All language subtitles for Civilisations.2018.s01e05.The.Triumph.of.Art.[MPup]

ARABIC SINGING

Heavenly vaults
but made by the earthly hand of man.

The imagined form of the universe.

A circle. No beginning, no end,

just wheeling eternity.

Domes had appeared in antiquity
and the medieval centuries

but never
with such compulsive grandeur.

In the 15th and 16th centuries,
domes appeared everywhere,

constellations of them.

They were all
the work of mortal men,

but by the lights of philosophers,
the infinite capacity

of man's mind, made him a mortal
God, king of the lower beings.

Artists and architects,
East and West,

now began to be spoken of
as touched by a divine gift.

From domes they built
from Rome to Lahore,

were the crowning achievement
of this moment of supreme,

almost sacrilegious,
creative confidence.

So, why do we treat
those blossomings

as though they were happening
on different cultural planets?

Well, I think you will know
the answer to that one.

It's that word "Renaissance",
isn't it?

Invariably attached to the word
Italian by those who coined it.

Oh, I know, every so often
it's extended north

and west to France and Germany,
and even, as far as literature was

concerned,
to the very shores of Albion.

But if we want to feel the pulse
of one of those great moments,

the surge of inventiveness,
when civilisation bounded forward,

we need to look
much further than that.

We need to look East.

The great flowering we call
the Renaissance owed much to Arab

scholars who recovered
the lost classics of antiquity,

of science, mathematics,
and philosophy.

Through the centuries that followed,
the outpouring of creativity

would flow both ways between
Islamic East and Christian West.

But for the imaginative freedom of
the artists themselves, the future

awaiting them, East or West, could
hardly have been more different.

Whenever something profound happens,

which propels civilisation forward,
it usually happens,

not through isolated sparks
of invention in one city or state

but through the spur of competition.

Competition across time,
going one better than the ancients,

but competition across borders, too,

even when those borders
divided warring cultures.

So it was with the Renaissances
in the Muslim and Christian worlds.

1,000 miles apart,
in Rome and Istanbul,

two old men - Michelangelo
and the Turk Mimar Sinan

both veteran builders were
competing for the same prize.

To outdo what,
for almost a millennium,

had been regarded as the greatest
house of God in the world.

The Hagia Sophia.

Commissioned by the
Emperor Justinian

in the early sixth century,

the Byzantine basilica
was the greatest architectural

achievement of the early
Christian church.

"Its dome," wrote one scholar,

"seemed not to be
founded on masonry at all,

"but suspended from heaven itself."

When the Ottoman Turks conquered
Constantinople in 1453,

instead of demolishing
the Hagia Sophia,
they converted it into a mosque.

But there was no escaping the fact

that this conversion
was superficial.

Islamic elements had merely
been bolted onto a church.

Somehow, Christianity
was always showing through.

There came a time when this partial
makeover wasn't good enough.

Not, at any rate,

for the greatest of the Ottoman
rulers Suleiman the Magnificent.

His armies had cut a swathe
through Christian Europe.

So when he decided
to build a new mosque,

unencumbered by Christian leftovers,
he was making a point for Allah.

And he was making it directly
at his rivals,

the holy Roman Emperor and the Pope.

Ironically, the master builder
ordered to create the great

Friday service mosque
had been born a Christian.

Mimar Sinan was a Janissary,
converted to Islam as a child

and conscripted into the crack
household troops of the Sultan.

Sinan rose through the ranks
to become the greatest military

engineer of his day.

But he always felt himself
destined for something greater

than bridges and fortresses.

"I wish to become an architect",
he told his biographer,

"so my perfect skills should
leave art to the world."

Suleiman's order was thrilling
but daunting.

A great dome surrounded by half
domes, four minarets,

a structure as immense
as the two-continent empire.

A mosque that would eclipse
Hagia Sophia.

The visible proclamation
of Islam's victory.

Sinan's great idea
is the indivisibility of space.

The architectural proclamation
of the union of all believers.

Here, the space isn't
chopped up by forests of columns

and barriers of choir and altar.

Here, we are all in it together.

Islam is a religion of law
and simple faith.

Everything revealed to all.

Islam means submission.

And what we submit to here
is the light of true faith

and of the Koran.

Its record, the light of God's law
streaming through 249 windows,

drowning the space with radiance.

How weightless this all feels,
even the gigantic dome.

That's all the more extraordinary

because it could only be supported
by absolutely titanic architecture.

