Original subtitles

I'm setting out to debunk a myth.

A myth that's persisted for far too long.

We all think we know what the Romans were about.

Impressive monuments, a bit like the one behind me.

Pont du Gard aqueduct in southern France,

which was built more than 2,000 years ago.

You can see it's an expression of engineering genius.

A harmonious symbol, if you like,

of the Romans' mastery over the natural world.

But when it came to art, so the story goes,

the Romans didn't have a clue.

The thing is, the whole idea about the Romans' artistic incompetence

is a myth.

To say that the Romans "didn't do art" is just nonsense.

Over the centuries, the Romans transformed art,

and defined the way we view the ancient world.

The history of Roman art may be the stuff of marble statues,

but it's anything but set in stone.

Every year exciting discoveries are made that offer fresh insights

into the artistic achievements of ancient Rome.

God, that really is special.

'In this series, we'll unlock the secrets of Roman art.'

That was a sort of glimpse for me of what it must be like

to actually discover some of these ancient Roman treasures.

'We'll show the ingenious techniques they used.

'It's a journey that will take us from the heart of Rome,

'to the furthest corners of the empire.'

But our story begins with the rise of Rome.

We'll reveal 10 works of art

which chart the city's transition

from a pugilistic republic to an empire...

..and discover how, in forging their identity,

the Romans invented a new form of art -

warts and all realism.

You cannot fathom the nature of ancient Rome

until you understand the history of Roman art.

I first fell in love with Roman art as a student

at the Courtauld Institute in London.

It always puzzled me that people could be so sniffy

about the art of ancient Rome.

It's high time we pruned back all the prejudices and misconceptions.

Roman art's always had a bit of an image problem.

The thing is, the Romans only had themselves to blame.

Because although in most fields they were massive self-publicists,

when it came to the visual arts, they had an inferiority complex

the size of...well, the size of the Coliseum.

There's a character in Virgil's great epic Roman national poem,

The Aeneid, who says, "Let others fashion from bronze

"lifelike breathing images and invoke living faces from marble."

"But Romans, never forget that government is your medium."

For 500 years, Rome was a republic

governed by an aristocratic senate, and a popular assembly.

And nowhere is its tough-minded, expansive spirit

more visible than in its art.

Traditionally, the history of Rome begins in 753 BC,

and it all centres upon a charming tale

concerning a wolf with rather maternal instincts

and two twin boys, Romulus and Remus.

Now, Romulus ended up killing his brother Remus,

but we won't get into that.

The thing is, the image of the wolf suckling the two boys

can be seen almost everywhere you go in Rome.

So, in fact, here she is.

There's Romulus and Remus underneath,

reaching up towards the teats of the wolf.

How much? 4 euros 15.

Grazie.

So if anything really encapsulates Rome,

it's that wolf with the twin boys.

It's my first treasure of ancient Rome,

but it's got a guilty secret.

The Capitoline wolf,

not only a symbol of Rome's fierce and independent spirit,

but long been considered the foundation stone of Roman art.

The boys themselves,

well, we know that they date from the 15th Century.

But according to the art historian JJ Winckelmann,

who, during the 18th Century,

actually invented the entire discipline of art history,

the she-wolf dates from the 5th Century BC

and is typical of Etruscan art, confirming the whole prejudice

that the Romans had to borrow or steal sophisticated art

of their Northern neighbours in Etruria.

The thing is, recent research has thrown up a whole storm

about the age of the she-wolf, and it turns out

that she may not be quite as ancient as we've been led to believe.

To settle the argument,

the art buffs turn to the science boffins

at the University of Salento in Brindisi,

who use the last radiocarbon dating technology

to discover when the wolf was cast.

Organic samples were taken from the inside of the statue.

These contain a radioactive isotope called Carbon-14,

which can be accurately dated using a particle accelerator.

The results would have had Winckelmann spinning in his grave.

The Romans are just going to have to get used to the fact that

their beloved wolf is 1,500 years younger than they thought.

You know, the whole controversy that surrounds the Capitoline wolf

is, in a sense, emblematic of Roman art as a whole,

because we think we know everything there is to know about it,

we think that there's nothing left to say, but there is, clearly.

If even the Etruscan Capitoline wolf isn't actually Etruscan,

then what icons of Roman art can we really trust?

