Original subtitles

This may look like an ordinary door in Florence.

But it isn't.

The man who lived here invented the Renaissance.

There he is. Giorgio Vasari.

The one with the interested cherub looking on.

Vasari was a painter, and as you can see,

not a particularly good one.

His work lacked elegance and grace.

In a word, it was clunky.

He was actually born just down the road from here in Arezzo.

But when he was in his teens, very impressionable,

he came here to Florence and wheedled his way into

the company of the city's greatest artist, the divine Michelangelo.

For the rest of his career, Vasari remained a Michelangelo groupie.

It shows in his painting

and more importantly for us,

it shows in his writing.

In 1550, Vasari published a book,

a very special book,

because it turned out to be the most influential art book ever written.

It was called The Lives Of The Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors And Architects,

though these days we usually shorten that to The Lives Of The Artists.

As the first book of its kind,

Vasari's Lives set the agenda for all the art books that followed.

Inside, it was packed with biographies

of the artists that Vasari admired.

And in the preface, for the first time in art,

Vasari uses the term "rinascita",

to describe what was going on around him.

"Rinascita" is Italian for "rebirth".

Or, as we call it now, Renaissance.

What Vasari says in his famous preface is that

under the ancient Greeks and Romans,

civilisation reached its greatest height

and the arts achieved perfection.

Then along came the barbarians who destroyed everything

and the arts fell into ruin.

Until we get to Vasari's own times,

roughly between about 1400 and 1600 -

the dates are a little vague -

when there's this great "rinascita", this Renaissance.

And civilisation returns to Italy.

It's a rousing tale of cultural triumph.

Unfortunately, it's just not true.

Civilisation wasn't completely lost for a millennium and a half

and it wasn't reborn suddenly in Renaissance Italy.

Vasari's Renaissance is the creation of a jingoistic Florentine,

who's cheering on his own team

in the great football match of civilisation.

But if the momentous rebirth didn't happen,

what did?

This is Padua,

and that is the famous Equestrian Statue

of the mercenary Gattamelata by Donatello.

Now, this was made in around 1450 and according to Vasari,

this was the first great equestrian statue of the Renaissance,

the first time a Renaissance artist matched

the achievements of the ancients.

But was it?

If we head north from Padua, out of Italy,

a long way north into the land of the barbarians,

or as we call them today, the Germans,

we'll find a different storyline being enacted.

The Germans, poor mites, they barely get a mention in Vasari.

But in the real world, their artistic achievements were huge.

This stone fellow here is called the Bamberg Horseman.

He's life-sized and he was made here in Germany in around 1220.

So that's two and a half centuries or so

before Donatello's Gattamelata

The Bamberg Horseman isn't mentioned in Vasari,

and when you do come across him in books,

he's invariably dismissed as a piece of Gothic art,

something backward or primitive.

But that's not what I see up there.

I see a remarkable piece of equestrian carving.

Look at the detail of the cloth, the hair,

the musculature of the horse.

This isn't some impossible bronze beast ridden by

an impossible bronze warrior.

This is something more modest, less heroic.

And real horses, ridden by real people, have proportions like these.

The fact is, when Vasari ignored the North in his story

of the Renaissance, he ignored some of the key developments in art.

So in this series, yes, we'll be looking at Leonardo da Vinci.

And at Vasari's divine Michelangelo.

And at Botticelli and his Venuses.

All Vasari's Italian favourites will be looked at, but not yet.

Not before their time.

First, we need to catch up with the furious progress

that was being made in this bubbling cauldron

of Renaissance creativity...

Bruges.

Ah, Bruges!

These days, it's so pretty and well-preserved.

It's hard to imagine what a frantic, cutting-edge,

Wild West of a town this was

in the early days of the Renaissance.

If you're ever in the Stadt Bibliothek in Berlin,

ask to see the manuscript of Anthony of Burgundy

and open it on Folio 244.

