1 00:00:08,120 --> 00:00:12,120 Think of the Gothic cathedral and you think of the austerity of stone. 2 00:00:16,080 --> 00:00:20,520 Rows of saints and angels ushering the righteous into heaven 3 00:00:20,520 --> 00:00:24,280 and thrusting the damned into the jaws of hell. 4 00:00:27,760 --> 00:00:30,080 But in some cathedral towns, 5 00:00:30,080 --> 00:00:33,080 what the flocks of the faithful actually saw 6 00:00:33,080 --> 00:00:36,760 as they approached the doors of their great church... 7 00:00:44,680 --> 00:00:45,720 ..was this. 8 00:00:49,440 --> 00:00:51,600 A miracle. 9 00:00:51,600 --> 00:00:56,280 Stone transformed by being painted all the colours of the rainbow. 10 00:01:00,360 --> 00:01:04,840 The teeming cast of the Gospel story robed in scarlet, 11 00:01:04,840 --> 00:01:07,880 gold and the azure blue of heaven. 12 00:01:13,120 --> 00:01:16,160 "Let there be light," the Creator had said. 13 00:01:16,160 --> 00:01:19,560 And so when you walked through those heavenly gates, 14 00:01:19,560 --> 00:01:22,520 you were not plunged into darkness, 15 00:01:22,520 --> 00:01:26,400 you were lifted into the dazzling light of God. 16 00:01:33,320 --> 00:01:35,600 When a pilgrim came through the doors 17 00:01:35,600 --> 00:01:39,800 of the medieval Gothic cathedral, a miracle immediately happened. 18 00:01:41,920 --> 00:01:44,440 The laws of gravity were suspended. 19 00:01:44,440 --> 00:01:47,400 Everything, the whole of your sensibilities, 20 00:01:47,400 --> 00:01:49,320 were transported upwards. 21 00:01:57,760 --> 00:01:59,600 Everything is about light. 22 00:01:59,600 --> 00:02:03,240 The light of the Gospel, the light of the divine force 23 00:02:03,240 --> 00:02:07,160 of the Creator, so that the whole of the architectural design 24 00:02:07,160 --> 00:02:13,280 was meant to optimise that flood of heavenly coloured light. 25 00:02:18,520 --> 00:02:21,360 Shining down on you in Chartres Cathedral 26 00:02:21,360 --> 00:02:24,280 were the stories of the Bible. 27 00:02:24,280 --> 00:02:28,160 You didn't need to be literate to be drawn into the sacred epic 28 00:02:28,160 --> 00:02:29,640 by the blaze of colour. 29 00:02:31,360 --> 00:02:35,000 Included in the story were the people themselves. 30 00:02:35,000 --> 00:02:37,880 The wheelwrights and the water carriers, 31 00:02:37,880 --> 00:02:41,160 the butchers and bakers with their boule of bread. 32 00:02:45,080 --> 00:02:49,320 Now, medieval man believed that jewels, rubies, sapphires, 33 00:02:49,320 --> 00:02:53,400 topazes, had the power not just to concentrate brilliance 34 00:02:53,400 --> 00:02:58,040 but actually emit light, and they had another power too. 35 00:02:58,040 --> 00:03:01,760 They could transport you from your earthly existence 36 00:03:01,760 --> 00:03:05,720 into that extraordinary immaterial world of heaven. 37 00:03:09,200 --> 00:03:12,920 So that all this stained glass were meant to be immense 38 00:03:12,920 --> 00:03:16,760 expanses of jewel-like radiance. 39 00:03:18,200 --> 00:03:23,080 So when you were in here, you got a glimpse of paradise. 40 00:03:27,200 --> 00:03:32,640 Visions of paradise through instinctive, joy-giving colour, 41 00:03:32,640 --> 00:03:35,120 easily accessible to everyone, 42 00:03:35,120 --> 00:03:38,560 was not exclusive to the Christian Church. 43 00:03:38,560 --> 00:03:42,800 For centuries, colour as the symbol of the divine was an idea common 44 00:03:42,800 --> 00:03:46,400 to different civilisations across the globe. 45 00:03:50,440 --> 00:03:52,840 But at the birth of the modern age, 46 00:03:52,840 --> 00:03:58,160 when religion began to lose its grip on mass belief, 47 00:03:58,160 --> 00:04:02,680 then a new generation of artists would reinvent 48 00:04:02,680 --> 00:04:05,240 the idea of divine illumination. 49 00:04:09,560 --> 00:04:13,320 But when the smoke of chimneys and the fog of war 50 00:04:13,320 --> 00:04:17,040 threatened to cast everything into the dark, 51 00:04:17,040 --> 00:04:21,720 was it even possible to deliver a glimpse of salvation 52 00:04:21,720 --> 00:04:24,480 in glowing, living colour? 53 00:05:05,680 --> 00:05:07,960 In the centuries following Chartres, 54 00:05:07,960 --> 00:05:11,760 there was one place in Europe where the luminous Gothic 55 00:05:11,760 --> 00:05:14,200 lived on most radiantly. 56 00:05:15,840 --> 00:05:20,400 That was Venice, floating on the shimmering surface of its lagoon. 57 00:05:21,640 --> 00:05:25,360 The city had grown rich by facing east. 58 00:05:25,360 --> 00:05:29,280 First to the Byzantine Empire, whose glittering mosaics 59 00:05:29,280 --> 00:05:32,600 and iridescent silks it had plundered and copied. 60 00:05:35,520 --> 00:05:39,080 And then to the Islamic world, whose woven rugs, 61 00:05:39,080 --> 00:05:43,560 jewels and precious pigments it had brought to Europe. 62 00:05:47,120 --> 00:05:50,640 Here, surrounded by the luxuries of their world, 63 00:05:50,640 --> 00:05:54,560 the Venetians made the case for an art built with blocks 64 00:05:54,560 --> 00:05:57,880 of colour that challenge the more sober ideals 65 00:05:57,880 --> 00:06:00,240 of the Renaissance in Florence. 66 00:06:04,640 --> 00:06:08,400 For Renaissance theorists, it was the idea 67 00:06:08,400 --> 00:06:11,120 which made art a lofty, noble practice, 68 00:06:11,120 --> 00:06:14,760 and you got the idea from drawing classical models, 69 00:06:14,760 --> 00:06:16,480 especially sculpture. 70 00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:21,600 That drawn idea then dictated composition 71 00:06:21,600 --> 00:06:27,160 and it was what distinguished high art from the low, decorative stuff - 72 00:06:27,160 --> 00:06:30,880 jewellery, textiles, ornaments for the house and body. 73 00:06:31,920 --> 00:06:37,520 And according to this theory of design, drawing always came first. 74 00:06:38,880 --> 00:06:42,440 And then you filled in those shapes with colour. 75 00:06:43,440 --> 00:06:47,520 Well, the champions of colour said, they would say that, wouldn't they? 76 00:06:47,520 --> 00:06:50,240 Because they are all Florentines and Romans 77 00:06:50,240 --> 00:06:52,080 obsessed with antique ruins, 78 00:06:52,080 --> 00:06:55,080 and for them, colour is just cheap and cheerful. 79 00:06:55,080 --> 00:06:58,480 It's the gaudy entertainment for the masses. 80 00:06:58,480 --> 00:07:00,920 But we are Venetians 81 00:07:00,920 --> 00:07:05,240 and we know that colour can model composition 82 00:07:05,240 --> 00:07:09,000 quite as effectively as the drawn line. 83 00:07:09,000 --> 00:07:11,560 They reproach us for being too much 84 00:07:11,560 --> 00:07:14,480 in love with fabric and with jewellery. 85 00:07:14,480 --> 00:07:18,840 Not only do we not apologise for that, we embrace it, 86 00:07:18,840 --> 00:07:22,360 because perhaps at the heart of what we do 87 00:07:22,360 --> 00:07:28,160 is the translation of gem-like radiance into brilliance on canvas. 88 00:07:32,760 --> 00:07:37,240 The first great colourist to set Venetian art on this path 89 00:07:37,240 --> 00:07:41,520 and to do it with a dazzling luminousness of oils on wood 90 00:07:41,520 --> 00:07:43,320 was Giovanni Bellini. 91 00:07:48,160 --> 00:07:51,440 In his masterpiece, The Sacred Conversation, 92 00:07:51,440 --> 00:07:53,640 in the church of San Zaccaria, 93 00:07:53,640 --> 00:07:58,360 Bellini shows he can do Renaissance perspective to perfection 94 00:07:58,360 --> 00:08:02,120 but it's the intensity of the saturated colours 95 00:08:02,120 --> 00:08:05,760 that delivers what Bellini really wants, 96 00:08:05,760 --> 00:08:08,800 harmony experienced physically, 97 00:08:08,800 --> 00:08:14,800 so that the figures, even these very still ones, seem naturally alive. 