Original subtitles

'Hi. I'm Matthew Collings and this is the first programme

'in a series about Renaissance painting.'

We've forgotten how to value the Renaissance.

You can learn how radical it was by looking at it in great detail.

Seeing how the micro...

relates to the macro.

And by thinking about it in a new way.

We see Renaissance art today through its place in history,

where it's what happened before modern art

and now it's part of the heritage industry.

But when it was done, it WAS modern art.

It was painters trying out new things in a moment when society

was rocked by new ideas about reality.

Renaissance art is artists rethinking reality.

We're all familiar with these effects...

The feeling of awe at the beauty of the Renaissance.

I'm going to show how those effects were created and explain

why they still have power over us after so many centuries.

I've chosen three great works,

one per programme,

to sum up the range of mood that Renaissance art has.

The invention of original symbols in Hieronymus Bosch's, The Garden Of Earthly Delights,

symbols that unhinge everything you thought you knew.

The creation of space in Piero della Francesca's Baptism,

space that has a feeling of dramatic emotion -

even though no-one's actually emoting.

And in the picture I'm going to look at in this programme,

The Madonna Of The Meadow, by Raphael,

the treatment of colour so it creates light.

So the painting seems like an exquisite box of light,

glowing from within.

I'm going to explain exactly how it works,

but just as it's a picture of three figures, this story is also about three important artists.

Raphael.

Leonardo da Vinci.

And Michelangelo.

This is the triumvirate of greats,

the kings of the Renaissance,

whose fights to outdo each other in coming up with new effects

caused a massive shift in the history of art.

It could do something new now and it would be hundreds of years before it got tired of it.

An overwhelming sense of the real.

And at the heart of it is this picture.

Not just humans that are signs for ideas which is what art before

the Renaissance did, but humans that have real fragile, human fleshiness.

Join me on a trip to the other side of an illusion.

What we're really seeing when we think we're seeing natural reality.

Seeing something like the reality of a photo or a scene from a film,

or the reality of a theme actually happening in front of us,

so we could step in that space

and kiss those babies,

and give that mummy a hug.

# Carry on, love is coming

# Love is coming to us all... #

Raphael painted The Madonna Of The Meadow when he was only 22.

He drew this self-portrait when he was only a teenager.

He must be some kind of genius, you're probably thinking.

A genius is a magic being who can perform miracles.

There is no such thing.

Even at this young age, Raphael was working in an established visual tradition which began around 1400,

80 years before his birth, in the region of Tuscany in central Italy.

It was the tradition we call the Renaissance.

It includes observed reality.

Raphael's hair probably did fall like that.

His mouth probably had that shape.

But when he contrasts that schematic big hat with the complicated forms

of the face to show that the face is complicated,

when he carefully delineates only certain features,

he's idealising reality.

So what you're seeing here is as much unreal as it is real.

That real-unreal tension is the place to start

to understand a picture of holy beings manifested on earth.

The feeling that you could put your hand through

the sheer plane of the surface of the painting and touch them

is caused by a whole series of effects that Raphael

has set up in this painting.

What it has to offer in terms of sheer beauty is an utter mystery of light.

You are getting an amazing glow from what are very intense colours here,

and that glow is elaborated by further glows,

little circular repeats,

so her hair binds her head in that circular shape.

Then the gold curve of that hem of her neckline is also circular.

And the little children's heads are bound by their gold halos.

And there are the gold curving lines on her sleeves.

So all these glowing repeats are continued through to

the circular, beautiful, thin golden thread at the edge of the drapery.

You are alerted to a theme of glowing.

It's a painting that's all about light.

It tells you that light is colour.

Raphael paints himself at 22.

His life story is a fabulous dream of artistic extremes.

Before he was 30,

he was the most successful artist there'd ever been.

He died young. He had many women.

But he found time to surpass his rivals by creating restless changeable harmonies

of different colour vibrations,

which is fundamentally what The Madonna Of The Meadow is.

