Civilisations - S1.E5 ∙ The Triumph of Art
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00:00HEAVENLY VAULTS
00:09Heavenly vaults, but made by the earthly hand of man.
00:17The imagined form of the universe, a circle, no beginning, no end, just wheeling eternity.
00:28Domes had appeared in antiquity and the medieval centuries, but never with such compulsive grandeur.
00:37In the 15th and 16th centuries, domes appeared everywhere, constellations of them.
00:47They were all the work of mortal man, but by the lights of philosophers,
00:53the infinite capacity of man's mind made him a mortal god, king of the lower beings.
01:02Artists and architects, east and west, now began to be spoken of as touched by a divine gift.
01:10The domes they built from Rome to Lahore were the crowning achievement of this moment of supreme,
01:16almost sacrilegious creative confidence.
01:20So why do we treat those blossomings as though they were happening on different cultural planets?
01:27Well, I think you all know the answer to that one. It's that word Renaissance, isn't it?
01:32Invariably attached to the word Italian, by those who coined it.
01:37Oh, I know, every so often it's extended north and west to France and Germany,
01:43and even as far as literature was concerned, to the very shores of Albion.
01:48But if we want to feel the pulse of one of those great moments,
01:53the surge of inventiveness when civilisation bounded forward,
01:58we need to look much further than that. We need to look east.
02:06The great flowering we call the Renaissance owed much to Arab scholars
02:11who recovered the lost classics of antiquity, of science, mathematics and philosophy.
02:19Through the centuries that followed, the outpouring of creativity would flow both ways,
02:25between Islamic East and Christian West.
02:30But for the imaginative freedom of the artists themselves,
02:34the future awaiting them, East or West, could hardly have been more different.
03:19Whenever something profound happens, which propels civilisation forward,
03:24it usually happens not through isolated sparks of invention in one city or state,
03:30but through the spur of competition.
03:36Competition across time, going one better than the ancients,
03:40but competition across borders too, even when those borders are not always the same.
03:48And those borders divided warring cultures.
03:54So it was with the Renaissances in the Muslim and Christian worlds.
04:031,000 miles apart, in Rome and Istanbul,
04:08two old men, Michelangelo and the Turk Mimar Sinan,
04:15two veteran builders were competing for the same prize.
04:21To outdo what for almost a millennium had been regarded
04:25as the greatest house of God in the world, the Higher Sophia.
04:33Commissioned by the Emperor Justinian in the early 6th century,
04:37the Byzantine Basilica was the greatest architectural achievement of the early Christian Church.
04:43Its dome, wrote one scholar, seemed not to be founded on masonry at all,
04:49but suspended from heaven itself.
04:53When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453,
04:57instead of demolishing the Higher Sophia, they converted it into a mosque.
05:05But there was no escaping the fact that this conversion was superficial.
05:09Islamic elements had merely been bolted onto a church.
05:15Somehow, Christianity was always showing through.
05:25There came a time when this partial makeover wasn't good enough,
05:29not at any rate for the greatest of the Ottoman rulers,
05:33Suleiman the Magnificent.
05:35His armies had cut a swathe through Christian Europe.
05:39So when he decided to build a new mosque, unencumbered by Christian leftovers,
05:45he was making a point for Allah.
05:47And he was making it directly at his rivals, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope.
05:55Ironically, the master builder ordered to create the great Friday Service Mosque
06:01had been born a Christian.
06:05Mimar Sinan was a Janissary, converted to Islam as a child
06:09and conscripted into the crack household troops of the Sultan.
06:15Sinan rose through the ranks to become the greatest military engineer of his day.
06:21But he always felt himself destined for something greater than bridges and fortresses.
06:25I wish to become an architect, he told his biographer,
06:29so my perfect skills should leave art to the world.
06:35Suleiman's order was thrilling but daunting.
06:39A great dome surrounded by half domes, four minarets,
06:43a structure as immense as the two-continent empire,
06:47a mosque that would eclipse Hagia Sophia.
06:51The visible proclamation of Islam's victory.
07:07Sinan's great idea is the indivisibility of space,
07:11the architectural proclamation of the union of all believers.
07:16Here, the space isn't chopped up by forests of columns
07:20and barriers of choir and altar.
07:24Here, we are all in it together.
07:32Islam is a religion of law and simple faith.
07:38Everything revealed to all.
07:42Islam means submission.
07:48And what we submit to here is the light,
07:52the light of true faith and of the Quran, its record,
07:56the light of God's law streaming through 249 windows,
08:02drowning the space with radiance.
08:06How weightless this all feels, even the gigantic dome,
08:10and that's all the more extraordinary,
08:12because it could only be supported
08:14by absolutely titanic architecture,
08:18these huge four masonry piers.
08:22Everything is kind of airy and light and graceful,
08:26but you feel behind it is this hard,
08:30mathematical, engineering mind of Sinan.
08:36That achievement, that achievement of Islam,
08:40that achievement of Islam,
08:42that achievement of Islam,
08:44that achievement of Islam,
08:46that achievement of Islam,
08:48that achievement, something built on the ground
08:52that is full of this kind of planetary uplift
08:56towards which our gaze is sent over and over again,
09:00is what makes this place
09:02one of the most beautiful buildings on Earth.