These huge four masonry piers.

Everything is, kind of, airy,
and light, and graceful,

but, you feel, behind it
is this hard mathematical
engineering mind of Sinan.

That achievement,

something built on the ground
that is full of this kind of

planetary uplift
towards which our gaze is sent

over and over again

is what makes this place one of the
most beautiful buildings on earth.

Sinan was not
working in isolation.

He knew very well, that in
Christian Europe architects had been

working to remake Christian
architecture on an imperial scale.

Turkish visitors to Rome,
just like their Italian counterparts

visiting Istanbul,
would have seen first hand

this east-west competition
of cultural one-upmanship.

Sinan had thought
obsessively about the long

history of Constantinople
and in Rome, too, artists

and architects found themselves
in a dialogue with the past.

The Western Renaissance
had been founded on the idea

of rebuilding the ruins
of the classical pagan past

and re-consecrating them
for a new Christian age.

The supreme test
would be St Peter's.

The original basilica built
by Constantine

in the fourth century was, by 1500,
in danger of collapse.

In 1505,
Pope Julius II shocked Rome

by deciding to demolish
the old basilica.

The visionary architect Donato
Bromante won the competition to

build its successor.

He got the job because

a small, perfect building
caught the Pope's eye.

This little gem is really a glimpse
inside the Renaissance mind,

in particular, into Donato
Bromante's mind.

It's a freestanding shrine to
St Peter in the cloister

of the church of San Pietro
in Montorio, the place where

St Peter himself was said to have
been crucified upside down.

Let's think about what the word
Renaissance means.

It means a rebirth.

And what was being reborn
was classical antiquity.

Bromante walked around
Rome making very careful

scholarly notes of what he saw.

What he saw were pagan temples.

So, what we have here
is the perfect classical form

of one of those
ruined Roman temples.

A dome, sitting on a drum,

with a colonnaded
encirclement outside.

And, as such, what it does
is take those perfect forms,

the hemisphere and wheeling circle,
the revolution of the planets,

like a great cosmic timepiece,
and says,

this, harmoniously, is how
the new sacred art is going to be.

There's something else on
Bromante's mind, as well.

This is really a miniature size,
doll's house prototype

for what he will want to happen
to St Peter's itself.

Only one problem. This is so perfect
because it is so teeny-weeny.

But his job was to put
Hagia Sophia in the shade.

So, St Peter's
had to be very big indeed.

And that was going to be
a mighty challenge.

Bromante began work in 1506 but he
didn't live to see his miniature

St Peter's translated
into the big one.

But the greatest of his successors,
Michelangelo,

was determined to honour
the essence of Bromante's design.

A central dome pierced by windows.

Michelangelo was in his 70s
when, as the Pope's third choice,

he got the job,
grumbling that he was doing it

only for the glory of God.

Many of his greatest late
works like The Last Judgment in the

Sistine Chapel were in their own way
titanic architectural
constructions,

vast masses of figures,
pulled and pushed through space.

Most of his drawings for the project
have been lost

but a wooden model survives
to show us that his vision,
like Bromante's,

was of an enormous Christian temple,
a Greek cross.

No nave or fussy side chapels
distracting from the focal point of

the great crowning dome, its windows
flooding the interior with light.

The whole immense structure
supported on four giant piers.

It's astonishing to realise
that the two greatest monumental

buildings in the world,
one for Islam

and one for Christianity, were going
up at the same time in the 1550s.

And, on the same basic
building principles.

Many wonder did Mimar Sinan
and Michelangelo know
what each other was doing?

For Michelangelo, as for Sinan,
the challenge was how to make

the mighty engineering beautiful,
apparently seamless.

He took his cue from Bromante,
a perfect elegant hemispherical
dome,

an echo of ancient Rome.

But it was also somehow pure,

Michelangelo's colossal strength
translated into flowing line.

Michelangelo toiled away
into his 80s on this.

Living in a cell-like room
in St Peter's, racked with pain,

refusing pay, eating very little.

February 24th, 1552,
was a great day.

Both in the career of
the 76-year-old Michelangelo

and in the long extraordinary
history of the biggest dome

in the world, the cupola on top
of St Peter's

because it was the day when the
cornice of the drum was finished.

The cornice is
just below the area of the windows.

Essentially, it's the base which
made it impossible for anyone,

no matter what happened after
Michelangelo's death,

12 years later, to change its size,
but, more importantly,

it made it impossible to change
Michelangelo's beautiful vision.

