All language subtitles for The Renaissance Unchained S01E01 Gods, Myths and Oil Paints

This may look like an
ordinary door in Florence.

But it isn't.

The man who lived here
invented the Renaissance.

There he is. Giorgio Vasari.

The one with the interested
cherub looking on.

Vasari was a painter,
and as you can see,

not a particularly good one.

His work lacked elegance and grace.

In a word, it was clunky.

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

But when he was in his teens,
very impressionable,

he came here to Florence
and wheedled his way into

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

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

It shows in his painting

and more importantly for us,

it shows in his writing.

In 1550, Vasari published a book,

a very special book,

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

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

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

As the first book of its kind,

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

Inside, it was packed
with biographies

of the artists that Vasari admired.

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

Vasari uses the term "rinascita",

to describe what was
going on around him.

"Rinascita" is Italian
for "rebirth".

Or, as we call it now, Renaissance.

What Vasari says in his famous
preface is that

under the ancient Greeks and Romans,

civilisation reached
its greatest height

and the arts achieved perfection.

Then along came the barbarians
who destroyed everything

and the arts fell into ruin.

Until we get to Vasari's own times,

roughly between
about 1400 and 1600 -

the dates are a little vague -

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

And civilisation returns to Italy.

It's a rousing tale
of cultural triumph.

Unfortunately, it's just not true.

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

and it wasn't reborn suddenly
in Renaissance Italy.

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

who's cheering on his own team

in the great football match
of civilisation.

But if the momentous rebirth
didn't happen,

what did?

This is Padua,

and that is the famous
Equestrian Statue

of the mercenary Gattamelata
by Donatello.

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

this was the first great equestrian
statue of the Renaissance,

the first time a Renaissance artist
matched

the achievements of the ancients.

But was it?

If we head north from Padua,
out of Italy,

a long way north into
the land of the barbarians,

or as we call them today,
the Germans,

we'll find a different
storyline being enacted.

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

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

This stone fellow here is called
the Bamberg Horseman.

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

So that's two and a half centuries
or so

before Donatello's Gattamelata

The Bamberg Horseman
isn't mentioned in Vasari,

and when you do come across him
in books,

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

something backward or primitive.

But that's not what I see up there.

I see a remarkable piece
of equestrian carving.

Look at the detail of the cloth,
the hair,

the musculature of the horse.

This isn't some impossible bronze
beast ridden by

an impossible bronze warrior.

This is something more modest,
less heroic.

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

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

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

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

And at Vasari's divine Michelangelo.

And at Botticelli and his Venuses.

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

Not before their time.

First, we need to catch up
with the furious progress

that was being made in
this bubbling cauldron

of Renaissance creativity...

Bruges.

Ah, Bruges!

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

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

Wild West of a town this was

in the early days
of the Renaissance.

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

ask to see the manuscript
of Anthony of Burgundy

and open it on Folio 244.

It shows you what went on
in the bathhouses in Bruges

in around 1400 when the
businessmen were in town.

On the right, the baths.

On the left, the beds.

All those fellows in the bathhouses,

the travelling businessmen,
were trading in cloth, fabrics.

That's what made the city rich.

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

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

selling cloth from around the world.

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

it's all recorded in
spectacular close-up

in the art of Renaissance Flanders.

So all these merchants in here

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

we know very well,

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

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

And there's Giovanni Arnolfini
himself, wealthy cloth merchant

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

Exactly what they're pledging

has been the subject
of much controversy,

to which I'm not going to add here.

What I want to discuss is
something much more important -

what the Arnolfinis are wearing.

Let's start with Mrs Arnolfini.

Now, she's wearing
a bulky green dress

that's made from a Bruges
speciality, wool.

Like this outfit, here.

Now, this wool was mostly
imported from England,

then woven here by the
famous Flemish weavers.

In the painting,
the dress looks rather bulky.

That's because it's lined with fur.

If you look carefully at the edges,

you'll see this
white fur poking out.

Now, that is actually the fur...

..of one of these,

a red squirrel.

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

The white bit, the purest bit,

what they used to call minever.

It would have taken around
2,000 squirrels

to line Mrs Arnolfini's dress.

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

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

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

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

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

So that's Mrs Arnolfini.

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

..these. Pine martens,

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

the second most expensive fur
after sable,

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

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

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

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

where the best velvet was made.

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

That huge, wobbly top-hat affair,

that looks several sizes
too big for him.

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

and it's a kind of fashionable
Renaissance boater

that everyone was wearing in 1432.

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

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

in the microscopic,
almost magical detail

that was van Eyck's trademark.

