All language subtitles for BBC.Civilisations.7of9.Radiance.1080p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.eng

This programme contains some
scenes of a sexual nature.

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,
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's
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
sacred 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.