It shows you what went on in the bathhouses in Bruges

in around 1400 when the businessmen were in town.

On the right, the baths.

On the left, the beds.

All those fellows in the bathhouses,

the travelling businessmen, were trading in cloth, fabrics.

That's what made the city rich.

And they were doing it here, in the Cloth Hall in Bruges.

At its peak, there'd be 400 stalls crammed into here,

selling cloth from around the world.

And if you want to know what these fabulous fabrics looked like,

it's all recorded in spectacular close-up

in the art of Renaissance Flanders.

So all these merchants in here

were from Spain, Poland, Russia, England and one of them, an Italian,

we know very well,

because his face is one of the most memorable in Renaissance art.

Ah, yes. The Arnolfini Marriage, by Jan van Eyck.

And there's Giovanni Arnolfini himself, wealthy cloth merchant

from Lucca, pledging his fidelity to the lovely Mrs Arnolfini.

Exactly what they're pledging

has been the subject of much controversy,

to which I'm not going to add here.

What I want to discuss is something much more important -

what the Arnolfinis are wearing.

Let's start with Mrs Arnolfini.

Now, she's wearing a bulky green dress

that's made from a Bruges speciality, wool.

Like this outfit, here.

Now, this wool was mostly imported from England,

then woven here by the famous Flemish weavers.

In the painting, the dress looks rather bulky.

That's because it's lined with fur.

If you look carefully at the edges,

you'll see this white fur poking out.

Now, that is actually the fur...

..of one of these,

a red squirrel.

And not just any bit of the fur, but this bit here.

The white bit, the purest bit,

what they used to call minever.

It would have taken around 2,000 squirrels

to line Mrs Arnolfini's dress.

So when you look at her again, at the National Gallery in London,

try to forget she's actually wearing 2,000 dead squirrels.

As for her headdress, which looks so complicated, that's just a piece

of white linen, like this, which has been folded over five times

and is then worn on the head like so, kept in place with pins.

So that's Mrs Arnolfini.

But what about him? Well, he's wearing...

..these. Pine martens,

imported from the forests of Poland and Russia, hugely expensive,

the second most expensive fur after sable,

and Arnolfini's tunic would have required about 100 of these.

So that's a lot of money, right there.

On top of the fur, there's this dark purple velvet

that's probably imported from Lucca, Arnolfini's home town,

where the best velvet was made.

But the most interesting thing he's wearing, I think, is his hat.

That huge, wobbly top-hat affair,

that looks several sizes too big for him.

It's actually made of this, straw that's been dyed black

and it's a kind of fashionable Renaissance boater

that everyone was wearing in 1432.

Very light, practical, and as you can see, flattering.

Look closely at van Eyck's hat and all becomes clear

in the microscopic, almost magical detail

that was van Eyck's trademark.

30 years before the birth of Leonardo...

..50 years before Michelangelo was born,

the artists of Bruges were already seeing as clearly as this.

What was happening here in the early years of the 15th century

was nothing less than a pictorial revolution.

A completely new way of seeing and painting.

And in its clarity, its precision,

it was far ahead of anything that was happening in Italy at the time.

But that's not how art history sees it.

Ever since Vasari, until very recently,

these early masters of Bruges and Flanders have been looked down on,

patronised. Do you know what they call them in art history books?

THIS is what they call them.

At the back of the Arnolfini Marriage, high up on the wall,

there is one of these - a convex mirror.

These convex mirrors keep popping up in Flemish art

in various ways and for various reasons.

In the Arnolfini Marriage,

van Eyck uses it to smuggle in a cunning self-portrait.

Now, if I ask our handsome cameraman Matt to step up to the mirror

and film it, you'll see his reflection in the glass.

And in exactly the same way, van Eyck uses it to show himself

and a mysterious second figure, rhyming, as it were,

with the Arnolfinis at the front.

But other Flemish artists use them in different ways.

When Quentin Matsys put one on the table used by a money changer

and his wife, it's there for their protection.

