Think of the Gothic cathedral and you think of the austerity of stone.
Rows of saints and angels ushering the righteous into heaven
and thrusting the damned into the jaws of hell.
But in some cathedral towns,
what the flocks of the faithful actually saw
as they approached the doors of their great church...
..was this.
A miracle.
Stone transformed by being painted all the colours of the rainbow.
The teeming cast of the Gospel story robed in scarlet,
gold and the azure blue of heaven.
"Let there be light," the Creator had said.
And so when you walked through those heavenly gates,
you were not plunged into darkness,
you were lifted into the dazzling light of God.
When a pilgrim came through the doors
of the medieval Gothic cathedral, a miracle immediately happened.
The laws of gravity were suspended.
Everything, the whole of your sensibilities,
were transported upwards.
Everything is about light.
The light of the Gospel, the light of the divine force
of the Creator, so that the whole of the architectural design
was meant to optimise that flood of heavenly coloured light.
Shining down on you in Chartres Cathedral
were the stories of the Bible.
You didn't need to be literate to be drawn into the sacred epic
by the blaze of colour.
Included in the story were the people themselves.
The wheelwrights and the water carriers,
the butchers and bakers with their boule of bread.
Now, medieval man believed that jewels, rubies, sapphires,
topazes, had the power not just to concentrate brilliance
but actually emit light, and they had another power too.
They could transport you from your earthly existence
into that extraordinary immaterial world of heaven.
So that all this stained glass were meant to be immense
expanses of jewel-like radiance.
So when you were in here, you got a glimpse of paradise.
Visions of paradise through instinctive, joy-giving colour,
easily accessible to everyone,
was not exclusive to the Christian Church.
For centuries, colour as the symbol of the divine was an idea common
to different civilisations across the globe.
But at the birth of the modern age,
when religion began to lose its grip on mass belief,
then a new generation of artists would reinvent
the idea of divine illumination.
But when the smoke of chimneys and the fog of war
threatened to cast everything into the dark,
was it even possible to deliver a glimpse of salvation
in glowing, living colour?
In the centuries following Chartres,
there was one place in Europe where the luminous Gothic
lived on most radiantly.
That was Venice, floating on the shimmering surface of its lagoon.
The city had grown rich by facing east.
First to the Byzantine Empire, whose glittering mosaics
and iridescent silks it had plundered and copied.
And then to the Islamic world, whose woven rugs,
jewels and precious pigments it had brought to Europe.
Here, surrounded by the luxuries of their world,
the Venetians made the case for an art built with blocks
of colour that challenge the more sober ideals
of the Renaissance in Florence.
For Renaissance theorists, it was the idea
which made art a lofty, noble practice,
and you got the idea from drawing classical models,
especially sculpture.
That drawn idea then dictated composition
and it was what distinguished high art from the low, decorative stuff -
jewellery, textiles, ornaments for the house and body.
And according to this theory of design, drawing always came first.
And then you filled in those shapes with colour.
Well, the champions of colour said, they would say that, wouldn't they?
Because they are all Florentines and Romans
obsessed with antique ruins,
and for them, colour is just cheap and cheerful.
It's the gaudy entertainment for the masses.
But we are Venetians
and we know that colour can model composition
quite as effectively as the drawn line.
They reproach us for being too much
in love with fabric and with jewellery.
Not only do we not apologise for that, we embrace it,
because perhaps at the heart of what we do
is the translation of gem-like radiance into brilliance on canvas.
The first great colourist to set Venetian art on this path
and to do it with a dazzling luminousness of oils on wood
was Giovanni Bellini.
In his masterpiece, The Sacred Conversation,
in the church of San Zaccaria,
Bellini shows he can do Renaissance perspective to perfection
but it's the intensity of the saturated colours
that delivers what Bellini really wants,
harmony experienced physically,
so that the figures, even these very still ones, seem naturally alive.
Bellini has thought about how different colour tones
work with each other.
St Peter's golden ochre on the left
balanced with St Jerome's vermilion on the right.
St Catherine's rose and green with St Lucy's vision of blue and gold.
And in the centre, the Virgin and Child swathed in ultramarine,
a pigment so precious that it was most often reserved for the Madonna.
