rumour doing the rounds claimed that when he was young,

he contracted a sexual disease from a male lover.

And after that, his little rod never worked again.

We do know that women weren't allowed into Sanssouci.

No women was a strict house rule.

So what that code up there, the way Sanssouci is written,

what it actually seems to be saying is "Sans vergule,"

without a little rod, "Souci point," worry stops.

Only the Rococo could have come up with that.

Inside Sanssouci, the Rococo revolution gently continues.

To lead the new Rococo way of life, you needed new Rococo spaces.

This is the music room, where all you did was play music

and listen to it.

Frederick was actually a very decent composer.

He played the flute and wrote numerous concertos.

You're actually listening to one now.

MUSIC PLAYS

The dining room, another Rococo speciality.

Of course, there'd been big draughty banqueting halls before,

but this idea of a room created specially for the pleasures

of eating, with all the different courses served on gorgeous

pieces of crockery, that was a Rococo idea.

The bedroom.

When it comes to the pursuit of pleasure, the bedroom was,

of course, especially important.

Before the Rococo Age, the bedroom was a room for sleeping in,

but now...

Well, now, it became a room full of pleasurable possibilities.

What we're actually watching here is the invention of modern living.

Frilly bedrooms, elegant dining rooms,

single level living in a bungalow.

The Rococo were so prescient, it even invented...

..the home study.

Study was now seen as one of life's great pleasures.

People started having libraries at home.

As Voltaire put it, probably in this very room because he stayed

here once, "Study delivers us from the burden of our leisure."

(Hmm... Casanova...)

HE CHUCKLES QUIETLY

Ah!

Ooh!

HE READS QUIETLY TO HIMSELF

Do you know what the Greek word for beautiful is?

It's omorfi.

And the only reason I know that is because of Casanova, here.

During one of his interminable searches for love,

Casanova encountered a young Irish girl called Louise O'Murphy.

O'Murphy was the daughter of an Irish soldier who had somehow

ended up in France.

Casanova saw her naked one day and was

so struck by her teenage beauty, he had her picture painted.

And on this picture, he says he added the inscription "Omorfi" -

beautiful, in Greek.

A pun on her name, O'Murphy.

Like most of what Casanova wrote,

the Omorfi story is obviously nonsense. He just made it up.

But Louise O'Murphy isn't nonsense. She definitely existed.

The proof is this infamous painting of her by Francois Boucher,

court painter to Louis XV.

The picture, nicknamed the Blond Odalisque, hangs at the Pinakothek

in Munich, and shows Louise O'Murphy sticking out her bottom, brazenly.

The real Louise O'Murphy was Louis XV's teenage mistress.

She bore him children, gave him her best years, and then he dumped her.

So, nothing remarkable there. A typical story of the French court.

But Boucher's portrait is remarkable for its sheer licentiousness.

Art has given us plenty of nudes before,

but none of them was quite as shameless and direct as this.

Boucher is often viewed as the Rococo's most typical painter,

particularly by those who don't like the Rococo.

As Louis XV's official artist,

he was the go-to painter in the Rococo's naughtiest moments.

Do I like his work? No.

Do we have to deal with it? Yes.

Because Boucher's frilly nudes and pink bottomed goddesses mark

the arrival in art of a new type of sensuality.

Crude, pink, and artificial.

In Boucher's art, nothing looks real. It's like Rococo Manga.

A cartoonish world,

in which the pursuit of pleasure has had all its complications removed.

No doubt, no guilt,

no hesitation,

just desire, raw and colour-coded, a plastic pink.

Boucher painted another notorious female portrait in the same

pose as Louise O'Murphy. It hangs in the Louvre now.

And this one is nicknamed the Brunette Odalisque.

This time, the woman in the picture is Boucher's own wife.

Poor Madame Boucher has spread-eagled herself for him

and pulled up her nightdress.

So distressed was the French encyclopaedist Diderot by this

notorious image that he accused Boucher of prostituting

his own wife.

"In Boucher," fumed Diderot,

"degradation of taste, colour, composition, character,

"expression and drawing have all kept

"pace with moral depravity."

One of the main subplots of this series,

apart from showing you all the different sides of the Rococo,

is to prove to you that the Rococo age invented the modern world.

If I show you a Watteau, that doesn't really do it, does it?

Watteau's too subtle and elusive. Too whispery and gentle.

But if I show you a Boucher, well, that's us, isn't it?

Pleasure without consequences, nudity without modesty,

desire without boundaries.