30 years before
the birth of Leonardo...

..50 years before
Michelangelo was born,

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

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

was nothing less than
a pictorial revolution.

A completely new way
of seeing and painting.

And in its clarity, its precision,

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

But that's not how
art history sees it.

Ever since Vasari,
until very recently,

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

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

THIS is what they call them.

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

there is one of these -
a convex mirror.

These convex mirrors keep
popping up in Flemish art

in various ways
and for various reasons.

In the Arnolfini Marriage,

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

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

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

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

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

with the Arnolfinis at the front.

But other Flemish artists
use them in different ways.

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

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

In Flanders, the bankers used them
to see round corners

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

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

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

..the other way.

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

was the same guild,
the Guild of St Luke,

to which painters also belonged.

St Luke was actually
the patron saint of painters

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

who's drawing the Madonna,
imagining the unimaginable.

With St Luke by their side,

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

..and how it does it.

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

painted by van Eyck again in 1436

and it's another miraculous
feat of observation.

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

his cross, his mitre.

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

And look!

There's van Eyck again,

haunting the picture
with his secret presence.

Now, to see as clearly as this,

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

..you need these.

Joris van der Paele,

who commissioned this great
devotional picture from van Eyck,

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

"Joris" is Dutch for "George"

and that's why St George

is presenting his patron
to the Madonna

and making sure
he's read his prayers,

even though his old eyes are going.

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

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

And if you examine the older
faces in Renaissance art,

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

Sometimes in unexpected places.

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

others for seeing money.

Hieronymus Bosch,
the great Flemish doom merchant,

even managed to find
a pair being sported in hell.

Now, although glasses
had been around

for the best part of a century,

it was in Flanders
at the time of van Eyck,

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

and great steps were taken
in ways of seeing.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you
exactly how

these newly precise lenses

and this new magnification
were used in Bruges.

Flemish artists were
very secretive about it.

To this day,
it's a controversial topic.

But when you look into
the minute details

crammed into this miraculous
Renaissance art,

a bit of help was surely needed.

Let me put it this way -

either for the first few
millennia of Western art,

no artist anywhere was born
with good enough eyesight

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

or after these first few millennia,

something happened here
that made it finally possible

to see things more clearly.

I know which version I believe.

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

The Monuments Men.

Well, this was the painting

they were trying to steal
back from the Nazis.

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

a masterpiece of spectacular
complexity and mysterious ambition,

with so much going on in it
and this strange God

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

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

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

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

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

"speculum sine".

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

it would continue "macula".

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

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

Mary, who was born without sin,

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

And that is how van Eyck
paints her as well,

as a vision of unblemished
female perfection.

As with so much Flemish art,

the Ghent Altar is very
confusing at first sight.

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

But even this is a challenge.

As for the real thing,
that sits behind bulletproof glass

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

and where it looms up before us

like a daunting cliff face
of dense Flemish symbolism.

But that's only from a distance,

because the real joy of
the Ghent Altarpiece,

the real joy of all
of van Eyck's art

is to get close and
to see the details.

♪ Il dolcissimo Signore... ♪

When you press your nose
against a van Eyck,

the confusion ceases and
it all gets intoxicating.

Botanists have identified
42 different species of plant

painted accurately
on the Ghent Altar.

And see that delightful
landscape at the back?

It's supposed to be
the New Jerusalem,

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

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

Bruges made biblical.

All this perfectly recorded reality,

this shiny truth that
Flemish art invented,

isn't reality for the sake of it.

It's not trying to fool anybody.

This is reality as a powerful
new weapon of conviction.

Van Eyck is smuggling
big religious truths

into the everyday life of Flanders,

making them touchable,
bringing them nearer.

This is art that is having
to envisage things

that have never been
envisaged before.

And what a feast of invention it is.

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

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

But this isn't
any old arts programme.

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

to arrange some exclusive access
to the Ghent Altarpiece.

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

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

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

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

and see exactly how he does it.

But first,
I want to show you something.

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

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

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

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

It was painted in egg tempera,

the medium they preferred
in early Renaissance Italy.

It's basically watercolour
with a binding of egg yolks

to hold the pigments together

and it dries very quickly into
these fabulous glowing colours.

What a gorgeous pink that is!

So that's tempera over here...

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

So that's the Angel Gabriel
telling the Virgin Mary

that she's going
to give birth to Jesus

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

but look how van Eyck's
captured the fabrics.

Look at what the angel's wearing.

And compare this...

..with this.

See how the cloth is done
in the Filippo Lippi

or these plants over here.

Compare those...