If Bellini's colour music pulls you into a devotional trance,
his pupil Titian would use that same glow of colour to flatter
the self-admiring world of the elite.
Painted when Titian was in his 20s,
this isn't just a portrait of a Venetian noble,
but a painterly mission statement.
There, outrageously front and centre,
painted in ultramarine mixed with some rose and white
is a waterfall sleeve of Venetian colour drowning classical stone.
Ten years later, Titian would unleash this same colour
with even fuller force in his stupendous masterpiece
Bacchus And Ariadne.
It's a moment of supercharged romantic voltage,
the helpless rush of unexpected love
that takes place in a dancing twist of passion.
Ariadne, abandoned by her lover, Perseus, spins round
to lock eyes with the god of wine,
who launches himself from his chariot, jet-propelled by desire.
And it's a picture that is constructed out of these
two different dynamics of colour.
Bacchus's riotous gang are coming from these earthy
green, brown colours of the woods on the right
and it's all moving towards this beautiful limpid blue area
in which this tragic heroine is standing there
waiting for the touch of Bacchus's love.
On one side, the profane colours of animal energy and sexual love.
Titian's fleshy, blushing naturalism on full display.
On the other, the colour of the heavens
where Ariadne will be transformed into a constellation of stars.
It's an irony, I suppose, that Venice,
generally thought to be the most mercenary and materialist
of all cultures
thought that its art was above all spiritual.
That it was about looks, about gospel radiance,
about the sheer weightlessness of saturated colour.
Even the most pure and dazzling marble kept you on the ground,
but surrender to colour, and you took off.
You ascended into the dizzy imperium of the painterly paradise.
The Venetian style had a good run
but by the end of the 17th century,
its intoxication with colour and the dancing line
came to seem too in love with pleasure
for an age that had become dominated by heavyweight empires.
Now, when grandiose patrons built their baroque mega-palaces,
they wanted sober classicism to project their omnipotent power.
But there was one place,
the palace of a prince-bishop in southern Germany,
where the Venetian magic with light and air
had one last performance to deliver.
The largest ceiling fresco ever painted.
Painted in the 1750s by the Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo,
it's a version of Apollo the sun god
illuminating the four continents of the world.
It's a standard baroque subject,
but here Tiepolo uses colour and movement
to create something revolutionary.
Impossible to take in all at once,
he's designed it to unfold as you ascend the staircase.
And it works in the opposite way from what you would expect.
If at first you are pulled into the golden light of heaven,
the higher you climb, the more you are brought down to earth.
Until you come face-to-face not with the divine
but with all the colours of the human world.
Tiepolo really reinvents what it means to look at a painting,
what a painting is.
You can walk all around this space, he wants you to do it.
The figures move, they're endlessly animated.
This is a world in motion.
It is a commotion of figures.
It's almost as though he anticipates movie directors
in his insistence that everything floats, everything is elastic,
and there's a word for that, and that word is freedom.
This has to be one of the most stupendous demonstrations
of the spectacular power of painting.
This is meaty, earthy, sweaty humanity.
We are in the company of these figures
and almost none of them are looking at us.
I don't think there's any other work in all of European art
where we see so many backs. Backs of bodies, backs of heads.
Everybody is oblivious to our presence.
They're just getting on with what they have to do.
The musicians are playing, the merchants are making money,
and this sense of coming across a world
gives us the feeling that this is all real.
And you put those two qualities together, Tiepolo,
his astonishing, exhilarating freedom
and his instinct for the earthiness of human life
translated into painting,
and you know you have something that's radically fresh.
And the more you look, the more subversive it becomes.
In Tiepolo's anthem to all the flora and fauna of the world,
Christianity has been reduced to two insignificant figures
carrying a cross,
and the ruling prince-bishop of Wurzburg
into just an image of an image, being carried off into the clouds.
Tiepolo's world of motion and light
no longer belongs to rulers or gods but to us.
If in Europe, Tiepolo's colour drama was taking art away
from a world of Christian devotion and into the material world
of goods and men, then at the far end of European trade routes,
another culture's rapturous embrace of colour
would take it increasingly into the mystical and the divine.
This is the ancient Hindu festival of Holi.