And you can see even more fundamentally what it is when it comes out of its frame.

This is the research lab of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna which owns the painting.

It's now getting a check-over.

It's a rare chance to see a great work of art with its hallowed aura stripped away.

If I bounce it back and forth, between the museum wall where it's reverent...

and the museum research lab where it's just a bit of wood with

paint on, I can convey a sense of the picture's different registers,

seamless reality, heightened emotion and inner mechanics.

The hard work that Raphael is making colour do.

In relation to the other colours,

the colour of the meadow is the least bright but it is incredibly saturated.

Those green brown tones are activating every single thing in the picture.

He makes that greenish brownish colour greener

when it's next to the red, in order to make the red vibrate.

And it's yellower here to make the blue vibrate.

Realism technique.

There are painting elements here

that make you feel you're seeing reality.

And the main one is colour.

To see how colour works, imagine the picture without any.

Now see the blue going in...

You see immediately that it isn't just blue.

It's a graded tonal blue, light and dark.

Now see the red.

And now the meadow colour.

Now the pale blue.

And now the pale colours that make up the flesh and hair of the figures.

Those graded effects

are the equivalent of shadows and light in the real world.

They exist in the painting to depict the look of reality,

but they also exist to create an overall balance of different colour intensities.

It's no accident the meadow is in shadow there, green-red,

and in non-shadow there, blue-yellow.

Those are spectrum opposites.

Any artist knows there's an optical vibration when they're put together.

It's not that Raphael saw the scene and painted it.

He's making up a scene and structuring it around an abstract design.

More or less, one pale colour with light graded to dark

to create something that looks convincingly 3-D, a town.

It's only a little area of the whole painting but

its intense believability has an effect everywhere.

It makes you think the picture is all deep detailed three-dimensional space.

What Renaissance artist did with painterly techniques around 1500

was unprecedented in the history of art.

To get it, you've got to think about what you're seeing.

Raphael stokes up thick textures of paint, really ridged.

He plays that thickness against beautiful gossamer thinness,

just washes of liquid paint.

As you can see in the difference

between the depicted flesh of the child and the depicted fabric of the dress.

The overall glow is made out of different shapes

that each have their own different way of seeming to be glowing.

Every shape has a sort of darkness around the edge and is bright inside.

So he's got that dark crown on the edge, bright inside thing going, one thing after another.

The richness of it is to do really,

primarily, in the way that the surfaces are treated and the colours

are treated, so that each thing has its own life as a surface.

And you've got these things going next to each other, one next to the other so that something is modelled

in such a way that seems completely believable,

even though it's absolutely artificial, it's created, it's an invented thing.

He invents nature scenes, a circle of berries,

a couple of flowers, to stand for religious ideas but also to enhance the colour effect everywhere.

So you end up with the real, combined with the supernatural,

kind of the 'super-real'.

Everything that is shown to you is a bit believable as

something in nature but far more strong as a symbolic thing.

So you're more prepared to believe in that circle as a sort of

little circle of God's grace,

as much as it is a circle of strawberries.

And you're more prepared to believe in that poppy with its redness

as a symbol of the passion and the death of Christ,

simply because you see more how vibrating and beautiful

and luminous the poppy is next to the green and brown of the fields.

A bit of rhetorical symbolism

in some religious art actually comes alive emotionally.

Those associations would have been powerful for Raphael's audience.

For us, they could easily be missed

or at least experienced much less intensely.

Here's a lot of modern tourists in Florence, the city where Raphael painted The Madonna Of The Meadow.

We enjoy a multilayered experience in these old Renaissance places.

History, wealth, luxury,

art, beauty, religiosity and relaxed general chilling.

The people who looked at Renaissance art 500 years ago were like us,

in being able to flit back and forth

between different ways of appreciating art.

But different to most of us, even those of us who

are actually religious in that they experience the religious nature

of art much more overwhelmingly.