Well, in fact, there is a more trustworthy work

of early Roman art in this very museum.

A bronze head that suggests the Romans weren't a race of dreamers

in thrall to myth and legend, but down-to-earth hardmen,

concerned with tough realities like war and business

and the push and pull of political compromise.

It's thought to date from the early Republic,

and probably depicts a leading statesman.

This is one of the most venerable of all Roman busts.

It's called the Capitoline Brutus, because it was originally named,

when it was discovered in the 16th century,

after L. Junius Brutus,

who was the first consul of the Republic,

but whoever created this bust

seems to have really summoned the spirit of his age,

and that points to a degree of sophistication that, I think,

people often overlook when they think about Roman art.

It feels like it's the embodiment,

the concentration of that acquisitive Roman spirit

that marched out from Rome and conquered,

eventually, the Mediterranean world.

That gaze is terrifying. So fierce.

The Romans had always been a race of warriors,

and the story of the Republic is a litany

of one conquest after another.

By the third century BC,

they'd subjugated first the Italian peninsula,

then Carthage, Greece and beyond.

As Rome's generals romped round the Med,

sacking cities willy-nilly,

they brought home beautiful works of art,

like these stunning Hellenistic Greek statues.

It was the age of plunder, and it earnt the Romans a reputation

as the art equivalent of simple thieves and common plagiarists.

Of course, the truth is much more complex.

The Romans subtly adapted the Hellenistic tradition

their forefathers had stolen or copied,

infusing it with a distinctive spirit of their own.

Above all, they relished the lifelike modelling

of Hellenistic art, like this seated boxer's broken nose,

scarred face and cauliflower ears.

And upon this foundation,

they constructed their first great contribution

to the history of Western art.

I've come to one of Rome's most spectacular museums,

the Centrale Montemartini, to see how it happened.

This chap's known as the Barberini Togatus,

and I don't think you'd really call him a treasure of Ancient Rome.

Aside from anything else, this head, although it's ancient,

actually belonged to an entirely different statue.

But these two heads on this sculpture are original,

and they allude to the importance of ancestor worship

within noble Roman families.

He's proudly displaying his lineage,

and it's thought that these busts - just like this -

were used in various ritual contexts in the ancient world,

sometimes at funerals for Roman aristocrats.

And this is an important statue because it reveals

one of the sources for a very profound innovation within Roman art,

which is known as the veristic or true-to-life portrait,

the warts and all famous portrait busts that the Romans did so well.

Greek art was exquisite and refined,

but seen by the Romans as a bit soft and effeminate.

They thought of themselves as barbarians in comparison,

but they were proud of their martial nature,

and they needed a more grounded, less OTT, style of art

to express their warrior identity.

So Roman realism is down-to-earth.

It embodies the Republican values of gravitas,

dignitas and integritas.

The wrinkles in the busts can be read like the lines of a CV.

Each crease proclaims experience and wisdom.

These men were at pains to depict themselves

as trustworthy people of flesh and blood.

And what's brilliant is that, 2,000 years later,

we know what the people in the history books look like.

This bust of Cicero, a leading statesman and orator,

celebrates the wisdom of old age in his wrinkles and jowls.

Even the legendary Julius Caesar is no film star,

with his receding hair and lined face.

And his great rival, Pompey the Great,

looks more like a portly farmer than a leader of legions.

My favourite veristic bust is housed today

at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Just around this corner here

is one of the out-and-out stars of the Hermitage collection.

It's a bronze bust of an anonymous Roman by an anonymous sculptor,

and it's remarkable for a number of reasons,

not least because it's a very rare example of a work in bronze

that's actually survived from antiquity.

Just look at all of this subtle, supple modelling of all the forms,

all of the intricate locks of hair of the Roman's beard.

We do know that Romans often wore beards and went unshaven

during periods of mourning, and you can just tell

that here is a figure afflicted in grief.

It's recording the loss of a loved one.

It's so harrowing, the way that sorrow's just stamped into his face.

You can see everything from the sunken cheeks,

these dramatic lines that are going down from his nose to his mouth,

the actual downcast turn of those lips.

There's so much humanity in this one bust,

and I think of it as almost like the definition of melancholy.

This guy could be the Hamlet of the ancient world, if you like,

with that limitless sadness, that mournful expression.