To mark this great occasion,
what did Michelangelo do?

He threw a party.

And it wasn't for the patricians
and the princes,

and the Cardinal and the Pope,

it was for the workmen
who made this possible.

It was all the sausage
you could possibly eat,

four enormous pork livers,
and what does this tell us

about Michelangelo beyond
the lovely anecdote that

he felt a kind of fraternal
solidarity with the workmen?

It tells us this.

That Michelangelo, through all his
life, valued what his contemporaries

called "Ars". Ars, means art,
in the old sense of hands-on skill.

In his case, of an almost sublime
gift for technical engineering,

for structural power.

Knowing exactly
what should go where.

But you weren't going to be
a great artist

unless you could also marry
that technical ability with what

Michelangelo's contemporaries called
"ingenio" -

the ability to conceive
a sublime idea.

And that heroic idea
survived even his successors

making the curve of the dome
much steeper.

Michelangelo died 89 years old,

but before he could see
the dome completed.

The Greek cross temple idea struck
later popes as altogether too pagan.

A big long nave was added,
the opposite of what Bromante

and Michelangelo had wanted.

But you still feel the essence
of his "ingenio" beneath that dome.

Rising 120 metres above the ground,
over 40 metres diameter,

the tallest dome
in the world, taller than

the dome of the Suleiman mosque,
taller than the Hagia Sophia,

The work of the man his biographers
called Il Divino.

The divine one.

No-one would have quite dared
to say that about Mimar Sinan.

But in Europe,

the cult of the superhero artist
listening to his own voice,

which is to say the echo of God,
rather than his patron,

had taken off.

Their lives
were now for the first time

since antiquity the subject
of page-turning biographies.

As fascinating, if not more so,
than those of saints and kings.

For, often,
they describe the work of sinners.

And among the gallery
of self-described geniuses,

no-one sinned quite like
the Florentine goldsmith

Benvenuto Cellini.

It was from house arrest for living
in sin with a boyfriend

who shopped him to the authorities
that Cellini wrote

his blood-soaked, chest beating
thriller of an autobiography

which, aside from a catalogue
of murders, prison escapes,

and gunfights,
was one long document of yearning

to be treated
as a true artist genius,

alongside his hero, Michelangelo.

Michelangelo knew Cellini
and, in fact,

on at least one occasion,
gave him a hearty endorsement,

but as the world's best goldsmith,

and, for Benvenuto,
that was not going to be enough.

Only a bona fide genius,
after all,

could have managed to turn
a golden salt cellar

into a witty erotic sculpture.

But the godly form of Poseidon
showed that Cellini

could make heroic figures
with the best of them.

In Florence,

the bronze to beat was Donatello's
heroine from scripture, Judith,

holding up the head
of the enemy general, Holofernes,

she'd just beheaded.

But Judith had been set up on the
Piazza Della Signoria,

in front of the seat
of Florence's government

to celebrate chasing
the Medici despots out of Florence.

So when, almost a century later,
Cosimo de' Medici became duke,

he wanted a statue which
would reverse all that,

a manly hero beheading
a female monster.

And Cellini, an alpha-male
who knew all about bloody killings,

seized his chance.

Donatello had cast Judith in pieces,

Cellini promised to do
the Perseus in one casting.

"Impossible," scoffed the duke.

"The liquid bronze won't reach
all those extremities."

"Watch me," said Cellini, who liked
talking back to his patrons.

Cellini was playing for the highest
stakes imaginable,

the casting of the Perseus was the
moment that was going to

transform him from a goldsmith,
a craftsman, a mere artisan,

to whom everybody condescended,
into an artist superhero -

the real thing.

Having set up everything just right,
suddenly as the melted bronze

was going to be poured, Cellini
falls deathly ill

of a terrible fever.

So sick, so ill,
he's sure he's going to die.

There's an incredible storm.

Wind, rain, the roof
is partly removed,

the cover of the furnace explodes.

And most fatally, the temperature of
the molten bronze starts to lower.

That word that nobody wants
to hear in a foundry - caking.

The premature coagulation
of the alloy starts to be set.

The assistants come running,
"maestro, maestro!"

Everything is going pear-shaped.

The bronze alloy will cool,
it won't run to all the extremities

of the mould, and you end up
with this little, kind of,

dwarfish homunculus.

So Cellini jumps off his deathbed
and gets every conceivable

kitchen utensil, plates, platters
all made of pewter -

they're thrown on the fire.