The religious picture told a Renaissance person about

life after death and the transitory nature of life on Earth.

You're seeing the Madonna Of The Meadow now on TV

but to enter that original mindset a bit more,

you'd have to imagine the picture's original owners

looking at it in their private chapel in their private house

with their private priest in attendance

and prayers being said in front of it, and chanting,

and a smell of burning incense.

When these rituals are enacted a portal opens up between this world

of mortality, ageing, death, and the cosmic world of God.

The Madonna is the gate to heaven.

All this action in the front is the timeless spiritual world.

Inside it, if we're Renaissance people, we feel protected and confident.

Christ is handed the crucifix.

He accepts it. That's his fate.

He will die for our sins and we have the possibility of being saved.

Out there stands for normal human reality, the earthly realm,

but everything up here is heaven on Earth.

Raphael was born Raphael Santi.

He came from a background that combined privilege and graft.

His father, Giovanni Santi, was the court painter to the Duke of Montefeltro

whose base was this top palace in the city of Urbino in central Italy.

It was full of art and elegant wealthy people.

Raphael learned to be charming from this social environment

but he did his time downstairs, as it were, learning to paint in his father's workshop,

copying the look of his father's art.

As well as painting, Raphael's father had the job of

composing flattering verses about the Duke's great deeds.

One of these survives.

It's a poem about the Duke's great taste in the latest art.

Giovanni Santi sings the praises of his own Italian Renaissance contemporaries,

artists like Fra Angelico who was so good at conveying religious emotion.

But he also lets us know that this believable look of

reality serving religious faith did not come originally

from the Italian Renaissance,

but from the Northern one.

Paintings from the countries we now call Holland and Belgium

which was then just the Netherlands.

Giovanni picks out Jan Van Eyck

to praise, as well as other great names of northern art.

It was full of realistic details of objects and faces with an incredibly

minutely observed sense of light falling on objects.

So light and emotion seemed to go together.

Profound quizzical sadness, all the sadness in the world,

in the face of the dying Jesus

in this painting by Gerard David.

Extreme anguished emotion.

All stops out emotion.

The corpse of Jesus and the anguished misery of Mary

in this painting by Roger van der Weyden.

The influence of Netherlands art is in The Madonna Of The Meadow

but there's also something else.

The role of simple clear shapes in getting emotion across.

This simplified look has different traditions flowing into it.

One is the arts that existed in these regions before the Renaissance.

Medieval art.

People are basically signs for religious ideas,

constructed out of very reduced abstract shapes.

The triangle,

the circle, the square.

The simplest shapes that exist.

In northern art, these schematized humans

become animated, detailed humans.

But in Italian art, they're animated by a very exaggerated

sense of human physical perfection and this is a different tradition.

It had long ago withered away, but Renaissance people actually dug it up.

All over Renaissance Italy, the remains of the Roman Empire

existed as stones and rubble,

including stones carved into beautiful ancient Gods.

For centuries, the Christian church destroyed and buried this art

but in the Renaissance it started to be preserved instead of destroyed.

Renaissance means rebirth.

It means the rediscovery of ancient knowledge.

The way to be modern, Renaissance people thought, was to emulate the old.

Classical statues from vast acres of time before the Renaissance,

1,500 years or 2,000 years,

were about movement and action, positive and negative shapes.

The parts of the body, the spaces around the parts, both equally dynamic.

Classical, dynamic art was like the dynamic aims of the ages that the Greeks and Romans lived in,

very powerful empires rising up out of very little.

That's a syndrome that Renaissance people could identify with.

Renaissance artists reinterpreted these pleasurably dynamic forms as Christian instead of Pagan.

They transformed them into a marvellous line-up of biblical beings, Christ, not Apollo.

Saints and angels and not all the ancient Gods.

And instead of Venus, Mary, the mother of God.

When we look at a picture like this and find it beautiful, it's because

of a lot of different types of beauty all brought into one thing.