98 00:08:17,480 --> 00:08:21,200 Bellini has thought about how different colour tones 99 00:08:21,200 --> 00:08:22,760 work with each other. 100 00:08:22,760 --> 00:08:24,920 St Peter's golden ochre on the left 101 00:08:24,920 --> 00:08:28,760 balanced with St Jerome's vermilion on the right. 102 00:08:31,760 --> 00:08:37,800 St Catherine's rose and green with St Lucy's vision of blue and gold. 103 00:08:42,200 --> 00:08:47,200 And in the centre, the Virgin and Child swathed in ultramarine, 104 00:08:47,200 --> 00:08:51,560 a pigment so precious that it was most often reserved for the Madonna. 105 00:09:01,960 --> 00:09:06,560 If Bellini's colour music pulls you into a devotional trance, 106 00:09:06,560 --> 00:09:11,240 his pupil Titian would use that same glow of colour to flatter 107 00:09:11,240 --> 00:09:14,160 the self-admiring world of the elite. 108 00:09:16,880 --> 00:09:18,720 Painted when Titian was in his 20s, 109 00:09:18,720 --> 00:09:23,480 this isn't just a portrait of a Venetian noble, 110 00:09:23,480 --> 00:09:25,920 but a painterly mission statement. 111 00:09:28,920 --> 00:09:31,920 There, outrageously front and centre, 112 00:09:31,920 --> 00:09:36,240 painted in ultramarine mixed with some rose and white 113 00:09:36,240 --> 00:09:41,120 is a waterfall sleeve of Venetian colour drowning classical stone. 114 00:09:51,680 --> 00:09:55,600 Ten years later, Titian would unleash this same colour 115 00:09:55,600 --> 00:09:59,600 with even fuller force in his stupendous masterpiece 116 00:09:59,600 --> 00:10:01,920 Bacchus And Ariadne. 117 00:10:05,160 --> 00:10:09,640 It's a moment of supercharged romantic voltage, 118 00:10:09,640 --> 00:10:12,840 the helpless rush of unexpected love 119 00:10:12,840 --> 00:10:16,480 that takes place in a dancing twist of passion. 120 00:10:18,600 --> 00:10:23,160 Ariadne, abandoned by her lover, Perseus, spins round 121 00:10:23,160 --> 00:10:26,080 to lock eyes with the god of wine, 122 00:10:26,080 --> 00:10:32,080 who launches himself from his chariot, jet-propelled by desire. 123 00:10:35,960 --> 00:10:38,520 And it's a picture that is constructed out of these 124 00:10:38,520 --> 00:10:41,920 two different dynamics of colour. 125 00:10:43,360 --> 00:10:48,000 Bacchus's riotous gang are coming from these earthy 126 00:10:48,000 --> 00:10:51,480 green, brown colours of the woods on the right 127 00:10:51,480 --> 00:10:57,240 and it's all moving towards this beautiful limpid blue area 128 00:10:57,240 --> 00:11:00,640 in which this tragic heroine is standing there 129 00:11:00,640 --> 00:11:04,400 waiting for the touch of Bacchus's love. 130 00:11:09,360 --> 00:11:14,880 On one side, the profane colours of animal energy and sexual love. 131 00:11:14,880 --> 00:11:19,600 Titian's fleshy, blushing naturalism on full display. 132 00:11:20,880 --> 00:11:23,720 On the other, the colour of the heavens 133 00:11:23,720 --> 00:11:28,800 where Ariadne will be transformed into a constellation of stars. 134 00:11:32,920 --> 00:11:35,080 It's an irony, I suppose, that Venice, 135 00:11:35,080 --> 00:11:38,600 generally thought to be the most mercenary and materialist 136 00:11:38,600 --> 00:11:40,080 of all cultures 137 00:11:40,080 --> 00:11:43,680 thought that its art was above all spiritual. 138 00:11:43,680 --> 00:11:46,160 That it was about looks, about gospel radiance, 139 00:11:46,160 --> 00:11:50,440 about the sheer weightlessness of saturated colour. 140 00:11:50,440 --> 00:11:55,480 Even the most pure and dazzling marble kept you on the ground, 141 00:11:55,480 --> 00:11:59,600 but surrender to colour, and you took off. 142 00:11:59,600 --> 00:12:05,520 You ascended into the dizzy imperium of the painterly paradise. 143 00:12:09,600 --> 00:12:12,680 The Venetian style had a good run 144 00:12:12,680 --> 00:12:15,800 but by the end of the 17th century, 145 00:12:15,800 --> 00:12:19,240 its intoxication with colour and the dancing line 146 00:12:19,240 --> 00:12:22,200 came to seem too in love with pleasure 147 00:12:22,200 --> 00:12:27,200 for an age that had become dominated by heavyweight empires. 148 00:12:29,760 --> 00:12:34,040 Now, when grandiose patrons built their baroque mega-palaces, 149 00:12:34,040 --> 00:12:38,880 they wanted sober classicism to project their omnipotent power. 150 00:12:40,200 --> 00:12:42,560 But there was one place, 151 00:12:42,560 --> 00:12:45,800 the palace of a prince-bishop in southern Germany, 152 00:12:45,800 --> 00:12:49,560 where the Venetian magic with light and air 153 00:12:49,560 --> 00:12:52,840 had one last performance to deliver. 154 00:12:54,200 --> 00:12:58,000 The largest ceiling fresco ever painted. 155 00:13:18,920 --> 00:13:23,440 Painted in the 1750s by the Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo, 156 00:13:23,440 --> 00:13:25,840 it's a version of Apollo the sun god 157 00:13:25,840 --> 00:13:29,640 illuminating the four continents of the world. 158 00:13:33,320 --> 00:13:36,480 It's a standard baroque subject, 159 00:13:36,480 --> 00:13:39,400 but here Tiepolo uses colour and movement 160 00:13:39,400 --> 00:13:41,920 to create something revolutionary. 161 00:13:44,640 --> 00:13:46,600 Impossible to take in all at once, 162 00:13:46,600 --> 00:13:51,760 he's designed it to unfold as you ascend the staircase. 163 00:13:51,760 --> 00:13:56,040 And it works in the opposite way from what you would expect. 164 00:13:58,080 --> 00:14:02,680 If at first you are pulled into the golden light of heaven, 165 00:14:02,680 --> 00:14:06,920 the higher you climb, the more you are brought down to earth. 166 00:14:09,480 --> 00:14:13,080 Until you come face-to-face not with the divine 167 00:14:13,080 --> 00:14:16,560 but with all the colours of the human world. 168 00:14:18,920 --> 00:14:22,440 Tiepolo really reinvents what it means to look at a painting, 169 00:14:22,440 --> 00:14:24,400 what a painting is. 170 00:14:24,400 --> 00:14:27,520 You can walk all around this space, he wants you to do it. 171 00:14:27,520 --> 00:14:31,080 The figures move, they're endlessly animated. 172 00:14:31,080 --> 00:14:33,000 This is a world in motion. 173 00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:35,680 It is a commotion of figures. 174 00:14:37,520 --> 00:14:41,080 It's almost as though he anticipates movie directors 175 00:14:41,080 --> 00:14:45,520 in his insistence that everything floats, everything is elastic, 176 00:14:45,520 --> 00:14:49,080 and there's a word for that, and that word is freedom. 177 00:14:52,880 --> 00:14:57,200 This has to be one of the most stupendous demonstrations 178 00:14:57,200 --> 00:15:00,160 of the spectacular power of painting. 179 00:15:03,120 --> 00:15:07,000 This is meaty, earthy, sweaty humanity. 180 00:15:09,640 --> 00:15:12,160 We are in the company of these figures 181 00:15:12,160 --> 00:15:16,720 and almost none of them are looking at us. 182 00:15:16,720 --> 00:15:20,840 I don't think there's any other work in all of European art 183 00:15:20,840 --> 00:15:25,080 where we see so many backs. Backs of bodies, backs of heads. 184 00:15:25,080 --> 00:15:28,240 Everybody is oblivious to our presence. 