Madness Rococo: Travel, Pleasure, Madness

ANIMAL HOWLS

SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC

Argh!

Ooh-la-la!

Ah!

Urgh!

Argh!

Eek!

So far in this series, we've concentrated on the good news

from the Rococo - travel, pleasure,

the pursuit of happiness.

Although it lasted most of the 18th century,

the Rococo was art's happy hour

when much fun was had by many.

Unfortunately, there's a downside.

When you spend as much energy as the Rococo did,

running away from reality, there comes a time

when unreality becomes the norm,

when common sense gives way to madness and the darkness sets in.

And that's what this film is about - the madness of the Rococo,

the monsters that crawl out of the dark when reason has had

too much to drink and the artistic imagination goes on the prowl.

We're going to see some very queer things in this film.

Goya, for instance. Was there ever an artist who explored

the dark more energetically than Goya?

Or Messerschmidt?

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, from Austria.

What kind of a sculptor in what kind of an age produces art like this?

And then there's Longhi. Ah, yes, Longhi,

observer in chief of Venetian decadence,

who looked beneath the mask and found another mask.

All that's coming up, as we explore Rococo's dark side.

But first, we're going to Britain,

where the madness flourished particularly fiercely

and where some very strange people made some very strange appearances

in some very strange art.

Allow me to introduce you to Sir Francis Dashwood - Libertine,

fantasist and inveterate Rococo dresser-up.

This, believe it or not, is Dashwood too,

in his guise as a Turkish Sultan.

And here he is again as the Pope,

worshipping a topless goddess.

But the maddest of these mad Rococo depictions of Sir Francis Dashwood

is surely this one, painted by William Hogarth.

Dashwood as a monk, pretending to be St Francis of Assisi.

In most countries, a man like this would be arrested

and put into a mental home, but in Rococo Britain,

he was encouraged to enter politics, held several important

government posts, and eventually became Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Dashwood's career has a familiar ring to it.

He went to Eton, painted here by Canaletto,

where he made his important political friendships.

He was a Tory and in his younger days,

before he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dashwood was

a keen member of various drinking clubs,

including the most notorious of them all,

the Hellfire Club.

The Hellfire Club was a gentleman's club

with a religious bent.

Its members, who included many of the leading

politicians of the time, dressed up as monks.

They called themselves "Brother".

They met in these spooky caves in West Wickham, where they managed

somehow to combine anti-Catholicism

with drinking too much

and wenching.

No-one knows for sure what the Hellfire Club got up to

down here, it's all very mysterious, but some information did seep out.

Dashwood, dressed as St Francis, would lead the pretend monks through

a series of outrageous religious ceremonies, mocking the Catholics.

Then, they'd all get immensely drunk

and turn their attention to the prostitutes -

or nuns, as they called them -

they'd invited along to their black mass.

So here we are, slap in the middle of the so-called Enlightenment,

yet here is half the Government dressed up as monks, drinking

themselves stupid and chasing after pretend nuns in a cave.

That's why I love the Rococo. It's completely potty.

According to rumours, Hogarth was also a member of the Hellfire Club.

He was definitely associated with it in some way.

And in this very strange

portrait of Dashwood as St Francis, Hogarth shows

the Chancellor of the Exchequer worshipping a crucified Venus.

Instead of a Bible, he's reading a pornographic novel.

And the fruit at his feet has taken a naughty form

and looks like a woman's buttocks.

Hogarth, who is usually thought of as the first truly great

British painter, and who looked more like his pug than his pug did,

was another Rococo frequenter of drinking clubs.

In 1732, he became a founder member

of something called the Sublime Order of Roast Beefs,

a patriotic eating club and drinking club.

# When mighty roast beef was the Englishman's food

# It ennobled our hearts and enriched our blood

# Our soldiers were brave and our cultures were good... #

They met in an upstairs room at the old Covent Garden Theatre,

where they drank too much beer

and sang nationalistic songs about the potency of British beef.