He's got his heat back.

The alloy flows through
the mould everywhere it should.

He has won the transformation
he so badly wanted.

And Cellini has a wonderful,
vainglorious sentence

for what happens.

He said, "I revived a corpse."

This is the mine-blowing masterpiece
the tourists don't notice,

as they're too busy doing selfies

with the copy of
Michelangelo's David nearby.

But if they did give it a minute or
two, they'd see Cellini's outrageous

miracle in bronze, hard metal
that somehow gushes hot blood

and writhes with snaky horror.

Perseus, head down,
armed raised in triumph

like some sports champion
with the ultimate trophy.

All the ancient
Perseuses and Medusas

contrasts between beauteous hero
and grotesque gorgon -

not here.

Cellini has the genius crazy
idea of making them interchangeably,

androgynously beautiful.

Boy-girl, girl-boy,
both looking down.

Even the hairdos aren't
actually that different -

tousled curls or writhing snakes.

Cellini is a sorcerer, an alchemist.

He's made hard metal sweat
with the exertion of killing.

He's turned that hot alloy
back into liquid,

the blood coursing through
the hero's body,

the blood pouring
from Medusa's sliced away neck.

And, remember, even dead,
her look could kill you.

So Cellini has one bit
of mischief to play out,

at the expense of his hero,
Michelangelo, no less -

positioning the sculpture
where it would seem it had caught

David's attention.

The petrifying gaze of Medusa turns
David into cold, lifeless stone.

Cellini got away with
his stupendous work only

because it flattered his Medici
patron's sense of self-importance.

The great days of Florence are gone,
but a show of grandstanding art

would postpone
insignificance indefinitely.

And for rising empires,

art and artists were indispensable
to the projection of their power.

And this was as true in Muslim Asia
as in Christian Europe.

The Mughal Empire in India
was a sponge for all the cultures

it inherited and admired.

And that tolerant,
curious openness to many influences,

east and west
under the Emperor Akbar

became a principal
of government.

When he and his descendants rebuilt
the old ruined Hindu city of Lahore,

they borrowed from Indian
temple style

and from
Persian architecture.

But most crucially, Akbar,
who had learned painting himself,

made art the mirror
of his civilisation.

"There are many that hate painting,"
Akbar said,

"but such men I dislike."

Akbar established workshops
of hundreds of artists,

great factories of royal culture
that dwarfed the modest studios

of western painters.

Mughal art drew on Indian epics,
Persian poetry, calligraphy

and profuse decoration,

but it quickly
developed its own style,

crowded with dashing incident,

courtly elegance and sometimes

under the influence of Western art

seen by Akbar,
a flair for naturalism.

Akbar himself, always at the centre
of the subject matter,

paid personal attention to the work,

regularly descending on workshops
and, to the terror of the artists,

promoting or demoting painters,

depending on how he liked
or disliked their latest work.

And though like all the generations
of Mughal emperors

and their successors,
he was embattled,

sometimes literally
with his son, Jahangir,

he bequeathed to him the sense
that the authority

of the Mughal Empire
would be built on art

as much as government
and military power.

It would be seen to
contemporaries and posterity

above all as a civilisation.

Jahangir didn't really
need to be told by his father

how important art was.

In his own right,
he was the most intellectually

and aesthetically
driven of the whole dynasty.

Well, this is one of the great
masterpieces of Mughal painting.

But it's also
an extraordinary masterpiece

of imperial self-congratulation,

even by the standards
of the World's Seizer,

that's what Jahangir's name means,
the title he gave to itself.

He's encircled with a golden halo
that's the size of a small planet,

and it's giving off these
extraordinarily intense

golden glimmer,

so fierce that one of the little
putti, one of the cupids,

who's been flown in directly
from European art,

has to cover his eyes
with his hands

lest his eyeballs be
scalded by the radiation

of Jahangir's magnificence.

The slightly implausible conceit
of the painting is that Jahangir

prefers the company of a saintly
Muslim holy man to worldly rulers.

The Sufi sheikh himself
has been painted

with wonderful fustian simplicity -

a brown coat,
perfect candyfloss whiskers there.

He's receiving a present from
the hands of Jahangir himself,

but of course the hands
don't actually touch.

And there is something else going on
in in this extraordinary painting.

It's also a picture about
the competition between Mughal art

and European art,

between East and West.

There's an Ottoman sultan
who's shown with the Turkish turban

and he's looking respectfully
in the direction of Jahangir,

but most significant is that the
gesture he's making with his hands,

like that, are the gesture
of Indian deferential respect.