185 00:15:28,240 --> 00:15:30,400 They're just getting on with what they have to do. 186 00:15:30,400 --> 00:15:33,920 The musicians are playing, the merchants are making money, 187 00:15:33,920 --> 00:15:37,320 and this sense of coming across a world 188 00:15:37,320 --> 00:15:41,080 gives us the feeling that this is all real. 189 00:15:41,080 --> 00:15:45,360 And you put those two qualities together, Tiepolo, 190 00:15:45,360 --> 00:15:49,000 his astonishing, exhilarating freedom 191 00:15:49,000 --> 00:15:53,480 and his instinct for the earthiness of human life 192 00:15:53,480 --> 00:15:56,040 translated into painting, 193 00:15:56,040 --> 00:16:00,560 and you know you have something that's radically fresh. 194 00:16:03,480 --> 00:16:07,240 And the more you look, the more subversive it becomes. 195 00:16:09,160 --> 00:16:13,760 In Tiepolo's anthem to all the flora and fauna of the world, 196 00:16:13,760 --> 00:16:18,520 Christianity has been reduced to two insignificant figures 197 00:16:18,520 --> 00:16:21,240 carrying a cross, 198 00:16:21,240 --> 00:16:24,400 and the ruling prince-bishop of Wurzburg 199 00:16:24,400 --> 00:16:29,320 into just an image of an image, being carried off into the clouds. 200 00:16:33,400 --> 00:16:36,440 Tiepolo's world of motion and light 201 00:16:36,440 --> 00:16:40,240 no longer belongs to rulers or gods but to us. 202 00:16:57,080 --> 00:17:01,160 If in Europe, Tiepolo's colour drama was taking art away 203 00:17:01,160 --> 00:17:06,080 from a world of Christian devotion and into the material world 204 00:17:06,080 --> 00:17:10,400 of goods and men, then at the far end of European trade routes, 205 00:17:10,400 --> 00:17:14,560 another culture's rapturous embrace of colour 206 00:17:14,560 --> 00:17:18,680 would take it increasingly into the mystical and the divine. 207 00:17:22,640 --> 00:17:26,280 This is the ancient Hindu festival of Holi. 208 00:17:30,400 --> 00:17:34,440 One of the most sacred festivals in the Indian calendar. 209 00:17:34,440 --> 00:17:39,640 Every spring, revellers drown themselves in clouds of pure pigment 210 00:17:39,640 --> 00:17:43,440 as a symbol of the joyous resurgence of life. 211 00:17:48,640 --> 00:17:50,800 In the early 18th century, 212 00:17:50,800 --> 00:17:54,560 this festival became the subject of a striking set of images 213 00:17:54,560 --> 00:17:57,760 commissioned by the Maharaja of Jodhpur. 214 00:18:03,720 --> 00:18:07,320 In them, colour becomes the symbol of karma, 215 00:18:07,320 --> 00:18:10,720 sensory and sexual pleasure, 216 00:18:10,720 --> 00:18:12,320 which in Hindu faith 217 00:18:12,320 --> 00:18:16,080 was one of the essential sacred goals of human life. 218 00:18:22,560 --> 00:18:24,560 In the 1770s, the paintings 219 00:18:24,560 --> 00:18:27,960 then left the world of courtly pleasure behind 220 00:18:27,960 --> 00:18:31,720 to illustrate the ancient tales of the Hindu epics. 221 00:18:31,720 --> 00:18:36,720 The people's stories and adventures of the Hindu gods. 222 00:18:39,320 --> 00:18:43,560 Designed to be held up at court to illustrate the epic poems 223 00:18:43,560 --> 00:18:48,680 read alongside them, these immersive images drew their inspiration 224 00:18:48,680 --> 00:18:51,520 from the folk art of the people. 225 00:18:55,840 --> 00:18:58,600 Together with the stylisation of line, 226 00:18:58,600 --> 00:19:03,600 these pictures seethe with fantastic animation. 227 00:19:03,600 --> 00:19:07,760 Literally the dynamic life of animals, 228 00:19:07,760 --> 00:19:11,840 and to contain all these rollicking adventures, 229 00:19:11,840 --> 00:19:16,040 the format of the paintings had now to be a landscape, 230 00:19:16,040 --> 00:19:19,440 a landscape of dream and magic. 231 00:19:23,960 --> 00:19:29,320 They had this great bolt of intense, radiant colour, 232 00:19:29,320 --> 00:19:33,600 but above all, these pictures become, like the epics themselves, 233 00:19:33,600 --> 00:19:37,200 massively populated, casts of thousands 234 00:19:37,200 --> 00:19:43,600 of maidens, of rabbits, of flocks of deer and armies of monkeys. 235 00:19:43,600 --> 00:19:48,680 There are elephants running under the great rolling clouds 236 00:19:48,680 --> 00:19:50,040 of the monsoon. 237 00:20:04,200 --> 00:20:07,080 These aren't realistic landscapes, of course. 238 00:20:07,080 --> 00:20:11,400 Here, we are in the dreamscape storyland of the Hindu epics 239 00:20:11,400 --> 00:20:14,920 where gods like Rama come in sacred blue. 240 00:20:18,160 --> 00:20:22,600 And where fantasy colours convey the verdant wonders of nature. 241 00:20:31,360 --> 00:20:35,200 By the 1820s, both courtly playtime 242 00:20:35,200 --> 00:20:39,280 and epic animation have been left behind. 243 00:20:40,720 --> 00:20:44,920 In this image, one artist used colour to illustrate 244 00:20:44,920 --> 00:20:49,640 nothing less than the metaphysics of the universe. 245 00:20:49,640 --> 00:20:52,280 Depicting it not as a black hole 246 00:20:52,280 --> 00:20:55,120 but as sheets of shimmering gold. 247 00:20:57,720 --> 00:21:01,280 This is the nothing, the absolute of Hindu metaphysics, 248 00:21:01,280 --> 00:21:05,000 out of which eventually the world will be created, 249 00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:09,320 so the first panel is that nothing and yet there is something, 250 00:21:09,320 --> 00:21:11,680 because you can see the brush strokes there 251 00:21:11,680 --> 00:21:14,960 and the brush strokes give a sense of the pulse of the ether. 252 00:21:14,960 --> 00:21:18,360 It's not just emptiness, it's not just absence at all. 253 00:21:19,400 --> 00:21:22,560 And then the second panel, we have the Mahasiddha, 254 00:21:22,560 --> 00:21:25,680 the nearly perfect person, 255 00:21:25,680 --> 00:21:28,960 in whom consciousness is dawning, 256 00:21:28,960 --> 00:21:34,400 the second stage of the great moment of primordial creation. 257 00:21:34,400 --> 00:21:38,680 And this exquisitely painted figure is holding a little flower 258 00:21:38,680 --> 00:21:42,680 so that the world is starting to bud and bloom. 259 00:21:44,800 --> 00:21:46,360 And in the third panel, 260 00:21:46,360 --> 00:21:50,560 finally the physical material of the world resolves 261 00:21:50,560 --> 00:21:53,560 into earthly matter, which is silver, 262 00:21:53,560 --> 00:21:56,120 so all we have are silver and gold. 263 00:21:58,200 --> 00:22:03,240 Now, nothing like this had ever been seen before in Indian painting. 264 00:22:03,240 --> 00:22:07,040 Actually, nothing like it had been seen before 265 00:22:07,040 --> 00:22:09,360 in all of the history of art. 266 00:22:12,240 --> 00:22:17,000 What we've got here is the nearest visualisation you can get to 267 00:22:17,000 --> 00:22:19,280 of a trance. 268 00:22:35,640 --> 00:22:40,000 If in India colour was seen as the secret source of the divine energy 269 00:22:40,000 --> 00:22:45,600 from which all life flowed, in 18th-century Europe, 270 00:22:45,600 --> 00:22:49,000 the loss of faith in a divinely ordered world 271 00:22:49,000 --> 00:22:53,560 would lead one painter from the light into the dark. 272 00:22:57,520 --> 00:23:04,000 In 1788, the Spanish court painter Francisco de Goya painted this, 273 00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:07,320 the annual festival of San Isidro, 274 00:23:07,320 --> 00:23:10,320 Madrid's patron saint. 