..with the plants in the van Eyck,

these beautiful white lilies,

which, like the immaculate mirror,

symbolise the purity
of the Virgin Mary.

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

And, critically,
a different technique.

Now, Vasari tells us that
van Eyck invented oil paints

and that's just not true.

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

in Buddhist art.

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

and used them
with extraordinary skill

and it's these oil paints,

along with the lenses
and the glasses,

that made Flemish art possible.

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

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

The whole restoration
of the Ghent Altarpiece

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

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

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

and now we're actually
in the process

of removing all the overpaints,

so we're actually scraping away
the later additions

to reveal the original
intention of the artist.

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

greens here are actually dirty
varnishes that we left on

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

So there's a bright white
underneath those dark,

discoloured varnishes.
It's very vivid.

You do see very, very clearly there.

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

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

the colours are brighter,

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

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

yes, indeed,
the green does jump at you.

But I think, most importantly,
it has an effect

on the depth of field because
not only the colours,

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

but once we start taking off
the first varnish

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

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

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

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

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

In Flanders, the great artists
of the Northern Renaissance

began making their
contemporaries immortal.

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

This fierce-looking chappy
and Vladimir Putin lookalike

is Chancellor Rolin,
staring with scary determination

across one of van Eyck's
finest landscapes.

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

and the touching
crow's feet around his eyes.

There was so much invention, too,

about this thrilling
Flemish portraiture.

This is the Sint-Janshospitaal
in Bruges

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

a Bruges master who was
particularly good at portraits.

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

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

This fellow here is
Maarten van Nieuwenhove

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

painted in 1487
and it's very clever.

Maarten van Nieuwenhove
is at a table praying.

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

bought from the Arnolfinis, perhaps.

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

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

So he's praying to them,

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

This space and that space
are next to each other.

Look at the table here.

That goes across both
pictures as well.

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

goes over into
Maarten van Nieuwenhove's bit

and even overlaps
a bit of the frame.

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

there's a typical Flemish payoff.

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

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

This is art that can paint miracles.

In the hands of the Flemish,

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

Yet look what they call it.

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

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

Another thing oil paints were
especially good at capturing

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

In particular, the artists
of the Northern Renaissance

had a lot of fun with armour.

And that's handy
because one of the saints

who pops up most often in their art

was the armour painter's delight,
St George.

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

by right-wing factions in England,
for instance,

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

who was born in Palestine
near Tel Aviv

and who served in the Roman army.

So all those skinheads

who've got St George tattooed
on their foreheads,

they're actively promoting

Turkish, Greek, Palestinian,
Roman and Jewish unity.

Well done, lads!

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

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

and an exciting challenge
for the new oil paints.

The new paints transformed armour
into a delicate metal mirror

on which sophisticated games
could be played with light.

Apart from encouraging all this
exciting investigation of light

and its symbolism, something else
the St George story did

was to pull Renaissance art
out of its comfort zone

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

Forced to imagine
the terrible beasties

that St George had to slay,

Renaissance art took a step
into dark new territories.

And not just in Flanders.

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

relocated his St George on
what looks like another planet.

So the St George story
pushed Renaissance art

into these dark new areas.

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

to tackle combat and movement

and that had an especially
powerful impact on sculpture.

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

He's certainly the most spectacular.

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

in the Church of St Nicholas.

What a thing!

Bigger than life-size
and carved out of wood

with breathtaking skill and drama
and the details are horrific.

Bits of dismembered body
are strewn across the plinth.

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

waiting to be murdered.

And then,
in a very un-Renaissance detail,

this bisexual dragon
is so traumatised

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

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

when Michelangelo
was still a teenager.

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

because this is a Renaissance

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

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

with action, drama and darkness.

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

But why does that make it
a lesser achievement?

The mad imaginings of
the Northern Renaissance

didn't stop with dragons.

When art armed itself
with oil paints,

it armed itself with the power
to make anything real.

This really is supposed to be it -

the mythical Fountain of Youth,

where you go in old
and you come out young.

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

but plenty of Renaissance folk did.

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

envisaged its wondrous effects.

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

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

landed here in Florida in 1513

and discovered that
it wasn't a myth -

the Fountain of Youth
really existed.

In Cranach's delirious masterpiece,

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

dipped in the special waters

and turned again into
St Trinian's girls.

It may have stopped working.

Anyway,
here we are in the Renaissance,

this great rebirth
of ancient knowledge,

but all the old legends,
superstitions and myths

are exerting just
as powerful a hold

on the artistic imagination
as they ever did.

Enjoying Lucas Cranach is like
visiting a German nature camp.