# Oh, the roast beef of old England

# And old English roast beef

# Our fathers of old were robust and strong

# And kept open house with good cheer all day long... #

That boozy, burpy, rude tone you get in Hogarth's art,

it's the tone of the tavern.

In the modern world, you still get it at football matches.

All that swearing, mocking of the opposition, the jingoism.

# Who sully those honours which once shone in fame... #

Hogarth's noisy nationalism

is usually brushed over by his defenders.

It's all good fun, they say. He was just being boisterous.

# And old English roast beef. #

I'm not sure about that.

With Hogarth, the devil is always in the details, and in Calais Gate -

his most famous picture - there's a lot going on that's very unpleasant.

Calais Gate, or The Roast Beef Of Old England,

as it's properly called, shows a busy French street,

with Hogarth himself lurking in the crowd.

You can actually see him there in the picture,

about to be arrested, and all this is based on a real event.

In 1748, Hogarth went over to Calais

and while sketching the city gates,

he was detained as a spy by the French police.

This infuriated him immensely and as soon as he got back to London,

he got his revenge by painting this picture.

Now, the city walls were part of Calais's defences

and the British had only just finished their war with the French,

so drawing the city defences at such a time was very foolish.

Of course he was going to get arrested.

But what's really unpleasant here is the religious nastiness of this

picture, the dark anti-Catholic ideas that are being expressed here.

Hogarth has set his scene in the build-up to Easter,

Lent, when French Catholics were not supposed to eat any meat.

So the British taverns in Calais, hungry for the roast beef

of old England, had to import it specially from home.

And this great slab of British beef has just arrived at the port.

This fat French friar here, fingering the side of beef,

he's quite funny.

And these hungry French soldiers having to make do with

a thin gruel, they're pretty funny too.

But what isn't so funny is what's going on in the rest of the picture.

Here at the front, on the left,

there are three hideous nuns worshipping a dried-out fish.

The fish, remember, was a traditional symbol of Christ.

So this comic fish's face is a giggling and perverse reference

to the true face of Christ that was said to have been left

on Veronica's veil when she wiped his dying face.

In a Catholic Mass, at the climax of the Mass,

the moment of Communion, the holy wafer

and the goblet of wine become the body and blood of Jesus.

It's the centre of Catholic belief, this idea of transubstantiation.

And that is what Hogarth is mocking here.

At the back of the picture, a Catholic priest outside

a tavern was handing out the Communion to his congregation.

While the English eat good old English beef,

the French get Jesus as a wafer.

And right at the top, the most unpleasant detail of all,

a crow has landed on a cross, and its hungry beak has begun

pecking uselessly at Jesus' symbolic body.

In France, at Lent, even the crows are hungry for a bit of flesh.

# Oh, the roast beef of old England

# And old English roast beef. #

Wahey!

So beneath the Rococo's jollity, there was darkness.

And beneath its beauty, there was darkness too.

Have you ever wondered why women try to make their faces

whiter by using makeup?

It's a status thing. Goes back long before the Rococo.

If you were poor, you worked outdoors, right?

So you got suntanned.

And the moment somebody saw you, they knew you were poor.

With paleness, the opposite was true.

If you were pale, you stayed indoors, enjoying your leisure.

So your skin was white,

a condition that found particular favour in the Rococo.

It wasn't just the women either.

There were plenty of Michael Jacksons out there as well,

trying desperately to look less dark than they were.

But it was the women who really suffered,

and among whom the fiercest tragedies were enacted.

See this mirror, a beautiful Georgian mirror,

made by William Linnell in 1759.

This mirror used to belong to a famous Rococo beauty called

Maria Gunning.

Maria Gunning came from Ireland.

Her family was poor, so she became an actress and wowed them

with her looks.

First in Dublin, and then in London.

She arrived in London in 1751.

She was 18 and quickly became the Angelina Jolie of her times,

a celebrity actress, famed for her beauty.

When Maria went by in her carriage,

crowds would line the streets, in the hope of glimpsing her.