No Turk would ever have done that.

But if the Ottoman
sultan is belittled

by Jahangir's court painter,

it says nothing compared to what
happens to King James I of England,

who is placed below the
emperor's feet,

wearing a look of what can only
be described as sour resentment

at his low place
in the pecking order.

And the artist who's doing
this and who was enjoying it all,

has an exquisite self-portrait
at the bottom of the painting.

His name is Bichitra. He's a Hindu,
we know that by the saffron robe.

And it's a beautiful,
beautiful profile self-portrait.

Exquisite details of the beard,
of the turban,

of his painterly hand,

almost as refined as the technique
he's used for the emperor himself.

In fact, this is a doubly
reflective self-portrait -

a miniature of a miniature,

the one Bichitra is holding
and which tells us everything

about the ambiguous
status of the Mughal artist.

There are the signs of favour -

an elephant and two horses which the
emperor has given his painter

but on an understood condition.

Ultimately for all that he's
slipstreaming behind the power

and the glory of Jahangir,
he knows his place

and that's defined by
the last detail in that tiny

frame of him kneeling,
prostrating himself

at the feet of the
Seizure of the World.

And look where he is.

He has literally backed
himself into a corner.

For when all is said and done,

these intricate beautiful
paintings are miniatures,

book illustrations contained within
the framing page,

and their enjoyment
confined to the emperor,

his court and anyone
he sought to impress.

Only once, albeit spectacularly,

did Jahangir make art visible
to all of his subjects.

On the outer wall of Lahore Fort,
Jahangir set a vast display

of mosaic tiles, creating
the biggest mural in the world.

70 metres high and 450 metres long.

Kashi Kari - the name for this
mosaic technique came from Persia,

but as with all Mughal art,
it's a glorious hybrid.

There are angels from Europe,

Chinese dragons,

royal hunts
and epic battles.

History, mythology,
birds and beasts,

the whole world Jahangir
revelled in is on display.

In effect, it's a
huge vertical book,

the one truly open book in all of
Mughal art.

Readable by all Jahangir's subjects
passing through the gates

of Lahore Fort.

Or, is it?

Despite the sheer
boldness of the gesture,

the link forged between
ruler and subjects

is undermined
by vertical remoteness.

As your eye travels up,
the brilliant pages

swim in and out of vision

until they disappear
into the great city.

Ultimately, even the
experimentally-minded Jahangir

couldn't conceive of public art
that was truly accessible

to his subjects.

The Mughals with their
fastidious connoisseurship

could barely have
imagined the revolution

in looking that was
unfolding in Western art.

By the 17th century,

European images were busy exploding

through any kind
of containing frame.

The body slammed the beholder
with great, meaty,

muscular life-size or larger
figures, all deployed by artists who

re-wrote the rules about decorum
or threw them away altogether.

And this liberation of the senses
began in the place you'd

least expect, the Rome that had
been remade by Michelangelo

and the Counter-Reformation popes.

There came a point
when the Roman Church

would be
a victim of its own success.

All that wealth, all that power,
the biggest basilica

with the biggest dome in the world,

and you know that sooner or later,
someone's going to come along

and say, "Remember the simplicity
of Christ."

"Remember Christ's mission
to teach and preach to the poor."

And then there'd be a second great
point that the whole

idea of the Christian message
is that the compassion of God

lay in giving his own son
the form of human flesh and blood.

Now, you put those two things
together,

poverty and a physical presence
of flesh and blood,

and you know there
has to be a new kind of art.

Only problem is,
nobody could do that

since the death
of Michelangelo,

and then along comes
a second Michelangelo.

We shouldn't get carried away,
but isn't it striking that the

rule breakers
in art were often law breakers?

Like Cellini,
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

was a bisexual murderer
with major anger management issues,

foul-mouthed, short fused,
in and out of jail.

But if he acted like a devil,
he painted like an angel.

And patrons who suddenly wanted
startlingly raw

realistic images of ordinary people,
many of them poor,

to persuade themselves they were
reviving Christ's gospel to the

humble, couldn't get enough of him.

This is the church
of Sant'Agostino in Rome

and this just may
be my favourite Caravaggio,

the Madonna of Loreto.

Even by the standards
of Christian legends,

this one is a bit of a stretch.