275 00:23:10,320 --> 00:23:13,960 Airy with colour and light, it's an exercise in that 276 00:23:13,960 --> 00:23:17,400 quintessentially 18th-century occupation, 277 00:23:17,400 --> 00:23:19,400 the pursuit of happiness. 278 00:23:21,320 --> 00:23:25,560 The heaviness of church and state are banished to the horizon above 279 00:23:25,560 --> 00:23:29,720 while the people and their pets are dancing and drinking below. 280 00:23:32,160 --> 00:23:36,440 Night would never fall, but it did. 281 00:23:46,760 --> 00:23:51,040 30 years later, Goya painted the same scene, the same day, 282 00:23:51,040 --> 00:23:54,800 but the ordered world is now disordered, 283 00:23:54,800 --> 00:24:00,640 dancing instead to the tune of a madman on a discordant guitar. 284 00:24:08,200 --> 00:24:11,760 Someone has turned the lights out. 285 00:24:11,760 --> 00:24:16,800 In place of all that brightness and light, the festival of San Isidro, 286 00:24:16,800 --> 00:24:22,120 we have this, the sky has turned to the colour of tar pitch sludge. 287 00:24:22,120 --> 00:24:27,040 In the place of liveliness we have a rolling freak show here, 288 00:24:27,040 --> 00:24:31,360 a great clump of the gibbering, the psychotic, the unhinged, 289 00:24:31,360 --> 00:24:33,720 glassy eyed, their mouths open. 290 00:24:35,600 --> 00:24:40,480 In a corner of the painting there is a figure seen in profile 291 00:24:40,480 --> 00:24:45,080 who seems to sum up everything that's going on in Goya's head. 292 00:24:45,080 --> 00:24:47,360 The figure has an open mouth 293 00:24:47,360 --> 00:24:53,760 and that open mouth seems to be emitting a terrible howl of pain. 294 00:24:55,960 --> 00:24:59,720 So how did Goya get from colour and life 295 00:24:59,720 --> 00:25:03,400 to this particular pit of sorrow? 296 00:25:03,400 --> 00:25:06,520 The clue is in the painting. 297 00:25:08,560 --> 00:25:12,440 There, in the centre of the clump of the crazed 298 00:25:12,440 --> 00:25:15,720 is the unmistakable face of Napoleon. 299 00:25:17,440 --> 00:25:20,920 The author of all this woe. 300 00:25:24,080 --> 00:25:28,720 Between 1810 and 1820, Goya witnessed the violence 301 00:25:28,720 --> 00:25:32,160 unleashed by Napoleon's invasion of Spain. 302 00:25:34,800 --> 00:25:38,280 Here, in graphic detail are the unspeakable crimes 303 00:25:38,280 --> 00:25:40,200 triggered by the French invasion 304 00:25:40,200 --> 00:25:45,160 and prolonged by the civil wars that pitted Goya's beloved liberals 305 00:25:45,160 --> 00:25:49,000 against the reactionary forces of church and state. 306 00:25:50,640 --> 00:25:52,960 In the place of colour and light, 307 00:25:52,960 --> 00:25:55,600 the horrors of war are laid bare 308 00:25:55,600 --> 00:25:59,040 in scratched images of black and white. 309 00:26:02,680 --> 00:26:07,840 And in his 70s, Goya came to paint his Black Paintings. 310 00:26:08,840 --> 00:26:14,240 14 images daubed directly onto the walls of his home. 311 00:26:18,760 --> 00:26:22,400 The Black Paintings seem to me to be an endgame for Goya, 312 00:26:22,400 --> 00:26:26,000 not just in his own life and career in his 70s, 313 00:26:26,000 --> 00:26:30,000 but also his feeling about an endgame for art, 314 00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:33,080 the art that aspired through beauty 315 00:26:33,080 --> 00:26:36,720 to ennoble the spirit of civilisation. 316 00:26:36,720 --> 00:26:39,440 One of the most terrifying of all these paintings, 317 00:26:39,440 --> 00:26:42,200 perhaps the most famous one, 318 00:26:42,200 --> 00:26:46,520 shows Saturn devouring one of his children. 319 00:26:46,520 --> 00:26:47,960 That's what it's come to. 320 00:26:47,960 --> 00:26:51,920 The huge tradition of classical mythology 321 00:26:51,920 --> 00:26:55,560 reduced to a mad, antic, capering monster 322 00:26:55,560 --> 00:26:58,880 chewing on the stump of a small body, 323 00:26:58,880 --> 00:27:01,400 but look at that body. 324 00:27:01,400 --> 00:27:03,120 Not a child at all. 325 00:27:03,120 --> 00:27:07,160 It's the body miniaturised of a female nude. 326 00:27:07,160 --> 00:27:10,480 Two millennia of looking at the nude, 327 00:27:10,480 --> 00:27:14,560 of seeing it as a symbol of art's perfection 328 00:27:14,560 --> 00:27:18,320 is reduced to this horrifying image 329 00:27:18,320 --> 00:27:20,760 of sadistic cruelty. 330 00:27:22,120 --> 00:27:26,040 In one of the paintings, he puts the lights back on. 331 00:27:26,040 --> 00:27:29,640 We're able to see something, but what is it we're seeing? 332 00:27:29,640 --> 00:27:33,880 The light is given to us to reveal another kind of horror. 333 00:27:35,120 --> 00:27:37,960 These two huge peasant-like figures 334 00:27:37,960 --> 00:27:41,040 beating the living daylights out of each other. 335 00:27:41,040 --> 00:27:44,680 Blood is streaming down the head of one of them, 336 00:27:44,680 --> 00:27:51,400 even as they sink deeper and deeper into a kind of sandy quagmire. 337 00:27:53,320 --> 00:27:56,680 This is what Spain has become. 338 00:27:56,680 --> 00:28:00,400 Endless, relentless, mutual slaughter. 339 00:28:04,120 --> 00:28:09,160 Now, all these monsters and horrors and demons and dragons 340 00:28:09,160 --> 00:28:12,280 of course had appeared all over European art before, 341 00:28:12,280 --> 00:28:14,400 but where had they appeared? 342 00:28:14,400 --> 00:28:18,480 They'd appeared in images of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse, 343 00:28:18,480 --> 00:28:24,760 and they were always balanced by a sense of the optimism of salvation. 344 00:28:24,760 --> 00:28:30,480 But Goya has come to the conclusion that God is absent without leave 345 00:28:30,480 --> 00:28:36,320 and there's one painting, which in a sense is least likely 346 00:28:36,320 --> 00:28:39,880 to have that horrifyingly pessimistic eloquence, but it does. 347 00:28:39,880 --> 00:28:43,960 There are no figures, there's just a dog, a mutt. 348 00:28:43,960 --> 00:28:46,960 But for this dog, the master is gone, 349 00:28:46,960 --> 00:28:49,000 dead, slaughtered, missing. 350 00:28:49,000 --> 00:28:51,840 He's no longer going to be fed. 351 00:28:51,840 --> 00:28:55,600 He's simply faced with drowning 352 00:28:55,600 --> 00:28:59,840 inside this formless brown vacuum. 353 00:29:03,480 --> 00:29:05,960 It's all come down to this, then. 354 00:29:05,960 --> 00:29:09,240 A dog without a master. 355 00:29:09,240 --> 00:29:12,040 Spain without its God. 356 00:29:12,040 --> 00:29:17,120 Humanity absolutely without civilisation. 357 00:29:41,360 --> 00:29:44,920 Eventually, a new generation of Western artist 358 00:29:44,920 --> 00:29:48,000 would put colour back into European art. 359 00:29:50,880 --> 00:29:55,840 But their inspiration would come from another culture 360 00:29:55,840 --> 00:29:59,200 on the other side of the world - Japan. 361 00:30:01,200 --> 00:30:02,920 After a century of civil war, 362 00:30:02,920 --> 00:30:07,080 Japan's capital had been moved to Edo, now modern Tokyo. 363 00:30:07,080 --> 00:30:11,200 And by 1700, it had become the world's largest city, 364 00:30:11,200 --> 00:30:14,040 home to over one million people. 365 00:30:20,960 --> 00:30:23,040 Driving the city's spectacular growth 366 00:30:23,040 --> 00:30:26,400 had been a new class of hardworking merchants 367 00:30:26,400 --> 00:30:31,600 who'd grown rich supplying luxuries to the aristocratic elite. 368 00:30:31,600 --> 00:30:36,720 But in Japan's strictly hierarchical society, it was unthinkable 369 00:30:36,720 --> 00:30:41,240 that mere businessmen could dream of a share of power. 