In Flanders, the bankers used them to see round corners

and make sure no-one was sneaking up on them.

It's like those helpful mirrors you get on the London Underground

in the corridors so you can see if anything is coming...

..the other way.

Interestingly, here in Bruges, the guild of the mirror makers

was the same guild, the Guild of St Luke,

to which painters also belonged.

St Luke was actually the patron saint of painters

so you often see him in Renaissance art, presented as an artist

who's drawing the Madonna, imagining the unimaginable.

With St Luke by their side,

the painters of Bruges were changing what art does...

..and how it does it.

This is the Madonna with Joris van der Paele, as it's called,

painted by van Eyck again in 1436

and it's another miraculous feat of observation.

Look at the robes that St Donatian on the left is wearing,

his cross, his mitre.

Or, on the other side, the lovely reflections in St George's armour.

And look!

There's van Eyck again,

haunting the picture with his secret presence.

Now, to see as clearly as this,

you either need eyesight that's miraculously good, or...

..you need these.

Joris van der Paele,

who commissioned this great devotional picture from van Eyck,

has been using his glasses to help him read his prayers.

"Joris" is Dutch for "George"

and that's why St George

is presenting his patron to the Madonna

and making sure he's read his prayers,

even though his old eyes are going.

Now, glasses weren't actually invented in Bruges in the 1400s.

They were invented in Italy about a century earlier in Pisa.

And if you examine the older faces in Renaissance art,

you'll see a pair of specs popping up quite often.

Sometimes in unexpected places.

Some are painted, some are carved, some are for seeing God,

others for seeing money.

Hieronymus Bosch, the great Flemish doom merchant,

even managed to find a pair being sported in hell.

Now, although glasses had been around

for the best part of a century,

it was in Flanders at the time of van Eyck,

early in the 15th century, that the art of lens making was perfected

and great steps were taken in ways of seeing.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you exactly how

these newly precise lenses

and this new magnification were used in Bruges.

Flemish artists were very secretive about it.

To this day, it's a controversial topic.

But when you look into the minute details

crammed into this miraculous Renaissance art,

a bit of help was surely needed.

Let me put it this way -

either for the first few millennia of Western art,

no artist anywhere was born with good enough eyesight

to record reality as clearly as it was recorded here in Flanders,

or after these first few millennia,

something happened here that made it finally possible

to see things more clearly.

I know which version I believe.

I don't know if you've seen that rather bad George Clooney movie,

The Monuments Men.

Well, this was the painting

they were trying to steal back from the Nazis.

It's van Eyck's greatest achievement - the Ghent Altar,

a masterpiece of spectacular complexity and mysterious ambition,

with so much going on in it and this strange God

looming up in the centre, like an all-powerful Oriental potentate.

Now, the mirror makes a secret appearance in here as well, sort of.

You see the Virgin Mary sitting on the right hand of God?

Look at the band of writing above her head. See what it says.

It's in Latin, but you can just about make out the first bit -

"speculum sine".

And if you could see through that gorgeous bit of cloth below,

it would continue "macula".

"Speculum sine macula" - it means the immaculate mirror.

It's a quote from the Bible, the Book of Wisdom.

Mary, who was born without sin,

is being compared to one of these - speculum sine macula.

And that is how van Eyck paints her as well,

as a vision of unblemished female perfection.

As with so much Flemish art,

the Ghent Altar is very confusing at first sight.

This is just a handy replica they keep at Ghent Cathedral.

But even this is a challenge.

As for the real thing, that sits behind bulletproof glass

in a dark chapel at the back, where even the Nazis can't steal it again

and where it looms up before us

like a daunting cliff face of dense Flemish symbolism.

But that's only from a distance,

because the real joy of the Ghent Altarpiece,

the real joy of all of van Eyck's art

is to get close and to see the details.