To escape destruction
in the 13th century,

the House of the Virgin
was supposed to have been

airlifted out of the Holy Land,
touching down in the Italian

town of Loreto, where it became
a place of pilgrimage.

Every so often, the Virgin herself
would show up for the pilgrims.

But this is no provincial scene,
is it?

Its appealing doorway
in the backstreets of Rome,

the doorstep drama is lit
by a great wash of light.

But the reason why
one of the Caravaggio's critics

said the painting caused a great
"schiamazzo", a cackle,

was because so much flesh
was on display.

This is a barefoot Madonna,
not the spun sugar version

of conventional painting,
but of real-life body,

probably Caravaggio's girlfriend.

And the adoration dwells
on that sumptuous form -

the heavy lids,
the glossy ropes of hair.

And the naked Christ Child is
a squirmy bambino, fat with pasta.

And the poor pilgrim couple
who kneel before them

are made bodily present too -

that big rump of the man,

those calloused
feet from the long walk.

As in all the greatest Caravaggio's,
these big fleshy figures

are uncomfortably,
almost disturbingly, close to us.

Caravaggio has broken right
through the fourth wall

and he's done it in the name of
making the Christian message true.

By which he means physically true.

We don't get a kind of remote
heavenly apparition that's granted

to us by the intercession
of some priest.

No, we are physically in the company
of the Madonna and Child,

just as much as if we are walking
down the street and look round

and there they are,
standing in a doorway.

And this, of course, is
a breach in every kind of decorum,

social as well as aesthetic.

But breaking rules was what
this generation of Western artists

was all about.

And the closer they got both
to God and to kings,

paradoxically, the more freedoms
they claimed.

And one of the most spectacular
of those rule breakers was a woman

in her 40s
when she painted this in England -

Artemisia Gentileschi.

Well, I love the fact that this
extraordinary picture is in the

Royal Collection because in its way
it too is a royal proclamation.

If artists of this generation made
the claim that they were sovereigns

of the realm of art, this picture
does something much more ambitious.

It says that claim was not
only for men,

women, too, can be sovereigns
of painting.

Only a woman could have done
this particular painting

as a combination of a self-portrait
and the allegory of painting.

And the allegory comes from
a book written by a man

called Cesare Ripa.

He says the image of painting
should have black hair, should be

slightly dishevelled with a passion
and engagement of painting.

Painting should wear a gold
chain round her neck...

There you see the gold chain.

..with a mask at the end of it
indicating imitation or mimicry.

She should hold a brush in one hand
and a palate in the other.

And Artemisia does all that,

but there's one detail that is
missing.

It's there in what Ripa says
the allegory of painting should be

and it's a bandage or a gag which
is going to go around the mouth,

because painting doesn't speak.

Now, men, of course, thought women
shouldn't speak,

certainly until they were spoken to.

But Artemisia Gentileschi,
who had been raped

by one of her father's
assistants the age of 18,

was determined that
nobody was going to shut her up,

either in life or in her work.

And what she does here is of
course liberate the figure

from painting to a kind of
conventional stereotype,

the stereotype in Ripa's book,

and turn it into something like
a living physical force.

Look at the twist of her body.

The twist of her body
is so that she can paint.

And what she's painting is
the painting we're looking at.

The whole thing is unapologetic.

"Look at me, I'm a professional.

"I'm in the business,
I'm in the throes of creativity

"and what is wrong with that?"

Artemisia's breakthrough
self-portrait was bought

by none other than King Charles I,
that great stickler for protocol

but also a great lover of art.

And there was no court in Europe
more obsessed with protocol

than that of Philip IV in Spain.

But right at the heart of that court
was the greatest of artistic

freethinkers, Diego Velazquez.

As official painter to the king,
Velazquez produced

images of the royals on demand,

though always with unprecedented
sparkling naturalism -

the human showing through
the fancy dress.

And on one occasion at least,
despite,

or maybe because of the
strength of his position,

he committed an extraordinary
act of painterly lese-majeste.

Towards the end of his career
in 1656,

Velazquez he produced a picture,
this one, Las Meninas,

The Maids Of Honour, which
more than any other before or since

stakes the most ambitious claim
for the power of art and the artist.

It's a painting which
reverses all the usual

expectations of the relationship
between patron and artist.

In this picture, it is the painter
thoughtfully looking at us

who is truly sovereign.

Anyone who comes into the presence
of this masterpiece,

or as it really feels,
steps across the threshold

of that huge work,
feels him or herself

uncannily in presence of all
the characters who populate it.