370 00:30:41,240 --> 00:30:46,240 Instead, they created a new urban culture of their own. 371 00:30:48,640 --> 00:30:51,280 They were a very clubbable lot. 372 00:30:51,280 --> 00:30:54,880 They wanted poetry, haiku-reciting societies. 373 00:30:54,880 --> 00:30:57,920 They wanted the kabuki theatre. They wanted music. 374 00:30:57,920 --> 00:31:00,800 They wanted comedy clubs, and they got them. 375 00:31:00,800 --> 00:31:05,760 And when you have all that, what's the next thing that comes along? 376 00:31:05,760 --> 00:31:08,600 Of course, a new kind of art. 377 00:31:13,040 --> 00:31:16,760 This art would take the form of an ancient Japanese craft - 378 00:31:16,760 --> 00:31:19,040 the wood block print, 379 00:31:19,040 --> 00:31:20,800 which, from the 1760s, 380 00:31:20,800 --> 00:31:25,360 became available in over ten layers of blazing colour. 381 00:31:27,960 --> 00:31:31,200 Made by a community of artisans, from artists and publishers 382 00:31:31,200 --> 00:31:35,960 to woodcarvers and colour printers, this was mass-produced art. 383 00:31:35,960 --> 00:31:40,120 Not for rulers or religion, but for the people. 384 00:31:42,520 --> 00:31:44,320 Sold on every street corner 385 00:31:44,320 --> 00:31:47,360 for the price of a double helping of noodles, 386 00:31:47,360 --> 00:31:51,720 what came with it was a shot of pure metropolitan pleasure. 387 00:31:53,320 --> 00:31:57,400 These prints, glowing with this intense, spectacular colour, 388 00:31:57,400 --> 00:32:00,000 are what we think about when we think about the greatest 389 00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:03,040 things that Japanese art ever produced. 390 00:32:03,040 --> 00:32:07,160 This is not an art made by some starchy official academy 391 00:32:07,160 --> 00:32:08,600 laying down rules. 392 00:32:08,600 --> 00:32:13,520 No, this, essentially, was generated spontaneously 393 00:32:13,520 --> 00:32:18,120 by the hungry consumerism of a bustling city like Edo, 394 00:32:18,120 --> 00:32:20,400 and it wanted to be entertained. 395 00:32:24,280 --> 00:32:28,120 And these pictures had to play their part. 396 00:32:28,120 --> 00:32:31,840 They were called ukiyo-e, after "uki", meaning both floating, 397 00:32:31,840 --> 00:32:36,320 but also "uki uki", excited or feeling bouncy. 398 00:32:37,840 --> 00:32:40,400 And their subjects were Edo's ukiyo, 399 00:32:40,400 --> 00:32:42,840 its licensed entertainment districts. 400 00:32:45,600 --> 00:32:48,600 Here were the stars of the kabuki stage. 401 00:32:50,760 --> 00:32:53,760 Here, too, were the city's most famous showgirls 402 00:32:53,760 --> 00:32:57,200 and courtesans wearing the latest fashions. 403 00:32:59,400 --> 00:33:02,000 These prints were like Playboy meets Vogue, 404 00:33:02,000 --> 00:33:04,960 and they put you in the front row of the catwalk. 405 00:33:07,440 --> 00:33:09,800 And then, of course, there was sex. 406 00:33:12,120 --> 00:33:16,480 Awaiting those who could afford it was the Yoshiwara pleasure district, 407 00:33:16,480 --> 00:33:20,160 and there, ready to make the most well-heeled clients happy, 408 00:33:20,160 --> 00:33:23,680 were the exquisite oiran courtesans. 409 00:33:25,640 --> 00:33:28,320 These women became immortalised in pornography. 410 00:33:30,080 --> 00:33:33,040 Which, at its most graphically inventive, 411 00:33:33,040 --> 00:33:37,200 managed also to be genuinely beautiful. 412 00:33:39,560 --> 00:33:43,680 Designed for women as well as for men, it was called shunga - 413 00:33:43,680 --> 00:33:46,240 literally, spring pictures. 414 00:33:46,240 --> 00:33:49,240 Though you won't find much in the way of daffodils here. 415 00:33:59,760 --> 00:34:02,320 And if they were surprisingly egalitarian 416 00:34:02,320 --> 00:34:05,960 in their depictions of male and female pleasure, 417 00:34:05,960 --> 00:34:09,520 their beauty also papered over the exploited lives 418 00:34:09,520 --> 00:34:12,520 many of these women unquestionably led. 419 00:34:24,880 --> 00:34:27,280 But it's not all hard-core. 420 00:34:27,280 --> 00:34:29,880 Some of the most beautiful of these images of love 421 00:34:29,880 --> 00:34:33,240 are very delicate and tender. 422 00:34:33,240 --> 00:34:38,480 Passion indicated by the curl of toes or the touch of hands, 423 00:34:38,480 --> 00:34:41,760 or by the nape of a woman's neck. 424 00:34:41,760 --> 00:34:45,960 And we feel almost as though we're in the room. 425 00:34:45,960 --> 00:34:48,280 And that happens because of what woodcuts are. 426 00:34:48,280 --> 00:34:51,720 They can't model light and shade very well. 427 00:34:51,720 --> 00:34:56,560 But what they can do with these swooping and serpentine lines 428 00:34:56,560 --> 00:34:59,360 filled with this extraordinary glowing colour 429 00:34:59,360 --> 00:35:02,920 is make us dive right into this lovely, 430 00:35:02,920 --> 00:35:05,960 amorous universe they present. 431 00:35:07,640 --> 00:35:12,360 This was an art everybody could afford that gave you pleasure. 432 00:35:12,360 --> 00:35:15,200 And if it's all a fantasy, so, what's wrong with that? 433 00:35:15,200 --> 00:35:18,080 We can all use a fantasy now and then. 434 00:35:24,040 --> 00:35:29,840 By the 1830s, coinciding with a boom in domestic tourism, 435 00:35:29,840 --> 00:35:33,640 Edo's printmakers expanded their subject matter to include 436 00:35:33,640 --> 00:35:36,960 the most famous vistas in the Japanese landscape. 437 00:35:41,400 --> 00:35:45,240 The artist behind the shift was Katsushika Hokusai, 438 00:35:45,240 --> 00:35:47,560 who, for a time, at the age of 70, 439 00:35:47,560 --> 00:35:51,640 turned his eye almost exclusively to a single landmark. 440 00:35:57,080 --> 00:35:59,440 Japan's most sacred mountain. 441 00:36:03,760 --> 00:36:06,200 In his 36 views of Mount Fuji, 442 00:36:06,200 --> 00:36:11,880 Hokusai pitted the restless working lives of Japan's common people 443 00:36:11,880 --> 00:36:15,240 against the ever-present cone of the mountain. 444 00:36:21,160 --> 00:36:24,560 Close-up and far off, in every season 445 00:36:24,560 --> 00:36:27,880 and under every condition of weather and light. 446 00:36:30,440 --> 00:36:33,720 Combining brilliant colour with a breathtakingly 447 00:36:33,720 --> 00:36:36,640 experimental manipulation of space, 448 00:36:36,640 --> 00:36:40,320 Hokusai created some of the most thrilling images 449 00:36:40,320 --> 00:36:42,560 in the history of art. 450 00:36:44,640 --> 00:36:46,120 And here is the masterpiece. 451 00:36:47,760 --> 00:36:53,280 This is about as perfect a picture as any mortal would ever make. 452 00:36:53,280 --> 00:36:55,000 If my hand is shaking a bit here, 453 00:36:55,000 --> 00:36:57,920 it's because this is the original thing. 454 00:36:57,920 --> 00:37:02,760 The colours are so intense, it's so fresh, it's so clean. 455 00:37:02,760 --> 00:37:05,360 And this heroic, epic figure 456 00:37:05,360 --> 00:37:09,240 pulling on the line as these stylised waves 457 00:37:09,240 --> 00:37:15,240 roll towards him with Mount Fuji all the time there as a guardian. 458 00:37:17,640 --> 00:37:20,160 You feel, if you want to talk about where modern art begins, 459 00:37:20,160 --> 00:37:22,120 it begins right here in Edo. 460 00:37:22,120 --> 00:37:24,640 Because nature has been translated 461 00:37:24,640 --> 00:37:29,280 as if into a different language, into pattern, into abstract design. 