Get yourself down to your local newsagent, have a look

at the top shelf and I think you'll find those are our preferences too.

But just because Boucher painted so many subservient women

doesn't mean that all the women of the Rococo were subservient.

They weren't.

DOOR CLOSES

Right, we're going to have general knowledge quiz.

On this table, I have three things and I want you to tell me

what it is that connects them.

So the first thing is a champagne glass, in that Babycham shape,

what they call a coupe de champagne.

So that's object number one.

Next, Elvis in his pomp. Note the hairstyle.

That's the clue.

And finally, this bottle of nail polish.

Pink nail polish.

A particular kind of pink.

So, pink nail polish, Elvis, and a champagne glass.

What connects them?

Easy-peasy, right?

I bet all you Stephen Frys out there got it straightaway.

What connects all these objects is that momentous Rococo presence.

The infamous, the all-powerful,

Madame de Pompadour,

Louis XV's favourite mistress,

the first and greatest of the Grandes Horizontales.

Just in case you didn't get it, Elvis's hairstyle here,

all piled up in a teddy boy quiff, that's called a Pompadour.

It's how Madame de Pompadour wore her hair,

brushed up from the front, an uplifting style.

And this colour, here, that's very specifically Pompadour Pink.

Pink was her favourite colour.

It was particularly popular in the Sevres porcelain factory,

on which she lavished so much of her attention and the nation's money.

Madame de Pompadour's pink

became one of the Rococo's definitive colours.

And this, according to legend, this type of champagne glass,

the flat type, the coupe de champagne,

this is supposed to have been inspired, say the French,

by the shape of Madame de Pompadour's breasts,

which were cupped gently, like this.

Madame de Pompadour is supposed to have met the French king,

Louis XV, at a fancy dress ball

in February 1745 in the famous

Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.

Madame de Pompadour came as a sexy shepherdess,

while the king, bizarrely, was dressed as a tree.

So he didn't even have to lure her into the bushes to

have his wicked way with her. He WAS the bushes.

By the end of the evening, she'd climbed into his branches.

That night, the courtiers saw her carriage parked outside

the royal apartments,

where it stayed for the next 20 years.

What Madame de Pompadour seemed to realise straightaway,

as she set about becoming the most powerful woman in France,

and then the most powerful woman in the world, was that she could

use art to shape her image and maintain her power.

In reality,

she was just the daughter of a failed Parisienne financier,

but in art, she could become something else, something new.

In art, Madame de Pompadour could

become a captivating Rococo presence.

Her favourite portraitist, Boucher again,

was particularly skilled at portraying her.

He shows her playing a piano, or reading a book.

Beauty, yes, but also brains.

Notice how in most of Boucher's pictures of her,

she shows you this side, her best side,

but in this one, unusually, she's looking straight at us.

What's really interesting about the way Boucher portrayed her is

how unregal she looks, how informal.

By this time, 1750, her power was absolute.

Pompadour sent more people to the Bastille than any French king.

She started wars, she changed world history,

but in Boucher's art,

she's such a light and delicate

and kittenish presence.

One of the chief functions of these pictures

was to keep the King interested.

He was paying for them all, after all,

so that coquettish tone they have,

that shy thing looking out through the big eyes,

that's not aimed at you or me, that's aimed at Louis XV.

The most powerful woman in Europe is saying,

"I'm only a delicate little flower,

"so come and protect me,

"you big hunk of a king."

Elsewhere in the Rococo, the female cast of this exciting age

was achieving a different kind of power.

Religious power.

This is the Church of the Carmini in Venice,

and inside are a couple of beautiful altarpieces,

one by Cima da Conegliano

and the other by Lorenzo Lotto.

But we're not going to see them

because they were painted in the Renaissance,

and this is a film about the Rococo.

So instead, we're going next door to the Scuola Grande dei Carmini.

These "scuolas" were charitable organisations set up

to help the poor, so if you were homeless in Rococo times,

you came in here and they'd put you up.

Not bad for a hostel, is it?

This particular scuola grande was set up

by an organisation of charitable women called the Lay Carmelites.

They weren't actually nuns - they were friends of nuns,

associated with the Carmelite order.

And their main task here was to make these -

scapulars.

The scapular is a Catholic talisman,

something you wear around your neck to ward off evil

and keep you on the straight and narrow.

It's just two bits of cloth connected at the sides,

and you wear it around your neck like that, under your shirt.

I used to have one as a kid,

but I'm afraid I strayed from the straight and narrow,

and this is a recent purchase.