One of the most sacred festivals in the Indian calendar.
Every spring, revellers drown themselves in clouds of pure pigment
as a symbol of the joyous resurgence of life.
In the early 18th century,
this festival became the subject of a striking set of images
commissioned by the Maharaja of Jodhpur.
In them, colour becomes the symbol of karma,
sensory and sexual pleasure,
which in Hindu faith
was one of the essential sacred goals of human life.
In the 1770s, the paintings
then left the world of courtly pleasure behind
to illustrate the ancient tales of the Hindu epics.
The people's stories and adventures of the Hindu gods.
Designed to be held up at court to illustrate the epic poems
read alongside them, these immersive images drew their inspiration
from the folk art of the people.
Together with the stylisation of line,
these pictures seethe with fantastic animation.
Literally the dynamic life of animals,
and to contain all these rollicking adventures,
the format of the paintings had now to be a landscape,
a landscape of dream and magic.
They had this great bolt of intense, radiant colour,
but above all, these pictures become, like the epics themselves,
massively populated, casts of thousands
of maidens, of rabbits, of flocks of deer and armies of monkeys.
There are elephants running under the great rolling clouds
of the monsoon.
These aren't realistic landscapes, of course.
Here, we are in the dreamscape storyland of the Hindu epics
where gods like Rama come in sacred blue.
And where fantasy colours convey the verdant wonders of nature.
By the 1820s, both courtly playtime
and epic animation have been left behind.
In this image, one artist used colour to illustrate
nothing less than the metaphysics of the universe.
Depicting it not as a black hole
but as sheets of shimmering gold.
This is the nothing, the absolute of Hindu metaphysics,
out of which eventually the world will be created,
so the first panel is that nothing and yet there is something,
because you can see the brush strokes there
and the brush strokes give a sense of the pulse of the ether.
It's not just emptiness, it's not just absence at all.
And then the second panel, we have the Mahasiddha,
the nearly perfect person,
in whom consciousness is dawning,
the second stage of the great moment of primordial creation.
And this exquisitely painted figure is holding a little flower
so that the world is starting to bud and bloom.
And in the third panel,
finally the physical material of the world resolves
into earthly matter, which is silver,
so all we have are silver and gold.
Now, nothing like this had ever been seen before in Indian painting.
Actually, nothing like it had been seen before
in all of the history of art.
What we've got here is the nearest visualisation you can get to
of a trance.
If in India colour was seen as the secret source of the divine energy
from which all life flowed, in 18th-century Europe,
the loss of faith in a divinely ordered world
would lead one painter from the light into the dark.
In 1788, the Spanish court painter Francisco de Goya painted this,
the annual festival of San Isidro,
Madrid's patron saint.
Airy with colour and light, it's an exercise in that
quintessentially 18th-century occupation,
the pursuit of happiness.
The heaviness of church and state are banished to the horizon above
while the people and their pets are dancing and drinking below.
Night would never fall, but it did.
30 years later, Goya painted the same scene, the same day,
but the ordered world is now disordered,
dancing instead to the tune of a madman on a discordant guitar.
Someone has turned the lights out.
In place of all that brightness and light, the festival of San Isidro,
we have this, the sky has turned to the colour of tar pitch sludge.
In the place of liveliness we have a rolling freak show here,
a great clump of the gibbering, the psychotic, the unhinged,
glassy eyed, their mouths open.
In a corner of the painting there is a figure seen in profile
who seems to sum up everything that's going on in Goya's head.
The figure has an open mouth
and that open mouth seems to be emitting a terrible howl of pain.
So how did Goya get from colour and life
to this particular pit of sorrow?
The clue is in the painting.
There, in the centre of the clump of the crazed
is the unmistakable face of Napoleon.
The author of all this woe.
Between 1810 and 1820, Goya witnessed the violence
unleashed by Napoleon's invasion of Spain.
Here, in graphic detail are the unspeakable crimes
triggered by the French invasion
and prolonged by the civil wars that pitted Goya's beloved liberals
against the reactionary forces of church and state.
In the place of colour and light,
the horrors of war are laid bare
in scratched images of black and white.
And in his 70s, Goya came to paint his Black Paintings.
14 images daubed directly onto the walls of his home.