One man with a passion for the warts and all style of the Romans

is the British sculptor Antony Gormley,

who's curating an exhibition of his own here at the Hermitage.

For me, there's no question that

the greatest gift that classical art from Rome gave was the portrait,

and I think the kind of psychological insight,

and that sense of - I don't know, it's like Freud before Freud -

and we should look at this chap, because here is Balbin.

So he was emperor, 238 AD.

So he's sort of fairly late on.

Anyway, there's something absolutely exquisite and so insightful

about the way that this mouth has been carved,

that slight lowering of the left-hand side of his mouth.

But then, just look at his eyes.

He is an emperor, but he's no longer in control.

And there's this...I mean, really scared look on his face.

He knows that his days are numbered.

I just think that Roman art reached its highest perfection

in the ability to interrogate the inner workings of the mind

through an understanding of physiognomy and portraiture,

and I think they raised portraiture to heights

that actually were never reached again, in my view.

During the Republic, a sophisticated art world emerged

for the first time in history.

To keep up with this new and insatiable demand,

the Romans started quarrying marble

in the Apennine mountains near Carrara in Tuscany.

The historian Pliny claimed that the marble here was purer

and whiter than anything from Greece.

and whiter than anything from Greece.

For anyone who likes sculpture, this is a proper pilgrimage.

This is like returning to the source,

because this is the place that Michelangelo came

to get the stone to make his famous Pieta.

So this is the source. This is the mother lode.

MAN SPEAKS ITALIAN I love this guy.

My guides are quarry owner Franco Barattini

and sculptor Marcello Giorgi.

So this is the top of the mountain?

Yeah.

That is extraordinary.

And what's so special about the rock that comes out of the ground here?

It's the transparency. So...

You can see some of the brightness which comes out already,

and that's before it's been polished up to become really like snow.

I would like that very much.

Sculpting in marble requires a huge amount of skill.

Good sculptors were in demand in ancient Rome,

but in terms of status, they were jobbing artisans,

so few star names have come down to us.

Sculptor Massimo Gelenni is making a copy of a Roman bust

using a hammer and chisel, just as the Romans would have done.

Aha! Hi, Massimo.

Massimo. Hello, hi. Alistair. Alistair.

And I recognise this fellow. It's Marcus Tullius Cicero.

That's pretty good!

It looks like it's soft.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Like, er...the skin's warm.

Which is significant with a bust like this,

because what you can see are lots of the realistic details.

The character of the face.

Crow's feet by the eyes, the lines across the forehead,

the wrinkles,

the slightly jowly, fatter cheeks.

All of these details are very realistic,

typical of the busts of that period.

Thanks! You can work now with the scalpello.

Well now I feel inspired, now I have the Pietrasanta hat.

So, um...I place it up...

No! No! OK.

No, down here, right?

He got genuinely worried. So, down here.

That's rubbish, I'm not getting any purchase.

Put the hat back on.

Modern sculptors, like their Renaissance predecessors,

prize the luminescence of Carrara marble.

But for the Romans, this wasn't enough.

It had to be as real as possible.

The latest scientific techniques

suggest that the ancient world many not have been

as monochromatic as most of us imagine.

This is a very rare thing.

When she was excavated,

traces of colour survived,

especially on the skin tones.

When you say traces of colour,

you're saying that these patches are remnants of paint,

that this would have been painted in antiquity?

Fully painted. Completely painted? Completely painted.

How do you know?

Well, we studied the surviving pigments,

which includes a pigment called Egyptian Blue,

which was basically only used in antiquity.

Especially mixed in the skin tones.

If you, for example, mix white and pink,

you don't really get a realistic skin tone.

You need to add something blueish or greenish,

very, very small amounts to make it more real,

more lifelike.

So all of these blotches here is a piece of Egyptian blue

that has survived from the Roman era?

That's really quite beautiful,

that's like the spirit of the Roman statue,

which has somehow been preserved. Yes.

So I have a question for you.

What is the point of sculpting in such an expensive material

if you're then going to slather it with paint?

Well, you make it even more beautiful,

and paint is translucent,

so the quality of the marble

would have shown through the paint layers.

So revelation number one is that this head was definitively

covered with paint, realistic pigment,

creating a lifelike impression of a person or goddess,

in the Roman world.