If you wear a scapular, the story goes,

and lead a pious life,

you're sure to go to heaven.

The Virgin Mary herself has guaranteed it.

This entire building, the whole scuola,

was funded on the proceeds of selling these things.

They were very popular, as you can imagine - free ticket to heaven.

Anyway, the reason I've brought you in here

is because the Rococo masterpiece we're here to see

is all about scapulas.

It's by Tiepolo, the greatest ceiling painter of the Rococo.

We saw him in film one of this series, the one about travel,

working for the rich and famous in Bavaria.

Here, in his hometown of Venice,

in the Scuola Grande dei Carmini,

he's working for God...

..and the scapular.

What the ceiling actually shows us

is the moment the Virgin Mary handed the first scapular

to a saint called St Simon Stock.

He's the old boy with the beard on the left,

who's being handed the scapular by a handsome angel.

Tiepolo's most haughty Madonna,

a grand dame of the skies,

looks down her nose at us in that Venetian way...

..whilst Stock, the grateful Carmelite saint,

reaches out pathetically for her gift,

like a down-and-out in a doorway asking for "a couple of bob, guv".

Do you know where we're actually meant to be, where all this is set?

It's actually Cambridge in England

because that is where the Virgin Mary appeared

to the English saint, St Simon Stock, on July 16th, 1251.

He'd been asking for a favour from her.

And she gave him the scapular with the words,

"Whosoever dies wearing this scapular

"shall not suffer eternal fire."

If you wear one of these, you're sure to be saved.

So the Carmelites did really well out of the scapular.

Lots of people wanted one

and, in 1749, to mark this great success,

Tiepolo was commissioned to paint this ceiling.

So why are WE here,

with our scapulars and our unlikely saints' tales?

Because this is an excellent place to witness

the pleasure principle at work in the religious art of the Rococo.

Tiepolo has set his action in the cool and calm light of dawn.

The sky is blue, the sun tints the clouds a gentle pink.

The lighting of Tiepolo's skies is delightful.

This is the ceiling of the nearby Church of the Gesuati.

It was cleaned just recently.

And look how cool and refreshing the skies are.

Tiepolo took religious art out of the thunder,

the storms and explosions of the Baroque,

and relocated it in the cool, calm, delicious light

of a Venetian dawn.

It's one of his greatest achievements.

They've lit a lot of fires in here in the past 300 years,

so it's all yellower than it should be, but you can still feel

this new airiness of Tiepolo's religious vision.

In the Baroque age, religious art tried to awe you into submission.

In the Rococo, it enchants you,

entices you, seduces you.

Tiepolo's art is a religious honey trap,

with perfect weather conditions, beautiful religious babes,

and, if you wear one of these, a short cut to Heaven.

Who could resist all of that?

Where's the ladder? I want to go up there!

MUSIC AND LAUGHTER

Venice, France, Germany...

You expect the Rococo to have fetched up in those places,

don't you?

As we saw in film one,

it was an artistic impulse hellbent on travel.

So sooner or later,

it had to arrive in Britain as well.

The British aren't naturally Rococo types, of course,

but this wasn't some will-o'-the-wisp art movement

that flutters briefly and it's gone.

The Rococo LOOKS fragile and delicate,

but it turned out to be... unstoppable.

It was a sandstorm of pleasure that blew in everywhere.

Even the dour and cold-blooded Britons

couldn't keep it out for ever.

It got here eventually and look what it gave us -

Gainsborough, the most dashing, quick-fingered,

loose-wristed painter Britain has ever produced.

Gainsborough could paint anything.

He was that good.

He did landscapes that are so breathy and healthy and British.

He painted men of power,

and gave them an air of interesting complexity.

And he painted himself, too,

as a modest chap with strong eyes.

So he did all that. But there are two things he did particularly well.

The first is, paint women, which he did with breathtaking bravura.

I think this one's my favourite -

Countess Howe of Kenwood House.

It's her pink dress that intoxicates me.

And the fact that she looks so much like Helen Mirren.

But, wait, THIS could be my favourite, too.

Mrs Robinson at the Wallace Collection.

Look how much character he finds in that exceptional Rococo face.

Oh, here's to you, Mrs Robinson!

This is Sophia Charlotte Digby, Lady Sheffield.

She's just got married, hence the big Rococo getup.

Look how she casually dangles her arm,

making sure we can all see her wedding ring.

Sophia Charlotte Digby knows we're looking at her.

But she pretends she doesn't.