462 00:37:29,280 --> 00:37:31,720 You could cut the painting there 463 00:37:31,720 --> 00:37:35,560 and this would be the most beautiful abstract painting you'd ever see. 464 00:37:37,800 --> 00:37:40,160 It's one of the excitements in one's life, really, 465 00:37:40,160 --> 00:37:42,880 to be able to hold something so close 466 00:37:42,880 --> 00:37:45,640 to its precious moment of creation. 467 00:37:55,120 --> 00:38:00,240 But these images also contained a deeper, more spiritual message. 468 00:38:03,640 --> 00:38:05,680 For Hokusai, a devout Buddhist, 469 00:38:05,680 --> 00:38:08,760 Mount Fuji was not just a sacred mountain, 470 00:38:08,760 --> 00:38:11,240 a source of water and life, 471 00:38:11,240 --> 00:38:14,200 but a talisman of immortality. 472 00:38:19,240 --> 00:38:22,800 So his brilliantly-coloured images weren't just postcards 473 00:38:22,800 --> 00:38:26,120 for Edo city-dwellers escaping the daily grind, 474 00:38:26,120 --> 00:38:31,520 but revelations of the spirituality embedded in the landscape. 475 00:38:32,840 --> 00:38:37,800 An antidote to the crushing materialism of modern city life. 476 00:38:42,200 --> 00:38:44,680 This marriage, made with colour 477 00:38:44,680 --> 00:38:47,720 between the worldly and the unworldly, 478 00:38:47,720 --> 00:38:53,960 was destined for export to a society badly in need of that radiance. 479 00:38:58,280 --> 00:39:03,320 Within just a decade of Japan's opening up to the West in 1853, 480 00:39:03,320 --> 00:39:07,760 Japanese prints were avidly collected by a group of artists 481 00:39:07,760 --> 00:39:11,400 at the vanguard of their own artistic revolution. 482 00:39:15,240 --> 00:39:17,400 Not least by Claude Monet, 483 00:39:17,400 --> 00:39:19,880 whose collection of 231 prints 484 00:39:19,880 --> 00:39:23,120 can still be seen covering the walls of his house. 485 00:39:26,000 --> 00:39:28,920 What Monet and his fellow Impressionists wanted 486 00:39:28,920 --> 00:39:32,160 was to reinvent the process of seeing. 487 00:39:32,160 --> 00:39:36,960 To paint not objects in light, but the light itself. 488 00:39:36,960 --> 00:39:40,120 And that wasn't just scientific ambition. 489 00:39:40,120 --> 00:39:44,960 Trapping the radiance would be an illumination for millions 490 00:39:44,960 --> 00:39:47,880 increasingly caught in urban gloom. 491 00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:51,480 What they saw in Japanese art was what they had wanted, 492 00:39:51,480 --> 00:39:53,000 what they dreamed of. 493 00:39:53,000 --> 00:39:56,200 What they were attempting to build up confidence to do. 494 00:39:56,200 --> 00:39:58,480 And it was a huge validation. 495 00:39:58,480 --> 00:40:02,040 It was a kind of vote of confidence in their own instincts 496 00:40:02,040 --> 00:40:04,160 about what modern art could do. 497 00:40:06,360 --> 00:40:10,000 Modern art would be, just as the Japanese artists who produced it, 498 00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:12,200 brilliantly, brilliantly coloured. 499 00:40:14,240 --> 00:40:17,080 Modern art would do dizzying things with space. 500 00:40:17,080 --> 00:40:21,200 Those cropped mountains, the gigantic panoramas. 501 00:40:21,200 --> 00:40:24,720 That was another cue to the way you could reshape space 502 00:40:24,720 --> 00:40:29,800 and depth to overthrow the old rules of perspective. 503 00:40:34,400 --> 00:40:38,160 Thirdly, and very, very important, was the overspill, 504 00:40:38,160 --> 00:40:41,160 it was so conspicuous in Japanese prints, 505 00:40:41,160 --> 00:40:43,600 between the country and the town. 506 00:40:45,200 --> 00:40:47,360 They all looked around at the suburbs of Paris, 507 00:40:47,360 --> 00:40:49,640 and that was happening to them. 508 00:40:49,640 --> 00:40:53,160 You could paint a rural and an urban population, workers, 509 00:40:53,160 --> 00:40:56,040 tourists looking at Mount Fuji, in the same way. 510 00:40:56,040 --> 00:40:59,520 So they looked at the Japanese and said, "It's extraordinary, 511 00:40:59,520 --> 00:41:03,560 "but that's us. That's how we create modern art." 512 00:41:03,560 --> 00:41:07,200 So they took that vision and they ran with it. 513 00:41:24,240 --> 00:41:27,240 Japanese art also introduced Monet 514 00:41:27,240 --> 00:41:30,200 to the infinite possibility of series. 515 00:41:30,200 --> 00:41:33,920 An identical subject painted at different times 516 00:41:33,920 --> 00:41:35,680 and in different light. 517 00:41:37,600 --> 00:41:40,880 Somehow, not tedious repetition, 518 00:41:40,880 --> 00:41:42,880 but an unfolding revelation. 519 00:41:46,240 --> 00:41:49,880 And so, in the 1890s, Monet turned his eye 520 00:41:49,880 --> 00:41:56,520 to his own version of Mount Fuji - a man-made cliff face. 521 00:41:56,520 --> 00:41:59,280 The facade of Rouen Cathedral. 522 00:42:02,200 --> 00:42:03,720 Over a period of three years, 523 00:42:03,720 --> 00:42:08,240 he would create over 30 versions of the same painting. 524 00:42:12,440 --> 00:42:16,440 Each one flooded with a different wash of light. 525 00:42:30,120 --> 00:42:33,320 Monet had said there are no objective facts 526 00:42:33,320 --> 00:42:38,080 about a landscape or a building which we need to describe literally. 527 00:42:38,080 --> 00:42:42,040 There is only the sensation of looking at them. 528 00:42:43,400 --> 00:42:47,400 And he tries to deliver in these paintings that sensation. 529 00:42:47,400 --> 00:42:51,840 So that the front of the church becomes a great sponge 530 00:42:51,840 --> 00:42:56,560 that sucks up the light at different moments of the day 531 00:42:56,560 --> 00:43:03,560 and delivers extraordinary euphoria of harmony between the light, 532 00:43:03,560 --> 00:43:06,160 our eyes and that stone. 533 00:43:08,280 --> 00:43:13,520 What it builds into is a kind of symphony of colour harmony. 534 00:43:13,520 --> 00:43:17,080 What, in the end, Monet is painting in this series 535 00:43:17,080 --> 00:43:20,240 is nothing short than the colour of time. 536 00:43:28,880 --> 00:43:32,880 In an act of painterly transubstantiation, 537 00:43:32,880 --> 00:43:37,440 Monet turns the monumental masonry of the cathedral's facade 538 00:43:37,440 --> 00:43:42,320 into flickering stabs of brilliantly-coloured paint. 539 00:43:42,320 --> 00:43:45,640 An immaterial vision of light and air. 540 00:44:00,360 --> 00:44:04,160 Of all Monet's fellow artists, it was Vincent van Gogh 541 00:44:04,160 --> 00:44:06,680 who'd reach most feverishly 542 00:44:06,680 --> 00:44:10,520 towards an even more radiant redemption in paint. 543 00:44:12,800 --> 00:44:15,800 Earlier in his life, Vincent had failed in his calling 544 00:44:15,800 --> 00:44:19,800 as a preacher to the downtrodden and the destitute, 545 00:44:19,800 --> 00:44:23,480 sometimes in the darkness of the coalmines. 546 00:44:25,520 --> 00:44:27,760 But his discovery of Japanese prints, 547 00:44:27,760 --> 00:44:31,640 and paint, raw and straight from the tube, 548 00:44:31,640 --> 00:44:35,040 gave him back his spiritual vocation. 549 00:44:39,120 --> 00:44:41,760 And so, in 1888, Vincent travelled south 550 00:44:41,760 --> 00:44:44,600 to what he called Japanese light, 551 00:44:44,600 --> 00:44:47,160 to forge his own vision of art. 552 00:44:48,840 --> 00:44:52,640 Marrying Japanese pantheistic vision of nature 553 00:44:52,640 --> 00:44:55,440 with brushstrokes of pure colour, 554 00:44:55,440 --> 00:44:58,760 this art would open the eyes of everyone, 555 00:44:58,760 --> 00:45:03,400 especially the poor, to the miraculous force of life. 556 00:45:04,520 --> 00:45:08,880 And it would be as accessible as stained glass had been 557 00:45:08,880 --> 00:45:10,800 for medieval pilgrims 558 00:45:10,800 --> 00:45:13,840 and as popular as a Hokusai print. 