The Black Paintings seem to me to be an endgame for Goya,
not just in his own life and career in his 70s,
but also his feeling about an endgame for art,
the art that aspired through beauty
to ennoble the spirit of civilisation.
One of the most terrifying of all these paintings,
perhaps the most famous one,
shows Saturn devouring one of his children.
That's what it's come to.
The huge tradition of classical mythology
reduced to a mad, antic, capering monster
chewing on the stump of a small body,
but look at that body.
Not a child at all.
It's the body miniaturised of a female nude.
Two millennia of looking at the nude,
of seeing it as a symbol of art's perfection
is reduced to this horrifying image
of sadistic cruelty.
In one of the paintings, he puts the lights back on.
We're able to see something, but what is it we're seeing?
The light is given to us to reveal another kind of horror.
These two huge peasant-like figures
beating the living daylights out of each other.
Blood is streaming down the head of one of them,
even as they sink deeper and deeper into a kind of sandy quagmire.
This is what Spain has become.
Endless, relentless, mutual slaughter.
Now, all these monsters and horrors and demons and dragons
of course had appeared all over European art before,
but where had they appeared?
They'd appeared in images of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse,
and they were always balanced by a sense of the optimism of salvation.
But Goya has come to the conclusion that God is absent without leave
and there's one painting, which in a sense is least likely
to have that horrifyingly pessimistic eloquence, but it does.
There are no figures, there's just a dog, a mutt.
But for this dog, the master is gone,
dead, slaughtered, missing.
He's no longer going to be fed.
He's simply faced with drowning
inside this formless brown vacuum.
It's all come down to this, then.
A dog without a master.
Spain without its God.
Humanity absolutely without civilisation.
Eventually, a new generation of Western artist
would put colour back into European art.
But their inspiration would come from another culture
on the other side of the world - Japan.
After a century of civil war,
Japan's capital had been moved to Edo, now modern Tokyo.
And by 1700, it had become the world's largest city,
home to over one million people.
Driving the city's spectacular growth
had been a new class of hardworking merchants
who'd grown rich supplying luxuries to the aristocratic elite.
But in Japan's strictly hierarchical society, it was unthinkable
that mere businessmen could dream of a share of power.
Instead, they created a new urban culture of their own.
They were a very clubbable lot.
They wanted poetry, haiku-reciting societies.
They wanted the kabuki theatre. They wanted music.
They wanted comedy clubs, and they got them.
And when you have all that, what's the next thing that comes along?
Of course, a new kind of art.
This art would take the form of an ancient Japanese craft -
the wood block print,
which, from the 1760s,
became available in over ten layers of blazing colour.
Made by a community of artisans, from artists and publishers
to woodcarvers and colour printers, this was mass-produced art.
Not for rulers or religion, but for the people.
Sold on every street corner
for the price of a double helping of noodles,
what came with it was a shot of pure metropolitan pleasure.
These prints, glowing with this intense, spectacular colour,
are what we think about when we think about the greatest
things that Japanese art ever produced.
This is not an art made by some starchy official academy
laying down rules.
No, this, essentially, was generated spontaneously
by the hungry consumerism of a bustling city like Edo,
and it wanted to be entertained.
And these pictures had to play their part.
They were called ukiyo-e, after "uki", meaning both floating,
but also "uki uki", excited or feeling bouncy.
And their subjects were Edo's ukiyo,
its licensed entertainment districts.
Here were the stars of the kabuki stage.
Here, too, were the city's most famous showgirls
and courtesans wearing the latest fashions.
These prints were like Playboy meets Vogue,
and they put you in the front row of the catwalk.
And then, of course, there was sex.
Awaiting those who could afford it was the Yoshiwara pleasure district,
and there, ready to make the most well-heeled clients happy,
were the exquisite oiran courtesans.
These women became immortalised in pornography.
Which, at its most graphically inventive,
managed also to be genuinely beautiful.
Designed for women as well as for men, it was called shunga -
literally, spring pictures.
Though you won't find much in the way of daffodils here.
And if they were surprisingly egalitarian
in their depictions of male and female pleasure,
their beauty also papered over the exploited lives
many of these women unquestionably led.
But it's not all hard-core.