09:08Sinan was not working in isolation.
09:12He knew very well that in Christian Europe,
09:14architects had been working to remake Christian architecture
09:18on an imperial scale.
09:20Turkish visitors to Rome,
09:22just like their Italian counterparts visiting Istanbul,
09:26would have seen first-hand
09:28this east-west competition of cultural one-upmanship.
09:32Sinan had thought obsessively
09:34about the long history of Constantinople,
09:39and in Rome too, artists and architects
09:43found themselves in a dialogue with the past.
09:47The Western Renaissance had been founded
09:49on the idea of rebuilding the ruins
09:51of the classical pagan past
09:53and reconsecrating them for a new Christian age.
09:57The supreme test would be St Peter's,
10:01the original basilica built by Constantine in the 4th century,
10:05was, by 1500, in danger of collapse.
10:11In 1505, Pope Julius II shocked Rome
10:15by deciding to demolish the old basilica.
10:19The visionary architect Donato Bramante
10:23won a competition to build its successor.
10:27He got the job because a small, perfect building
10:31caught the Pope's eye.
10:37This little gem is really a glimpse
10:39inside the Renaissance mind,
10:41in particular into Donato Bramante's mind.
10:45It's a freestanding shrine to St Peter
10:49in the cloister of the church of San Pietro in Montorio,
10:53the place where St Peter himself
10:55was said to have been crucified upside down.
10:59Let's think about what the word Renaissance means.
11:01It means rebirth,
11:03and what was being reborn was classical antiquity.
11:07Bramante walked around Rome
11:09making very careful scholarly notes of what he saw.
11:13And what he saw were pagan temples.
11:19So what we have here is the perfect classical form
11:21of one of those ruined Roman temples.
11:25A dome sitting on a drum
11:27with a colonnaded encirclement outside.
11:33And as such,
11:35what it does is take those perfect forms,
11:39the hemisphere and the wheeling circle,
11:41the revolution of the planets,
11:43like a great cosmic timepiece,
11:45and says,
11:47this harmoniously is how the new world is going to be.
11:51And says, this harmoniously
11:53is how the new sacred art is going to be.
12:01There's something else on Bramante's mind as well.
12:05This is really a miniature-sized doll's house prototype
12:09for what he will want to happen to St Peter's itself.
12:15Only one problem.
12:17This is so perfect
12:20because it is so teeny-weeny.
12:28But his job was to put Hagia Sophia in the shade,
12:32so St Peter's had to be very big indeed.
12:36And that was going to be a mighty challenge.
12:44Bramante began work in 1506,
12:46but he didn't live to see his miniature St Peter's
12:49translated into the big one.
12:53But the greatest of his successors, Michelangelo,
12:57was determined to honour the essence of Bramante's design,
13:01a central dome pierced by windows.
13:05Michelangelo was in his 70s,
13:07when, as the Pope's third choice,
13:09he got the job grumbling
13:11that he was doing it only for the glory of God.
13:15Many of his greatest late works,
13:17like The Last Judgement and the Sistine Chapel,
13:20were in their own way titanic architectural constructions,
13:24vast masses of figures pulled and pushed through space.
13:32Most of his drawings for the project have been lost,
13:35but a wooden model survives to show us
13:38that his vision, like Bramante's,
13:40was of an enormous Christian temple, a Greek cross.
13:44No nave or fussy side chapels
13:46distracting from the focal point of the great crowning dome,
13:50its windows flooding the interior with light.
13:54The whole immense structure supported on four giant piers.
14:00It's astonishing to realise
14:02that the two greatest monumental buildings in the world,
14:06one for Islam and one for Christianity,
14:09were going up at the same time in the 1550s,
14:12and on the same basic building principles.
14:17Any wonder, did Mimar Sinan and Michelangelo
14:20know what each other was doing?
14:24For Michelangelo, as for Sinan,
14:26the challenge was how to make the mighty engineering
14:29beautiful, apparently seamless.
14:35He took his cue from Bramante,
14:37a perfect, elegant, hemispherical dome,
14:40an echo of ancient Rome.
14:44But it was also somehow pure Michelangelo,
14:47colossal strength translated into flowing line.
14:54Michelangelo toiled away into his 80s on this,
14:57living in a cell-like room in St Peter's,
15:00wracked with pain, refusing pay, eating very little.
15:06February the 24th, 1552, was a great day,
15:10both in the career of the 76-year-old Michelangelo
15:14and in the long, extraordinary history
15:17of the biggest dome in the world,
15:19the cupola on top of St Peter's,
15:22because it was the day when the cornice of the drum was finished.
15:28Cornice is just below the area of the windows.
15:31Essentially, it's the base which made it impossible
15:35for anyone, no matter what happened after Michelangelo's death,
15:3812 years later, to change its size,
15:41but more importantly, it made it impossible
15:44to change Michelangelo's beautiful vision.
15:50To mark this great occasion, what did Michelangelo do?
15:53He threw a party, and it wasn't for the patricians
15:56and the princes and the cardinal and the pope,
15:59it was for the workmen who made this possible.
16:02It was all the sausage you could possibly eat
16:05for enormous pork livers.