♪ Il dolcissimo Signore... ♪

When you press your nose against a van Eyck,

the confusion ceases and it all gets intoxicating.

Botanists have identified 42 different species of plant

painted accurately on the Ghent Altar.

And see that delightful landscape at the back?

It's supposed to be the New Jerusalem,

as described in the Bible at the end of the world.

But it looks an awful lot like Flanders, doesn't it?

Bruges made biblical.

All this perfectly recorded reality,

this shiny truth that Flemish art invented,

isn't reality for the sake of it.

It's not trying to fool anybody.

This is reality as a powerful new weapon of conviction.

Van Eyck is smuggling big religious truths

into the everyday life of Flanders,

making them touchable, bringing them nearer.

This is art that is having to envisage things

that have never been envisaged before.

And what a feast of invention it is.

So how was it done? To see that, we have to get even closer.

Normally, you can't get any closer than this to van Eyck's masterpiece.

But this isn't any old arts programme.

This is the Renaissance Unchained on the BBC, so I've managed

to arrange some exclusive access to the Ghent Altarpiece.

Not even George Clooney could get as close as we are going to get.

In just a moment, we're going to be going in there,

where they're restoring some of the panels of the Ghent Altar

and we're going to get really close to van Eyck

and see exactly how he does it.

But first, I want to show you something.

This is by Filippo Lippi, a painter from Florence much loved by Vasari,

and it's a scene from the life of St Benedict, painted in around 1450.

So that's 20 or so years after the Ghent Altarpiece.

Now, this wasn't painted in oil paints, which is what van Eyck used.

It was painted in egg tempera,

the medium they preferred in early Renaissance Italy.

It's basically watercolour with a binding of egg yolks

to hold the pigments together

and it dries very quickly into these fabulous glowing colours.

What a gorgeous pink that is!

So that's tempera over here...

..but over here is van Eyck's Annunciation.

So that's the Angel Gabriel telling the Virgin Mary

that she's going to give birth to Jesus

and this was painted about 20 years before the Filippo Lippi,

but look how van Eyck's captured the fabrics.

Look at what the angel's wearing.

And compare this...

..with this.

See how the cloth is done in the Filippo Lippi

or these plants over here.

Compare those...

..with the plants in the van Eyck,

these beautiful white lilies,

which, like the immaculate mirror,

symbolise the purity of the Virgin Mary.

It's a different world, isn't it?

And, critically, a different technique.

Now, Vasari tells us that van Eyck invented oil paints

and that's just not true.

They were already in use in Afghanistan in the seventh century,

in Buddhist art.

But he did master them in ways that no-one had mastered them before

and used them with extraordinary skill

and it's these oil paints,

along with the lenses and the glasses,

that made Flemish art possible.

And inside here, they've been restoring van Eyck panel by panel,

so it's a wonderful opportunity to see exactly how it's all done.

The whole restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece

is a very big project and the first step is the outside wing panels,

which we're currently working on and we're already quite far.

We took already all the vanishes off, the discoloured varnishes,

and now we're actually in the process

of removing all the overpaints,

so we're actually scraping away the later additions

to reveal the original intention of the artist.

And you can see it really well there, all those dark brown,

greens here are actually dirty varnishes that we left on

to show people and this is the original colour that's underneath.

So there's a bright white underneath those dark,

discoloured varnishes. It's very vivid.

You do see very, very clearly there.

The white now has come out a Persil white, beautiful.

Looking at the angel, what strikes me is this, as you said,

the colours are brighter,

this beautiful green that's come out of the angel's wings.

Yeah, after the cleaning, they are a bit brighter and especially,

yes, indeed, the green does jump at you.

But I think, most importantly, it has an effect

on the depth of field because not only the colours,

I think the colours are, as I said, a bit muted,

but once we start taking off the first varnish

and then the overpaint, you feel like you're in a room again.

You get drawn into the picture and the whole 3-D effect.

I think it's the experience of being there in the room.