She got so famous,

her shoemaker began charging people sixpence just to see her shoes.

So it didn't take her long to find herself an Earl, and in 1752,

she married the Earl of Coventry

and settled down to a life of being beautiful.

This is the actual mirror he bought for her.

It used to hang above the mantelpiece in her dressing room.

Every day, Maria Gunning would spend hours painting her face,

getting ready to appear before her doting public.

And soon enough, that's what killed her.

The whitener she used was made of lead white,

which achieves excellent coverage.

But the lead began combining with the moisture in her skin

to form an acid that began eating away at her face.

To cover up these patches where her skin had fallen off,

Maria Gunning would apply even more whitener.

The rouge on her cheeks, a fashion imported from France,

where the country-girl look became briefly popular,

was made from lead paste and cinnabar -

a waste product of mercury mining.

So, rouge gave you lead poisoning and mercury poisoning.

As for her lipstick, Maria Gunning liked to use mercuric fucus -

a seaweed extract

with a particularly high concentration of mercury.

So the acid ate away at her skin, the lead poisoned her

the mercury seeped into her veins

and as the sores grew ever more visible,

so more and more makeup was needed to cover them.

She died at the age of 27

and spent her final year in a darkened room

where no-one could see her.

This lovely George II giltwood overmantle mirror,

given to her by her husband,

with its exuberant acanthus scrolls

and its brimming basket of flowers,

would have seen all this.

And the poor mirror must have thought to itself,

"Human beings, you couldn't make them up!"

Back in Venice,

history clearly had it in for the city of masks.

And the good times were now numbered.

The pesky Dutch and English

had stolen the most important trade routes.

Venice was no longer the gateway to the East.

Its naval power had crumbled, so, as we saw in film one,

the one about travel,

Rococo Venice needed to reinvent itself...

..as a tourist trap.

To attract the louche, but increasingly crucial Grand Tourists,

the Serenissima had turned itself into the international centre

of European naughtiness.

If drinking was your vice, or gambling,

or chasing after women and men,

then Venice was the place for you.

The best time to go was, of course, carnival time,

when you could wear a mask and be as decadent as you wanted.

No-one knew who you were.

Fortunately for us, to record this immense social naughtiness,

Venice managed to produce one more great painter.

He was born Pierre Antonio Falca,

but we know him better by his Rococo stage name -

Pietro Longhi.

Longhi was the Venetian Hogarth,

a satirical, nosy-parker,

keeping his eye on his fellow citizens.

But, because he was a Venetian,

Longhi could never be as burpy

and beery as Hogarth.

Longhi's tactic was to charm the truth out of you.

He'd giggle and he'd sweet-talk

until he was close enough to peep behind the mask.

You could wear a mask in Venice from St Stephen's Day,

that's 26th December,

till Shrove Tuesday - so that's three months or so.

And also, from 5th October until Christmas.

So that's another three months.

So for near as damn six months of the year,

the Venetians could go about pretending

they weren't who they were.

The Venetian mask had various purposes.

In the cramped streets of Venice,

it was a way of hiding in full view of your fellows.

And it was particularly useful in the gambling dens,

where no-one knew who you were

or how much you owed them!

Women wore a mask called a moretta,

which means "the dark lady".

They were oval and you kept them in place with your teeth,

biting on to a little button inside.

So, a woman in a moretta couldn't speak without her mask falling off,

giving away her identity.

Venetian women evolved a subtle language of silent flirtation.

An inclination of the head,

a flutter of the eyelashes,

a nod, a wink.

WOMAN GIGGLES

The men, meanwhile, wore a white mask called a bauta,

shaped like a face, except for the bottom.

It stuck out like a projecting chin,

so you could eat and drink and gossip while wearing it.

The Venetian bauta wasn't just worn at Carnival time.

It had a political role too.

Venetian nobles wore them at important decision-making events

so they could cast their votes anonymously.

But the chief role of the mask was to hide the darkness within.

Venetian society had grown decadent and rotten.

It did not want everyone to know.