16:07And what does this tell us about Michelangelo
16:10beyond the lovely anecdote
16:12that he felt a kind of fraternal solidarity with the workmen?
16:16Well, it tells us this, that Michelangelo,
16:19through all his life,
16:21valued what his contemporaries called arts.
16:24Arts means art, but it means art in the old sense
16:28of hands-on skills,
16:30in his case, of an almost sublime gift
16:33for technical engineering, for structural power,
16:37knowing exactly what should go where.
16:40But you weren't going to be a great artist
16:43unless you could also marry that technical ability
16:46with what Michelangelo's contemporaries called ingenio,
16:50the ability to conceive a sublime idea.
16:53And that heroic idea survived even his successors
16:57making the curve of the dome much steeper.
17:03Michelangelo died 89 years old,
17:06but before he could see the dome completed,
17:09the Greek cross-temple idea struck later popes as altogether too pagan.
17:15A big long nave was added,
17:17the opposite of what Bramante and Michelangelo had wanted.
17:21But you still feel the essence of his ingenio beneath that dome.
17:30Rising 120 metres above the ground,
17:33over 40 metres diameter,
17:35the tallest dome in the world,
17:37taller than the dome of the Sillimania Mosque,
17:40taller than the Hagia Sophia.
17:44The work of the man his biographers called Il Divino,
17:48the Divine One.
17:50No-one would have quite dared to say that about Mina Sinan.
17:55But in Europe, a cult of the superhero artist
17:59listening to his own voice,
18:01which is to say the echo of God rather than his patron,
18:05had taken off.
18:10Their lives were now, for the first time since antiquity,
18:15the subject of page-turning biographies,
18:19as fascinating, if not more so, than those of saints and kings,
18:23for often they described the work of sinners.
18:28And among the gallery of self-described geniuses,
18:31no-one sinned quite like the Florentine goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.
18:37It was from house arrest for living in sin with a boyfriend
18:41who'd shopped him to the authorities
18:43that Cellini wrote his blood-soaked, chess-beating thriller
18:48of an autobiography, which,
18:50aside from the catalogue of murders,
18:52prison escapes and gunfights,
18:54was one long document of yearning to be treated
18:57as a true artist's genius,
19:00alongside his hero Michelangelo.
19:04Michelangelo knew Cellini,
19:06and in fact on at least one occasion gave him a hearty endorsement.
19:10But as the world's best goldsmith,
19:13and for Benvenuto, that was not going to be enough.
19:18Only a bona fide genius, after all,
19:21could have managed to turn a golden salt cellar
19:24into a witty, erotic sculpture.
19:27But the godly former Poseidon showed
19:30that Cellini could make heroic figures with the best of them.
19:34In Florence, the bronze to beat
19:36was Donatello's heroine from scripture, Judith,
19:39holding up the head of the enemy general, Holofernes,
19:43she'd just beheaded.
19:47The Judith had been set up on the Piazza della Signoria
19:51in front of the seat of Florence's government,
19:54to celebrate chasing Nemedici despots out of Florence.
19:58So when, almost a century later,
20:00Cosimo Nemedici became duke,
20:02he wanted a statue which would reverse all that.
20:06A manly hero, beheading a female monster.
20:11And Cellini, an alpha male
20:13who knew all about bloody killings, seized his chance.
20:18Donatello had cast Judith in pieces.
20:21Cellini promised to do the Perseus in one casting.
20:25Impossible, scoffed the duke.
20:27The liquid bronze won't reach all those extremities.
20:30Watch me, said Cellini,
20:32who liked talking back to his patrons.
20:41Cellini was playing for the highest stakes imaginable.
20:45The casting of the Perseus was the moment
20:48that was going to transform him from a goldsmith,
20:52a craftsman, the mere artisan
20:54to whom everybody condescended,
20:57into an artist superhero.
21:00The real thing.
21:05Having set up everything he just writes,
21:08suddenly, as the melted bronze was going to be poured,
21:11Cellini falls deathly ill of a terrible fever.
21:15So sick, so ill, he's sure he's going to die.
21:22There's an incredible storm
21:24There's an incredible storm.
21:26Wind, rain, the roof is partly removed.
21:29The cover of the furnace explodes.
21:35And most fatally, the temperature of the molten bronze
21:40starts to lower.
21:42That word that nobody wants to hear in a foundry.
21:46Caking.
21:48The premature coagulation of the alloy starts to be said.
21:52The assistants come running.
21:54Maestro, maestro, everything is going pear-shaped.
21:57The bronze alloy will cool.
21:59It won't run to all the extremities of the mould.
22:02And you end up with this little kind of dwarfish homunculus.
22:06So Cellini jumps off his deathbed
22:09and gets every conceivable kitchen utensil,
22:12plates, platters, all made of pewter.
22:15They're thrown on the fire.
22:17He's got his heat pack.
22:20The alloy flows through the mould everywhere it should.
22:27He has won the transformation he so badly wanted.
22:38And Cellini has a wonderful, vainglorious sentence
22:42for what happens.
22:44He said, I revived a corpse.
22:49This is the mind-blowing masterpiece
22:52that tourists don't notice
22:54as they're too busy doing selfies
22:57with the copy of Michelangelo's David Nearby.