559 00:45:15,600 --> 00:45:17,280 With this epiphany in mind, 560 00:45:17,280 --> 00:45:21,520 Vincent gathered all the intensity of his spiritual longing 561 00:45:21,520 --> 00:45:25,120 into one all-consuming obsession - 562 00:45:25,120 --> 00:45:29,800 how to bring heaven to earth and turn it into a painting. 563 00:45:33,160 --> 00:45:36,160 So on a warm night in September in 1888, 564 00:45:36,160 --> 00:45:39,000 he comes down from his little apartment 565 00:45:39,000 --> 00:45:41,040 in Place Lamartine in Arles 566 00:45:41,040 --> 00:45:43,880 and goes around the corner and he sees this. 567 00:45:47,560 --> 00:45:50,040 Great expanse of the River Rhone 568 00:45:50,040 --> 00:45:54,640 with the city of Arles reduced to a little rim of human activity, 569 00:45:54,640 --> 00:45:57,960 lit by rather sulphurous gas lights. 570 00:45:57,960 --> 00:46:02,440 And somehow, this amazing moment speaks to him 571 00:46:02,440 --> 00:46:06,840 that he can actually do this cosmic painting. 572 00:46:10,200 --> 00:46:13,800 And he creates a kind of compositional double trinity. 573 00:46:15,080 --> 00:46:18,760 The first trinity is of land and water and sky. 574 00:46:18,760 --> 00:46:21,440 And the land is this little spit of the bank 575 00:46:21,440 --> 00:46:25,480 with those very Japanese boats tied up in the harbour there. 576 00:46:25,480 --> 00:46:30,000 Then comes the river and then comes the burning night sky, 577 00:46:30,000 --> 00:46:33,800 delivered in great pulsing brushstrokes 578 00:46:33,800 --> 00:46:36,520 of heavily-loaded aquamarine. 579 00:46:39,920 --> 00:46:42,920 And the three of them, land, water and sky, 580 00:46:42,920 --> 00:46:45,360 are all melting and dissolving together. 581 00:46:48,520 --> 00:46:50,000 And the second trinity, 582 00:46:50,000 --> 00:46:53,360 the one which really was most important, was that of light. 583 00:46:55,000 --> 00:46:57,600 The gas lamps are just indicated by 584 00:46:57,600 --> 00:47:00,880 a kind of stab of crusty, dark yellow. 585 00:47:00,880 --> 00:47:03,680 And then those gas lamps are reflected 586 00:47:03,680 --> 00:47:06,800 in the second element of the trinity lights. 587 00:47:06,800 --> 00:47:10,520 Beautiful reflections which soften their harshness. 588 00:47:10,520 --> 00:47:15,920 And these kind of fans of heavily-loaded brushstrokes 589 00:47:15,920 --> 00:47:18,000 just fall into the water. 590 00:47:20,520 --> 00:47:25,480 And the third level of the lights is Ursa Major exploding in the sky. 591 00:47:25,480 --> 00:47:28,960 Taking his brush, he squashes it against the canvas, 592 00:47:28,960 --> 00:47:32,560 and on top of that, another brush loaded with lead white, 593 00:47:32,560 --> 00:47:34,960 and the points go, jab-jab-jab-jab-jab! 594 00:47:34,960 --> 00:47:39,120 And those stars and everything explodes, 595 00:47:39,120 --> 00:47:41,560 and he knows he's got it. 596 00:47:41,560 --> 00:47:44,120 He's got what he's been looking for. 597 00:47:44,120 --> 00:47:48,800 He's got this extraordinary sense of us in the universe 598 00:47:48,800 --> 00:47:52,320 and this couple of lovers are staring out, 599 00:47:52,320 --> 00:47:55,920 feeling what he wants us to feel. 600 00:47:55,920 --> 00:47:58,840 He said, you don't need to go to church. 601 00:47:58,840 --> 00:48:01,360 The church of the day is this. 602 00:48:01,360 --> 00:48:03,880 This great illumination, 603 00:48:03,880 --> 00:48:07,360 like a burst of beauty from a stained-glass window. 604 00:48:07,360 --> 00:48:11,760 This is the radiance of here and now. 605 00:48:20,520 --> 00:48:24,680 Van Gogh didn't live to see his rapture on canvas become 606 00:48:24,680 --> 00:48:27,760 the new church of colour for untold millions. 607 00:48:27,760 --> 00:48:32,000 His own mind skidded into darkness and self-destruction. 608 00:48:34,240 --> 00:48:37,960 But eventually, one painter would deliver on Van Gogh's promise 609 00:48:37,960 --> 00:48:41,320 of art's redemptive power - Henri Matisse. 610 00:48:44,240 --> 00:48:48,840 But unlike Monet and Van Gogh, Matisse would look not to Japan, 611 00:48:48,840 --> 00:48:52,080 but to the art of other, non-European traditions 612 00:48:52,080 --> 00:48:56,120 in his search for a people's art of instinctive colour. 613 00:48:57,800 --> 00:49:01,480 And it was the art of Islam that pulled him most strongly. 614 00:49:03,600 --> 00:49:06,680 Visiting Tangier in 1912 and 1913, 615 00:49:06,680 --> 00:49:11,280 Matisse saw that in Islamic culture, art was everywhere. 616 00:49:11,280 --> 00:49:16,120 In the mosque, on the street, in carpets and clothes. 617 00:49:18,720 --> 00:49:22,280 And in its sensuous embrace of decoration, 618 00:49:22,280 --> 00:49:25,760 long written off by the West as an inferior genre, 619 00:49:25,760 --> 00:49:31,160 Matisse saw the essence of a truly modern, inclusively-universal art. 620 00:49:34,400 --> 00:49:36,720 And so, while here, Matisse brought east 621 00:49:36,720 --> 00:49:39,880 and west together by combining Islamic colour 622 00:49:39,880 --> 00:49:44,320 and decoration with the iconography of Christian worship. 623 00:49:47,480 --> 00:49:52,480 A triptych - three paintings hung together like an altarpiece. 624 00:49:55,200 --> 00:50:00,320 On either side, portals to better, brighter worlds. 625 00:50:03,000 --> 00:50:05,120 And in the centre, in the place of a Madonna, 626 00:50:05,120 --> 00:50:10,080 a local girl enthroned in luminous blue/green. 627 00:50:10,080 --> 00:50:14,040 Not quite the ultramarine of the virgin, but still. 628 00:50:17,320 --> 00:50:19,520 When Matisse got back to France, 629 00:50:19,520 --> 00:50:22,240 everything he'd experienced in Tangier, 630 00:50:22,240 --> 00:50:26,160 the hot, glowing light, the intense saturated colour 631 00:50:26,160 --> 00:50:30,040 he'd seen on the clothes of people and on the walls of houses, 632 00:50:30,040 --> 00:50:34,320 the graceful, flowing lines of Islamic ornamentation 633 00:50:34,320 --> 00:50:36,240 all came together. 634 00:50:36,240 --> 00:50:39,760 Not just to make an extraordinary ensemble of paintings, 635 00:50:39,760 --> 00:50:45,160 but something that was completely unanticipated in his work so far. 636 00:50:45,160 --> 00:50:47,240 And, more importantly, 637 00:50:47,240 --> 00:50:52,200 which would take art into a completely new place. 638 00:51:01,160 --> 00:51:05,680 No artist had ever been taken seriously before using scissors 639 00:51:05,680 --> 00:51:09,320 and coloured paper, but by the 1940s, 640 00:51:09,320 --> 00:51:12,560 Matisse saw that the deceptive innocence of the form 641 00:51:12,560 --> 00:51:16,480 was THE key to that universal language of colour 642 00:51:16,480 --> 00:51:20,600 and flowing line he'd been hunting all his life. 643 00:51:27,040 --> 00:51:31,400 Channelling childhood experiences of circus acts with dancing bodies 644 00:51:31,400 --> 00:51:36,280 and organic forms, Matisse created his cut-outs - 645 00:51:36,280 --> 00:51:41,600 childlike images that bound and leap with the rhythms and energy of life. 646 00:51:43,840 --> 00:51:46,320 He's working now like a paper sculptor, 647 00:51:46,320 --> 00:51:48,160 almost as if he's creating 648 00:51:48,160 --> 00:51:51,360 the ultimate illustrated children's book. 649 00:51:55,280 --> 00:51:58,160 But he's carving directly into colour. 