This interesting Longhi painting, called The Charlatan

shows a phony doctor flogging his wares at carnival time

in the dark arcades of the Doge's palace.

But the real charlatan here

is the anonymous nobleman in the foreground...

MAN LAUGHS

..who makes a crude grab for a passing woman's skirt.

We'll never know exactly what's going on in Longhi's art.

His symbolism is too twisted and Venetian.

We've lost touch with too many of its secret meanings.

But one thing we can be sure of

is there are no heroes in his pictures,

no-one we should look up to.

So, what have you got?

HE LAUGHS

In Longhi's art, the corrupt, the flighty,

the ridiculous, have elbowed out the gods and the heroes

and grabbed the leading roles.

In Rococo Venice,

it wasn't the meek who inherited the earth

but the schemers,

the mountebanks, the charlatans.

WAVES LAP

So, the pleasure capital of Europe was awash with naughtiness.

Whatever your vice, Venice catered for it.

But vices cost money.

And if you didn't have any, and got into debt,

then they sent you somewhere very Rococo -

prison.

The prison island of Santo Stefano,

a busy Rococo location with a hellish history.

The Italians have been sending people to Santa Stefano

since Roman times.

Nero's wife, Octavia, was exiled here.

A couple of thousand years later,

this is where Mussolini sent his political prisoners.

But it got really interesting in Rococo times,

when Santo Stefano led the way in prison architecture.

Prisons played a huge part in the Rococo.

They were crucial in literature, for instance -

Casanova, that archetypal Rococo seducer, was in and out of prison.

And his life story is full of prison escapades.

The Marquis de Sade was another one.

An archetypal Rococo rogue,

who did all his best work locked up.

So the Rococo specialised in prisons,

and here at Santo Stefano there's a unique survival

of the Rococo's biggest and darkest prison idea.

You must've heard of Jeremy Bentham -

he's one of the Rococo's weirdest presences,

and he's still with us.

Or, at least, bits of him are.

Bentham left his corpse to University College, London,

and every day his Rococo skeleton goes on display

encased in a pretend-body stuffed with horsehair.

As for his head, well, they keep that in a box.

And it only gets taken out on special occasions.

Bentham was a social philosopher,

constantly thinking up better ways for us to live.

And he invented a new way of thinking called utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism's big idea was that usefulness brought happiness,

so everything should be really, really useful -

especially a prison.

According to Bentham,

the greatest happiness for the greatest number

was the measure of right and wrong.

So whatever made a prison work best, that's what you need to do.

So he invented a new type of prison

called a panopticon...

..and he persuaded the English government to help him develop it.

His plan was to build one of these in London,

exactly where Tate Britain is today.

And it would've looked much like this.

The panopticon was round,

and its big idea was that the prisoners on the perimeter

could be spied on constantly

by the guards watching them from the centre.

It was all about surveillance.

How could a few people keep track of lots of people?

In a panopticon, the cells went all the way round,

and in the middle was an observation tower patrolled by the guards.

And this observation tower had blinds in it -

venetian blinds, as it happens -

so the guards could watch the prisoners,

but the prisoners could never be sure

if they were being watched or not.

It's a very sinister idea.

What Bentham was trying to engineer with his Rococo panopticon

was a situation in which the prisoners controlled themselves.

In their imaginations, they always believed they were being watched,

so they could never feel...

unwatched.

And, of course, Bentham was right,

the modern world is being invented here,

and its sophisticated surveillance.

With the CCTV camera, the building doesn't have to be round any more.

But the panopticon's big idea,

that the few can spy on the many, has survived.

Once he'd invented his panopticon,

Bentham wanted to expand its use.

Hospitals could be based on this model, he said,

mad houses,

and even schools.

So, as the Rococo slipped ever deeper

into the blackness of its own ending,

the craziness of Jeremy Bentham's daft ideas

ceased slowly to appear so crazy...

..and began to look more and more like the norm.

When the Rococo uncorked the inner man

and pushed him out onto art's stage,

it made public bits of the mind

that had previously remained private.