Can we extrapolate from that to make revelation number two,

and say that all the Roman marbles

that we encounter in galleries around the world

would have been painted in a similar fashion?

It is definitely a possibility.

Perhaps some sculptures would have been fully painted

including the skin tones.

Some others, only details might have been painted.

This example was definitely fully painted.

She would have been painted to look like a real person.

I've always been fascinated by the strange and wonderful alchemy

that goes into creating a lifelike impression in marble or bronze.

I've been told it's a process of self-discovery.

My guru is sculpture Marcello Georgi,

who's making a bronze bust of me.

Step one - he reproduces me in wax.

You're using the techniques that the Roman artists would have used?

Yes, yes. In fact, this is more or less the same technique,

the same way used in Roma.

Obviously the Romans didn't have gas burners,

but they had to warm up the wax,

and you make it pliable in your hands.

They probably use also different kind of wax, natural wax from bees.

Beeswax? Yeah, sure.

And these will be the thickness of the bronze.

So, the important point to understand

is that in the finished bronze portrait,

the bronze corresponds to the wax?

Yes. This is a weird experience.

Strange for you, to see your face...?

Appearing. Appearing, yes.

How's that? Is that similar?

I must admit, I'm a little bit apprehensive

that Marcello may be creating Frankenstein's monster.

They don't look pretty, but the tubes are needed

to let molten bronze flow into my head.

Next I'm entombed in a special mixture of clay and plaster.

From there, it's into the oven, where my wax alter ego melts away.

All that will be left is a negative impression of me.

Five days later, I'm taken out of the oven,

and buried in a sand pit.

Molten bronze heated to more than 1,000 degrees

is poured into the cavity left by the wax.

This gives the process its name, the lost wax technique.

12 hours later, and it's time to see what lies within the clay womb.

It's a bit of a rough birth.

Time will tell how my bronze doppelganger scrubs up.

This is it, underneath this green scarf on the plinth. Yeah.

That's my head under there.

Yeah. OK, let's see it.

I show you? Yep.

Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready.

Oooh!

What do you think?

God, it's weird. I mean, I...it's...I tell you,

I think it's really uncanny seeing yourself,

because in a way, you associate things like this

with people who are dead.

I tell you what I really think, as well, is that Roman busts

looked much older.

And I think this looks a little young, really.

It sort of feels like I should be a bit older

before someone's made a bust.

It's your portrait, so it's totally different.

I think the Romans' portrait is still nowadays

the most important example of realistic portrait.

I love the fact that this was something that the Romans did

that was new. Here was this idea that they had a style, realism,

the warts and all, the kind of unvarnished truth.

Sort of saying, "You can read in my face

"all of my experiences over the years."

They were the men who made the Roman Empire what it was.

I'm not convinced this chap would have created the Roman Empire,

but I think it's beautiful, and thank you very much

for spending two months of your life, poor you,

having to sculpt my head!

Thank you. You're welcome.

The Romans' love of realism quickly evolved

beyond the portrait bust.

If that was their greatest artistic innovation,

then running it a close second

was the documentary-style historical relief.

The so-called altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus

is considered one of the most celebrated,

crucial monuments of the Roman republic,

in part because it lies right at the beginning

of a quintessential Roman tradition,

the historical relief commemorating real events that took place.

So what we have here, if you like,

is the blueprint for later Roman art.

This is one of the essential chromosomes

in the genetic code of Roman art history.

And the event depicted is a census that was taken

by the consuls of the citizens of Rome, usually every five years.

So at the left, you see young men being enrolled into the Roman army.

And in the centre, you have what was called the suovetaurilia -

I think I've got that right -

or the sacrificial killing of a bull, a ram and a pig...

..in honour of the God Mars, who you can see here,

wearing a helmet and his cuirass.

And then on the other side, you have the man

presiding over the whole ceremony, the censor himself,

with a veil, a crown of laurel...

..and what's specially distinctive about this relief,

as well as the realism of the subject matter,

is the style with which it's been made,

because the carving is really factual,

it's down to earth, it's sober.

It feels quite blunt. In places it's awkward,

but it does have an honesty, a sincerity, a straightforwardness,

a kind of pragmatism that feels perfectly suited

to the spirit of the Republic.