So, what else could you do with these exciting new paints?

One of the things you could record more clearly was people.

In Flanders, the great artists of the Northern Renaissance

began making their contemporaries immortal.

We simply haven't seen faces as tangible as these in art before.

This fierce-looking chappy and Vladimir Putin lookalike

is Chancellor Rolin, staring with scary determination

across one of van Eyck's finest landscapes.

And they say this is van Eyck himself in a big red turban

and the touching crow's feet around his eyes.

There was so much invention, too,

about this thrilling Flemish portraiture.

This is the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges

and it's full of the work of Hans Memling,

a Bruges master who was particularly good at portraits.

Memling was a master painter of that very difficult subject - young men,

when they haven't got any character yet, no wrinkles or flabby bits.

This fellow here is Maarten van Nieuwenhove

and this is a two-part painting, or diptych,

painted in 1487 and it's very clever.

Maarten van Nieuwenhove is at a table praying.

Look at that beautiful purple velvet jerkin he's wearing,

bought from the Arnolfinis, perhaps.

And in the other half, the Virgin Mary and Jesus,

noticeably less realistic and the objects of Maarten's prayer.

So he's praying to them,

but - and this is so brilliant - they're both in the same room.

This space and that space are next to each other.

Look at the table here.

That goes across both pictures as well.

And see Mary's robe - it flows to the bottom,

goes over into Maarten van Nieuwenhove's bit

and even overlaps a bit of the frame.

So it's a wondrous blending of realities and, at the back,

there's a typical Flemish payoff.

Look - a convex mirror and reflected in it, Mary and Maarten

from the back and from the side, sitting around the same table.

This is art that can paint miracles.

In the hands of the Flemish,

reality became such a powerful weapon in the artist's armoury.

Yet look what they call it.

When Vasari wrote the north out of the story of the Renaissance,

he planted 500 years of prejudice in the annals of art.

Another thing oil paints were especially good at capturing

was textures. Oh, my God, they were good at textures!

In particular, the artists of the Northern Renaissance

had a lot of fun with armour.

And that's handy because one of the saints

who pops up most often in their art

was the armour painter's delight, St George.

You know, whenever I see St George adopted as a nationalist symbol

by right-wing factions in England, for instance,

it always makes me laugh, because he was actually a Turk of Greek origin

who was born in Palestine near Tel Aviv

and who served in the Roman army.

So all those skinheads

who've got St George tattooed on their foreheads,

they're actively promoting

Turkish, Greek, Palestinian, Roman and Jewish unity.

Well done, lads!

St George was popular because he saved a princess from a dragon

and that made him a ready-made symbol of Christian salvation

and an exciting challenge for the new oil paints.

The new paints transformed armour into a delicate metal mirror

on which sophisticated games could be played with light.

Apart from encouraging all this exciting investigation of light

and its symbolism, something else the St George story did

was to pull Renaissance art out of its comfort zone

and to send it slithering into dark new areas of the imagination.

Forced to imagine the terrible beasties

that St George had to slay,

Renaissance art took a step into dark new territories.

And not just in Flanders.

Back in Italy, that very strange painter Cosimo Tura of Ferrara

relocated his St George on what looks like another planet.

So the St George story pushed Renaissance art

into these dark new areas.

And that wasn't all - it also made it necessary

to tackle combat and movement

and that had an especially powerful impact on sculpture.

This is what I think is the finest of the northern St Georges.

He's certainly the most spectacular.

You probably haven't heard of him because he's in Stockholm in Sweden

in the Church of St Nicholas.

What a thing!

Bigger than life-size and carved out of wood

with breathtaking skill and drama and the details are horrific.

Bits of dismembered body are strewn across the plinth.

And little baby dragons poke their heads out of the ground,

waiting to be murdered.

And then, in a very un-Renaissance detail,

this bisexual dragon is so traumatised

by St George's mighty spearing that it's emptied its bowels with fear.