A feeling of human, physical perfection from classical statues,

light and detail from Netherlands art,

charming simplicity from medieval art.

There's so much.

It looks as though it's pure simplicity and that's because of how it's all organised.

The clear geometric shape that Raphael's holy group is ordered into is a triangle.

So you've got a triangle in a rectangle.

A triangle of the figures, the rectangle of the picture as a whole.

Everywhere in the picture the main shape is elaborated with little repeats of it,

different versions of it,

so your eye is being encouraged to see that shape,

even though your mind is telling you it's a scene of a woman in a field with children,

a symbolic holy scene, a feeling that religious truth is happening,

but the feeling is there because the eye is getting such a pleasure from the organisation of the scene.

We're used to hearing that, "oh, artist is a genius, he's so spiritual,"

and that's what they did in the Renaissance.

But there's no such thing as an artist being a genius at being spiritual.

A painting has to work visually and then it can communicate effectively.

The reason she's in a meadow is that nature is a powerful signifier of the real.

It's not a stylised pattern of flowers but the feeling of a real outdoors atmosphere.

It's not actually a real meadow just as it's not actually a real woman.

But in each case, they're composites.

Raphael copies parts of real things, living people, sights in nature,

and he puts all those bits together to create an idealised hole.

From the age of 17, Raphael was a professional artist.

He sought out artist father figures to learn from.

Raphael absorbed artistic ideas and then overtook the artists who had them.

Eventually he did this with artists who considered great Titans

of our history like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

But the pattern was set initially by his father, on the one hand, who's a very minor figure in our history,

and on the other hand by this man, Pietro Perugino, who was a great figure when Raphael was young.

In fact, he was thought of as the greatest painter in central Italy.

He was famous for the radiating light of his pictures and the sweetness of his figures,

but he very quickly became viewed

as the man who failed to be as original and lively

as his assistant, Raphael.

Perugino was 30 years older than Raphael.

When they shared commissions, Raphael painted in exactly the same style as Perugino.

They worked together on these frescos in Perugia around the year 1500.

There's no sign at all of anything other than Perugino's style.

But when Perugino passed on commissions to Raphael because

he was too busy to do them himself, Raphael tweaked the style.

Raphael painted The Coronation Of The Virgin when he was 20.

The Madonna's tomb after her mortal forms died,

and heaven where the Madonna is crowned for eternity by Jesus.

Perugino's sweet expressions, oval faces, small mouths,

the gentle shapes and his quietness are all absorbed by Raphael.

But in Perugino, the figures line up and the pleasure is in each one

being a marvellous and beautiful separate invention,

but the separation is quite obvious,

while in Raphael there are separate people but

there is a unified flow of shapes,

so your eye doesn't care where one person ends and another begins.

Instead, one continuous rhythm

uniting many complicated forms is the pleasurable thing.

Raphael made himself into Perugino.

He became him, then he became better than him

so he became restless and wanted something else.

Working for two years with Perugino on these beautiful frescos in the Collegio del Cambio,

a money-changing place in Perugia,

Raphael heard about the artistic success of Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence.

So, finally, in 1504, when he was 21, Raphael decided to go there and become them.

The great art of Michelangelo, his statue of David had just been set up.

Leonardo was on the council that decided where it should go.

Raphael arrived with a letter of introduction to this art power scene in Florence.

It was written for him by the wife of the Duke of Montefeltro.

It established Raphael's credentials as a serious painter.

He was in the city where Renaissance art began, 100 years before,

and in the studios of the artists who are now the stars of Renaissance style.

He was 30 years younger than Leonardo and eight years younger than Michelangelo.

Later on, Michelangelo was to hate Raphael,

but in this period, history only records that he disliked Leonardo.

If Michelangelo and Leonardo's personal relationship was a damp squib, artistically it was

the fiery furnace in which Raphael forged the visual ideas

that would go into The Madonna Of The Meadow.