Some of the most beautiful of these images of love
are very delicate and tender.
Passion indicated by the curl of toes or the touch of hands,
or by the nape of a woman's neck.
And we feel almost as though we're in the room.
And that happens because of what woodcuts are.
They can't model light and shade very well.
But what they can do with these swooping and serpentine lines
filled with this extraordinary glowing colour
is make us dive right into this lovely,
amorous universe they present.
This was an art everybody could afford that gave you pleasure.
And if it's all a fantasy, so, what's wrong with that?
We can all use a fantasy now and then.
By the 1830s, coinciding with a boom in domestic tourism,
Edo's printmakers expanded their subject matter to include
the most famous vistas in the Japanese landscape.
The artist behind the shift was Katsushika Hokusai,
who, for a time, at the age of 70,
turned his eye almost exclusively to a single landmark.
Japan's most sacred mountain.
In his 36 views of Mount Fuji,
Hokusai pitted the restless working lives of Japan's common people
against the ever-present cone of the mountain.
Close-up and far off, in every season
and under every condition of weather and light.
Combining brilliant colour with a breathtakingly
experimental manipulation of space,
Hokusai created some of the most thrilling images
in the history of art.
And here is the masterpiece.
This is about as perfect a picture as any mortal would ever make.
If my hand is shaking a bit here,
it's because this is the original thing.
The colours are so intense, it's so fresh, it's so clean.
And this heroic, epic figure
pulling on the line as these stylised waves
roll towards him with Mount Fuji all the time there as a guardian.
You feel, if you want to talk about where modern art begins,
it begins right here in Edo.
Because nature has been translated
as if into a different language, into pattern, into abstract design.
You could cut the painting there
and this would be the most beautiful abstract painting you'd ever see.
It's one of the excitements in one's life, really,
to be able to hold something so close
to its precious moment of creation.
But these images also contained a deeper, more spiritual message.
For Hokusai, a devout Buddhist,
Mount Fuji was not just a sacred mountain,
a source of water and life,
but a talisman of immortality.
So his brilliantly-coloured images weren't just postcards
for Edo city-dwellers escaping the daily grind,
but revelations of the spirituality embedded in the landscape.
An antidote to the crushing materialism of modern city life.
This marriage, made with colour
between the worldly and the unworldly,
was destined for export to a society badly in need of that radiance.
Within just a decade of Japan's opening up to the West in 1853,
Japanese prints were avidly collected by a group of artists
at the vanguard of their own artistic revolution.
Not least by Claude Monet,
whose collection of 231 prints
can still be seen covering the walls of his house.
What Monet and his fellow Impressionists wanted
was to reinvent the process of seeing.
To paint not objects in light, but the light itself.
And that wasn't just scientific ambition.
Trapping the radiance would be an illumination for millions
increasingly caught in urban gloom.
What they saw in Japanese art was what they had wanted,
what they dreamed of.
What they were attempting to build up confidence to do.
And it was a huge validation.
It was a kind of vote of confidence in their own instincts
about what modern art could do.
Modern art would be, just as the Japanese artists who produced it,
brilliantly, brilliantly coloured.
Modern art would do dizzying things with space.
Those cropped mountains, the gigantic panoramas.
That was another cue to the way you could reshape space
and depth to overthrow the old rules of perspective.
Thirdly, and very, very important, was the overspill,
it was so conspicuous in Japanese prints,
between the country and the town.
They all looked around at the suburbs of Paris,
and that was happening to them.
You could paint a rural and an urban population, workers,
tourists looking at Mount Fuji, in the same way.
So they looked at the Japanese and said, "It's extraordinary,
"but that's us. That's how we create modern art."
So they took that vision and they ran with it.
Japanese art also introduced Monet
to the infinite possibility of series.
An identical subject painted at different times
and in different light.
Somehow, not tedious repetition,
but an unfolding revelation.
And so, in the 1890s, Monet turned his eye
to his own version of Mount Fuji - a man-made cliff face.
The facade of Rouen Cathedral.
Over a period of three years,
he would create over 30 versions of the same painting.
Each one flooded with a different wash of light.
Monet had said there are no objective facts
about a landscape or a building which we need to describe literally.
There is only the sensation of looking at them.