23:01But if they did give it a minute or two,
23:04they'd see Cellini's outrageous miracle in bronze,
23:08hard metal that somehow gushes hot blood and rise.
23:12Cellini's hot blood and writhes with snaky horror.
23:16Perseus, head down, arm raised in triumph
23:19like some sports champion with the ultimate trophy.
23:27All the ancient Perseuses and Medusas
23:30were contrasts between beauteous hero and grotesque gorgon.
23:34Not here.
23:36Cellini has the genius, crazy idea
23:40and unchangeably, androgynously beautiful.
23:43Boy, girl, girl, boy, both looking down.
23:46Even the hairdos aren't actually that different,
23:49tousled curls or writhing snakes.
23:55Cellini is a sorcerer, an alchemist.
23:58He's made hard metal sweat with the exertion of killing.
24:02He's turned that hot alloy back into liquid,
24:05the blood coursing through the hero's body,
24:08the blood pouring from Medusa's sliced-away neck.
24:14And remember, even dead, her look could kill you.
24:22So Cellini has one bit of mischief to play out
24:25at the expense of his hero, Michelangelo, no less.
24:29Positioning the sculpture where it would seem
24:32it had caught David's attention.
24:35The petrifying gaze of Medusa turns David
24:38into cold, lifeless stone.
24:49Cellini got away with his stupendous work
24:52only because it flattered his Medici patron's sense of self-importance.
24:57The great days of Florence are gone,
25:00but a show of grandstanding art
25:02can postpone insignificance indefinitely.
25:07And for rising empires,
25:09art and artists were indispensable to the projection of their power.
25:18And this was as true in Muslim Asia as in Christian Europe.
25:23The Mughal Empire in India was a sponge
25:26for all the cultures it inherited and admired.
25:30And that tolerant, curious openness
25:33to many influences east and west,
25:36under the Emperor Akbar, became a principle of government.
25:42When he and his descendants rebuilt
25:45the old, ruined Hindu city of Lahore,
25:48they borrowed from Indian temple style
25:51and from Persian architecture.
25:54But most crucially, Akbar, who had learned painting himself,
25:58made art the mirror of his civilisation.
26:03There are many that hate painting, Akbar said,
26:06but such men I dislike.
26:11Akbar established workshops of hundreds of artists,
26:15great factories of royal culture,
26:17that dwarfed the modest studios of Western painters.
26:22Mughal art drew on Indian epics,
26:26Persian poetry, calligraphy and profuse decoration,
26:29but it quickly developed its own style,
26:32crowded with dashing incident,
26:35courtly elegance and, sometimes under the influence of Western art,
26:39seen by Akbar, a flair for naturalism.
26:45Akbar himself, always at the centre of the subject matter,
26:49paid personal attention to the work regularly,
26:52descending on workshops and to the terror of the artists,
26:56promoting or demoting painters,
26:59depending on how he liked or disliked their latest work.
27:07And though, like all the generations of Mughal emperors
27:10and their successors, he was embattled,
27:13sometimes literally, with his son, Jahangir,
27:16he bequeathed to him the sense that the authority of the Mughal Empire
27:20was built on art as much as government and military power.
27:24It would be seen to contemporaries and posterity,
27:28above all, as a civilisation.
27:33Jahangir really didn't need to be told by his father
27:37how important art was.
27:39In his own right, he was the most intellectually
27:42and aesthetically driven of the whole dynasty.
27:45Well, this is one of the great masterpieces of Mughal painting,
27:49but it's also an extraordinary masterpiece
27:53of imperial self-congratulation,
27:56even by the standards of the world's Caesar.
28:00That's what Jahangir's name means,
28:03the title he gave to himself.
28:05He's encircled with a golden halo
28:09that's the size of a small planet,
28:12and it's giving off these extraordinarily intense golden glimmer,
28:16so fierce that one of the little putti, one of the cupids,
28:20who's been flown in directly from European art,
28:24has to cover his eyes with his hands,
28:27lest his eyeballs be scalded
28:30by the radiation of Jahangir's magnificence.
28:38The slightly implausible conceit of the painting
28:41is that Jahangir prefers the company of a saintly Muslim holy man
28:46to worldly rulers.
28:48The Sufi Sheikh himself has been painted
28:51with wonderful Fustian simplicity.
28:54A brown coat, perfect candy-floss whiskers there.
28:59He's receiving a present from the hands of Jahangir himself,
29:03but, of course, the hands don't actually touch.
29:07And there is something else going on in this extraordinary painting.
29:13It's also a picture about the competition
29:16between Mughal art and European art,
29:19between East and West.
29:25There's an Ottoman sultan who's shown with the Turkish turban,
29:30and he's looking respectfully in the direction of Jahangir,
29:33but most significant is that the gesture he's making
29:37with his hands like that
29:39are the gesture of Indian deferential respect.
29:43No Turk would ever have done that.
29:46But if the Ottoman sultan is belittled by Jahangir's court painter,
29:50it says nothing compared to what happens to King James I of England,
29:55who is placed below the emperor's feet,
29:58wearing a look of what can only be described as
30:01sour resentment at his low place in the pecking order.