When Leonardo drew a Madonna and child, like this,

Michelangelo saw it and his response was to carve this.

So that when Raphael saw the carving

he quickly did a lot of sketches of it like this.

Which led to this,

one of a whole series of variations on the Madonna and child theme

that Raphael painted in Florence, 20 of them in all.

Sometimes he made it simple, like this,

sometimes he made it more complicated...

Serene kind face,

rich bright colours, hazy landscape in the background,

beautiful field.

And when he twisted the Madonna's body in a different way,

and cast the light of the painting differently,

it became this, The Madonna Of The Meadow.

An archive of evidence in the British Museum in London

shows that the energy of the influence from Leonardo was all conducted through drawing.

When you see drawings by Raphael

in an atmosphere of loving, careful conservation

like they are here in the British Museum,

you're seeing them in a very different atmosphere,

in a very different context than when they were originally done.

When they were done there would have been scraps lying around,

at most they would have been tools or resources leading up to making the painting,

because the ideal didn't yet exist of genius artists

whose every thought process was of interest to anyone.

It was, in fact, with Raphael that that ideal becomes established and as soon as Raphael died,

all his scraps and drawings were collected and revered.

So at the very early stage of working on a painting,

Raphael will do a drawing and that drawing you would imagine would be

absolutely marvellous with the highlights in the eyes and the fingernails done beautifully

and every strand of hair done fantastically,

and everything looking very real like we expect a Renaissance painting to be.

But the drawing is nothing like that.

A drawing by Raphael at the early stages is not about capturing a bit of anatomical accuracy,

it's about finding a bit of formal abstract beauty,

finding abstract beauty in the human body,

and the nature of that abstract beauty is flow,

is finding some kind of flow between the separate parts of the human body

and between separate bodies. And out of a few scribbly curves done with a pen

he's finding a form that will unite head with head,

or hand with hand or body with other body,

so that everything seems to be happening in one single movement

rather than a lot of bits all tied together.

So Raphael's coming up with all that on a piece of paper

that's only about eight or nine inches more or less square,

holding it in his hand, pretty much as I'm holding it now,

and he would have done it probably in less time than it took me to talk about it.

From a continuous process of drawing - many many dozens of them,

for he never stays for long on one thing, he arrives at all

the individual forms that he needs to make the whole perfect effect.

And in his mind when he's doing it he's got the memory of drawings shown to him by Leonardo who's

generous enough to make his work available to Raphael,

when Raphael was in Florence and talk him through what he was doing.

For example, he's got a picture here

where he's working through in the form of a pen and ink scribble,

a conception of the Virgin and Child with a cat in the lap of Jesus.

The cat's struggling, it's full of movement.

Jesus is holding on to it, and Mary's holding onto Jesus.

You can see at one point Mary's head was in a different position and then it ends up being over there.

And on the other side of the paper,

Leonardo's continued scribbling, the same theme, Mary, Jesus and

the cat but an entirely different abstract conception of four,

making those human and animal forms beautiful,

making them flow in an entirely different way

to what he was doing in the scribble on the other side.

And it's that flow that Raphael's interested in.

What he learned from Michelangelo in Florence was hard, crisp, clear lines,

and a bright crystalline atmosphere.

Michelangelo reinterpreted Leonardo

in his own way with his painting, the Holy Family.

And Raphael reinterpreted them both in his way with The Madonna Of The Meadow.

Raphael got stimulation from Michelangelo but he also got clients from him.

The wealthy elite who bought Renaissance art looked around

their Renaissance environment and they saw pictures by Leonardo and Michelangelo and Raphael

of saints and angels and they said, "How about seeing pictures as good as this of me or of my wife?"

A look established by Renaissance art for how saints and angels and Jesus and Mary should appear,

is now adapted for how portraits of the wealthy should appear...

So they can see themselves glowing like elevated beings.

Leonardo gives the wife of a merchant the look of a Madonna.