And he tries to deliver in these paintings that sensation.
So that the front of the church becomes a great sponge
that sucks up the light at different moments of the day
and delivers extraordinary euphoria of harmony between the light,
our eyes and that stone.
What it builds into is a kind of symphony of colour harmony.
What, in the end, Monet is painting in this series
is nothing short than the colour of time.
In an act of painterly transubstantiation,
Monet turns the monumental masonry of the cathedral's facade
into flickering stabs of brilliantly-coloured paint.
An immaterial vision of light and air.
Of all Monet's fellow artists, it was Vincent van Gogh
who'd reach most feverishly
towards an even more radiant redemption in paint.
Earlier in his life, Vincent had failed in his calling
as a preacher to the downtrodden and the destitute,
sometimes in the darkness of the coalmines.
But his discovery of Japanese prints,
and paint, raw and straight from the tube,
gave him back his spiritual vocation.
And so, in 1888, Vincent travelled south
to what he called Japanese light,
to forge his own vision of art.
Marrying Japanese pantheistic vision of nature
with brushstrokes of pure colour,
this art would open the eyes of everyone,
especially the poor, to the miraculous force of life.
And it would be as accessible as stained glass had been
for medieval pilgrims
and as popular as a Hokusai print.
With this epiphany in mind,
Vincent gathered all the intensity of his spiritual longing
into one all-consuming obsession -
how to bring heaven to earth and turn it into a painting.
So on a warm night in September in 1888,
he comes down from his little apartment
in Place Lamartine in Arles
and goes around the corner and he sees this.
Great expanse of the River Rhone
with the city of Arles reduced to a little rim of human activity,
lit by rather sulphurous gas lights.
And somehow, this amazing moment speaks to him
that he can actually do this cosmic painting.
And he creates a kind of compositional double trinity.
The first trinity is of land and water and sky.
And the land is this little spit of the bank
with those very Japanese boats tied up in the harbour there.
Then comes the river and then comes the burning night sky,
delivered in great pulsing brushstrokes
of heavily-loaded aquamarine.
And the three of them, land, water and sky,
are all melting and dissolving together.
And the second trinity,
the one which really was most important, was that of light.
The gas lamps are just indicated by
a kind of stab of crusty, dark yellow.
And then those gas lamps are reflected
in the second element of the trinity lights.
Beautiful reflections which soften their harshness.
And these kind of fans of heavily-loaded brushstrokes
just fall into the water.
And the third level of the lights is Ursa Major exploding in the sky.
Taking his brush, he squashes it against the canvas,
and on top of that, another brush loaded with lead white,
and the points go, jab-jab-jab-jab-jab!
And those stars and everything explodes,
and he knows he's got it.
He's got what he's been looking for.
He's got this extraordinary sense of us in the universe
and this couple of lovers are staring out,
feeling what he wants us to feel.
He said, you don't need to go to church.
The church of the day is this.
This great illumination,
like a burst of beauty from a stained-glass window.
This is the radiance of here and now.
Van Gogh didn't live to see his rapture on canvas become
the new church of colour for untold millions.
His own mind skidded into darkness and self-destruction.
But eventually, one painter would deliver on Van Gogh's promise
of art's redemptive power - Henri Matisse.
But unlike Monet and Van Gogh, Matisse would look not to Japan,
but to the art of other, non-European traditions
in his search for a people's art of instinctive colour.
And it was the art of Islam that pulled him most strongly.
Visiting Tangier in 1912 and 1913,
Matisse saw that in Islamic culture, art was everywhere.
In the mosque, on the street, in carpets and clothes.
And in its sensuous embrace of decoration,
long written off by the West as an inferior genre,
Matisse saw the essence of a truly modern, inclusively-universal art.
And so, while here, Matisse brought east
and west together by combining Islamic colour
and decoration with the iconography of Christian worship.
A triptych - three paintings hung together like an altarpiece.
On either side, portals to better, brighter worlds.
And in the centre, in the place of a Madonna,
a local girl enthroned in luminous blue/green.
Not quite the ultramarine of the virgin, but still.
When Matisse got back to France,
everything he'd experienced in Tangier,
the hot, glowing light, the intense saturated colour
he'd seen on the clothes of people and on the walls of houses,
the graceful, flowing lines of Islamic ornamentation
all came together.