That thoughtful painter,
the little princess,

her maids of honour,

the dwarfs,

even that slumbering dog.

It is an absolute triumph
of illusionistic painting.

Something else as well...

..Velazquez is the most
cerebral artist of his generation

and this is a huge brainteaser.

There's a giant in the room
and it's that epic sized canvas

but what's on it?

A painting of the little princess,

or of Philip VI
and his queen?

Is that mirror showing
a reflection of the royal couple

painted on Velazquez's canvas?

Or the real king and queen who
are actually present in the room?

Is the sudden attentiveness
the beginnings of a curtsy on the

part of the maid because the royal
couple have come into the studio...

..or are just departing?

It's full of games that play
with the mind,

it's full of complicated layers
of meaning,

all of which build into a meditation
on which it is to paint.

And they are so fiendishly
ingenious that they have challenged

generation after generation
of writers and commentators

and artists to nail its ultimate
meaning. And do you know?

I don't think anyone has yet
quite got to the bottom of it.

But if presumptuously I were to
tell you in a sentence

what I think it's about,

I think it's about
who or what, in every sense,

controls the way we look.

The look we put on
when we know we're being watched,

our body language when we suddenly
have to defer to authority,

the concentrated look of the
artist glancing from subject

to picture and back again.

There's really only one sovereign
of staring here

and it's not the king.

He only exists in the picture
courtesy of the painter.

The royal ego is shrunk and
contained inside that small frame

at the back of the room.

A reversal of roles that
was provocative in he West

and inconceivable in he East,

where anything so cheeky would
get you in the deepest trouble.

And taking liberties
with conventions didn't stop

when monarchs went
missing from the picture.

The Dutch Republic fought Spain to
a standstill to secure its freedom.

But independence often
goes along with civic myths

and in Holland, the rich
burgers of Amsterdam like to portray

themselves as vigilant
militia companies,

ready at the drop of a hat
to go off to war.

Though, when they commissioned group
portraits, what they actually

wanted for their money
was just a bunch of likenesses.

And if there were a lot of them,
the artist elasticated the format

accordingly to get everyone in.

But then there was Rembrandt.

And what he thought his militia
patrons might like more than

a collection of the overdressed
was an action portrait of an ethos.

The actual title of the picture is

The March Out Of The Company Of
Frans Banning Cocq

and, boy, are they marching.

They're on the point
of beginning that march

and the idea of this painting
is, above all, energy.

Dynamism, vitality, that's what
Rembrandt wanted to celebrate

in Amsterdam.

It is propulsive. It moves through
that frame into our own space.

Rembrandt has used his entire
box of tricks to make this

feel like a moving image,
like a movie, in fact.

If you look at the kind
of foreshortened hand,

the order that's being given
is happening in his body language.

Look at the foreshortened spear.

You can see his rather
glamorously dressed lieutenant

in that gorgeous yellow coat

is just on the point of moving
as well.

Everything is coming at us.

And it also has a soundtrack.

Everything is exploding.

SHOUTING

A gun is being fired.
GUNSHOTS

A drum is being beaten.
DRUM ROLLS

A dog is barking.
DOG BARKS

Take a look at Frans Banning Cocq's
perfect little mouth

and it's open.
He is giving that order.

A little girl,
maybe the mascot of the company,

is running into the brilliant light.

Some people have trouble with this
painting and have thought

of it for centuries
as a kind of garish chaos,

too much, too much going on.

But Rembrandt being Rembrandt,
he stops just this side of chaos.

That amidst this
extraordinary kind of melee

is an incredibly strong
compositional armature

and it's an armature
of two parallel lines.

One angle of the parallelogram
is made by that rhythm of the lines,

of the spear, the gun,
the partisan.

On the other hand, it's made
by the baton of the captain,

the musket, the gorgeous flag
of the Kloveniers.

And if you think about it, those
two lines converge at an arrowhead

and the arrowhead
appropriately is the commander.

The Night Watch is a perfect
miracle of dynamism

and discipline together.

And that's the living ethos that
Rembrandt is trying to communicate.

In his boiling brain,

he reckons he's doing
the overstuffed patricians a favour.

They no longer
pose and preen, they act.

And the fact that it's a painting
about freedom with order

makes it an extraordinary moment,
not just in the history

of painting, but it's a moment
in the history of civilisation, too.

Amsterdam is beating
not only the drum,

but its own chest, saying,

"We can be free, but we are
also strong and disciplined."