The result is the Mona Lisa.

It's the emergence in art history of the secular portrait.

A client close up in a painting by Raphael

and the client's wife in a companion portrait -

the Donis, painted by Raphael in 1506.

Agnolo Doni, and his wife Maddalena.

The pictures celebrate their marriage.

They got Raphael to do the job because they wanted his artistic

greatness to be associated with them, so their becoming a couple was understood to be great too.

But with these portraits, Raphael also celebrates

the couple of great artists who've now become his inspiration -

Michelangelo and Leonardo.

With Raphael's portrait of Maddalena, in particular, Raphael emulates Leonardo's Mona Lisa.

Seen in Leonardo's studio,

the Mona Lisa has become a model for Raphael to continue and develop,

maybe even improve.

He gets rid of Leonardo's mysterious smoky light effects and substitutes

instead something like the colour of Michelangelo's Holy Family.

Only it's not the acid pastels of Michelangelo,

but the rich refined, beautiful colour glow of Raphael,

the colour harmonies that make Raphael what he is.

So with these portraits Raphael is celebrating Michelangelo and Leonardo, revering them,

but he's also pushing ahead his own ambitious self.

Raphael paints himself in his twenties, on the rise in the Renaissance art world.

A growing waiting list starts up for his work.

In 1507 he takes on a commission for a giant Madonna,

not for a private palazzo but for the most spectacular

newly-built Renaissance church in Florence, the San Spirito.

# One morning I woke up

# And I knew... #

And he's in the middle of the work, the Baldacchino Madonna,

its first layers of colour laid in, as you can see,

a lot of the bare white ground of the painting,

and the lightly drawn lines of the figures are still visible,

when he hears that the Pope himself is now hot for Raphael's stuff.

Rome is the next big step in his hurtling career.

Raphael is here because, at a very young age,

Donato Bramante, who's the architect to the Pope,

has recommended to the Pope that Raphael comes and joins

a big crew of artists that the Pope has got working in his new private quarters

that he's had built and that he now works decorated with magnificent

paintings, frescos on all the walls.

This is the time when the Pope is transforming Rome into the gleaming streamlined city that we now know

from a raggedy old medieval dump that had been for about 1,000 years.

The first thing Raphael does for the Pope is to paint the School Of Athens.

Renaissance intellectuals identify with the classical philosophers of ancient Greece,

so the Pope's agents commission Raphael to do the painting in the Pope's private library.

It's so successful he gets lifetime employment by the Papal Court.

Every day he attends meetings at the Vatican Palace

to discuss new painting ideas that might interest the Pope.

He has 50 other artists following behind him, the staff of his new enormous art workshop.

Just as the family of the Montefeltros in Urbino smoothed the way for Raphael's entry

into Florence high society, so the circle of power people and intellectuals that surrounded

Pope Julius II in Rome smoothed the way for Raphael to get more commissions from the Pope -

like this man, Tommaso Inghirami, whose portrait Raphael painted.

His books and pen and ink show that he leads a life of the mind,

his gaze upward shows that even though he's got a wonky eye,

he sees the important things in life.

He sees where the power is and that's the place where Raphael wants to be.

Here is Tommaso Inghirami wearing a laurel wreath

and acting the part of Epicurus, the philosopher of pleasure.

The School Of Athens is all Renaissance people

who've served the Pope, acting as philosophers.

The Pope's architect, Bramante, who's a distant relative of Raphael,

is the philosopher mathematician, Euclid.

And Leonardo da Vinci is Plato, the philosopher of reason.

Great men, composed into circles and semi-circles.

Those philosophers ordered the universe and these abstract triangles are visually ordering

that random crowd so it makes beautiful visual sense.

And in this corner, Raphael himself

stands around acting the philosopher painter, casual,

but with a look that tells you he understands the scale of his own achievement.

Once he was given the position of top artist for the most powerful client in the world, the Pope,

who he painted in about 1510,

Raphael went on to master every genre that Western art

would ever be interested in for 400 years, like Realism.