Historical reliefs open a window onto the everyday lives of Rome's citizens.

And my next treasure celebrates not a senator or a general,

but a baker.

This big old block of crumbling brickwork and masonry

is essentially one gigantic chunk of bourgeois self-promotion.

Because it's a tomb,

and it says, "This is the monument of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces."

And on the other side it tells us what he did. He was a baker,

he was a contractor, he was a public servant.

And I imagine him as quite a plump and pleased-with-himself man,

because he's managed to bag himself this important spot here

at this intersection of various busy thoroughfares heading into the city.

And for those Romans who were illiterate, in fact most of them,

he wanted to tell them how well he'd done in the frieze at the top.

What we see is not a mythological scene,

which you might expect on a tomb.

Instead, we see something resolutely realistic.

It shows us life in one of his bakeries.

There are various workers, they're sifting grain,

they're kneading dough, they're cutting the dough up into loaves.

They're putting it into an oven.

The interesting thing as well about the style of the frieze,

is that some people call it plebeian art. It's art of the people.

People who aren't really interested in highfalutin nonsense.

They're interested in realities, everyday business.

Eurysaces was clearly a brilliant businessman,

and he made damn sure that we know it.

The Roman republic left behind a form of historical art,

which transports us back to their world.

I'm heading out of Rome now,

I'm heading south along the ancient Appian Way,

the Roman road, towards probably the greatest archaeological site

ever discovered.

There, we can see the republic at its height,

around the turn of the first century BC...

..when the visual culture of the Roman world

reached undreamt-of opulence and complexity,

and art touched the everyday lives of Roman citizens of every class.

I'm just having to slow down,

because this is incredibly bumpy bit of the Appian Way!

I have a feeling that the car's suspension

is maybe going to give up.

So wish me luck!

The Bay of Naples is 120 miles south of Rome.

It was a fashionable resort for wealthy Romans,

where they built luxurious seaside villas and lived la dolce vita.

EXPLOSIVE ERUPTION

But that all changed when a rather famous volcano

called Vesuvius erupted and buried the nearby town of Pompeii

in scalding volcanic dust and debris.

When excavations began here in the 18th century,

they unearthed a really rich

and complex visual culture here in Pompeii,

which was just a mere provincial backwater

in comparison with the metropolis of Rome.

So ultimately, that Vesuvian tragedy testifies to the quality,

the variety and the obsessions of Roman art.

What makes Pompeii so special

is that fragile and exquisite works of art have been preserved

in almost perfect condition.

Nowhere else can you enjoy such vibrant mosaics

and wonderful paintings.

Artistic disciplines in which Republican Romans truly excelled.

So this is one of the grandest residences in Pompeii.

It's known as the House Of The Faun, named after this sculpture.

This is a beautiful piece.

I think it sets the tone for the entire house,

which was clearly, as you look around, extremely opulent.

Frescos, pattern mosaic floors.

I mean, this could be a piece of '60s op art.

This is a wonderful geometric extravaganza.

Complete with dog. And you can see over here,

there's another mosaic of doves. There were loads of them.

It was a real display of aesthetic connoisseurship.

The real piece de resistance of the decoration of this villa

is just over here.

It's not the real thing, the real thing has long since been removed.

It's really quite an epic piece.

An enormous mosaic presenting a dramatic, tumultuous battle scene,

starring the Macedonian hero Alexander the Great,

charging in and defeating his enemy, the King of the Persians, Darius,

in a battle from the 330s BC.

CRIES OF BATTLE

And this is the original. And you can see at once

that rather than displaying it on the floor,

they've presented it on a wall, which is an interesting thing to do,

because you can revel in the mastery with which this Roman artefact

has been made.

You see, when you get up close, you suddenly realise

just what an epic undertaking making this piece actually was.

This is a genuine masterpiece of the mosaicist art.

Just see how small the bits of rock and the bits of stone,

known as tesserae, are, that construct the wider image.

There are estimates that say for every square centimetre,

there are 15 odd pieces of stone,

and that would mean that the entire mosaic would have

between possibly two-and-a-half million

to maybe five-and-a-half million of these bits of stone

to construct the entire image.

It's really mind-boggling,

and the overall design is really compelling

as a piece of just narrative history.