650 00:51:58,160 --> 00:52:02,360 He's letting this blazing colour actually build the forms. 651 00:52:02,360 --> 00:52:04,720 And he's working very, very fast. 652 00:52:04,720 --> 00:52:07,320 It's all exuberant, spontaneous instinct. 653 00:52:07,320 --> 00:52:13,120 These lines leap and bound and loop and somersault over the space. 654 00:52:13,120 --> 00:52:18,200 The space itself is filled with a kind of extraordinary animation. 655 00:52:21,320 --> 00:52:23,200 The speed and the freedom is such 656 00:52:23,200 --> 00:52:26,640 that he'd never been able to do when he was painting. 657 00:52:26,640 --> 00:52:29,000 And you have the sense that he feels 658 00:52:29,000 --> 00:52:31,880 painting is too studious and laborious. 659 00:52:31,880 --> 00:52:33,520 And what the cut-outs are 660 00:52:33,520 --> 00:52:37,800 are a great uncorking of creative energy. 661 00:52:37,800 --> 00:52:41,440 It's as though there's some sort of electricity that's now pulsing 662 00:52:41,440 --> 00:52:45,320 and surging through those old hands of his. 663 00:52:58,760 --> 00:53:01,760 If it seems as though they were created in a wash of pleasure, 664 00:53:01,760 --> 00:53:04,480 the truth was very different. 665 00:53:04,480 --> 00:53:07,480 It was 1943. France was occupied. 666 00:53:07,480 --> 00:53:09,760 Matisse was distraught. 667 00:53:09,760 --> 00:53:11,440 His family in peril. 668 00:53:11,440 --> 00:53:17,440 There, blazingly lit, are the bombs of WWII. 669 00:53:17,440 --> 00:53:21,160 There, too, amidst the jumps for joy, 670 00:53:21,160 --> 00:53:24,720 the fragile bodies and bleeding hearts. 671 00:53:24,720 --> 00:53:28,520 Illusions, perhaps, to Matisse's miraculous survival 672 00:53:28,520 --> 00:53:31,840 from surgery for cancer of the bowel. 673 00:53:37,120 --> 00:53:40,360 But this was resistance from the wheelchair, 674 00:53:40,360 --> 00:53:42,880 the life-force in a mist of death. 675 00:53:46,960 --> 00:53:49,640 And so, at the age of 78, 676 00:53:49,640 --> 00:53:53,720 when one of Matisse's convalescent nurses-turned-nun 677 00:53:53,720 --> 00:53:58,040 came to him with a plan for a little chapel in the south of France, 678 00:53:58,040 --> 00:54:02,960 Matisse seized on it as the last great task of his life. 679 00:54:06,640 --> 00:54:09,400 Ostensibly a place for nuns to pray, 680 00:54:09,400 --> 00:54:13,280 it would also be a place of peace for all humanity. 681 00:54:16,040 --> 00:54:18,440 Something which would sum up in one space 682 00:54:18,440 --> 00:54:24,160 art's power to heal the wounds of a darkened, fallen world. 683 00:54:30,880 --> 00:54:34,920 The chapel that Matisse built here for the Dominican nuns is tiny. 684 00:54:34,920 --> 00:54:39,720 And yet, in some sense, it does feel an almost infinite space. 685 00:54:41,760 --> 00:54:44,840 He took pains that there should be no red in this chapel 686 00:54:44,840 --> 00:54:49,080 because red seemed to him too angry, too hot, too violent. 687 00:54:51,400 --> 00:54:55,320 Everything that mattered to him through his whole life was here, 688 00:54:55,320 --> 00:54:57,760 and it was not about obedience or submission, 689 00:54:57,760 --> 00:55:02,960 it was all about the marriage between nature and spirituality. 690 00:55:02,960 --> 00:55:05,840 Human nature and the other kind of nature, too. 691 00:55:05,840 --> 00:55:10,040 The virgin and child, there they are, up above me. 692 00:55:10,040 --> 00:55:13,640 This is a real, live woman with an exposed breast. 693 00:55:13,640 --> 00:55:16,800 But the breast, of course, is Mary's exposed breast, 694 00:55:16,800 --> 00:55:19,040 interceding for the sins of mankind. 695 00:55:19,040 --> 00:55:24,600 But she's a mum, she's carrying baby Jesus, who's got his arms flung out. 696 00:55:24,600 --> 00:55:26,960 Yes, in the attitude of the crucifixion, 697 00:55:26,960 --> 00:55:31,080 but also in the attitude of an exuberant little boy. 698 00:55:31,080 --> 00:55:35,080 And then there is nature absolutely everywhere. 699 00:55:39,800 --> 00:55:43,680 When he thought about the stone he would use for this beautiful altar, 700 00:55:43,680 --> 00:55:48,520 he thought, "Well, I need stones with seashells in them." 701 00:55:48,520 --> 00:55:53,000 Because the sea represents the beginning of creation, 702 00:55:53,000 --> 00:55:56,160 the primordial moment when God casts his face 703 00:55:56,160 --> 00:55:58,360 upon the deep and creates life. 704 00:55:58,360 --> 00:56:01,120 And that's what Matisse is doing here. 705 00:56:01,120 --> 00:56:04,480 He's translating all of life, the whole world, 706 00:56:04,480 --> 00:56:07,200 into this one beautiful space. 707 00:56:11,440 --> 00:56:17,320 Into his tiny chapel, Matisse poured an encyclopaedia of global art 708 00:56:17,320 --> 00:56:20,200 to make a space where the wars between cultures 709 00:56:20,200 --> 00:56:22,720 could be put on hold. 710 00:56:25,040 --> 00:56:28,720 Everything here resolves in reconciliation. 711 00:56:30,040 --> 00:56:33,960 The purity of line with the radiance of colour. 712 00:56:36,320 --> 00:56:41,720 Medieval Christian glass with a decorative abstraction of Islam. 713 00:56:43,760 --> 00:56:49,000 African carving with a full-frontal force of Russian icons. 714 00:56:50,640 --> 00:56:53,080 And what sustained Matisse's sense 715 00:56:53,080 --> 00:56:56,640 that all these elements could work together 716 00:56:56,640 --> 00:56:59,400 was his conviction that they all came from 717 00:56:59,400 --> 00:57:02,400 the common culture of the people 718 00:57:02,400 --> 00:57:06,080 and shared the same universal message. 719 00:57:08,200 --> 00:57:12,840 What the Matisse chapel delivers is the instinctive sense 720 00:57:12,840 --> 00:57:18,120 that redemption and the pleasure of the senses belong together. 721 00:57:18,120 --> 00:57:21,360 That you actually got salvation from happiness. 722 00:57:22,960 --> 00:57:26,120 He thought ultimately that that's what art had to deliver. 723 00:57:26,120 --> 00:57:28,960 And, of course, all of his predecessors he revered, 724 00:57:28,960 --> 00:57:32,080 like Van Gogh, were struggling to make that work 725 00:57:32,080 --> 00:57:34,840 for a very different world, for the modern world. 726 00:57:34,840 --> 00:57:38,160 For the world of calamity, of war, of destruction, 727 00:57:38,160 --> 00:57:40,480 of personal pain and darkness. 728 00:57:42,280 --> 00:57:44,760 Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not at all sure 729 00:57:44,760 --> 00:57:49,600 that our own world, our own time is any brighter now. 730 00:57:49,600 --> 00:57:51,600 So what we need more than ever 731 00:57:51,600 --> 00:57:54,920 is what only the greatest art can provide. 732 00:57:54,920 --> 00:57:59,840 That is, surely, a bolt of illumination. 733 00:58:11,440 --> 00:58:15,280 The Open University has produced a free poster that explores 734 00:58:15,280 --> 00:58:19,000 the history of different civilisations through artefacts. 735 00:58:19,000 --> 00:58:24,480 To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553 736 00:58:24,480 --> 00:58:26,360 or go to the address on screen 737 00:58:26,360 --> 00:58:29,280 and follow the links for the Open University.