We want to get into the lives of other people.

Big dramas about society and the world where we can see our high ideals acted out.

Frightening dramas, the look of nightmares.

Transcendent dramas where we can identify with resplendent God figures and soar to the skies.

Sexy dramas where we can always dream that they might come true.

Even fashion art, the head scarf that that Madonna wears was the look in Rome in the early 1500s.

Raphael painted all these pictures after he started being known by Rome high society as the divine Raphael.

In 1511, the year he completed the School Of Athens,

there were two divines and Raphael had to deal with the other one.

A few yards down the Vatican corridors, the divine Michelangelo was employed by the Pope,

painting a heroic religious history of the world in the Pope's private chapel.

The lights go on on the Sistine Chapel ceiling but Michelangelo's inner being is shrouded in darkness.

He's a difficult man who frightens everyone.

He even shouts at the Pope.

No-one's allowed to see Michelangelo work because he's protective of his ideas but legend has it,

when Michelangelo was temporarily absent, Donato Bramante unlocked the door for Raphael.

He saw Michelangelo's style, epic figures with heroic frowns.

He went back down the corridor

and changed the School Of Athens.

His drawing for it shows it as it was supposed to be finished, a blank space on the steps.

He now filled that blank with a portrait of Michelangelo,

an epic figure looking heroically thoughtful.

Is it that Raphael is paying homage to Michelangelo or is he showing somehow that Raphael,

as he himself looks out from his painting, owns all this great epic beauty that he's painted

and maybe he also, to some extent, owns that portrait of Michelangelo.

So that he shows himself to be confident with Michelangelo.

He can take his ideas. He can even maybe show himself to be a bit better than Michelangelo,

more loved than Michelangelo.

Raphael got power from Michelangelo.

And then Michelangelo was sidelined as if he was chucked out of paradise.

He slunk off to Florence and left Raphael ruling the roost in Rome.

Raphael's last self portrait,

a realist version of the face

he usually presented, idealised.

The truth of the face of a man in his late thirties who's lived life to the full.

He may have gone a bit rough-looking but he was the man who could paint anything.

When Raphael painted the goddess Galatea on the walls of a luxury villa in Rome,

she had nothing to do with truth in the sense of this really happened and it looked like this,

but everything to do with the truth of art.

So you've got forms and textures and colours and spaces,

all describing the feel of the human body and its pleasures.

The body moving in touch with the things of the world -

with the air, the sea, the feel of the atmosphere.

All that human excitement and pleasure, and optimism,

the ideal of all that is summed up by a painting.

The villa was owned by the Pope's money lender, the richest man in Europe.

If these walls could speak, what stories they'd tell.

Actually, this is a false wall and when it's opened up

there are rough drawings by Raphael, scribbly try-outs left behind from

his work on the murals in the villa.

They remain faded and beautiful five centuries later.

Pure authenticity.

An artist who never stops drawing.

As he's doodling absentmindedly, a knot of resentments builds up around him.

An artist of Raphael's age, Sebastiano del Piombo,

paints a Cyclops in the same room,

an ugly God hopelessly attempting to win the love of the beautiful goddess Galatea.

Del Piombo was supposed to paint the whole room but Raphael was more famous so he got the job instead.

The Galatea's horizon line doesn't fit the one in the Cyclops picture.

And the scale is different and the internal rhythms of Raphael's

picture ignore the other picture too, as if del Piombo didn't exist,

even though for long periods they both would have been working in this room side by side.

It's like Raphael is the sexy goddess and del Piombo the ugly Cyclops.

Michelangelo fans the flames.

He writes letters to del Piombo, putting Raphael down, his jealousy of Raphael is acted out by proxy.

Sublimely rising above it, Raphael starts work on what will be his last painting,

the Transfiguration,

the resurrected Christ appearing to the apostles on a mountain in his sovereign majesty as the Son of God.