This is Vienna,

where Sigmund Freud would later tunnel so invasively

into the human psyche.

What, I wonder, would Freud have made

of the Rococo mindset that produced these?

These were made by the Viennese sculptor

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.

And I know this is the Rococo

and that all sorts of private fears and desires

came bubbling up from the inner man,

but still...they're particularly creepy, aren't they?

Born in the German Alps in 1736,

Messerschmidt began his career

as a conventional sculptor working for the Viennese court.

Here's his portrait of the Emperor Francis I.

And here's the Empress, Maria Theresa.

Competent?

Yes.

Special?

No.

So, it was all going swimmingly,

he had a prestigious position at the court...

when suddenly something went wrong.

In about 1770, Messerschmidt began having hallucinations

and bouts of paranoia,

and for no discernible reason,

he began making these.

In 1774, he applied for a professor's job

at the Vienna Academy Of Art

and was turned down.

Messerschmidt, they said,

was suffering from confusion in the head.

So he left for Pressburg -

nowadays called Bratislava -

and for the final ten years of his life,

these were all he did.

He called them his Character Heads.

Some were sculpted from marble,

others cast from lead.

They are basically self-portraits,

each one featuring a different grimace,

in what Messerschmidt claimed was a full catalogue

of the canonical grimaces of the human face.

In 1781, a German writer called Friedrich Nicolai

visited Messerschmidt in his studio.

It's the only eyewitness account of him there is.

And Messerschmidt explained to Nicolai

that he was suffering from intense pains in his abdomen.

The illness has since been diagnosed as Crohn's disease.

And to relieve these sharp pains,

Messerschmidt would pinch himself hard in the stomach,

and then he'd record the expression on his face

in these extraordinary heads.

There was more.

Scattered about the studio were bits and pieces

of occult imagery and books on magic.

Messerschmidt told Nicolai he was a follower

of Hermes Trismegistus, the ancient occult god,

whose name has given us the modern adjective "hermetic".

According to Hermes Trismegistus,

our duty on earth is to pursue a universal balance.

"As above, so below" was his doctrine.

Unfortunately, Messerschmidt's sculptures

had angered the Spirit of Proportion,

an ancient being who protected these occult secrets,

and so angry was the Spirit of Proportion with Messerschmidt

for making these that he began visiting him at night

and subjecting him to terrible tortures.

This particular head - The Beak, it's called -

is a record of one of these ghastly nights

and of what happened in the mind of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt,

when the Spirit of Proportion commenced his torture.

Only the Rococo could have come up with

an artistic storyline like this one.

That craze for wearing masks and costumes

that we saw in Longhi's paintings -

swapping identities, pretending you're someone else -

that wasn't just a Venetian craze.

It caught on all over the Rococo world,

particularly in France.

You'll remember in the last film

how we admired the art of Antoine Watteau

and his dreamy "fete galante".

All those mysterious couples

flirting,

strolling,

searching for love.

Who are they?

And why are they dressed like that?

You should recognise him - he's Harlequin -

and he appears in lots of Watteau paintings.

And so does he - Pierrot.

And they are all characters from the commedia dell'arte.

The commedia dell'arte was a type of travelling theatre

originally from Italy,

which toured Rococo Europe

mounting spontaneous, on-the-spot entertainments.

They'd turn up at your village and put on a show.

Like fairs today. Or the circus.

And the main characters were always the same - Harlequin, Pierrot -

but the stories were constantly changing,

improvised specially for the day.

The usual explanation for the presence

of these commedia dell'arte characters in Watteau's art

is that they're part of the Rococo's escape from reality,

a symbolic blurring

of the divide between real life and the theatre.

There's definitely some of that going on.

Watteau's art raises intriguing questions

about the nature of reality and all that.

But I think the reason why the people in his pictures

are wearing all these mixed-up costumes is much simpler -

they're attending a fancy-dress ball.

Masquerades were all the rage in Rococo France.