30:05And the artist who's doing this, and who's enjoying it all,
30:09has an exquisite self-portrait at the bottom of the painting.
30:14His name is Bachitra.
30:16He's a Hindu, you know that, by the saffron robe.
30:18And it's a beautiful, beautiful profile self-portrait.
30:22Exquisite details of the beard, of the turban,
30:25of his painterly hand,
30:27almost as refined as the technique he's used for the emperor himself.
30:35In fact, this is a doubly reflective self-portrait,
30:39a miniature of a miniature.
30:41The one Bachitra is holding,
30:43and which tells us everything about the ambiguous status
30:46of the Mughal artist.
30:48There are the signs of favour, an elephant and two horses,
30:51which the emperor has given his painter,
30:53but on an understood condition.
30:57Ultimately, for all that he's slipstreaming
31:00behind the power and the glory of Jahangir,
31:04he knows his place, and that's defined by the last detail
31:08in that tiny frame of him kneeling,
31:11prostrating himself at the feet of the Caesar of the world.
31:16And look where he is.
31:18He has literally backed himself into a corner.
31:24For, when all is said and done,
31:26these intricate, beautiful paintings are miniatures,
31:30book illustrations contained within the framing page,
31:34and their enjoyment confined to the emperor, his court,
31:38and anyone he sought to impress.
31:44Only once, albeit spectacularly,
31:48did Jahangir make art visible to all of his subjects.
31:54On the outer wall of Lahore Fort,
31:56Jahangir set a vast display of mosaic tiles,
31:59creating the biggest mural in the world,
32:0370 metres high and 450 metres long.
32:10Kashi Kari, the name for this mosaic technique,
32:13came from Persia,
32:15but as with all Mughal art, it's a glorious hybrid.
32:21There are angels from Europe,
32:24Chinese dragons,
32:27royal hunts and epic battles,
32:32history, mythology, birds and beasts,
32:35the whole world Jahangir revelled in is on display.
32:46In effect, it's a huge vertical book,
32:49the one truly open book in all of Mughal art,
32:52readable by all Jahangir's subjects,
32:56passing through the gates of Lahore Fort.
33:00Or is it?
33:03Despite the sheer boldness of the gesture,
33:05the link forged between ruler and subjects
33:08is undermined by vertical remoteness.
33:14As your eye travels up,
33:16the brilliant pages swim in and out of vision
33:19until they disappear into the great city.
33:26Ultimately, even the experimentally-minded Jahangir
33:30couldn't conceive of public art
33:33that was truly accessible to his subjects.
33:37The Mughals, with their fastidious connoisseurship,
33:40could barely have imagined the revolution in looking
33:43that was unfolding in Western art.
33:53By the 17th century,
33:55European images were busy exploding
33:58through any kind of containing frame.
34:00They body-slammed the beholder
34:02with great, meaty, muscular life-size or larger figures,
34:06all deployed by artists
34:08who rewrote the rules about decorum,
34:11or threw them away altogether.
34:17And this liberation of the senses
34:20began in the place you'd least expect,
34:23the Rome that had been remade by Michelangelo
34:26and the Counter-Reformation popes.
34:31There came a point when the Roman Church
34:34would be a victim of its own success.
34:37All that wealth, all that power,
34:39the biggest basilica with the biggest dome in the world.
34:42And you know that sooner or later,
34:44someone's going to come along and say,
34:46remember the simplicity of Christ?
34:49Remember Christ's mission to teach and preach to the poor?
34:53And then there'd be a second great point,
34:55that the whole idea of the Christian message
34:58is that the compassion of God
35:00lay in giving his own Son
35:03the form of human flesh and blood.
35:06Now, you put those two things together,
35:08poverty and the physical presence of flesh and blood,
35:12and you know there has to be a new kind of art.
35:15Only problem is, nobody could do that.
35:18Nobody could do that since the death of Michelangelo.
35:21And then along comes a second Michelangelo.
35:29We shouldn't get carried away, but isn't it striking
35:32that the rule-breakers in art were often law-breakers?
35:36Like Cellini, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
35:40was a bisexual murderer
35:42with major anger-management issues,
35:45both short-fused in and out of jail.
35:52But if he acted like a devil, he painted like an angel.
35:57And patrons who suddenly wanted startlingly raw,
36:01realistic images of ordinary people, many of them poor,
36:04to persuade themselves they were reviving Christ's gospel
36:08to the humble, couldn't get enough of him.
36:12This is the church of San Agostino in Rome,
36:16and this just may be my favourite Caravaggio,
36:21the Madonna of Loreto.
36:25Even by the standards of Christian legends,
36:28this one is a bit of a stretch.
36:31To escape destruction in the 13th century,
36:34the House of the Virgin was supposed to have been airlifted
36:38out of the Holy Land,
36:40touching down in the Italian town of Loreto,
36:43where it became a place of pilgrimage.
36:49Every so often, the Virgin herself would show up for the pilgrims.
36:54But this is no provincial scene, is it?
36:57It's a peeling doorway in the back streets of Rome,
37:00the doorstep drama as lit by a great wash of light.
37:05But the reason why one of Caravaggio's critics
37:08said the painting caused a great schiamazzo, a cackle,
37:12was because so much flesh was on display.
37:17This is a barefoot Madonna,
37:19not the spun-sugar version of conventional painting,
37:22but a real, live body, probably Caravaggio's girlfriend.
37:26And the adoration dwells on that sumptuous form,
37:29the heavy lids, the glossy ropes of hair.
37:32And the naked Christ Child is a squirmy bambino, fat with pasta.
37:42And the poor pilgrim couple who kneel before them
37:45are made bodily present too, that big rump of the man,
37:49those calloused feet from the long walk.
37:56As in all the greatest Caravaggios,
37:59these big, fleshy figures
38:02are uncomfortably, almost disturbingly close to us.
38:06Caravaggio's broken right through the fourth wall,
38:09and he's done it in the name of making the Christian message true,
38:14by which he means physically true.
38:17We don't get a kind of remote heavenly apparition
38:20that's granted to us by the intercession of some priests.
38:24No, we are physically in the company of the Madonna in charge
38:28just as much as if we are walking down the street
38:31and look round, and there they are, standing in a doorway.
38:35And this, of course, is a breach in every kind of decorum,
38:41social as well as aesthetic.
38:46But breaking rules was what this generation of Western artists
38:51was all about.
38:53And the closer they got both to God and to kings,
38:57paradoxically, the more freedoms they claimed.
39:02And one of the most spectacular of those rule-breakers was a woman.
39:06In her 40s, when she painted this in England, Artemisia Gentileschi.
39:13Well, I love the fact that this extraordinary picture
39:16is in the Royal Collection,
39:18because in its way, it too is a kind of royal proclamation.
39:22If artists of this generation made the claim
39:26that they were sovereigns of the realm of art,
39:29this picture does something much more ambitious.
39:32It says that claim was not only for men.
39:36Women too could be sovereigns of painting.
39:42Only a woman could have done this particular painting
39:46as a combination of a self-portrait
39:50and the allegory of painting.
39:53And the allegory comes from a book written by a man
39:56called Cesare Ripa.
39:58He says, the image of painting should have black hair,
40:01should be slightly dishevelled
40:03with the passion and engagement of painting.
40:06Painting should wear a gold chain round her neck.
40:10There you see the gold chain, with a mask at the end of it,
40:14indicating imitation or mimicry.
40:17She should hold a brush in one hand and a palette in the other.
40:21Artemisia does all that.
40:23But there's one detail that is missing.
40:26It's there in what Ripa says the allegory of painting should be,
40:30and it's a bandage or a gag which is going to go around the mouth,
40:34because painting doesn't speak.
40:37Now, men, of course, thought women shouldn't speak,
40:40certainly until they were spoken to.
40:43But Artemisia Gentileschi,
40:45who'd been raped by one of her father's assistants at the age of 18,
40:49was determined that nobody was going to shut her up,
40:52either in life or in her work.
40:55And what she does here is, of course,
40:57liberate the figure from painting
40:59to a kind of conventional stereotype,
41:02the stereotype in Ripa's book,
41:04and turn it into something like a living physical force.
41:08Look at the twist of her body.
41:11The twist of her body is so that she can paint
41:14what she's painting as the painting we're looking at.
41:19The whole thing is unapologetic.
41:23Look at me. I'm a professional.
41:26I'm in the business. I'm in the throes of creativity.
41:30And what is wrong with that?
41:34Artemisia's breakthrough self-portrait
41:37was bought by none other than King Charles I,
41:41that great stickler for protocol,
41:44though also a great lover of art.
41:47And there was no court in Europe more obsessed with protocol
41:51than that of Philip IV in Spain.
41:54But right at the heart of that court
41:56was the greatest of artistic freethinkers, Diego Velazquez.
42:01As official painter to the king,
42:03Velazquez produced images of the royals on demand,
42:07though always with unprecedented, sparkling naturalism,
42:11the human showing through the fancy dress.
42:14And on one occasion at least,
42:16despite or maybe because of the strength of his position,
42:20he committed an extraordinary act of painterly lairs majesté.
42:27Towards the end of his career, in 1656,
42:31Velazquez produced a picture, this one, Las Meninas,
42:35the Maids of Honour, which, more than any other before or since,
42:40stakes the most ambitious claim
42:43for the power of art and the artist.
42:47It's a painting which reverses all the usual expectations
42:52of the relationship between patron and artist.
42:56In this picture, it is the painter,
42:59thoughtfully looking at us, who is truly sovereign.
43:03Anyone who comes into the presence of this masterpiece,
43:07or, as it really feels,
43:09steps across the threshold of that huge work,
43:13feels him or herself uncannily
43:16in the presence of all the characters who populate it.
43:22That thoughtful painter,
43:24the little princess,
43:26her Maids of Honour,
43:28the dwarves,
43:30even that slumbering dog.
43:32It is an absolute triumph of illusionistic painting.
43:37Something else, as well.
43:41Velazquez is the most cerebral artist of his generation,
43:45and this is a huge brain-teaser.
43:49There's a giant in the room, and it's that epic-sized canvas.
43:54But what's on it?
43:56A painting of the little princess,
43:59a painting of the little princess,
44:02or of Philip IV and his Queen?