This is the visual declaration
of republican liberty.

Watch out, art,
but watch out, the world.

Nothing, you'd suppose, could be
further from the unleashed energy

that produced the Night Watch
than the controlled refinement

of Indian Mughal art.

But Rembrandt, who had
a lifelong fascination

with non-European cultures,
was in love with them.

In the 1650s he began to draw
his version of miniatures,

which had found their way
to Amsterdam probably as copies

through he East India Company.

Rembrandt responded to the
miniatures with his own graceful

pen and ink variations,
all rich with what he loved best -

human interest.

A group of Sufi sheiks.

The bond between father and son,

a favourite Rembrandt theme.

Some of the miniatures
he copied still exist

and they make a fascinating contrast

with Rembrandt's versions.

This is a painting of the Emperors
Akbar and Jahangir.

Rembrandt keeps the profile,

but ditches the formalism
for humane naturalism,

the rulers become characters.

Father and son look each other
in the eye

as Jahangir hands Akbar a book.

A Mughal portrait of Jahangir's
son, Shah Jahan On Horseback,

is still and poised.

But Rembrandt adds movement
and action.

What Rembrandt's sketches show

is that the tide of artistic
inspiration also flowed

from East to West.

In the end, Rembrandt was
a stay-at-home cultural traveller.

But what might he have made
of the real thing?

Of the marbled perfection of Agra?

Each building, a dialogue
between curve and straight line.

A civilisation as painterly
in its architecture as in its art.

Another extraordinary dome.

A marble monument to love,

20 years in the making.

The tribute of
the Emperor Shah Jahan

for his dead wife Mumtaz Mahal.

Grief and yearning translated
into architectural poetry.

While European art was fizzing
with experiment,

the Mughal's perfected
royal elegies crafted in stone.

This building,
the I'timad-ud-Daulah,

is the first of their
marble mausoleums

build a decade before the Taj Mahal.

Some claim it's the most perfect
building in India

and I think they may be right.

It too was a work of devotion,

but this time designed
by a cultivated woman,

Jahangir's favourite wife,
Nur Jahan.

She was the child of
a Persian father, Mirza Beg,

Jahangir's closest adviser.

When he died,
Nur Jahan built a tomb for him

as handsome as any emperor's.

And looking at it,
you would say her creation

is about as perfect
as anything

the hand of man can accomplish.

And then you go inside and see this.

Death in a jewel box.

The chilly funereal marble warmed
by an uncountable myriad of gems.

Encrusted in glowing paint,
the ceiling burns.

And on the walls, in a technique
borrowed from Italy

of planed-down jewels,
a paradise garden.

There are images of flowers
designed so naturalistically,

so scientifically, that they could
have come straight from the pages

of one of that endlessly curious
Jahangir's great books.

Here in the presence of the dead,
we have an eternal springtime.

And that perhaps is both
its glory and its limitation.

The mausoleum is like a page from
one of Jahangir's picture books.

And like those books,
it's private and contained.

Every hint of the uneven
roughness of life is smoothed away.

It couldn't be more different
from European art,

with its earthy,
subversive humanity,

the force of individual genius
coming at you.

How different that is

from the anonymous serenity
of this royal tomb,

a serenity that would
all too soon be shattered.

Out there, the western hurly-burly
is getting ready to make

terrible mischief, to smash its way
into the domed heavenly vault,

to stick its bloody,
great brutal boots

right into the paradise garden.

It'll make an empire based on
machines, money and muskets.

And then, slowly but surely,

the Mughal Empire
will disappear entirely

inside its courtly refinement,

becoming inexorably
just a cultural ornament.

So, after centuries
of extraordinary flowering,

did the Eastern Renaissance
just simply wither away?

Not quite.

Because these delicate blooms
and glowing jewels did survive.

They reappeared in
what Europeans wore on their bodies

and how they decorated their homes.

Mughal domes appeared in Brighton.

Western art critics
called that beauty decorative

to distinguish it from
pictures they put in frames -

what they considered "real art".

But it was in he East that
the ancient meaning of art as craft

was preserved
in all its majestic splendour -

and still is - because if the work
of art is to intensify

our delight
in the beauty of the world,

and to do so with pattern
and colour, the music of the eye,

then what you see here
was not an ending,

but another vibrant beginning.

The Open University has produced
a free poster that explores

the history of different
civilisations through artefacts.

To order your free copy,
please call...

..or go to the address on screen

and follow the links
for the Open University.