This was made by a German sculptor called Bernt Notke in around 1487

when Michelangelo was still a teenager.

Now, Bernt Notke isn't in Vasari, of course,

because this is a Renaissance

that obviously isn't trying to quote the Greeks or the Romans.

It's a Renaissance that's slapping you about the face

with action, drama and darkness.

There's nothing Italian about it, that's true.

But why does that make it a lesser achievement?

The mad imaginings of the Northern Renaissance

didn't stop with dragons.

When art armed itself with oil paints,

it armed itself with the power to make anything real.

This really is supposed to be it -

the mythical Fountain of Youth,

where you go in old and you come out young.

Now, you may not believe in the Fountain of Youth,

but plenty of Renaissance folk did.

This is how Lucas Cranach, prickly genius of the German Renaissance,

envisaged its wondrous effects.

Legend has it that a Spanish conquistador called Ponce de Leon,

who'd been sent to the Americas to find it,

landed here in Florida in 1513

and discovered that it wasn't a myth -

the Fountain of Youth really existed.

In Cranach's delirious masterpiece,

all the Joan Collinses in the village have been rounded up,

dipped in the special waters

and turned again into St Trinian's girls.

It may have stopped working.

Anyway, here we are in the Renaissance,

this great rebirth of ancient knowledge,

but all the old legends, superstitions and myths

are exerting just as powerful a hold

on the artistic imagination as they ever did.

Enjoying Lucas Cranach is like visiting a German nature camp.

What a lot of nudes there are romping about his pictures.

Some of them are Lucretias.

Others are Venuses.

But all of them, you feel, are here

because Cranach understood temptation

and had personal reasons to warn us of its dangers.

Perhaps that's why he's so unusually keen to paint Adam and Eve.

Now, the Adam and Eve story,

about the first man and the first woman committing the first sin,

was the only story in the Bible that forced painters to paint nudes.

There's no other way to do it.

Clothes, after all, hadn't been invented yet.

Set free in Paradise in their birthday suits,

Adam and Eve gave Renaissance art a perfect biblical excuse

to depict tempting human nudity.

According to the Bible,

Eve's crime was to pick forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge...

..and to tempt Adam with it.

But I think we all know what really went on in Paradise

when the first naked man met the first naked woman.

But all these Adams and Eves of the Renaissance

weren't just there for erotic reasons.

There were other forces at work on the art of the times

and the one that's always forgotten but shouldn't be is geography.

It wasn't just the Fountain of Youth

that was discovered around about now.

So, too, was Paradise itself.

It's a story told gloriously in a Renaissance art form

that's been unfairly ignored -

the great art form of the map.

These days, we're blase about maps, but in Renaissance times,

maps were extraordinary creations with a huge cosmic significance.

I can't think of many things

that would have been harder to make than this -

the so-called Fra Mauro Map,

made in Venice in around 1450 by a Venetian monk.

In those days, north was south and south was north

so the world was upside down.

It's exquisite, isn't it?

The glorious imagining of a glorious new world.

But, interestingly, round about here, there's something missing -

a little place called America, which hadn't been discovered yet.

So the first Renaissance map with the Americas actually on it

is this one - the Waldseemuller World Map of 1507.

There's America there,

or as they called most of it in those days, "terra incognita".

When Columbus discovered America in 1492,

he didn't just change history -

he changed art and particularly the story of Adam and Eve.

Their depiction has always triggered powerful guilts and worries.

Some of the most anxious paintings of the Renaissance

are representations of the first man and the first woman.

And up on the Sistine ceiling,

Michelangelo has left us in no doubt whatsoever

as to the terrible consequences of the first sin.

But these were still theoretical anxieties,

distant imaginings of distant biblical events.

When Columbus discovered America, that changed.

It wasn't just the Fountain of Youth that turned up in Florida.

As news began to filter through Europe

of the strange new world discovered by Columbus,

the Renaissance mind began putting two and two together

and Paradise itself suddenly had a location.