44:07Is that mirror showing a reflection of the royal couple
44:10painted on Velazquez's canvas?
44:14Or the real King and Queen,
44:16who are actually present in the room?
44:19Is the sudden attentiveness, the beginnings of a curtsy
44:23on the part of the maid,
44:25because the royal couple have come into the studio?
44:28Or are they just departing?
44:31It's full of games that play with the mind.
44:34It's full of complicated layers of meaning,
44:37all of which build into a meditation on which it is to paint.
44:41And they are so fiendishly ingenious
44:43that they challenge generation after generation
44:46of writers and commentators and artists
44:49to nail its ultimate meaning.
44:51And, do you know, I don't think anyone has yet
44:54quite got to the bottom of it.
44:57But if, presumptuously, I were to tell you,
45:01in a sentence, what I think it's about,
45:04I think it's about who, or what,
45:07in every sense, controls the way we look.
45:13The look we put on when we know we're being watched.
45:17Our body language, when we suddenly have to defer to authority.
45:22The concentrated look of the artist glancing
45:26from subject to picture and back again.
45:29There's really only one sovereign of staring here,
45:33and it's not the king.
45:35He only exists in the picture courtesy of the painter.
45:39The royal ego is shrunk and contained
45:42inside that small frame at the back of the room.
45:45A reversal of roles that was provocative in the West
45:48and inconceivable in the East,
45:51where anything so cheeky would get you in the deepest trouble.
45:56And taking liberties with conventions
45:59didn't stop when monarchs went missing from the picture.
46:04The Dutch Republic fought Spain
46:07to a standstill to secure its freedom.
46:10But independence often goes along with civic myths.
46:14And in Holland, the rich burghers of Amsterdam
46:17like to portray themselves as vigilant militia companies,
46:21ready at the drop of a hat to go off to war.
46:25Though when they commissioned group portraits,
46:27what they actually wanted for their money
46:29was just a bunch of likenesses.
46:31And if there were a lot of them,
46:33the artist elasticated the format accordingly
46:36to get everyone in.
46:39But then there was Rembrandt,
46:41and what he thought his militia patrons might like
46:44more than a collection of the overdressed
46:47was an action portrait of an ethos.
46:50The actual title of the picture
46:52is The March Out of the Company of Franz Banning Koch.
46:57And boy, are they marching.
46:59They're on the point of beginning that march.
47:01And the idea of this painting is, above all,
47:05energy, dynamism, vitality.
47:08That's what Rembrandt wanted to celebrate in Amsterdam.
47:15It is propulsive.
47:17It is propulsive.
47:19It moves through that frame into our own space.
47:25Rembrandt has used his entire box of tricks
47:29to make this feel like a moving image,
47:32like a movie, in fact.
47:34If you look at the kind of foreshortened hand,
47:37the order that's being given is happening in his body language.
47:43Look at the foreshortened spear.
47:45You can see his rather glamorously dressed left hand
47:48and that gorgeous yellow leather coat
47:51is just on the point of moving as well.
47:54Everything is coming at us.
47:58And it also has a soundtrack.
48:02Everything is exploding.
48:05A gun is being fired.
48:09A drum is being beaten.
48:11A dog is barking.
48:13Take a look at Franz Banning,
48:15cock's perfect little mouth, and it's open.
48:18He is giving that order.
48:22A little girl, maybe the mascot of the company,
48:25is running into the brilliant light.
48:30Some people who have trouble with this painting,
48:33who've thought of it for centuries,
48:35this kind of garish chaos, too much, too much going on.
48:39But Rembrandt being Rembrandt,
48:43he stops just this side of chaos
48:46that amidst this extraordinary kind of melee
48:49is an incredibly strong compositional armature.
48:54And it's an armature of two parallel lines.
48:58One angle of the parallelogram is made by
49:01that rhythm of the lines of the spear, the gun, the partisan.
49:07On the other hand, it's made by
49:10the baton of the arming captain,
49:13the musket, the gorgeous flag of the cloven ears.
49:19And if you think about it,
49:21those two lines converge as a kind of arrowhead,
49:24and the arrowhead, appropriately, is the commander.
49:32The Night Watch is a perfect miracle
49:35of dynamism and discipline together.
49:40And that's the living ethos that Rembrandt is trying to communicate.
49:45In his boiling brain,
49:47he reckons he's doing the overstuffed patricians a favour.
49:51They no longer pose and preen, they act.
49:56And the fact that it's a painting about freedom with order
50:00makes it an extraordinary moment,
50:03not just in the history of painting,
50:05but it's a moment in the history of civilisation, too.
50:09Amsterdam is beating not only the drum,
50:12but its own chest, saying,
50:14we can be free, but we are also strong and disciplined.
50:19This is the visual declaration of republican liberty.
50:24Watch out art, but watch out the world.
50:30Nothing, you'd suppose,
50:32could be further from the unleashed energy
50:35that produced the Night Watch
50:37than a controlled refinement of Indian Mughal art.
50:42But Rembrandt, who had a lifelong fascination
50:45with non-European cultures, was in love with them.