BATTLE CRIES

The mosaic brilliantly captures

the dramatic, visceral hurly-burly of battle.

You can see Alexander forging in from the left,

and compositionally there's this long spear which pierces

straight through a Persian, who's collapsing on horseback.

And Darius, the King of the Persians who's fleeing on his chariot,

reaches out to lament the fact that his comrade has just been speared

by Alexander.

Some of the bits that I love are, for example,

here there's a soldier who's fallen.

And you can see on the interior of the shield,

there's a reflection of this soldier's face.

So this isn't someone looking out of the image,

it's a reflection of this soldier looking back.

This is playing with depth,

in a way that suggested a true degree of sophistication.

And I love these horses leading the chariots,

these one, two, three, four black demented horses,

with their eyes wide open, full of anxiety, full of fear.

So lamentable.

They have a kind of jangled madness, a ferocity,

which reminds me of a painting like Picasso's Guernica,

and this was created millennia beforehand.

Just to think that if it wasn't for the eruption of that volcano,

this magnificent image, breathtaking as it is, with all of its power,

wouldn't exist for us, and our culture, Western civilisation,

would be all the poorer as a result.

Pompeii offers a kind of through-the-keyhole experience.

This ruined villa on the edge of the town

is a mysterious Neverland, with a very special treasure

that brings together myth, fantasy

and the unique customs of Roman life.

It's a bit of a maze, isn't it?

So it goes on and on, but...

Finally!

This is the chamber, for which this villa is so famous.

God, it's bizarre. You come in here...

and you're transported into this really mythical realm.

What you see is one continuous frieze that extends

all the way around the room, on all four walls.

And you walk into the middle, and you become a part of the action,

you're immersed by this painting, enfolded by it.

There are 28 figures on the frieze,

and some of them are recognisably human. They're woman, Roman women.

Here's a Roman matron, for example.

Here are also some women, perhaps a slave girl,

maybe this girl's a priestess. But along with them...

..you have these figures from myth. So here's Silenus, playing a lyre.

And then you have Bacchus and Ariadne.

This really disturbing demon woman...

with wings,

who seems to be whipping some poor lady

as part of a kind of rite and initiation.

The whole area, the aura of this is just suffused

with something very enigmatic.

Because no-one really knows what this painting is about.

There are lots of different theories.

In fact, a lot of it hinges on this lady over here.

Someone tending her hair,

a kind of Cupid-like winged figure

from myth, holding up a mirror to see her reflection.

And perhaps she, maybe with some of the other women,

is about to be initiated into some cult associated with Dionysus.

Maybe this is about a kind of ritual, a rite of passage,

an initiation into sexual maturity, if you like.

But the fact that I can't quite understand what exactly it means

doesn't detract, if anything it adds, it enhances...

..that elusive quality about it, which is really tantalising

for your imagination.

What's incredible is that this fresco

is just one among many uncovered at Pompeii.

'I've come to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples

'with painter Leo Stevenson,

'to examine the technical virtuosity of his Roman forebears.'

..the amount of painting that survived.

The quantity and sometimes the quality is staggering.

It just blows your mind.

I mean, an image like this, I think is quite typical.

I mean, what can we see? This is a Europa figure from myth

being carried away by Zeus, the chief god, in the form of a bull.

It's got enormous testicles!

Um, yes I've noticed that. But my eye is drawn to the drapery.

I mean, this is an artist working in the technique of fresco.

You paint into a special kind of wet plaster, a lime plaster.

The pigments get drawn in,

so it works quite quickly and efficiently.

When you're actually painting the image, you are against the clock.

Over the course of time, chemically it turns to stone.

That's why so many of these amazing paintings survive,

because they are literally stone, and the pigment is bound in the surface.

What I think is quite fantastic here

is you get a sense, not just of these individuals,

sort of almost like paintings on a wall,

but the whole room would have been decorated,

everything saturated with colour, imagery, design.

Yes, but what's astonishing about a museum like this is you see

a huge range of subject matter, as well as quality.

You have historical, mythological, you have still lives. Portraiture.

Seascapes, landscapes. Everything is here.

It's almost the whole panoply of subject matter that we know

from later times. But it existed then.

One of the things that interests me,

I've noticed that an awful lot of these images,

they're surrounded by black or brown borders.