They were notoriously decadent,

full of the flirtation and intrigue.

And the most popular costumes to wear at a masquerade,

the ones you could rent most easily off the shelf,

were the commedia dell'arte costumes

which everyone knew and recognised.

If you were going to a fancy-dress ball in the Rococo era,

you hired a commedia dell'arte costume.

And they were still popular a few centuries later.

As Bertie Wooster puts it in Right Ho, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse,

"For costume parties,

"every well-bred Englishman dresses as Pierrot."

One Watteau painting in particular - his masterpiece, I think -

pokes about so interestingly

in the deeper meanings of this Rococo identity swapping.

A gangly young man in a Pierrot costume

stands before us looking nervous.

The costume doesn't fit properly.

It's too big for him,

like an off-the-peg morning suit

hired cheaply for a wedding.

In commedia dell'arte shows, Pierrot, the sad clown,

is always chasing after the beautiful Columbine,

but she prefers the dashing Harlequin.

You know how women always go for the bad boys.

So she rejects poor Pierrot,

over and over and over again.

Unlucky in love,

unlucky in everything,

Watteau's Pierrot is so palpably human and vulnerable.

Yes, he's had a go at being someone else in his ill-fitting costume,

but he's not very good at it, is he?

This isn't humanity disguised,

it's humanity revealed.

What we've got here - and this is so brilliant - is a painter

who's using costumes not to escape reality,

but to confront it.

These days, the sad clown

has become a bit of a cliche,

but the Rococo invented him,

and Watteau's Pierrot was the first and greatest of them.

OWL HOOTS

So it was all getting darker.

All over Europe, the naysayers were taking over art,

dredging up the black stuff from their imaginations.

ANIMAL HOWLS

And the loudest noes could be heard in Spain,

when the incomparable Goya turned up

on the front line of art.

Every now and then an artist comes along

who doesn't just do things differently

but actually tears up the rulebook,

reinvents what art can and should do.

Goya was one of those.

His first notable successes in art,

were the Rococo tapestries he designed

for the royal court in Madrid.

They are supposed to be jolly and sweet

in a typical Rococo fashion,

and some of them are,

but others...aren't.

The tapestry designs brought Goya to the attention

of the Spanish royal family

and, as with most royal families,

they were hungry for artistic immortality.

And so, foolishly - very foolishly -

they invited Goya to paint their portraits.

The result was a display of royal mockery

on a scale unimaginable in any other epoch.

Only at the tail-end of the Rococo

could Goya have got away

with this damning portrayal of Charles IV and his family

with its startling determination to tell it like it is.

And just look what he made of the next king in the line,

Ferdinand VII - the ugliest king in art.

The Desperate Dan chin,

the half-formed mouth,

the wolverine sideburns...

If this were YOUR king, you'd want a republic, wouldn't you?

Goya was born without the flattery gene.

He was incapable of diplomacy,

and when he looked at the world around him

and saw stupidity, evil, darkness,

he just couldn't help himself -

he had to point it out to us.

In his private paintings,

the ones he made for himself,

it all comes tumbling out.

Here is the Casa De Locos - The Madhouse -

a terrifying stone jail where the crazies have taken over,

and all manner of unmentionable acts

are performed in the dark.

Here's the Inquisition.

Come to church to judge the dunces

and then to torture them.

And here's a procession of penitents in Holy Week

who don't need the Inquisition to torture them

because they're so keen to torture themselves.

That's Goya there, asleep.

Slumped over his desk with all these monsters pouring out of his head.

"The sleep of reason produces monsters"

is written on the desk.

This was going to be the title plate

of the Rococo's most inventive and brilliant torrent of darkness -

the great suite of etchings known as Goya's Caprichos.

The original copper plates from which these etchings were made

are now are found in the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid.

If you get a chance to see them, take it,

because they bring you so close to Goya.

The Caprichos are always exciting,

but they're particularly exciting

when you press your nose against them

and savour the beautiful scratchings of Goya's burin.

This is graphic art of spectacular freedom and wildness.

In this dark cascade of 80 scabrous images,

describing the horrors of the world around him,

Goya poured out all his disappointment,

his hatred,

his fear.

Who invented the graphic novel?

Goya.

Who invented Frankenstein's monster?

Goya.

Who invented zombies?

Goya.

Who invented scarecrows?

Horror movies?

And even Harry Potter?

Goya!

Pretty much every contemporary darkness you can name

is prefigured in the Caprichos.

They're astonishingly prescient,

and Goya knew all this about the monsters

produced by the sleep of reason

because they were his monsters, too.

Under the strain of all this brilliant invention,

his remarkable mind began to buckle.

First, he started going deaf,

then the panic attacks began.

Soon his own private horror

climaxed in a nervous breakdown.

On the walls of his house outside Madrid

he began painting his famous black paintings

and surrounding himself with their horror.

The witches and monsters were no longer a dream.

They were there -

moved into his house and living on his walls.

In Venice as well, events have now lurched into blackness.

In 1796, Napoleon invaded Italy

and quickly conquered the Serenissima.

The Venetian Republic which had lasted for 1,000 years

was abruptly terminated.

Napoleon carted off some of Venice's greatest art treasures to Paris

as war booty.

1,000 years of history snuffed out just like that.

So, for politics, these were terrible times.

But for art,

they were really interesting!

This is the Ca Rezzonico,

Venice's official museum of the 18th century.

And those are the only two Canalettos in Venice.

Grim ones from his early days.

But that's not what we're here for.

We're here...for this!

Now, that is a strange fresco, right?

It was painted by Domenico Tiepolo

son of the great Giambattista.

If you remember in film one,

there was that magnificent staircase in Wurzburg,

painted by Tiepolo Senior.

And remember the two portraits in the corner?

Giambattista Tiepolo on the left,

and on the right, his son Domenico, who assisted him.

Tiepolo Junior - Domenico Tiepolo -

was a really interesting painter too.

But while his father was alive,

no-one was going to notice him.

Poor Domenico was fated to spend most of his career

in his father's shadow.

It was only when Tiepolo Senior died, in 1770,

that Domenico came into his own.

These strange frescoes were painted for the Tiepolo family house,

the Villa Zianigo, on the mainland.

And they were done for his own amusement, privately.

And that's what makes them so telling.

This one here was in the entrance hall.

Imagine, you walk into the Tiepolo family house

and all these people turn their back on you.

Why?

Because they'd prefer to look at the magic lantern show

taking place in the background.

In Napoleon's Venice, amusement was what the crowd craved,

not art.

So that was the entrance hall.

But look what Tiepolo Junior painted at the back of the house.

A room full of Pulcinella.

Pulcinella was another character in the commedia dell'arte.

A hunchback with a big nose, whose deceitfulness was legendary.

This has to be one of the most inventive and outrageous

fresco cycles in the whole of Italian art.

All these Pulchinellas haven't just visited the room,

they've overrun it.

They're like a troop of monkeys in a zoo.

And I think that's what they're actually meant to be -

human monkeys clambering all over the modern world.

Ugly, itchy and ridiculous.

Pulcinella, the lecherous Venetian scoundrel,

has taken over the fresco spaces

formerly occupied by gods and heroes.

Where once this ceiling would have shown Apollo riding his chariot,

or Jesus ascending to Heaven,

there's now a circus show.

With a bunch of Pulcinellas clambering along a tightrope.

Welcome, says Domenico Tiepolo, to the modern world.

You know, Pulcinella here, the ugly Rococo hunchback,

was the model for Punch in the Punch and Judy shows

you still see at the seaside.

And he's always hitting Judy over the head.

Just like that.

And that's the thing about the Rococo,

it never really went away.

It's us in our early form.

In film one, we saw a society that was always going on holiday.

In film two, celebrity and pleasure became the order of the day.

And now, in film three, the clowns have taken over

and nothing's serious any more.

The Rococo wasn't just a great creative era,

it was a great creative prediction.