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

Some of them are Lucretias.

Others are Venuses.

But all of them, you feel, are here

because Cranach
understood temptation

and had personal reasons
to warn us of its dangers.

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

Now, the Adam and Eve story,

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

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

There's no other way to do it.

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

Set free in Paradise
in their birthday suits,

Adam and Eve gave Renaissance art
a perfect biblical excuse

to depict tempting human nudity.

According to the Bible,

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

..and to tempt Adam with it.

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

when the first naked man
met the first naked woman.

But all these Adams and Eves
of the Renaissance

weren't just there
for erotic reasons.

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

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

It wasn't just the Fountain of Youth

that was discovered
around about now.

So, too, was Paradise itself.

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

that's been unfairly ignored -

the great art form of the map.

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

maps were extraordinary creations
with a huge cosmic significance.

I can't think of many things

that would have been harder
to make than this -

the so-called Fra Mauro Map,

made in Venice in around 1450
by a Venetian monk.

In those days, north was south
and south was north

so the world was upside down.

It's exquisite, isn't it?

The glorious imagining
of a glorious new world.

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

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

So the first Renaissance map
with the Americas actually on it

is this one -
the Waldseemuller World Map of 1507.

There's America there,

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

When Columbus discovered America
in 1492,

he didn't just change history -

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

Their depiction has always triggered
powerful guilts and worries.

Some of the most anxious paintings
of the Renaissance

are representations of the first man
and the first woman.

And up on the Sistine ceiling,

Michelangelo has left us
in no doubt whatsoever

as to the terrible consequences
of the first sin.

But these were still
theoretical anxieties,

distant imaginings of
distant biblical events.

When Columbus discovered America,
that changed.

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

As news began to filter
through Europe

of the strange new world
discovered by Columbus,

the Renaissance mind began
putting two and two together

and Paradise itself
suddenly had a location.

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

a painting about sin and
its terrible consequences

and look what Adam and Eve
are sinning under -

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

Paradise was no longer theoretical.

Columbus had found it
and that was bad news,

because according to the scriptures,

man and woman would only
return to Paradise

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

When Columbus discovered America,

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

A less superstitious era
might have laughed it off,

but the Renaissance really
wasn't one of those.

Later in this series,

we'll be dealing in depth
with Hieronymus Bosch.

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

the anxiety of his times.

At times like this,
times of deep Renaissance despair,

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

But in this instance, it isn't,

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

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

Durer lived here in his house
in Nuremberg.

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

because one thing Durer
made sure of from the start

is that everyone knew
how great he was.

If they handed out medals
for arrogance,

Durer would have a shelf load.

Born in Nuremberg in 1471,

he was so good so quickly

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

a self-portrait as a teenage genius.

Durer invented the artistic
self-portrait.

Other artists had put themselves
in their pictures before,

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

Here he is at 22,

enjoying mightily his own
Renaissance handsomeness.

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

and loves himself even more.

And then, in 1500,

in a momentous Renaissance
slippage of human modesty,

the 29-year-old Albrecht Durer

compares himself unmissably
with Christ.

All over Durer's art,

we find him interjecting
himself into the storylines.

You even see it in his altarpieces.

In this busy crucifixion in Vienna,

who is that standing
at the back of the crowd?

Oh, look, it's Durer.

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

and Christ in this ruined
masterpiece in Prague?

Who do you think?

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

as he'd like us to believe.

He couldn't do grandeur
or emotional bigness.

Durer gets better
as he gets smaller.

His portraits, for instance,
are often transfixing,

as with this divine portrayal
of a girl from Venice.

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

Lots of little things combining
to create the final image.

It's a talent which
came in particularly useful

here in his printing studio.

It's a belief widely held in art

that Durer was the greatest
printmaker of all.

He was certainly one of the busiest

and so successfully did his prints
spread his fame

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

Everyone knows Durer's Melencolia.

It's probably the most famous
print ever made,

a mysterious figure surrounded

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

Lots of people have suggested
that Melencolia

is another disguised self-portrait

and I'm certainly prepared
to believe that.

Because, as far as I can see,

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

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

that finally convinced me
of his genius

or his altarpieces or even those
extraordinary portraits of his.

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

..was the day
I saw his watercolours.

The Albertina in Vienna
has a collection of them

that only goes on show
every couple of decades.

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

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

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

they might have flown
through yesterday sky.

He thought he was divinely chosen

and at moments like this,

you find yourself believing him.

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

It gave us oil paints.

It gave us optics.

It gave us the truth.

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

If Vasari got
the Northern Renaissance so wrong,

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