I think that represents frames.

Because what we're looking at is a picture of a picture.

Now we know that they had panel paintings, much as later ages had.

Individual pictures, you hung on a wall.

These pictures would have been staggeringly good.

You imagine the best art

that was produced in the centre of the spider's web in Rome itself.

Serious money, serious high-status people.

The kind of art they would've had.

Leo chooses to recreate a panel painting from a fresco at Pompeii,

showing a resplendent villa in the shadow of Vesuvius.

So this is all the gear.

This is all the gear. This is the important thing.

It's an egg. It's an egg. An egg.

Basically, egg yolk is used to bind the paint onto the surface.

When it dries, it lasts for a very, very long time,

as we know from the paintings that survived.

Now, the trick is to just take the yolk out without the white...

..so it's just the yolk itself.

Now, that's the binder. We now need to make the paint.

So if we pour a little bit of the egg yolk in here...

And if we take a colour,

say, for instance, this beautiful, um, Egyptian blue...

See, that's quite a rich gorgeous blue. Mm-hm.

I'm also going to add a little bit of white.

This white is actually a very refined chalk.

So effectively, that is your paint.

Wow.

That is my impression of that.

And you stuck throughout here to using the Roman technique of...

Yes, this is all done in tempera paint.

This is what they would have done.

If you compare and contrast, what have you done to take us

beyond the wall painting to the postulated original panel?

Well, I've mainly concentrated on using a greater subtlety

of colour, and of tone.

Now, by tone, I mean the range from the lightest light

to the darkest dark and all the shades in-between.

The background, I've compressed the tones so they're much closer

together, so that makes it a sort of a recession space, so effectively

the strongest, darkest tones are in the foreground with the building.

That's very impressive. Thank you.

However much I admire the Romans' desire to document their lives in art,

there are times when it goes a little far.

If you're prudish, you might want to go and make a cup of tea.

So if you were one of the men who lived in Pompeii,

you might pop out your villa and you have to go on a few errands,

buy a loaf of bread, maybe drink some wine in one of the bars.

Perhaps you might even have time to fit in a visit,

maybe quite a quick one, to one of Pompeii's 35 brothels.

That was one for every 71 men who lived in the town.

And just to help you find your way,

there were these very useful street signs.

There's another one up here.

I think you follow the direction of the, well, art historians call it

an ithyphallic penis.

So, come and have a look. It's not really the height of romance.

It's quite basic.

You'd hand over a few coins. And to get you in the mood,

there were these frescos of people having sex.

Now, well, that's... That's an intriguing one.

But this is the thing about Roman art, you come in,

and of course today, for us, these images induce all sorts of smirks

and lots of titters. "Oh, look!" It's all very smutty.

And this is clearly pornographic.

The thing about Roman art, though, is that there are images like this

throughout every genre, every location.

You can find pictures of people shagging, people having sex.

And for centuries, it's been hidden away.

People try to neatly tidy up Roman art

and suggest that images like this were only found in brothels

or bars.

It's not strictly true. You could find erotica,

even if it was considered erotica, we don't know,

all over the Roman world.

Exploring Pompeii, I'm overwhelmed by the sheer volume of art.

Today we prize individual paintings and sculptures,

but when it came to art, the Romans wanted everything at once.

Aesthetic overload defined the splendid look of the late republic.

It's almost as if this warrior race,

who were forever expanding their territorial frontiers,

were just as keen on conquering space in a visual sense as well.

By the first century BC, Roman art had come of age.

But at the same time, the republic was collapsing.

As Rome grew, power was concentrated in the hands of generals

like Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, who went to war

with each other.

BATTLE CRIES

This civil strife culminated in the epoch-changing Battle Of Actium,

off the coast of Western Greece.

The victor was Octavian,

Caesar's 31-year-old adopted son.

Following his spectacular victory at Actium,

Octavian found himself all of a sudden the sole ruler of the Mediterranean world.

And it wasn't long before the senate bestowed upon him a new title,

Augustus.

His metamorphosis into becoming the first emperor of Rome

was under way.

And in order to help him implement that shift

from republic to empire, Augustus and his court

had to precision-engineer a whole new concept of Roman art.

It was an artistic revolution based upon the image of Augustus himself.