50:49In the 1650s, he began to draw his version of miniatures,
50:53which had found their way to Amsterdam,
50:55probably as copies through the East India Company.
50:59Rembrandt responded to the miniatures
51:02with his own graceful pen-and-ink variations,
51:05all rich with what he loved best, human interest.
51:14A group of Sufi sheikhs.
51:20The bond between father and son, a favourite Rembrandt theme.
51:26Some of the miniatures he copied still exist,
51:29but they make a fascinating contrast with Rembrandt's versions.
51:34This is a painting of the emperors Akbar and Jahangir.
51:37Rembrandt keeps the profile,
51:39but ditches the formalism for humane naturalism.
51:42The rulers become characters.
51:46Father and son look each other in the eye
51:49as Jahangir hands Akbar a book.
51:54A Mughal portrait of Jahangir's son, Shah Jahan on horseback,
51:59is still and poised.
52:04But Rembrandt adds movement and action.
52:10What Rembrandt's sketches show
52:12is that the tide of artistic inspiration also flowed from east to west.
52:20In the end, Rembrandt was a stay-at-home cultural traveller.
52:24But what might he have made of the real thing?
52:31Of the marbled perfection of Agra?
52:38Each building, a dialogue between curve and straight line.
52:45A civilisation as painterly in its architecture as in its art.
52:50Another extraordinary dome.
52:55A marble monument to love,
52:5820 years in the making.
53:02The tribute of the Emperor Shah Jahan
53:05for his dead wife Mumtaz Mahal.
53:10Grief and yearning translated into architectural realism.
53:15Grief and yearning translated into architectural poetry.
53:21While European art was fizzing with experiment,
53:24the Mughals perfected royal elegies crafted in stone.
53:30This building, the Itimad-ur-Daula,
53:32is the first of their marble mausoleums,
53:35built a decade before the Taj Mahal.
53:40Some claim it's the most perfect building in India,
53:43and I think they may be right.
53:46It too was a work of devotion,
53:48but this time designed by a cultivated woman,
53:51Jahangir's favourite wife, Nur Jahan.
53:56She was the child of a Persian father, Mirza Beg,
53:59Jahangir's closest advisor.
54:03When he died, Nur Jahan built a tomb for him,
54:06as handsome as any Emperor's.
54:09And looking at it, you would say her creation
54:13is about as perfect as anything the hand of man can accomplish.
54:19And then you go inside and see this.
54:39Death in a jewel box.
54:43The chilly funereal marble,
54:45warmed by an uncountable myriad of gems.
54:51Encrusted in glowing paint, the ceiling burns.
54:58And on the walls, in a technique borrowed from Italy,
55:02of planed-down jewels, a paradise garden.
55:06There are images of flowers designed so naturalistically,
55:11so scientifically,
55:13that they could have come straight from the pages
55:16of one of that endlessly curious Jahangir's great books.
55:21Here, in the presence of the dead,
55:23we have an eternal springtime.
55:27And that, perhaps, is both its glory and its limitation.
55:32The mausoleum is like a page from one of Jahangir's picture books.
55:37And like those books, it's private and contained.
55:43Every hint of the uneven roughness of life is smoothed away.
55:51It can be seen as a reflection of life.
55:55It couldn't be more different from European art,
55:59with its earthy, subversive humanity.
56:02The force of individual genius coming at you.
56:07How different that is from the anonymous serenity of this royal tomb.
56:12A serenity that would all too soon be shattered.
56:17Out there, the Western hurly-burly
56:20is getting ready to make terrible mischief,
56:23to smash its way into the domed heavenly vault,
56:26to stick its bloody, great, brutal boots
56:29right into the paradise garden.
56:32It'll make an empire based on machines, money and muskets.
56:37And then, slowly but surely,
56:40the Mughal Empire will disappear entirely
56:43inside its courtly refinement,
56:46becoming inexorably just a cultural ornament.
56:51So, after centuries of extraordinary flowering,
56:55did the Eastern Renaissance simply wither away?
56:59Not quite.
57:01Because these delicate blooms and glowing jewels did survive.
57:07They reappeared in what Europeans wore on their bodies
57:11and how they decorated their homes.
57:15Mughal domes appeared in Brighton,
57:18Western art critics called that beauty decorative,
57:22to distinguish it from pictures they put in frames,
57:26what they considered real art.
57:31But it was in the East that the ancient meaning of art as craft
57:36was preserved in all its majestic splendour,
57:40and still is.
57:42Because, if the work of art is to intensify,
57:46if the work of art is to intensify our delight
57:49in the beauty of the world,
57:51and to do so with pattern and colour, the music of the eye,
57:55then what you see here was not an ending,
57:58but another vibrant beginning.
58:10The Open University has produced a free poster
58:14that explores the history of different civilisations
58:17through artefacts.
58:19To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553
58:24or go to the address on screen
58:26and follow the links for The Open University.
58:33And you can watch the full series of Civilisations now
58:36on BBC iPlayer.
58:38Is music always a civilising force?
58:41Read a question of the essay on BBC Radio 3 tonight at 10.45.
58:46Add a modern and acclaimed version of Hamlet with Andrew Scott
58:50as a troubled Danish prince,
58:52Saturday night at nine, here on BBC Two.