Not just to make an extraordinary ensemble of paintings,
but something that was completely unanticipated in his work so far.
And, more importantly,
which would take art into a completely new place.
No artist had ever been taken seriously before using scissors
and coloured paper, but by the 1940s,
Matisse saw that the deceptive innocence of the form
was THE key to that universal language of colour
and flowing line he'd been hunting all his life.
Channelling childhood experiences of circus acts with dancing bodies
and organic forms, Matisse created his cut-outs -
childlike images that bound and leap with the rhythms and energy of life.
He's working now like a paper sculptor,
almost as if he's creating
the ultimate illustrated children's book.
But he's carving directly into colour.
He's letting this blazing colour actually build the forms.
And he's working very, very fast.
It's all exuberant, spontaneous instinct.
These lines leap and bound and loop and somersault over the space.
The space itself is filled with a kind of extraordinary animation.
The speed and the freedom is such
that he'd never been able to do when he was painting.
And you have the sense that he feels
painting is too studious and laborious.
And what the cut-outs are
are a great uncorking of creative energy.
It's as though there's some sort of electricity that's now pulsing
and surging through those old hands of his.
If it seems as though they were created in a wash of pleasure,
the truth was very different.
It was 1943. France was occupied.
Matisse was distraught.
His family in peril.
There, blazingly lit, are the bombs of WWII.
There, too, amidst the jumps for joy,
the fragile bodies and bleeding hearts.
Illusions, perhaps, to Matisse's miraculous survival
from surgery for cancer of the bowel.
But this was resistance from the wheelchair,
the life-force in a mist of death.
And so, at the age of 78,
when one of Matisse's convalescent nurses-turned-nun
came to him with a plan for a little chapel in the south of France,
Matisse seized on it as the last great task of his life.
Ostensibly a place for nuns to pray,
it would also be a place of peace for all humanity.
Something which would sum up in one space
art's power to heal the wounds of a darkened, fallen world.
The chapel that Matisse built here for the Dominican nuns is tiny.
And yet, in some sense, it does feel an almost infinite space.
He took pains that there should be no red in this chapel
because red seemed to him too angry, too hot, too violent.
Everything that mattered to him through his whole life was here,
and it was not about obedience or submission,
it was all about the marriage between nature and spirituality.
Human nature and the other kind of nature, too.
The virgin and child, there they are, up above me.
This is a real, live woman with an exposed breast.
But the breast, of course, is Mary's exposed breast,
interceding for the sins of mankind.
But she's a mum, she's carrying baby Jesus, who's got his arms flung out.
Yes, in the attitude of the crucifixion,
but also in the attitude of an exuberant little boy.
And then there is nature absolutely everywhere.
When he thought about the stone he would use for this beautiful altar,
he thought, "Well, I need stones with seashells in them."
Because the sea represents the beginning of creation,
the primordial moment when God casts his face
upon the deep and creates life.
And that's what Matisse is doing here.
He's translating all of life, the whole world,
into this one beautiful space.
Into his tiny chapel, Matisse poured an encyclopaedia of global art
to make a space where the wars between cultures
could be put on hold.
Everything here resolves in reconciliation.
The purity of line with the radiance of colour.
Medieval Christian glass with a decorative abstraction of Islam.
African carving with a full-frontal force of Russian icons.
And what sustained Matisse's sense
that all these elements could work together
was his conviction that they all came from
the common culture of the people
and shared the same universal message.
What the Matisse chapel delivers is the instinctive sense
that redemption and the pleasure of the senses belong together.
That you actually got salvation from happiness.
He thought ultimately that that's what art had to deliver.
And, of course, all of his predecessors he revered,
like Van Gogh, were struggling to make that work
for a very different world, for the modern world.
For the world of calamity, of war, of destruction,
of personal pain and darkness.
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not at all sure
that our own world, our own time is any brighter now.
So what we need more than ever
is what only the greatest art can provide.
That is, surely, a bolt of illumination.
The Open University has produced a free poster that explores
the history of different civilisations through artefacts.
To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553
or go to the address on screen
and follow the links for the Open University.