Around 200 portraits of him survive.

Augustus appears in many different guises,

but they all have something in common.

The first emperor is handsome, young, and wart-free.

Before Augustus, Roman portraiture was primarily about commemoration,

about presenting individuals in a realistic fashion.

But this offered something completely new.

Because in opposition to the whole veristic tradition of Roman portraiture,

this offers a vision of someone really glamorous, not grizzled.

Charismatic rather than choleric.

He looks eternal, rather than earthly.

And Augustus was so pleased with his new portrait type,

that he kept it, unaltered, until he died, aged 76, in AD 14.

So in a sense, this head is the Roman equivalent of Botox.

It's removing unwanted lines and wrinkles,

because by the time of Augustus, old age was so last century.

That was the public face of the first emperor.

But in private, Augustus sanctioned a look

which, to those in the know, conveyed a very different message.

This is the really beautiful Blacas Cameo,

which is a portrait of Augustus that was painstakingly carved

out of this special stone called sardonyx,

which consists of three differently coloured layers.

And there's something about this particular example,

with its really smooth polish, lustrous forms,

that proclaims a majestic refinement.

But unlike the bronze head, which would've been seen by the masses,

this projects a message

that was only really fit for Augustus' court.

Because whoever made it presents Augustus almost as a god.

He's got this special kind of cape known as an aegis,

which was associated with the goddess Minerva.

And we know that back in the republic,

the Romans of course were famously mistrustful of monarchs.

And here, Augustus couldn't really look much more kingly if he tried.

So in public, he always said he was the first among equals,

he paid lip service to the power of the senators.

But in private, in art like this, he transmitted the truth,

a different message, one that paved the way for the future

when the emperors would be regarded as gods.

Augustus realised that Rome wasn't ready yet for god emperors.

He understood the psyche of the people,

and was playing a clever, even cynical game.

In fact, he was secretly killing off the republic,

at the same time as paving the way for his vision of the Roman empire.

And art played a leading role in this deception.

Nowhere can this be better seen

than in one of ancient Rome's greatest artistic treasures.

I've never actually visited the Ara Pacis Augusti

or the Altar Of Augustan Peace before in the flesh, as it were.

I've read a lot about it,

but it really is quite a magnificent monument,

work of art, really.

It was inaugurated in 13 BC, it was dedicated in 9 BC,

and this structure in the middle of the enclosure is the altar itself.

Monument to peace, and you can see up above, there's a simple frieze

of animals being led to the sacrifice, where they'd be slaughtered.

These big, thick swags of garlands

of fruit and natural produce.

This sense of teeming abundance is a big theme of the Ara Pacis.

In a sense, it was a real great piece of propaganda.

The political message is emblazoned

on the outside of the monument for all to see.

Up above, you see this and it really looks quite stunning.

You see this big procession.

It's a frieze which shows Roman officials, consuls, magistrates

and, crucially, the imperial family.

That figure there is Augustus, very damaged,

half his body's been crunched away by time.

You've got the empress, Livia.

You have Livia's son, the future emperor Tiberius.

It's almost as though the sculptures of the Ara Pacis

were trying to suggest that here was a new dynasty

that could potentially rule Rome for eternity,

which is really emblematised by another panel

which you can see just around the corner here.

You have this wonderful scrolling foliage down below

that looks like this very elegant kind of calligraphy.

But up above, you have this panel,

which in a sense is the poetic masterpiece of the Ara Pacis.

At the centre, you have a woman and her identification...

People are unsure who she might be.

She could be Pax, peace. She could be Venus,

a personification of Italia, or Tellus, this kind of Earth goddess.

In the background behind, you can see these wonderful swaying ears

of corn and wheat and poppies.

It's just a vision of a wonderful paradise here on Earth,

a golden age, and it's promising all of Augustus' subjects

that this is what life will be like in the future.

You can forget about all of the turmoil

and all of the chaos of the republic.

From now on, this is the new Augustan era of peace

and harmony and abundance.

It proved to be the perfect look for a new society,

as Augustus turned Rome from a city of brick

into a metropolis of marble,

and transformed the republic into an empire.

In the next episode, pleasure palaces,

unbridled debauchery,

blood lust,

triumphal might...

..and the most beautiful boy in the world.

It's art and the age of the emperors.

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