It's brilliant pictorial psychology from a painter who obviously

knew a thing or two about women

and their Rococo desire to express themselves through their clothes.

And look at her feet. She's moving.

You can almost hear all those extravagant silks rustling

as she glides towards us,

a bouquet on the move.

This movement, the strolling, the gliding, was new.

For 3,000 years portraits had basically stayed still.

The artist plonked the sitter in front of you and you examined them.

That was the deal.

Gainsborough, though, was different.

Gainsborough put his sitters strolling towards us,

heading for OUR space,

ambling through the parks,

and even dancing to the pleasurable new beat of the Rococo.

It's a bit like television presenters.

In the old days you plonked them in front of the subject

and they stayed there.

But these days your modern presenter is often on the move,

and sometimes has to throw in some serious walking.

The second thing Gainsborough was particularly good at was children.

My, but Gainsborough was good at children!

The Rococo invented childhood as we know it.

Before the Rococo came along, children were seen as mini-adults,

humankind in its imperfect early form.

In a world where half of all newborns died before they were five,

childhood was seen as something you survived.

The quicker you grew out of it, the better.

It wasn't till the Rococo years

that childhood began to be recognised

as something precious which needed to be protected and enjoyed...

..a brief and beautiful moment of innocence

and freedom.

As Rousseau, the influential French philosopher

and champion of childhood, put it

to all those parents afraid their kids were now doing nothing,

"Is it nothing to be happy?

"Nothing to run and jump all day?

"Give nature time to work before taking over her business."

I think this is my favourite painting of children

in the whole of art.

There are a couple of Picasso's that are in this sort of league,

but nothing else.

These are actually Gainsborough's own daughters,

Margaret on the left, Mary on the right.

She was five, and she was six.

The two girls skip through a wood, chasing a butterfly.

Margaret reaches out to grab it...

..while Mary, the older one, holds back.

I love that yellow dress she's wearing.

It's a triumph of flashing Rococo brushstrokes.

But just because it's dashingly done

doesn't mean it's carefree.

Yes, the Rococo chased after pleasure,

but it wasn't always blind to the consequences.

Look where the butterfly has landed.

A thorn bush. Uh-oh.

When Margaret grabs it, she'll prick her hand,

so what we've got here is a doting dad

who happens to be an artist of genius,

warning his daughters of the dark reality that lies ahead.

When childhood finishes...

this begins.

MUSIC PLAYS

Tragically, the symbolism of the butterfly

and the thorn bush turned out to be horribly pertinent.

It's almost as if Gainsborough had some kind of premonition.

His beloved daughters pop up often in his art,

and you can watch their lives unravelling

in these exceptionally tender pictures.

This one here, Mary, made a disastrous marriage

to a German oboe player called Johann Christian Fischer.

That's his music you can hear playing.

Decent composer, dreadful husband.

The marriage lasted a year,

by which time poor Mary had begun to lose her mind.

Margaret, meanwhile, remained a lifelong spinster,

and when her sister's life fell apart, she moved in with her,

and the two of them lived out their old age together.

How spooky that Gainsborough managed somehow to intuit all this.

GEESE CACKLE

Back at Versailles,

the adults of the Rococo were also having trouble growing up.

Welcome to the world's largest doll's house.

This is the fake village built at Versailles for Marie Antoinette,

the notorious Queen of Louis XVI.

It was built between 1783 and 1787.

And every single inch of it is a fantasy.

The Hameau de la Reine, the Queen's Hamlet, as it's called,

was meant to look like a village in Normandy...

..with these dinky, half-timbered cottages

and the useful front garden filled with picture-book cabbages.

Most of the fake village actually worked.

This dairy here was a functioning dairy,

and once the servants had washed down the cows for her,

Marie Antoinette would do the milking herself

using porcelain buckets made specially for her

by the Sevres factory.

In real life, of course,

Marie Antoinette didn't have a rural bone in her body.

She was the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor,

an Austrian archduchess bred and brought up to rule the plebs.

But that was in real life.

In the Queen's hamlet,

this extraordinary full-size rural theatre set,

the Austrian archduchess could play at being a modest milkmaid

tending her flock.

The Queen would wander about her village

dressed as a simple country girl in a plain muslin dress

and a straw hat.

And she actually lived in this extra-large cottage here,

the bijou two-storey cottage.

In her virtual hameau, Marie Antoinette could be someone else.

No longer the much-hated Queen of France,

wasting the nation's money on fancy fripperies,

but a simple country lass leading a simple country life.

The usual way to understand all this crazy rural escapism

is to see it as a display of decadence,

a grotesque Rococo descent into falsehood and hedonism -

Marie Antoinette and her Versailles milkmaids drifting further

and further away from reality.

But it was also part of something bigger, something more prescient,

a prediction, if you like, of how the world would go.

These days, lots of people pour out of the city

and into the countryside,

fantasising about the rural way of life.

The Hameau de la Reine in Versailles

is a giant version of the country cottage,

somewhere to flee at weekends from the pressures of city living.

But instead of moving to the Cotswolds,

Marie Antoinette could afford to make the Cotswolds come to her.

This great rural grand design of hers wasn't just an escape,

it was also a vision of the future.

MAN SHOUTS AND LAUGHS

Did you know that the word "school"

comes from the Ancient Greek "skhole",

which means "leisure time" or "play"?

It's like Plato says here in his famous Laws.

Games and play are a crucial part of our education.

It's where we really learn about life.

But that was in Ancient Greece.

I'm not so sure the same thing applies to Rococo France.

The relentless make-believe which characterises

the Rococo's pursuit of happiness,

and pops up so often in its art,

doesn't seem particularly educational to me...

..more like a way of being naughty without making it obvious.

I don't know if you've ever played "hot cockles".

It's a Christmas game. It was very popular in the Rococo.

The rules of "hot cockles" are basic to the point of being inane.

One person lays his head on the lap of another person

whilst someone else spanks them from behind on the bottom.

The point of the game is to guess who spanked you.

And if you get it right, you get to spank them next.

So it's a silly game,

but the reason the Rococo liked it

and why that quintessential Rococo painter,

Jean-Honore Fragonard, painted it

was because "hot cockles" had a powerful erotic undertone.

Men get to lay their head in the laps of women,

and women get to lay their heads in the laps of men,

and then they spank each other.

I wonder why that caught on in Rococo France(!)

Fragonard was a pupil of Boucher's,

who specialised in sly paintings of Rococo people having fun.

But he wasn't all bad.

Look at the way he uses that exciting new Rococo colour, yellow.

Ooh, Fragonard was the most exciting user of yellow

art had so far seen.

LAUGHTER

Not so good, however,

is the clunky eroticism that distinguishes his art.

His most famous picture, The Swing, is spectacularly naughty.

It's just not immediately obvious.

Who doesn't love a swing?

Swings provide such childish and innocent pleasure.

But not in the Rococo.

In Rococo times, anyone looking at Fragonard's Swing

would have known immediately what was really going on here.

The movement of the swing, up and down,

was a notorious sexual allusion.

As for the lover on the ground, well, what can he be looking at?

It would be her underwear, except, of course,

that in Rococo times there was no underwear.

Another telling joke in The Swing is that the chap on the ground,

the one looking up the girl's skirt, is in the exact pose

of Michelangelo's Adam on the Sistine ceiling.

And we all know what happened to Adam

when he took a bite of Eve's apple.

So all these games the Rococo played,

which Fragonard painted so slyly,

weren't really games at all.

They were pretences, deceits,

secret ways of being naughty.

A world obsessed with having fun was losing its moral bearings.

And no-one was certain any more where real life ended

and fantasy began.

WIND HOWLS / BAYING

What's real and what isn't?

Where do the games stop and real life begin?

The Rococo era never could tell the difference.

This is a very Rococo location,

perhaps the most Rococo location in London - Madame Tussauds.

And that's Madame Tussaud herself, wax artist extraordinaire.

That's her self-portrait.

As a young girl, Madame Tussaud was taught wax modelling

by a doctor her mother worked for.

He took her under his arm and shared his forensic skills with her.

She got so good at it that, in 1780,

she was appointed art tutor to Louis XVI's sister,

Madame Elisabeth.

And for the next ten years, she lived in Versailles

and watched its downfall.

When the French Revolution broke out in 1789,

Tussaud was also arrested.

But she talked her way out of it

and began making death masks

of those who'd been sent to the guillotine.

The wax models she made of the decapitated heads

were put on these poles

and then paraded through the streets like flags.

She made Louis XVI's death mask,

and this one here is Marie Antoinette.

This, then, was where the pursuit of happiness would eventually lead.

And how very Rococo of the Rococo that even in death

it couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

So far in this series, I've been enjoying

the pleasures of the Rococo - the good news.

But you can't drift as far away from reality as the Rococo did

without losing your bearings.

And in the next film,

we'll be looking at what happens in Rococo art

when reality creeps out...

and darkness creeps in.

LAUGHTER