Original subtitles

(MUSIC) MONTEVERDI: Introduction to Orfeo

The ancient church of St Mary Major, Santa Maria Maggiore,

stands in the centre of modern Rome.

(Hum of traffic)

The hellish Roman traffic swirls all round it.

But, if you go inside,

you'll find the original columns of the 5th-century church

built in rivalry with the neighbouring Temple of Juno, the mother goddess.

Since old St Peter's was pulled down,

there is nowhere else in Rome where one gets such a powerful impression

of the Christian church before the barbarian conquests.

This is the grandeur

that the Roman Church had once achieved, and was to achieve again.

Above the columns the mosaics of Old Testament stories

are almost the earliest illustrations of the Bible that exist -

brilliant, fresh colours, like early Matisse.

One sees what was lost

when almost the whole of early Christian art was destroyed.

(MUSIC) Mass for Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary

From the roof of Santa Maria Maggiore,

I can see long straight streets stretching for miles up and down,

and each ending in front of a famous church.

Down there is St John Lateran

and in the opposite direction is Santa Trinita dei Monti.

And at each of the piazzas are Egyptian obelisks,

symbols of that god-directed state which Rome had superseded.

Papal Rome, the Rome of Sixtus V,

is the most grandiose piece of town planning ever attempted.

And it anticipated by 50 years

all the great town plans of France and Germany.

And the amazing thing is that it was done

only a generation after Rome had been, as it seemed, completely humiliated -

almost wiped off the map.

The city had been sacked and burnt,

the people of northern Europe were heretics,

the Turks were threatening Vienna.

It could have seemed to a far-sighted intellectual,

that the papacy's only course was to face the facts

accept its dependence on the gold of America,

doled out through Spain.

Well, as you can see, this didn't happen.

Rome and the Church of Rome

regained many of the territories it had lost,

and became once more a great spiritual force.

But was it a civilising force?

In England, we tend to answer no.

We've been conditioned by generations of liberal Protestant historians

who tell us that no society based on obedience, repression and superstition

can be really civilised.

But no-one with an ounce of historical feeling or philosophic detachment

can be blind to the great ideals, to the passionate belief in sanctity,

to the outpouring of human genius in the service of God

which is made triumphantly visible to us,

every step we take in Baroque Rome.

(MUSIC) GIOVANELLI: Nunc Dimittis

(MUSIC) Salutare tuum

(MUSIC) Quod parasti ante faciem

(MUSIC) Ante faciem

(MUSIC) Omnium populorum

Whatever it is, it isn't barbarian or provincial.

Add to this that the Catholic revival was a popular movement,

that it gave ordinary people a means of satisfying,

through ritual, images, symbols, their deepest impulses,

so that their minds were at peace.

And I think one must agree to put off defining the word civilisation

till we've had a look at the Rome of the Popes.

(MUSIC) PALESTRINA: Lamentation

The first thing that strikes one

is that those who say the Renaissance had exhausted the Italian genius are wrong.

After 152?r, there was a moment of discouragement, a failure of confidence,

and no wonder.

Historians say the Sack of Rome

was more a symbol than an historically significant event.

Well, symbols sometimes feed the imagination more than facts.

Anyway, the Sack was real enough to anyone who'd witnessed it.

Michelangelo's Last Judgement,

which was commissioned by Clement VII as a kind of atonement for the Sack

fills the whole end wall of the Sistine Chapel behind me.

It's a disturbing, a crushing work.

Most of the figures are embodiments of fear or despair.

(MUSIC) PALESTRINA: Lamentation

Look at the damned being ferried across the Styx.

If you compare them with The Creation of Adam, on the ceiling,

you can see that something very drastic has happened

to the foremost imagination of Christendom.

Michelangelo had been reluctant to undertake The Last Judgement.

Under Clement's successor, Paul III Farnese

he was persuaded to continue it, although with rather a different purpose.

It ceased to be an act of atonement

or an attempt to externalise a bad dream,

and became the first and greatest assertion of the Church's power,

and of the fate that would befall heretics and schismatics.

(MUSIC) PALESTRINA: Lamentation, Incipit Orario

The Last Judgement belongs to a period of severity,

when the Catholic Church was approaching its problems

in rather the same puritanical spirit as the Protestants.

It's curious that this period should be inaugurated by Paul III,

because he was in many ways the last of the humanist popes.

He was cradled in corruption.

He was made a cardinal

because his sister, known as La Bella had been the mistress of Alexander Borgia.

At first sight, he looks like a crafty old fox.

But, if you look at Titian's portrait of him in Naples,

one of the greatest portraits ever painted, it's a wise old head.

And the longer you look, the more impressive it becomes.

And he took the two decisions

that were successfully to counter the Reformation:

he sanctioned the Jesuit order and he instituted the Council of Trent.

For almost 20 years,

several hundred bishops and cardinals from all over the Catholic world

met in the Cathedral of Trent to discuss the future of the Church.

There was a good deal of high politics, as well as theology.

But in the end, the Council did draw up a plan for the Catholic revival

which held good right up to the middle of the 19th century.

Michelangelo could refuse him nothing.

He not only finished The Last Judgement,

but in 1546 he accepted from the Pope the post of architect of St Peter's.

Thus Michelangelo, by his longevity no less than by his genius,

became the visual link

between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.

One of the reasons why medieval and Renaissance architecture

is so much better than our own

is that the architects were artists individual artists of genius.

The master masons of the Gothic cathedrals

started as carvers, working on the portals.

In the Renaissance, Brunellesco was originally a sculptor, Bramante a painter.

And of the great architects whom we shall see later on in the programme,

Pietro da Cortona was a painter and Bernini was a sculptor.

This has given to their work a power of plastic invention,

a sense of proportion and articulation based on the study of the human figure,

which knowledge of the tensile strength of steel

and other prerequisites of modern building doesn't always produce.

Well, of all non-professional architects,

Michelangelo was the most adventurous,

the least constrained either by classicism or functional requirements.

Not that he was unpractical - he did drawings for the fortification of Florence,

which from standards of military necessities are most ingenious,

and are also like the most superb works of abstract art.

For that matter, all his ground plans are thrilling abstract designs.

But he felt himself free to play with the elements of architecture

in such a way as to express his feelings.

And, as so often happens with a great artist,

they were prophetic feelings.

You can see what I mean in the building that stands behind me,

the Palazzo dei Conservatori here on the Capitol of Rome.

Grandeur and Obedience.

Well, it's grand all right.

And, if man is to take any pride in his history,

the Roman Capitol should be grand.

But the extraordinary thing

is how Michelangelo had expressed in his architecture

the principle of subordination.

In an earlier Renaissance building,

the parts maintained their identity with a harmonious independence.

In the Michelangelo fa�ade, everything is subordinate

to powerful rhythms that run right through the building.

He gave his immense authority to the device of a single pilaster

running up through two storeys.

In Renaissance architecture and Roman buildings for that matter,

you had one column per storey, one on top of the other.

In this building, the small columns are pressed into the foot of the giant pilaster.

They don't assert themselves; they simply add to its power.

These commanding verticals are met by even more assertive horizontals,

and the inevitable collision of these two directions

gives the building an extraordinary feeling of energy.

It seems as dramatically tense as a human situation.

Perhaps only Michelangelo had the energy of spirit

to pull together the vast, inchoate mass of St Peter's.

Four admirable architects had worked on it before him.

The central piers were already built, and part of the surrounding walls.

But he was able to give it the unifying stamp of his own character.

(MUSIC) MONTEVERDI: Vespers

It's the most sculptural of all his designs -

perhaps the grandest piece of architecture ever built

a vast, simple unit that carries the eye round

as if it were the carving of a torso.

(MUSIC) Domine ad adiuvandu me festina

(MUSIC) Sicut erat in principio

(MUSIC) Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia

(MUSIC) Alleluia

(MUSIC) Alleluia

People don't always appreciate the awe-inspiring grandeur

of the walls and cornices of St Peter's

but everybody knows the dome.

For centuries Lovers of art have gone into ecstasies

about its noble, energetic arc,

expressive of Michelangelo's spiritual aspirations.

It's perhaps the most commanding dome in the world,

easily dominating the other Roman cupolas that one sees as one looks across the city.

However, all the evidence suggests

that it does not represent Michelangelo's final intention.

As you can see in this print, he wanted it to be much more spherical,

less pointed.

It was in fact designed by an architect called Della Porta,

after Michelangelo's death.

Well, we can go on admiring it, and think rather more of Della Porta.

The last stone of the dome of St Peter's was put in place in 1590,

a few months before the death of Sixtus V.

The long period of austerity and consolidation was almost over.

The Catholic Church was victorious.

Now, how had that victory been achieved?

In England, most of us were brought up to believe

that it depended on the Index, the Jesuits and the Inquisition.

Well, I don't believe that a great outburst of creative energy,

such as took place in Rome between 1620 and 1640

can be the result of negative factors.

But I do admit that the civilisation of those years

did depend on certain assumptions

that are out of favour in England and America today.

The first of these, of course was the belief in authority,

the absolute authority of the Roman Church.

And this belief extended to sections of society

which we now assume to be naturally rebellious, like artists.

It comes as something of a shock to find that with a single exception,

the great artists of the time were all sincere, conforming Christians.

Guercino spent much of his mornings in prayer.

Bernini frequently went into retreats

and practised the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius.

Even Rubens attended mass every morning before beginning work.

This conformism wasn't based on fear of the Inquisition,

but on the simple belief

that the faith which had inspired the great saints of the preceding generation,

saints like St Filippo Neri,

was something by which a man should regulate his life.

The mid-16th century was a period of sanctity in the Roman Church,

almost equal to the 12th.

St John of the Cross the great poet of mysticism;

St Ignatius Loyola,

the visionary soldier turned psychologist;

St Teresa of Avila the great headmistress,

with her irresistible combination of mystical experience and common sense;

and St Carlo Borromeo the austere administrator.

One doesn't need to be a practising Catholic to feel immense respect

for a half-century that could produce these great spirits.

However, I'm not trying to pretend

that this episode in the history of civilisation

was of value chiefly because of its influence on artists or philosophers.

On the contrary, I think that intellectual life developed more fully

in the freer atmosphere of the north.

The great achievement of the Catholic Church

lay in harmonising, humanising, civilising

the deepest impulses of ordinary people.

(MUSIC) GABRIELI: Jubilate Deo

Harmonising, humanising, civilising.

Take the cult of the Virgin.

In the early 12th century,

the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation.

She'd taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians

the virtues of tenderness and compassion.

The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were her dwelling places upon earth.

And then in the Renaissance while remaining the Queen of Heaven,

she became also the human mother

in whom everyone could recognise

those qualities of warmth and love and approachability.

Now, imagine the feelings of a simple-hearted man or woman -

a Spanish peasant, an Italian artisan -

on hearing that the northern heretics were insulting the Virgin,

desecrating her sanctuaries, pulling down or decapitating her images.

He must have felt something deeper than indignation.

He must have felt that some part of his whole emotional life was threatened.

And he would have been right.

The stabilising, comprehensive religions of the world,

the religions which penetrate to every part of a man's being,

in Egypt, India, China,

gave the female principle of creation almost as much importance as the male

and wouldn't have taken seriously a philosophy that failed to include both.

Of course, I'm bound to say,

these were all what HG Wells called "communities of obedience".

The aggressive, nomadic societies, what he called "communities of will" -

Israel, Islam, the Protestant north -

conceived their gods as male.

Now, it's a curious fact

that the male religions have produced very little religious imagery -

in most cases have positively forbidden it.

The great religious art of the world in every country

is deeply involved with the female principle.

Of course, the ordinary Catholic who prayed to the Virgin

wasn't conscious of any of this,

nor was he or she interested in the really baffling theological problems

presented by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

He knew simply that heretics wanted to deprive him

of that sweet, compassionate, approachable being,

who would intercede for him

as his mother might have interceded with a hard master.

Take another human impulse that can be harmonised

but shouldn't be suppressed -

the impulse to confess.

A historian can't help observing how the need for confession has returned

even, or especially, in the land of the Pilgrim Fathers.

The difference is

that instead of confession being followed by a simple, comforting rubric,

which has behind it the weight of divine authority,

the modern confessor must grope his way into the labyrinth of the psyche,

with all its false turnings and dissolving perspectives.

A noble aim, but a terrifying responsibility.

No wonder that psychoanalysts have the highest suicide rate of any vocation.

Perhaps, after all, the old procedure had something to recommend it,

because, as a rule

it's the act of confession that matters not the attempted cure.

The leaders of the Catholic restoration had made the inspired decision

not to go halfway to meet Protestantism in any of its objections,

but rather to glory in those very doctrines

that the Protestants had most forcibly - sometimes most logically - repudiated.

Luther had repudiated the authority of the Pope.

Very well. No pains must be spared

to make a gigantic assertion that St Peter, the first Bishop of Rome,

had been divinely appointed as Christ's vicar on earth.

Ever since Erasmus

intelligent men in the north had spoken scornfully of relics.

Very well. Their importance must be magnified,

so that the four piers of St Peter's itself are gigantic reliquaries.

This one contained parts of the lance that pierced Our Lord's side.

And in front of it stands Longinus,

looking up with a gesture of dazzled enlightenment.

The veneration of relics was connected with the cult of the saints

and this had been equally condemned by the reformers.

Very well. The saints should be made more insistently real to the imagination,

and in particular their sufferings and ecstasies should be vividly recorded.

In all these ways,

the Church gave imaginative expression to deep-seated human impulses.

And it had another great strength,

which one may say was part of Mediterranean civilisation,

or at any rate a legacy from the pagan Renaissance:

it was not afraid of the human body.

Titian's Assumption of the Virgin,

a Baroque picture almost 100 years before its time,

was painted in the same period as his great celebrations of paganism.

Early in the 16th century,

Titian had given his immense authority to this union of dogma and sensuality.

And when the first Puritan influence of the Council of Trent was over

Titian's work was there

to inspire both Rubens, who made superb copies of it...

..and, I think, Bernini.

Protestantism, in its overzealous condemnation of sins of the flesh

had also cut itself off from the kind of comforting physical presence

that one finds in Bernini's Charity.

For all these reasons the art we call Baroque was a popular art.

The art of the Renaissance had appealed through intellectual means -

geometry, perspective, knowledge of antiquity -

to a small group of humanists.

The Baroque appealed, through the emotions,

to the widest possible audience.

Sometimes it does so by dramatic illustration.

This is The Calling of St Matthew, by Caravaggio, who was, on the whole,

the greatest, certainly the most original, painter of the period.

And like many other artists of the time, he uses a means of communication

that reminds one of the films.

Caravaggio experimented, as you can see here,

with violent contrasts of light and shade

that were popular in highbrow films of the '20s.

And later Baroque artists, like Bernini, delighted in the emotive close-up,

the tears and open lips and restless movement -

all those devices that were to be rediscovered in the movies.

The extraordinary thing is

that Baroque artists did it in bronze and marble, and not on celluloid.

Of course, in a way, it's a frivolous comparison,

because however much one admires the films

one must admit that they are often vulgar, always ephemeral,

whereas the work of Bernini is ideal and eternal.

He was a very great artist.

And although his work may seem

to lack the awe-inspiring seriousness and concentration of Michelangelo,

it was in its century even more pervasive and influential.

He not only gave Baroque Rome its character,

but he was the chief source of an international style

that spread all over Europe,

as Gothic had done and as the Renaissance style never did.

He was dazzlingly precocious.

At the age of 16, one of his carvings was bought by the Borghese family,

and by the time he was 20, he was already commissioned

to do a portrait of the Borghese pope, Paul V.

In the next three years he became more skillful in the carving of marble

than any sculptor has ever been, before or since.

His David, in contrast with the static David of Michelangelo,

catches the sudden twist of action.

And the vehement expression of the head is almost overdone.

Actually, it's a self-portrait of the young Bernini,

who made a face into a mirror -

said to have been held for him by his patron, the cardinal Scipione Borghese.

The Apollo and Daphne is an even more extraordinary example

of how marble can be made into something fluid and fleeting,

because it represents the moment

when Daphne, crying for help to her father, is changed into a laurel tree.

Her fingers are becoming leaves already.

It's just beginning to dawn on Apollo that he's lost her.

And if he could look down, he would see

that her beautiful legs are already turning into a tree trunk...

..and her toes are becoming roots and tendrils.

All these brilliant works were done for the Borghese family.

It was very bright of them to commission so young a man,

But by the 1620s, the rich Roman families,

who were in fact the families of successive popes,

had begun to compete as patrons and collectors,

often in a somewhat piratical manner.

One's reminded of the competition

between monster American collectors of 60 years ago - Mr Frick, Mr Morgan -

with the difference that Roman patrons competed for the works of living artists,

not simply for certified "Old Masters".

The leading Roman families

put painters under contract, like television stars.

And the painters really got paid, which they never did in the Renaissance.

As often happens, I believe,

a sudden relaxation and affluence after a period of austerity

produced an outburst of creative energy.

The 1620s were relaxed all right,

as one can see from Bernini's portrait of that most affluent cardinal

Scipione Borghese.

Of all these papal families, one easily outshone the rest: the Barberini.

This was due to the pontificate of Matteo Barberini

who, in 1623, became Pope Urban VIII.

He survived as Pope for 20 years.

But, as he himself foresaw, he survives in history

very largely because he was the patron of Bernini.

At the time of Urban's accession Bernini was only 25,

and the very next year he was made architect of St Peter's

a project that was to occupy him for more than 40 years.

At the end of that time, he had made visible

the victory of the Catholic Church.

The pilgrim approaching St Peter's before Bernini

would have found himself in a venerable and picturesque quarter of the city,

with a few large buildings,

isolated from one another by trees and meadows;

individually grand, but not making the impact of a complete architectural idea.

Now imagine his experiences after Bernini had done his work.

He would cross the Ponte St Angelo,

with its marble angels from Bernini's workshop,

and from the other side make his way to Bernini's piazza.

(MUSIC) GABRIELI: Canzon Primi Toni

Bernini is perhaps the only artist in history

who's been able to carry through such a vast design over so long a period.

And the result is a unity of impression

that exists nowhere else on so grand a scale.

Then, when our pilgrim passes through the enormous fa�ade,

the feeling of complete unity of style is maintained.

You get a better impression of the interior of St Peter's

from this painting than from a photograph.

It was painted 200 years ago, but in fact very little has changed.

Not only is the decoration basically all conceived by Bernini in a uniform style,

but the eye passes without a break

through the Baldacchino and up to that astonishing construction,

the throne of St Peter.

But perhaps what would have impressed our pilgrim most of all

would have been the bronze Baldacchino.

Bernini started work on it in the year he became architect of St Peter's, and it's incredible.

Yes, if one knows anything about bronze casting, it really is incredible.

It involved every sort of engineering difficulty.

And then there's the amazing richness and audacity of Bernini's invention,

and the perfection of craftsmanship, which extends to every detail.

More extraordinary still,

Bernini seems already to have foreseen in his imagination

what the whole development of St Peter's would be like

because this work which is the first thing he designed,

is completely in harmony with the great progression of works

executed over the whole span of 40 years.

I believe that anyone who uses his eyes without prejudice

will find his emotions stirred and enlarged

by these marvellous experiences.

As we enter this world of light and movement,

of weightless angels and billowing bishops and tumbling cherubs,

we are ourselves no longer weighed down by earthly things.

We participate imaginatively, as we do in a ballet

in the ecstatic repudiation of the forces of gravity.

But the word "ballet" suddenly puts me on my guard.

It was no accident that Bernini was the greatest scene designer of his age.

John Evelyn, the diarist, records how in 1644

he went to the opera in Rome,

where Bernini painted the scenes, cut the statues

invented the engines, composed the music,

wrote the comedy and built the theatre.

And we're told that at Bernini's productions,

people in the front row ran out of the theatre,

fearing they would be drenched by water or burnt by fire,

so powerful was the illusion that he created.

Of course, these stage sets have all vanished.

But we have some evidence of what they were like

in the fountain that Bernini designed for the Piazza Navona, here behind me.

It's an astonishing performance.

A sizeable Egyptian obelisk is lifted up on a hollow rock,

as if it weighed no more than a ballerina.

And round the rock are four gigantic figures,

symbolising the four great rivers of the world.

First of all the Danube

with its symbolic animal, the horse, emerging from a grotto -

said to be the only part of the monument carved by Bernini himself.

Incidentally, it's the portrait of a real horse, called Monte d'Oro.

And then the Nile

with a rather... rather ridiculous lion.

And then the Ganges, shrouded from the sun.

And finally the river Plate,

symbolised by heaven knows what sort of fabulous crocodile.

The Plate seems to be reeling back in horror.

The people of Rome used to maintain that he was showing his alarm

at the sight of the church fa�ade,

by Bernini's only serious rival, the architect Borromini.

Of this theatrical element in Bernini

a sublime example is the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria.

To begin with, Bernini has represented the members of the Cornaro family

on either side of the chapel,

looking as if they were in boxes, waiting for the curtain to go up.

Then, when we come to the drama itself

it's presented exactly as if it were on a small stage,

with a spotlight falling on the protagonists.

But at this point, the theatrical parallel must be dropped,

because what we see

The Ecstasy of Santa Teresa,

is one of the most deeply moving works in European art.

Bernini's gift of sympathetic imagination, of entering into the emotions of others,

a gift no doubt enhanced by his practice of St Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises,

is used to convey the rarest and most precious of all emotional states,

that of religious ecstasy.

He's illustrated exactly the passage of the saint's autobiography

in which she describes the supreme moment of her life,

how an angel with a flaming golden arrow pierced her heart repeatedly.

"The pain was so great that I screamed aloud,

but simultaneously felt such infinite sweetness

that I wished the pain to last eternally."

"It was the sweetest caressing of the soul by God."

(MUSIC) MONTEVERDI: Vespers

I don't think that anyone can accuse me

of underestimating the Catholic restoration,

or its greatest image-maker Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

So may I end by saying

that this episode in the history of civilisation arouses in me certain misgivings,

and they may be summed up in the words illusion and exploitation.

Of course, all art is to some extent an illusion.

It transforms experience in order to satisfy some need of the imagination.

But there are degrees of illusion,

depending on how far from direct experience the artist is prepared to go.

Bernini went very far -

just how far, one realises when one remembers

the historical Santa Teresa

with her plain, dauntless, sensible face.

The contrast with the swooning, sensuous beauty of the Cornaro Chapel

is almost shocking.

One can't help feeling that affluent Baroque,

in its escape from the severities of the earlier fight against Protestantism,

ended by escaping from reality into a world of illusion.

Art creates its own momentum and once set on this course

there was nothing it could do except become more and more sensational.

And this is what happens.

In the breathtaking performances that take place over our heads,

in the Gesu, and St Ignazio, and the Palazzo Barberini

we feel that the stopper is out.

Imaginative energy is fizzing away, up into the clouds,

and will soon evaporate.

(MUSIC) MONTEVERDI: Vespers

As for my other misgivings,

of course there was exploitation before the 16th century,

but never on so vast a scale.

In the Middle Ages,

it was usually accompanied by real popular participation.

Even in the Renaissance

palaces were to some extent seats of government and objects of local pride.

But the colossal palaces of the Pope's relatives

were simply expressions of private greed and vanity.

Farnese, Borghese, Barberini, Loduvisi -

these rapacious parvenus spent their short years of power

competing as to who should build the largest and most ornate saloons.

In doing so, they commissioned some great works of art,

and one can't help admiring their shameless courage.

At least they weren't mean and furtive, like some modern millionaires.

But their contribution to civilisation

was limited to this kind of visual exuberance.

The sense of grandeur is no doubt a human instinct;

but carried too far, it becomes inhuman.

I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit

has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.

(MUSIC) MONTEVERDI: Vespers Dixit Dominus