This is Hieronymus Bosch's famous Garden of Earthly Delights,

a painting about sin and its terrible consequences

and look what Adam and Eve are sinning under -

a dragon tree, Satan's tropical succulent of choice.

Paradise was no longer theoretical.

Columbus had found it and that was bad news,

because according to the scriptures,

man and woman would only return to Paradise

after the Day of Judgment, the last day of all.

When Columbus discovered America,

he set in motion a countdown to the end of the world.

A less superstitious era might have laughed it off,

but the Renaissance really wasn't one of those.

Later in this series,

we'll be dealing in depth with Hieronymus Bosch.

For now, all I ask is that you feel his anxiety -

the anxiety of his times.

At times like this, times of deep Renaissance despair,

turning to the era's greatest talent ought to be a relief.

But in this instance, it isn't,

because Albrecht Durer, the greatest German painter of the Renaissance,

was a stoker up of anxieties, not a reliever of them.

Durer lived here in his house in Nuremberg.

It's been kept exactly as he left it as a kind of shrine to him

because one thing Durer made sure of from the start

is that everyone knew how great he was.

If they handed out medals for arrogance,

Durer would have a shelf load.

Born in Nuremberg in 1471,

he was so good so quickly

that, by the age of 13, he drew this -

a self-portrait as a teenage genius.

Durer invented the artistic self-portrait.

Other artists had put themselves in their pictures before,

but no-one had made themselves the stars of their own art as Durer did.

Here he is at 22,

enjoying mightily his own Renaissance handsomeness.

And look, at 26, he's put on his best dandy ware

and loves himself even more.

And then, in 1500,

in a momentous Renaissance slippage of human modesty,

the 29-year-old Albrecht Durer

compares himself unmissably with Christ.

All over Durer's art,

we find him interjecting himself into the storylines.

You even see it in his altarpieces.

In this busy crucifixion in Vienna,

who is that standing at the back of the crowd?

Oh, look, it's Durer.

And who's invited himself along to join the Virgin Mary

and Christ in this ruined masterpiece in Prague?

Who do you think?

To my eyes, Durer's altarpieces are not as successful

as he'd like us to believe.

He couldn't do grandeur or emotional bigness.

Durer gets better as he gets smaller.

His portraits, for instance, are often transfixing,

as with this divine portrayal of a girl from Venice.

It's as if he couldn't work with a big brush, only a small one.

Lots of little things combining to create the final image.

It's a talent which came in particularly useful

here in his printing studio.

It's a belief widely held in art

that Durer was the greatest printmaker of all.

He was certainly one of the busiest

and so successfully did his prints spread his fame

that even Vasari heard of him and gave him a chapter in his book.

Everyone knows Durer's Melencolia.

It's probably the most famous print ever made,

a mysterious figure surrounded

by all this scattered Renaissance knowledge and made anxious by it.

Lots of people have suggested that Melencolia

is another disguised self-portrait

and I'm certainly prepared to believe that.

Because, as far as I can see,

Durer never passed up an opportunity to put himself in his art.

But, you know, it wasn't actually Durer's prints

that finally convinced me of his genius

or his altarpieces or even those extraordinary portraits of his.

The day that took my breath away and finally blew away all the doubts...

..was the day I saw his watercolours.

The Albertina in Vienna has a collection of them

that only goes on show every couple of decades.

If you're alive for such an occasion, go there.

This is Durer's famous Hare, twitching timidly before us.

And the wings of a roller, coloured so freshly and brightly,

they might have flown through yesterday sky.

He thought he was divinely chosen

and at moments like this,

you find yourself believing him.

So, that's the Northern Renaissance, an epoch of startling invention.

It gave us oil paints.

It gave us optics.

It gave us the truth.

In the next film, I'm heading south again.

If Vasari got the Northern Renaissance so wrong,

what did he also get wrong about the Renaissance in Italy?