Below, saints perform an exorcism on a boy possessed by spirits.

They point to the power of heaven.

Darkness leads up to radiant white around the triumphant Christ.

In the darkness, the bad vibes of artists' squabbles,

Michelangelo discouraged the cult of Raphael.

He said everything Raphael knew as an artist came from him.

But where Michelangelo could make art awesome, he could only do that.

Whereas Raphael could do awesome plus every other shade of feeling

you could possibly ask for - and it was all awesome.

The Transfiguration is a painting in two parts.

Down there, every shadowed form you see brings out powerful colour glows

in the form next to it.

Up there, the shadows are blasted by the beautiful lights of the incarnation.

And so Raphael beat Michelangelo, even after death,

which like everything in the Raphael story, happened when he was surprisingly young.

It was on Good Friday, April 6th, the day of Raphael's 37th birthday

in the year 1520, he died from a fever brought on by overwork.

Raphael was buried in the Pantheon, his favourite classical building,

founded as a temple to all the Roman Gods,

and then with the coming of Christianity converted into a church.

Those ancient pillared structures below used to house statues of the Gods.

Now that one houses Raphael's tomb.

After death, Raphael became a God himself, a transcendent

God of art, whose light shone for many hundreds of years.

But with the coming of modern art, his status began to diminish

and now in the age of contemporary art is completely out of fashion.

And yet the mood around his tomb is very like a contemporary art event.

Why is there a rose on Raphael's tomb?

Because every day a real person has to come in with a real fresh red rose and lay it on there,

in a ritual of homage and appreciation that apparently has gone on for centuries.

The entire edifice of the tomb is a gloomy sight.

It's got a statue of a Madonna and child by a contemporary of Raphael's,

and all that's within an enormous classical temple-like structure.

When we look at it, are we reminded of Raphael's optimism and idealism?

Weirdly, in all its arch gloominess, it's more like OUR moment of art than it is like HIS.

We feel a bit distanced from optimistic idealism glowing out

of a painting that's in a visual tradition that lasted for hundreds of years that we find a bit stuffy.

We don't want to hear about how a painting is made.

We want to hear about what the painting's of, in a very direct way,

especially if it's about something negative.

So we're OK with idealism, if it's 3-D, it's got a bit of audience interactivity and it's about death.

Imagine Raphael's Madonna Of The Meadow really is a work of art of right now.

It's about seeing God.

It doesn't matter if you believe in God or not.

What's amazing is all the ways the picture has of getting its message across.

The Madonna rises above the landscape like a mountain because God is much greater than us.

The pale blue of the sky is a variation on the deep blue of the Madonna's robes,

so blue is woven all through the picture, like God is everywhere.

The symbolic flowers and strawberries

are like little sidebar stories backing up the main event, God.

That triangle shape that everything is composed into is like the

three-part nature of God, the Holy Trinity - Father, Son, Holy Ghost.

In geometry, a triangle is an essential shape that can't be broken down any further,

like the basic meaning of existence,

which God is and the basic stuff that we need to see, light.

Which brings me to the basic goodness of an artist

giving you all this stuff about God in a form that actually doesn't even really need to be explained.

In this programme, I've been paying homage to it by explaining and analysing it

because it's such a magnificent visual blast in the first place.

Renaissance meaning can't work the same way for us as it did for people 500 years ago.

The whole structure of society would have to be changed.

We would have had to never have invented cameras for a start,

but of course a lot else would have to change too.

So we have to accept the distance,

and be amazed that the same delicate light that was created by Raphael

in this painting, out of all the build-up of invention and tradition

that we've heard about in this film,

the same light that his audience saw as celestial,

can still be an optimistic glow you can take away with you now.

Goodbye.

In the next programme, The Garden Of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch.

Everyone knows these sights.

No-one knows what they mean.

I'll be unpacking the mysteries of Bosch's weird subterranean world of the mind.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk