https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GitR-XdIn8g&t=9205s
Waldemar On The Hidden Meaning Behind 8 Iconic Paintings | Every Picture Tells A Story
00:00:00 Ep 1: Thomas Gainsborough's "Mr and Mrs Andrews."
00:20:55 Ep 2: Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp."
00:42:28 Ep 3: Giorgione's "The Tempest."
01:04:53 Ep 4: Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus."
01:28:20 Ep 5: Caravaggio's "Boy Bitten by a Lizard."
01:51:52 Ep 6: Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa."
02:15:11 Ep 7: Edouard Manet's "D;jeuner sur L'Herbe"
02:38:37 Ep 8: Jan van Eyck's "The Arnolfini Portrait"
Conversation with Gemini
Ep 1: Thomas Gainsborough's "Mr and Mrs Andrews."
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hello this is valdar yak art critic producer and presenter of documentaries
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thanks for watching perspective YouTube's home for classical art
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[Music]
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[Music]
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the English Countryside is a deceptive terrain it looks so sweet so friendly so
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innocent but it's none of those things anyone who's listened to a few
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episodes of The Archers will already know that dark stuff happens in the
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English Countryside sharp of tooth red of claw
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it's a deadly Battleground the great English painter
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Thomas gainesborough certainly knew this he was a country boy born and bred a
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suffk lad Gainesboro recognized that beneath
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the deceptively innocent surfaces of outdoor England unpleasantness was
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thriving lives were being ruined greed was being shown
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voila gainsborough's Masterpiece of outdoor englishness his famous double
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portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews summer corn glistening in the sun fluffy clouds
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scotting across the sky English Oaks dotting The Horizon and sitting in front
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of it all like a pair of giant spiders in the middle of a web Mr and Mrs
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Andrews him with his big gun and his
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nonchalance she with the most puzzlingly unpleasant expression in the whole of
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gainsborough's art if this woman invited me up to spend the weekend at her big country house I
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don't think I'd accept something's going on here it's a pretty scene it's Merry
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England but something's going on here [Music]
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this is gainsborough's Town Sudbury in suffk where Mr Andrews and Gainesboro
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probably went to school together it's a tea and cakes Town these
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days somewh ye oldie on the tourist circuit but when Gainesboro was born
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here in 1727 this was a real slab of rural England
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a cloth town in serious decline Daniel defo came and visited subri quite early
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on in the century and thought that it was a very very poor place and with one or two rich people and all the poor
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people may will e the rich ones he said so it was quite a depress town and
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Sudbury has always been an earthy little working town and its main industry has been
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weaving um and indeed the gaina family were concerned with that not only gain's
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father but also his very much more successfully his uncle but it was quite a shaky business I think they made
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velvet here wool of course sbur is surrounded by sheep and interestingly
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silk this is gainsborough's garden and this beautiful old survivor is a mulbery
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tree planted here in 1610 it would have been handy for the
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Gainsborough to have a mulbury tree in the garden because mury trees are what silk worms feed on and the gainsb were
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in the cloth trade gainsborough's father was a Trader in fine
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materials and so in a way was his son if you ever get a chance to examine
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closely a portrait by gainsboro in his prime have a good look at the clothes
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they're wearing the silks the satins the brades
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the lace he had a genius for painting precious Fabrics
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he knew about them from birth and loved them dizzily I
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think picture after picture by Gainesboro at his best is a glorious
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advert for his father's
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calling even Mrs Andrews the baddy in this picture gets an outfit to die for
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pale blue silk in an outrageous expanse not what you'd usually wear if you're
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out killing [Music]
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pheasants I get the feeling in a lot of gainsborough's pictures that he liked the clothes more than he liked the
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people wearing them he was notoriously unimpressed by his sitters when he was
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painting Sarah siddens the most celebrated actress of her times the Elizabeth Hurley of the Georgian age he
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suddenly exploded damn your nose there's no end to it and behind the backs of his
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sitters he was even more scathing yes he he was known to complain
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about his sitters um but I think being a portraitist is really a considerable
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problem that you have all these people who by definition want to look better than they probably do um and that having
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that day in day out of about eight people a day um must be a considerable
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problem and and most portraitists got very very bored um with um
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self-important people rushing through their studio all day Gainesboro hated doing fashionable
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portraits the cursed face business he called it his tragedy was he was so damn good
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at it they only have one part worth looking at said Gainesboro of the fashionable
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types he painted and that is their purse so he sniffed the air and headed for
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where the biggest purses were gathered he moved to Bath where all the
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celebrities of Georgian England would visit to take the waters and to have their likeness done by Tomas
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Gainesboro the Mario testino of his age he ended up in London naturally the
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most fashionable Portrait Painter in England who was usually forgiven his
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little r resses because he captured a likeness better than anyone else he had
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the gift all right Gainesboro had the fastest hands of any painter this
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country's ever produced he painted like an expert swordsman whoosh whoos whoosh
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and the rich have always been able to take a bit of rudeness from their artists in return for some breathtaking
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immortality he realized that he had to cover a vast amount of C members in order to compete with people there are
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one or two records of um Head and Shoulder portraits which uh he completed
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in 1 hour 40 minutes and that is going at Sensational speed there's records of
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him getting drunk for a fortnite and then doing a skirt of a great full length portrait in a night so I think he
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used that speed to good effect so that he could get drunk for a fortnite and also um so that he could get through the
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acreage of canvas and compete in the real way Gainesboro was the youngest of nine
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children his father the cloth Merchant fell on hard times and was
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bankrupt young Thomas wasn't going to enter the cloth business he had another Talent
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art and according to a story which I don't quite believe but I'll tell you anyway when he was a boy he saw a man
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trying to steal pears from his garden and Drew him so convincingly that the
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neighbors recognized this scoundrel immediately and nabbed him young
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Gainesboro was also naughty another story which I do believe is that he used
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to forge his own sick notes for school and captured his parents' handwriting
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perfectly from his days of forging sick notes at school and throughout his life
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Gainesboro was a subtle subversive always doing things on the
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sly at the age of 18 He got got married in secret to the illegitimate daughter
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of a Duke he'd got her pregnant she brought in ;200 a year
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which was very useful and which Gainesboro began to supplement busily by
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painting some of the most memorable portraits in British art
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[Music]
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this is the house the gainsb lived in it's an estate agents now and no one
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seems to know what went on in which room but it could be that this is the
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spot in which Gainesboro painted Mr and Mrs Andrews
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these days the picture hangs in the National Gallery and is famous the world over as gainsborough's earliest
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Masterpiece but until 50 years ago no one outside the Andrews family even knew
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it existed the National Gallery didn't buy it until 1960 so here's an interesting question
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why was this painting kept so secret for so long
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Andrews inherited half of the estate from his father aubre it was called his
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wife brought in the other half when they married in 1748 so although it wasn't strictly
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speaking a marriage of convenience it was certainly a most convenient marriage
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which left both of them twice as rich as they had been so far so normal here are
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two small town Moneybags celebrating the Union of two big time
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purses but something went wrong in the making of This Much moneyed wedding
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portrait I often watch people walking past this entertaining picture and enjoy it a lot but it's amazing how often they
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miss two crucial things about it one is how frightening Mrs Andrews is but the
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second is that it's unfinished if you look closely at that brown splodge in
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the middle of her lap something's missing the picture is
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incomplete Gainesboro never had his final say in this painting he meant to show something here
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but never did what was it and why did he never put it
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[Music] there why is Mr and Mrs Andrews
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unfinished these are the questions that need to be
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asked here you have a painting that's famous the world over as the perfect
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image of rural England but just as Paradise had a snake in it so Mrs
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Andrews had on her lap something that never got painted something that someone
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somewhere didn't want us to see and I'm sure I know what it is
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the single most aggressive and destructive act ever perpetrated by the government of Britain on its rural folk
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was the long and drawn out passing of the enclosure acts which took the common
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land away from the people put a fence around it and gave it to the landlords
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it was unforgivable it ruined the livings of so many country people
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gainsborough's heart always went out to them the poor had his
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sympathy not the rich and the landed like Mr and Mrs Robert
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Andrews this is the exact spot on which Gainesboro painted his wonderful picture
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you must recognize that Oak behind me this big fat English Oak which is exactly the same tree although it's
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thicker now than it was before and over there of course is that beautiful slab
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of the English Countryside which is behind Mr and M Andrews in the picture still I think really
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recognizable now Mr Andrews is standing just about here he's been at hunting so
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he's holding his shooting rifle nonchalantly under his arm Mrs Andrews
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she's sitting here demurely with her legs crossed now I've seen this picture so many times in the National Gallery
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but it wasn't until I came here and stood in this spot that I realized something incredibly interesting about
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it which is that behind gain in the painting hidden from sight is the house
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in which Mr and Mrs Andrews actually lived now that's significant not just
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because you didn't know it was there in the painting but also because it explains one of the great mysteries of
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Mr and Mrs Andrews which is why she is dressed in this flamboyant outfit of
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flowing pale blue silk while he is wearing his scruffy shooting gear OB ly
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what's happened is that he's been out doing the shooting while she has been waiting for him indoors and has now come
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out to meet him just a few hundred feet away from the house to sit on his bench
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the biggest change in the landscape of course is this huge row of trees behind me there's a forest down there now that
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isn't in the Gainesboro picture now that was planted deliberately by one of the later owners of the house apparently
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they built a council estate at the bottom of the hill so the owner decided to try and mask it and he planted this
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huge forest in between it and him the Corn's gone of course it's all
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been grassed over now but if you look carefully you can actually still see The Echoes of these FS there's little bits
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of them left and what's interesting about the furrows is that they're what's left over from this revolutionary new
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use of an Implement called the seed drill now this seed drill was the very latest in agrarian technology it made
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harvesting the corn so much easier and Mr Andrews was very proud of being a Pioneer in its
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use the seed drill wasn't widely taken up initially wealthy land owners are
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Keen to use it as it was a public demonstration of how wealthy and how advanced they were it wasn't received
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widely uh by the majority especially the Farm Workers in fact they could see with
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this change with mechanization coming in that actually their jobs would be a threat Mr and Mrs Andrew these Newly
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Weds are showing off the fruit of their Union their land and their agricultural
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progressiveness of course there isn't a peasant in sight and none of this was achieved by these two getting their
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hands dirty in any way what a painting shows to me is the
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importance of the new farming methods to him and it's a real statement that he's
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actually you know a very wealthy powerful landowner and and really accepting all these new ideas and it
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sort of really look at me I'm so you know really ahead of the game people say that Gainesboro was
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having a go at the rural rich in this picture I think that's right he was
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these are greedy people they've snatched the land away from its rightful owners
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and they're parading themselves in front of it while Gainesboro disapproves but there's something else
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going on here something more personal if Gainesboro really did go to school with
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Mr Andrews I think he rather liked him Mr Andrews is sympathetically painted
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he's dim but nice lounging around on his land with his gun and his
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dog it's Mrs Andrews who worries me she's surely one of the least attractive
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women in Gainesboro art uptight clinched stiff she's only a teenager 18 years old
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but she already has the demeanor of a middle-aged Rural
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haridan and what is that on her lap that unfinished blob of
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canvas I think there's only one thing it can be that must be a feather the tail
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feather of a pheasant I warrant and the rest of the bird is sitting on her
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knee he's been out hunting he's brought the bird back she's got it on her lap on
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a cloth so that it doesn't bleed into her beautiful blue dress
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but if there is a pheasant what's it doing there is the dead bird an innocent Aven
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corpse brought back from the morning's hunt and no more or does it have another
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meaning a deeper one a symbolic one gainsboro was a great admirer of
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Dutch art and in Dutch art you often find women wenches shop girls wives
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holding up dead birds snipe duck look at this Buck some butcher made how
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fiercely she clutches that look at her unsmiling
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determination does it remind you of [Music]
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anyone the fact is that most dead birds in Dutch art represent a man who's
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fallen into the clutches of a determined Woman and been
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[Music]
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plucked the bird in the hand of a buxom dutchwoman is invariably intended as a
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warning to us guys not to let ourselves be grabbed where it hurts and all the
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naughty dubl anons involving the word are entirely
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intentional Gainsborough a countryman would have known all about these Low Country readings and he would I suggest
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have been after just such a dubler on tant in his picture before it was
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censored I think that he didn't like Mrs Andrews much that he was warning Mr Andrews of the fate of the pheasant
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that's fallen into her lap and been grabbed just before this picture was
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finished I think its secret meaning was spotted and that Mrs Andrew realized all
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too clearly how unflattering a portrait of her was being painted
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here the picture was never finished because the sitters finally realized what Gainesboro was saying about them
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and didn't like [Music]
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it ah yes the English Countryside the corn in the field the
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Larks in the sky and the poison in the hearts of the
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[Music] people Mr and Mrs Andrews is a Great
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Masterpiece of gainor's early work but if only he'd been allowed to complete it
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it would have been greater
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still there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of
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them [Music]
Ep 2: Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp."
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death most of us prefer to avert our eyes at the sight of it but not artists
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oh no artists enjoy picking over it death has been one of Art's great
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subjects and Art's treatment of it has tended to separate the men from the boys
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the great artists from the ordinary ones witness the fascination with death of
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rembrand Van Ryan rembrand seemed often to have death
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on his mind his own yes in those doggedly pessimistic
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self-portraits but also everyone else's he paint Ed plenty of the usual
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dead christs hauled Up and Down the Cross like meat at a
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butchers and he painted meat at The Butchers crucified like a
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Christ you wouldn't want to be a bird in Rembrandt's presence because he only
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looked at you properly when you were dead from the beginning he was haunted
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by the Spectre of the end
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rembrand produced a couple of the most Brazen evocations of death in the whole of art above all there's his strange
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painting in the beautiful Moritz house in the ha the anatomy lesson of Dr
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TLP it's acknowledged as one of his most powerful works and the moment you see it
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you know you're in the presence of a most unusual masterpiece
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eight curious men hunched eagerly around a corpse like a gaggle of illegal
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gamblers on Tottenham Court Road captivated by the three card trick why would rembrand want to paint
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this it's a dull title isn't it the anatomy lesson of Dr TLP you imagine
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you're back at school don't you at a medical tutorial with a group of eager
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students Keen to learn the secrets of the dissector trade but that's not
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what's going on here because the first thing to note about this Eerie Masterwork is that
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rembrand in his quest for enigmatic silence seems to have left out something
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crucial from this scene something very noisy the
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audience a bing crowd of boisterous amsterdams two or 300 strong playing
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music munching picnics would have ringed this gory spectacle and watched the corps's
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dismemberment cut by cut slice by slice with great
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enthusiasm the public deection at the time of Renaissance were very popular it
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was normal that when you got a new girlfriend perhaps you wanted to marry
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to give a good present you bought a ticket for the next public deection to
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come the anatomy lesson in reality attracted many viewers you had to pay for each single
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visit or you could pay uh per corpse because the anatomy lesson lasted for 3
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days or 5 days depending on uh what was there to be
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explained in Holland in the 17th century the Dutch quiet people you would have
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thought sensible types not known for their bloodlust or their
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necrophilia developed an unprecedented passion for public
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dismemberment the dissection of a kadava muscle by muscle limb by limb became a
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mustsee event we go to cats and Starlight Express the Dutch in
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Rembrandt's day queued for tickets to a corpse cutting
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well the painting on the right is the very first painted Anatomy lesson we know not only Amsterdam not only Holland
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but worldwide it looks like a sort of festive banet of Civic guards only the
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banet has been replaced by a corpse the painting on the left is the
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first Anatomy lesson painted uh where we don't look at a an executed criminal's
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body but to a little child this baby seems to be asleep and it's also holding its own
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umbilical cord like what a little child would do of course not with the umbilical core
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but with your little finger for
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[Music]
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instance we're in Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam
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this is his bedroom this is his
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studio and this is his Prop
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Room Rembrandt's Cabinet of Curiosities a collection of curios built
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up over the years to fire his imagination
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in 1669 just before rembrand died an antique dealer came up here hoping to
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buy the lot and discovered among the coral and the stuffed beasties the
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seashells and the armor four human arms and legs skinned and floating in glass
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jars One of These Arms may have served as a model for the anatomy lesson of Dr
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to P if it did then rembrand had been hoarding it for 35
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years Laden not much of a town these days but in Rembrandt's time a hot House
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of money making and trade the van ran named after the river
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flowing past their front door a peti tributary of the giant R were
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Millers corn Grinders to the populace rembrand was born here would
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you believe in 16006 the eighth of nine
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children today his hometown seems perversely determined to ignore
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him they've put up a statue that pigeons poo on and that's about it all the sign
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there is in leaden that Rembrandt's story started
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here at 14 he was sent to University but soon dropped out he was going to be a
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painter and a cocky painter at that who outgrew lien quickly and moved in 1631
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to Amsterdam where the money was the clients the
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business and where they commemorate him everywhere these days
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and I mean
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everywhere a few months after his arrival out of the blue young rembrand
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the new artist in town was commissioned to paint a picture by a desperately
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fashionable Amsterdam GP who called himself Dr Nicholas
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tulp Dr tulp was a self-made man in every sense like rembrand he' come to
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Amsterdam from leaden where he' studied medicine at the University his real name was class
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Peterson but he changed it to TLP when he got to Amsterdam TLP in Dutch means
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tulip this was the era of tulip Mania in Holland the whole country had gone
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blooming mad tulip Mania was the internet boom of
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its day ruthless Garden millionaires made their for fortunes wheeling and
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dealing in rare varieties a single precious bulb could fetch the same price
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as a house there was a tulip carved into the Gable of TL's new house in Amsterdam so
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that's what he began calling himself as he did his rounds Dr tulip GP to the
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rich driving around Amsterdam in a coach emblazened with tulip
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designs it obviously worked was a piece of rebranding but how good a doctor was
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he well one of Dr TL's favorite prescriptions was to order his patients
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to drink 50 Cups of Tea a day and if that's impressive medicine then I'm a PG
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chimp TP was a showoff but that was just as well a less flashy doctor would
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surely not have chosen the newest painter in town a young gun called rembrand just arrived from leaden to
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capture for posterity his great tulpan performance at a public Anatomy lesson
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mounted in Amsterdam in the winter of 1632 by the surgeon
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Guild the surgeon's Guild consisted of Surgeons not doctors although in each
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painting there's always one doctor he was an academically trained doctor and was appointed by the
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local government to do teaching of anatomy the surgeons
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were organized in a guild and they were Craftsmen although they had a highly High um pretty high esteem of the of
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themselves it sounds impressive doesn't it the surgeons Guild but the surgeons
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of Amsterdam had to share their Guild with tripe producers clog manufacturers
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and skate makers so they relied on art to separate at them from their trip producing
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brothers and to endow them with the Grandeur they felt they
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deserved at least once a year the guild had a right to organize an anatomy lesson 200 or 300 people must have been
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present but the painting however only depicts those who were ready to pay for
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their own portraits we don't know exactly whether the doctor also painted for his own
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portrait but it seems likely it seems even more likely that the doctor took the initiative to commission the
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portrait because it's striking that most of the anatomy lessons were commissioned uh in or about the year
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that the doctor was appointed as the prelector of the surgeon's Guild so tulp made rembrand by choosing
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him and rembrand responded in kind by immortalizing tulp as the silent Hero at
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the center of a tense and Powerful medical drama we watch ER starring George
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Clooney the Dutch watched this starring Dr
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TLP it's a strange pose what's TLP actually doing well his right hand is
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probing The Corpse's arm with some forceps the skin already taken off of
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course while the other hand is going like that like a priest blessing his
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congregation what's actually happening is that TLP is lifting a muscle called
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the flexor digitorum superficialis located in the proximal interphalangeal
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joints and this as you know operates the fingers so with his left hand he's
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showing what would happen to the fingers if you moved this muscle they'd go like
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that the students lean over fascinated to see exactly what he
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means but TLP doesn't steal all the Limelight here does
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he much of the credit for the anatomy lesson's riveting presence is due to the
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deathly white corpse glowing like ready Breck at the center of the
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action poor guy all he'd done was try a bit of shoplifting yet look where it got
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him
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[Music] at the time of the Renaissance it was very normal that normal people could
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enjoy looking what is beneath our skin something which is not normal
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[Music] today those anomy art s who painted uh
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this picture like rembrand they would nowadays not be
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[Music] allowed today no artist is allowed
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whether in England or in Europe to detect the kava I think it's a
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shame the anatomical theaters between
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1550 and about 1850 all over Europe including London there were
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mainly small ones they were usually out of wood therefore many are not preserved
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unfortunately also not in London they were small
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because uh when you want to see something real
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life or a real death in this case you must be very near to the
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deection the public deection at the time of the Renaissance were really
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something the anatomy lesson rembrand paints actually took place on January
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the 31st 1632 the corpse belonged to one Adrian
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adrianson Alias the kid a petty criminal who like Rembrandt like Dr tulp himself
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came to Amsterdam from leaden in search of richer pickings he'd been caught stealing a
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coat and earlier on the very same day that rembrand paints he'd been hanged from the jibbit on the waterfront which
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seems a hell of a price to pay for stealing a coat they were not the the small
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criminals that were really the big guys that with a huge record of crime this
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was just the last drop that did it though it records a real event an
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actual Anatomy lesson the painting can't have been done right there before the
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corpse as it were in a real anatomy class the first thing you'd open up is
37:09
The Corpse's stomach that's where the squishiest and smelliest human bits are housed and with
37:16
Anatomy classes lasting a few days and no Refrigeration at hand the real Dr
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tulp would certainly not have started with his victim's arm
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he would have sliced straight into the guts the great death of Adrian adrianson
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made rembrand famous as his celebrity grew so did the
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size of his commissions the grandest painter in
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Amsterdam no longer troubled himself with mere coat snatchers he was painting Amsterdam's
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finest and he was packing them in it wasn't until 20 years after the
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anatomy lesson of Dr TLP that rembrand returned to the dissecting chamber for a
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second dose of dismemberment the anatomy lesson of Dr
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Damon a wonky painting that wasn't wonky once once it too featured a large
38:27
dissecting drama but half of it was lost in a fire
38:33
in 1723 including the head of Dr
38:40
Damon you see the man standing behind to corbs that's Dr diamond without the head
38:46
he's the assistant to the Proctor I think he's the famous person without the
38:51
head we know in Dutch art the first time I saw the anatomy
38:56
lesson of Dr to Damon and I bet you thought this too I mistook the two halves of The Corpse's
39:04
brain for long hair parted down the middle the corpse looks just like a dead
39:10
Christ doesn't he the top of his head handed around
39:16
like a cup makes a passible chalice too something always nags me about the
39:23
anatomy lesson of Dr tulp as well the way those middle-aged students pour over
39:29
the miraculously glowing corpse reminds me of the adoring Shepherds who hurry to
39:35
the stable in a nativity what I'm saying is that Adrien
39:41
adrianson and Jesus Christ have had the differences between them deliberately
39:47
blurred the kid may have been a no good coat stealer who met a grim and pitiful
39:54
death but Rembrandt's given him a send off worthy of a
40:02
God so the kid did well out of the picture but what about everyone else
40:08
well rembrand himself he fell out of fashion in his 40s he was bankrupt in
40:13
his 50s and he died in Hawk age 63 Dr TLP prospered initially he was the
40:22
first doctor to describe the anatomy of a chimpanzee and he went on to become
40:27
mayor of Amsterdam four times but just recently he's been outed
40:33
as a fraud in a clutch of revisionist medical books his reputation is shot his
40:40
imitators mistrusted the actual building in which
40:46
the dissection took place that dark Hall looming up above them is called the vag
40:53
these days and it's a restaurant in the red light district of am
40:59
Dam but there's something we haven't tackled yet remember I said something
41:04
seemed to be missing from this scene something crucial the audience well look
41:11
more closely follow tp's
41:18
eyes he's not looking at his students he's looking out Beyond
41:24
them look at the man on TL's right who's he staring
41:31
at at us of course we can't see the missing audience
41:38
because we are the missing audience and that man at the top of the pile of
41:44
students the one pointing down at Adrien adrianson corpse he's looking at us
41:53
too it isn't just the corpse he's pointing at he's pointing to everybody's
42:02
Futures there but for the grace of God go all of us is this picture's hidden
42:09
message thanks for the reminder
42:16
rembrand there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one
42:21
of them [Music]
Ep 3: Giorgione's "The Tempest."
42:33
[Music]
42:50
there are paintings whose meaning is a mystery there are painters who led
42:56
mysterious lives but only rarely very rarely do we encounter an utterly mysterious painting
43:03
by an utterly mysterious painter that's the case with the Tempest the
43:09
Masterpiece by jorio De Castel Franco better known to you and me as
43:16
[Music]
43:23
gejon the Tempest hangs in the Academia Gallery in Venice a city packed with great
43:31
pictures but so precious is the Tempest that they wouldn't even let us into the same room to film
43:41
it this is an icon of Western culture and is possibly the best conserved of
43:46
geon's Works still in existence entire books have been written
43:52
about the content of this painting which can be interpreted at various different levels
43:57
for 500 years The Tempest has led its many admirers on a wild goose
44:03
chase to this day there is no agreement about what we're actually witnessing
44:09
when we look at it who is she who is
44:16
he what are they doing and where are
44:23
they although Geon is considered perhaps venice's greatest painter he wasn't
44:28
actually from Venice he came from the Venetian Mainland the Veneto as it's
44:34
called a land of dark Hills mysterious Mists and silhouetted castles whose
44:40
poetic presence always haunts the backgrounds of his art
44:49
[Music]
45:10
Castle Franco where young gorio was born in 1477 is a pretty medieval city
45:18
surrounded by a moat we know zjo came from a humble
45:26
family that he was tall and imposing which is how he got his nickname
45:31
georgeon Big George Big George's earliest work in
45:37
45:43
and astronomical diagrams painted in the house of a local nobleman like so much of geon's art the
45:51
46:00
at an early age he left Castle Franco for Venice where he quickly made his Mark
46:07
with these mysterious fantasies filled with poetic longing for the
46:15
vetto but there's a problem we know GE Jon's art was revolutionary that he had
46:21
many followers and was much copied but we don't know exactly what he painted Ed
46:27
none of his work is signed not even the Tempest unlike other painters of
46:36
uh Renaissance Italy very little is known about him except for the the date
46:42
of his death and a few dates of uh of of some of of his paintings but when we
46:49
know the date the painting is lost and when we have the painting we have no date with one exception there is only
46:54
one painting in Vienna Laura which is dated on the back of it at 1506 so it's a it's a very mysterious
47:03
painter we know almost nothing about geon's life we know that he lived in this
47:09
Square in Venice that he played the loot beautifully that he was very handsome
47:16
that women liked him and that perhaps as a result he died young
47:27
it seems that his handsome looks and his beautiful loot playing brought him to the attention of a certain Venetian
47:35
lady she caught the plague Joon while conducting this elicit affair with her
47:41
caught it too he died in 1510 aged a little over 30 but he'd done enough he'd
47:50
changed the course of [Music]
47:55
art like no no one before him gejon was to feed the Venetian appetite for
48:01
melancholy ambiguity it's an appetite to the inhabitants of Venice seemed to inherit
48:08
with their mother's milk the city itself a floating
48:14
Labyrinth decaying before our eyes is a puzzle waiting to be
48:23
solved people like to look up and discover in the same place different things that they have possibly never
48:28
seen before this happens even to us venetians whenever we look up or look
48:35
around we discover something new we'd know more about GE Jon a lot
48:43
more if what he painted on the outside of this unnaturally blank building
48:48
hadn't crumbled into the water this used to be the warehouse of
48:53
the German merchants in Venice once it was completely covered with
48:58
Fresco by Geon today it's venice's main post
49:05
office and only this tiny decayed fragment
49:16
Remains The Tempest was painted just before geon's horribly premature death
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in 1510 we know it was probably commissioned by Gabrielle vendramin a
49:28
member of One of venice's most powerful families this is vendramin as an old man
49:34
painted by tishan who was always thought to have been gjon's pupil but notice the
49:41
cross in this painting it's terribly
49:50
important this cross which still exists behind this golden door was thought to
49:56
conin a fragment of the actual cross on which Jesus was
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crucified yet one day to the city's haror it was dropped accidentally into
50:07
this canal in Venice and sank to the bottom no one could find it until
50:13
Gabrielle's famed ancestor Andrea vendramin plunged into the water and
50:19
fished it out it was a miracle or so the venetians
50:25
believed their cross was
50:30
safe the miracle of the Cross gave the vendramin family great Fame in Venice
50:35
though you wouldn't know it today I tracked down the family Palace
50:41
and found it to be a simple hardware store looking around at the nuts and the
50:48
bolts it was impossible to imagine that in this building geon's Tempest was to
50:54
hang largely unseen for 400
51:01
years we don't know how Gabriel vendramin came to acquire the Tempest he
51:07
probably commissioned it directly from the painter 20 years after GE Jon's death a visitor to vend ramin's Palace
51:15
remembers seeing a little landscape with a storm with a gypsy and a soldier by
51:20
Georgio of castal Franco already the tempest's real meaning was lost
51:28
so perhaps it never had one Tempest is a very mysterious B and
51:34
this is proven by the very fact that there are 30 to 40 different interpretations of it uh one of them
51:41
being that it has no meaning at all this is one interpretation like the others from some contemporary sources We Gather
51:47
that the sort of pattern like Gabrielle vendramine who owned the painting in the in the 1520s loved to have guests in
51:55
their homes and to show them some paintings like this and and to and to play with them whether they would
52:01
understand or not this is the reason why many many scholars including myself vast
52:08
majority of Scholars including myself believe that a meaning was intended whether we are able to understand it or
52:14
not but the meaning was intended when dramin never sold the
52:19
Tempest he left a will forbidding his heirs from selling it too for the next 300 years hardly anyone
52:27
saw it one visitor to Venice who did was the poet Lord
52:34
Byron it became his favorite painting and obsessed him Byron believed the
52:40
Tempest was a portrait of gejon himself with his family it but a portrait of his
52:46
son and wife and self he wrote but Byron had a taste for other people's wives and
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he fell in love with the woman he took to be geon's spouse such a woman love in life he
53:01
drooled in 1932 the Italian State finally bought the painting and it's
53:07
hung in the Academia ever since daring all comers to guess its true
53:14
meaning interpreting The Tempest has become one of the great cottage industries of art history but somewhere
53:21
out there there's a solution and that solution must lie in the painting
53:29
itself guess what I think I found [Music]
53:38
it so what do we see in the Tempest the setting looks much like
53:45
Castle Franco itself underneath a stormy sky with lightning in
53:51
it there's a beautiful mother suckling a baby and a most handsome young man tall
53:59
finely dressed who seems to be her partner so was Byron right is this ge
54:08
Jon and his family no it isn't although we know so little about Geon we do
54:15
amazingly know what he looked like he painted a self-portrait in which he pretends to be King David slaying the
54:23
Giant Goliath not all the picture has survived but the
54:29
face that remains is clearly not the young man in the Tempest so who is he
54:35
and was Byron right or wrong about what he said the soldier is in fact a comrade of
54:44
the sock if you look at his socks you will see that they are different colors the comrades of the sock were private
54:51
associations very common in the Venice of that time of Young hedonists Who got
54:56
together to act plays enjoy themselves accompany wedding processions but just because the chap in the Tempest is
55:03
dressed as a fashionably loose Venetian it doesn't mean that's what he represents Venetian Art likeed to set
55:11
things in the present to take the Bible or the tales of the Gods out of the
55:16
distant past and make them real oh how they light their costumes just as Byron
55:24
does also hanging in the Academia is this huge Masterpiece by one of geon's
55:31
descendants veronesi it's called the feast in the house of Levi and it too is a painting
55:39
with a checkered history the feast in the house of Levi isn't its original name its first name
55:48
was the last supper and what it actually shows is the most famous dinner ever
55:55
eaten we don't recognize it these days because Christ and his disciples are wearing contemporary clothes and because
56:02
many of the characters in the painting aren't really supposed to be
56:08
there there's no mention in the Bible of dwarfs and Jesters attending the Last
56:16
Supper so could The Tempest like veron's Feast at the house of Levi be a secret
56:24
religious painting Prof Professor Salvador settis believes it
56:30
is what I did is basically to read all the literature on on the painting and to
56:37
see what is Meaningful in the painting and what is not which means the the man
56:43
the woman the child columns which are there a serpent which is hidden uh in a
56:52
bush the lightning in in the sky but since the lightning was uh widely used as a symbol
56:59
of God in JJ's time I assumed that there was an equivalence between God and
57:05
lightning um and it's a definite possibility that this is that that actually The Tempest represents Adam and
57:13
Eve with the first born child K actually and the serpent would be an illusion to
57:18
the original sin so all all different elements would be explained but there's a major flaw in
57:25
this surprise ing Adam and Eve Theory when the painting was cleaned that
57:30
serpent which Professor set his claims to have located under this bush turned
57:36
out to be nothing more than the root of a tree can this really be the Garden of
57:43
Eden I've looked at it on many occasions for many hours and never once felt any
57:50
religious atmosphere over at the Academia they prefer the simplest of all
57:58
explanations which of the many interpretations of the tempest's meaning
58:05
do you think is probably closest to the truth none of them none of them none of
58:11
them I like Mikel is one best of all a storm with a gypsy who is feeding her
58:17
child and a Shepherd so everybody else has been
58:22
wrong I don't know
58:28
if the painting isn't geon's family if it doesn't mean nothing at all if it
58:33
isn't a religious image what can it be well there is one area in which the
58:39
artists of Venice specialized and took particular Delight the stories of the
58:44
Gods mythology above all a lot of fun was had enjoying the antics of Zeus the God of
58:53
Thunder a Master of Disguise whose appetite for good-looking Mortals was
58:59
Clinton esly
59:05
insatiable here's geon's pupil tishan showing Zeus disguised as a shower of
59:11
gold coins making love to the surprised
59:18
Dan Zeus had a different disguise for every Affair to seduce the nymph Kalisto
59:25
he took the form of another woman Diana the huntress a stimulating example of
59:32
girl onir
59:37
mythology to make it with IO he came down as a barely visible
59:42
cloud of excitement and it wasn't just girls he
59:49
went for attracted by Young gamed Zeus turned
59:55
into an eagle and had his violent way with the
1:00:00
boy that lightning in the background of the Tempest must surely indicate the
1:00:06
presence of Zeus the god of thunder and thrower of lightning
1:00:11
bolts but he's not seducing the woman in the picture is
1:00:16
he she seems to be the partner of the handsome young man so what is Zeus doing
1:00:24
here after 500 years of mystery I think I've cracked joon's
1:00:33
code there is a story and only one story which fits snugly with what we see in
1:00:39
the Tempest it's outlined here by Homer in The Odyssey the most celebrated of
1:00:45
all classical poems it concerns de the goddess of fertility who made things
1:00:52
grow this is her with her clothes on but I think Geon painted her in the Tempest
1:00:59
with her clothes off according to Homer deita met a
1:01:06
handsome mortal at a wedding called iasan even though she was a goddess and
1:01:11
he was human they made love in a plowed field and had a baby that baby was
1:01:17
plotus the god of wealth Zeus deer's brother and
1:01:25
complicated ly her former lover who often enjoyed the Embrace of Mortals
1:01:30
himself was so angered by this illicit relationship between de and iasion that
1:01:37
he killed iasion with a lightning bolt smoked him with his bright Thunder says
1:01:45
Homer The Tempest shows the moment just before Zeus's deadly Revenge that's why
1:01:51
the atmosphere is so charged Deiter has given birth to the God of wealth but
1:01:57
iasion is about to be hit by a deadly Thunderbolt his crime he was a mortal
1:02:03
who made love to a God and we're like the audience at a Christmas pantomime
1:02:09
who can see what's going to happen and who want to shout look out look
1:02:16
out once you know the picture's overall meaning every little detail falls into
1:02:21
place deer's unexpectedly blonde hair there's not too many blondes in
1:02:27
Venice is described by Homer who calls her Fair trest deita goldenhair demer
1:02:35
poor asion has a broken column behind him that's bad luck broken columns even
1:02:43
in cemeteries today represent a life cut
1:02:48
short In classical art plotus the god of wealth was often shown as a baby boy in
1:02:55
the arms of of a woman but the cleverest clue so easy to
1:03:01
overlook is the mysterious white bird perched on the roof
1:03:08
behind one of deer's attributes the things that appear in pictures next to her so you know it's her is a
1:03:17
crane this beautiful white bird flies South in the spring to rear its young so
1:03:23
it represents fertility like her but the crane has another role in
1:03:31
mythology it's renowned for standing on one leg so during the Renaissance they
1:03:36
believed that in its other foot it held a stone and if it ever fell asleep that
1:03:42
stone would drop hit it on the other leg and wake it up and so the crane became a symbol of
1:03:49
vigilance always look around you be prepared for what happens next
1:03:57
it's exactly the kind of message that a rich man like Gabrielle vendramin whom
1:04:03
plotus has so favored would keep on the walls of his study as a constant
1:04:09
reminder of the fickleness of wealth here today gone
1:04:24
tomorrow The Tempest is a warning watch out because you never know where or when
1:04:31
the lightning May strike it's a good message for Gabrielle
1:04:36
vendramin it's a good message for all of [Music]
1:04:46
us there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of
1:04:52
them [Music]
Ep 4: Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus."
1:05:15
you know that scene in the first Bond movie Dr no where a glistening Ursula
1:05:20
Andress emerges from the sea in a skimpy bikini right in front of the excited Sha
1:05:27
connory of course you remember it it's one of the most famous arrivals in the movies well what you may not know is
1:05:34
that the inventor of James Bond Ian Fleming had a particular quattra chento
1:05:40
painting in mind when he imagined this Unforgettable scene it's a revolutionary painting
1:05:48
produced in Florence in about 1485 of another goddess coming out of
1:05:54
the sea not a screen goddess this time but an ancient Roman
1:05:59
one BTY chell's Venus the most celebrated nude goddess
1:06:06
in art her face instantly
1:06:12
recognizable because this Venus has infiltrated popular Consciousness to an unusually deep
1:06:19
level she's everywhere [Music]
1:06:27
but hold on a bit Ursula Andress was meant to be sexy and stirring in that
1:06:33
beefy Swiss way of hers she was after big desires and sweaty passions that's
1:06:40
definitely not what BTY chell's Venus is trying to do the Venus doesn't do
1:06:48
sweatiness she is to Ursula Andress what an orchid is to a T-bone steak
1:06:55
she's delicate fragile modest and I've always thought there's something of the
1:07:01
lady Dy about her that shy tilt of the neck the little look down the fetching
1:07:10
nervousness but if BTY Chelly never had in mind the full blooded arousal of all
1:07:17
those who looked at his sensationally famous Venus arriving naked on the beach
1:07:23
which he didn't what exactly was he
1:07:28
[Music] after the real trouble with the birth of
1:07:34
Venus is that we just know it too well now and so we have no way of trying to
1:07:41
arrive back at the moment in art and in Western culture when it didn't exist
1:07:46
because if we could get back to that moment then we would understand in a very visceral as well as intellectual
1:07:51
way what a revolutionary painting it was and ins some way still
1:07:56
is belli's real name was alesandro di Mariano diani filipepi he was born in
1:08:04
Florence where that house is behind me in 1444 in the Parish of All Saints on
1:08:11
Santi his father a leather worker was 50 when Sandra was born his mother was well
1:08:18
over 40 that's late even by modern standards in Renaissance times it was
1:08:25
asked for health troubles little Sandro was the Philip
1:08:31
Pei's fourth son the Run of his litter all his life people would say
1:08:37
about him Sandro Bello Amal sakro Sandro is handsome but
1:08:46
unhealthy he was always pale apparently and don't you think that some of this inherent paleness found its way into his
1:08:54
art [Music]
1:09:09
there are two recorded explanations for why alesandro de Philip peepe came to be
1:09:15
called BTY Chelli the more boring of the two is
1:09:20
that belli is a Corruption of the word bati Jello which means someone who beats
1:09:27
gold when belli was a teenager he was Apprentice to a Florentine Goldsmith and
1:09:33
may indeed have been just such a bti Jello or gold
1:09:39
beater his art always maintained a most fruitful relationship with gold that's
1:09:44
certainly true gold pops up in his paintings in lovely and interesting ways
1:09:57
[Music]
1:10:05
but the explanation which I prefer for the origin of the name belli is that it comes from his elder brother Giovani a
1:10:13
successful City Banker who was notoriously fat and therefore nicknamed
1:10:18
bti chela which means a barrel or a tub thus his sickly younger brother became
1:10:24
little Barrel bti Chelli it could be true what's sure is that when he was in
1:10:31
his mid teens Little Barrel gave up gold smithery and began his apprenticeship as
1:10:36
a painter and that delicacy of his that slight sickliness which contemporaries
1:10:43
remembered about him gave him an advantage when it came to producing pictures of rare Florentine
1:10:51
exquisiteness is there not something highly strung and Fran about all his
1:10:58
art as far as we can tell these big butelli paintings were basically
1:11:03
Furniture paintings it may seem an odd way to regard them these great cherish multi-million pound masterpieces but
1:11:10
they were part of interior decoration high-minded interior decoration of people who were very educated and these
1:11:18
are Elite pictures for a very small circle of people and they certainly were
1:11:24
not public consumption this is the street in which
1:11:29
belli lived and worked until his death and behind me is the house in which he must have painted The Birth of Venus one
1:11:37
of Bell's Neighbors in this street gave his name to a country you may have heard of America he was Amaro vuchi the great
1:11:45
Navigator the vuchi were the richest and most powerful family in this local and
1:11:51
BTY Chelli was soon working for them in Italian Vespa means Wasp that's why
1:11:59
those annoying little scooters that buzz around Italian cities at night right outside my hotel as a rule are called
1:12:07
Vespers the WASP was the Vespucci family's
1:12:13
symbol see the Wasps going into the hole in the tree there there're an indication
1:12:19
that this intriguing B Chell was painted for the vuchi family and she she's
1:12:25
curious she's one of the many women in Bell's art who at some point in their
1:12:30
history have been identified as a portrait of simoneta
1:12:36
vuchi simoneta was a much admired Florentine Beauty who married into the
1:12:41
vuchi family and there's a persistent rumor in art that she was also the model
1:12:48
for BTY chell's Venus but there's no evidence for this
1:12:53
of any kind in any case b chell's women have a certain
1:12:58
interchangeability to them a group look I really doubt whether this is simoneta
1:13:04
vuchi but what is intriguing is that this woman although she's managed to
1:13:09
hang on to all her clothes is also a
1:13:15
Venus she's shown here with Mars the God of War whom she's tamed by exhausting
1:13:22
him how well what do you [Music]
1:13:34
think today we all know Venus is the goddess of love I'm your Venus I'm your
1:13:41
fire what's your desire and all that but that's not how she
1:13:47
began originally Venus was a minor Roman goddess charged with the safekeeping of
1:13:55
town Gardens and Vineyards the goddess of allotments if you like it was only
1:14:00
when this minor Horticultural deity of the Romans took on and absorbed the
1:14:05
identity of Aphrodite the Greek goddess of love that
1:14:11
she grew into the potent and popular mythological Starlet so many have since
1:14:16
desired [Music]
1:14:36
B chell's most significant patrons were not in the end the VPI but an even
1:14:42
wealthier and more powerful Florentine family those fabulously potent fenz
1:14:48
Bankers the medich who essentially ruled the city and this rather Gloom Rural Retreat
1:14:56
was owned by one of the Lesser Medi Lorenzo de Pier Francesco de medich
1:15:01
essentially this was his summer house and somewhere in here we don't know where BTY chell's Birth of Venus used to
1:15:10
hang we don't know how it got here we don't know when it got here and we're not sure why it got here but we do know
1:15:17
that it used to hang somewhere in this Gloomy Rural Retreat alongside yet another of B chell's remarkable love
1:15:25
nest of venuses I hope you're feeling clever
1:15:32
because this painting takes a lot of keeping up with it's called La Prim Vera the spring
1:15:40
and it features Venus again she's the one standing in the middle rather quietly but we know it's her because
1:15:46
there's Cupid her son firing off arrows of Love above her [Music]
1:15:53
head over here here very important figure because the picture really moves
1:15:58
from this side to the other side over here blowing out his cheeks is zepha the
1:16:03
god of the West Wind now zepha is blowing away winter and therefore as it were ushering in the spring and as you
1:16:11
can see he's chasing this nymph here she's chloris zepha fell in love with chloris
1:16:18
but chloris wasn't interested he took her anyway and what's happening is that the act of taking Chlor
1:16:25
results in her transformation because she changes into Flora the goddess of
1:16:33
[Music] spring Venus as we said is in the Middle
1:16:38
with Cupid above her and she's attended by her usual attendance The Three Graces
1:16:43
joyously dancing and over here finally is mercury
1:16:50
waving his wand at the clouds to dispel them and therefore preparing for the
1:16:55
spring again now he is probably a slightly disguised portrait of Lorenzo deedi
1:17:03
Lorenzo the Magnificent as he was called if it is him he's the one who
1:17:08
commissioned this picture and if he commissioned it he probably did it because one of his cousins Lorenzo de
1:17:14
Pier Francesco de medich who lived in the villa de Castello was getting married and this painting was meant to
1:17:21
be an encouragement to him and indeed it was meant to provide advice about fertility and how to bring out the
1:17:27
best in your bride it could be that the bride was a
1:17:33
touch reluctant like clorice and that she had to be forced into the marriage but even if she was it results in all
1:17:41
this in this astonishing blooming wonderful flower filled spring this is
1:17:48
one of the world's greatest ever evocations of fertility [Music]
1:18:02
now remember this used to hang too alongside the birth of Venus in the villa de
1:18:07
Castello so are there any clues here to the kind of meaning we should be
1:18:13
expecting from The Birth of Venus of course there are
1:18:20
[Music]
1:18:26
the Mona Lisa has mystery the Venus de Milo has a great
1:18:32
body but body chell's Venus has the whole package mystery a great body hair
1:18:39
that could drive a man wild with entanglement and something else an X
1:18:47
Factor I've been puzzling over what this X Factor might be for a couple of decades now coming over to Florence
1:18:54
trying to work out why this particular woman toots so many people's horns and
1:19:00
I've come to believe that what gets us in the end is her
1:19:06
vulnerability sure all us SK want to jump into that picture with her and study some Latin but we also want to
1:19:13
protect her to wrap that cloak about her she's come out of her shell on this
1:19:18
Blustery Day so cold so fragile so hesitant and she looks so exposed she
1:19:25
needs us BTY chell's Venus makes us feel
1:19:32
wanted that amusing English poet Alexander Pope who was much taken with
1:19:37
beautiful women wrote once about a particularly gorgeous lady at court has
1:19:43
she no Faults then somebody asks him in the poem yes she has one I must Aver
1:19:48
replies Pope when all the world conspires to praise her the woman's death and does not here doesn't that
1:19:56
remind you of BTY chell's Venus she's outrageously beautiful yet
1:20:03
so embroiled is she in her own thoughts that she appears to be deaf to our praises and can't even hear our tongues
1:20:10
hitting the tabletop at the sight of [Music]
1:20:18
her when you first look at her you think she's beautiful but when you actually study her there are two particular
1:20:25
things that are sort of wrong with her it is to do with her left shoulder if you think about it and actually study
1:20:30
the painting her left shoulder is uncomfortably low I'll do this Quasimodo
1:20:35
in interpretation you can see it actually sort of does that down there but the neck and the shoulder together
1:20:41
do look slightly strange when your eye concentrates upon them um and for me the strange bit is looking at her foot as it
1:20:49
stands on the shell where there's a sort of bump in that way that slightly old
1:20:54
ladies get get bumps when they try and put their slightly large feet into small shoes and my eye is often drawn to that
1:21:00
and and then I think oh I forgive him she's been on the shell a long time and you know maybe she's got cramp or whatever but funny enough it's not an
1:21:07
anatomically beautiful body but it is um an aesthetically incredibly pleasing
1:21:15
[Music] one she was painted in around
1:21:20
1485 maybe for Lorenzo de Pier Francesco again
1:21:25
what is obvious is that this modesty she has that shyness the lady d look is
1:21:31
definitely intentional we know this because her pose is based directly on a
1:21:36
Roman statue owned by the medich the so-called Venus Pika or modest
1:21:43
Venus this Roman Venus covers herself up and hides her
1:21:48
bits she symbolizes the sort of modesty that florentines demanded of their women
1:21:55
particularly when they entered into marriage so although BTY chell's Venus
1:22:00
is naked indeed she's the first great mythological nude of the Renaissance and
1:22:05
she's nearly life-sized to boot despite all that the effects BTY Chell wanted to
1:22:10
convey with her was surely one of modesty not of
1:22:16
exposure though I don't think Bell's Birth of Venus is meant to be erotic there is no doubt that she does open the
1:22:23
door in Western Art to the nude as
1:22:29
carnal and you only have to go 50 years down the line to tishan painting the
1:22:35
Venus of urbino where you have a beautiful naked woman lying on a couch
1:22:42
incredibly aware of her own erotic teasing and sort of saying I am
1:22:48
available sexually and there begins
1:22:54
such a great and terrible history of Western Art and the female nude which is
1:23:00
about men looking at her and her needing to be desired now I don't think belli did that
1:23:08
with Venus I think that face still has a self-containment of the knowledge of
1:23:13
some spirituality to it but certainly once the cat is out of the bag once the
1:23:20
clothes are off the body you can't control where it goes [Music]
1:23:31
this is hess's the ogyny it's the classical text that most clearly describes the birth of Venus it's a hell
1:23:38
of a story blood curdling Uranus the god of the sky was being a beast to his
1:23:44
mother and lover Gia the Earth so Gaia persuaded their son Kronos a Titan to
1:23:52
sneak up on Uranus while he was making love to Gaia and to cut off his testicles Kronos then chucked these
1:24:00
genitals into the sea he lopped them off with the Flint and threw them from the mainland into
1:24:07
the Great Wash of the seawater and they drifted a while on the Open Sea and
1:24:12
there spread into a circle of white foam and from this circle of white foam grew
1:24:18
a girl Venus or Aphrodite as she was first called thus Venus was the nautical fruit
1:24:26
of Uranus's frothing [Music]
1:24:36
testicles now unless my eyes are failing me completely none of this Bears any
1:24:41
relation to anything we can see in the body
1:24:46
Chell we've got a naked Venus in a shell the Shell's in the sea and she's
1:24:51
surrounded by a cluster of mythological figures but surely no one here is being born no
1:24:59
frothing no castration no testicles yet if this isn't the birth of Venus as
1:25:05
we've been misinformed for hundreds of years what else could it
1:25:11
be let's have a close look at all this nature on show here this excellent
1:25:17
Horticulture there's plenty of it and it's all
1:25:22
meaningful this little plant here between her legs that's an anomy a lovely spring favorite which according
1:25:29
to Legend only grows when there's a warm wind so the Ancients used to call it the
1:25:35
Wind Flower and lo and behold up here in the
1:25:41
corner is our old friend zeph bringer of the warm wind and an inveterate
1:25:48
blower Zephyr isn't only blowing the enemy to life look at all those Roses is
1:25:54
pouring out of his mouth as well the rose is specifically Venus's flower the
1:26:00
Ancients believed that it only came into being at a very important moment the
1:26:06
first time Venus set foot on dry
1:26:11
land we've got the land here all right these are orange trees the ancient
1:26:17
symbols of the medii and this figure here she's
1:26:23
probably one of the hor the embodiment of the seasons she's the hor of spring I
1:26:31
warrant look at these gorgeous corn flowers painted on her dress and see
1:26:36
here she's wearing a girdle of roses the hor is handing a cloak to
1:26:42
Venus so that the modest Venus can cover
1:26:47
herself so what does it all mean well it means that the painting
1:26:53
seems to celebr celebrate an important arrival an arrival that brings
1:26:58
fertility is it therefore another marriage painting joyously commissioned
1:27:04
to celebrate the arrival in the medich family of another fertile bride I think
1:27:13
so but that's conjecture what's certain is that this
1:27:18
isn't the birth of Venus it's her disembarkation she's a DED somewhere on
1:27:25
her shell and when she touches the land it blooms what could this be then well I
1:27:32
think it's in here again hess's theogony having been born of Uranus's testicles
1:27:38
and drifted across the sea Venus made her way to seawash Cyprus and stepped
1:27:44
ashore a modest lovely goddess and about her slender feet the grass grew so the
1:27:52
painting we've been calling the birth of Venus ought properly to be called Venus
1:27:58
having been born of Uranus's testicles arrives in Cyprus and makes things
1:28:04
grow but for some reason that title never caught
1:28:12
on there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them
Ep 5: Caravaggio's "Boy Bitten by a Lizard."
1:28:20
[Music]
1:28:46
this little fellow is called a bearded dragon he's from Australia he's an innocent little beast he sits there in
1:28:53
the sand and flies I think he's gorgeous but he and
1:28:58
his kind have had a tough time of it in art their behavior misunderstood their
1:29:03
appearance mocked their reputations
1:29:08
[Music] blackened Art's been nasty to lizards
1:29:14
and perhaps the most unfortunate of the many unfortunate lizards scattered about Art's darkest corners is the one who's
1:29:22
been forced into playing a leading role in caravaggio's early Masterpiece that exceptionally puzzling
1:29:29
meeting of human and reptilian ambition boy bitten by a
1:29:35
[Music]
1:29:44
lizard why would a lizard bite this boy who is he what does it all mean and
1:29:52
why has Caravaggio bothered to paint it these are tricky questions and
1:29:59
unfortunately we can't answer them here in this delightful reptilian company no
1:30:05
we have to go somewhere dangerous and edgy somewhere murderous and anxious we
1:30:11
have to go somewhere where even the lizards keep out of sight we have to go
1:30:16
to Rome
1:30:22
[Music] even today you have to keep your wits
1:30:28
about you in Rome what your back watch your money watch your girl but back in
1:30:35
1592 it was much much worse the Mean Streets of Rome were a notoriously
1:30:42
dangerous terrain thieves gypsies vagabonds
1:30:47
brigands On The Run prostitutes on the make taverns full of card Sharps and
1:30:53
pick Pockets out of work soldiers looking for Action it was violent horrid scary no
1:31:02
place certainly for a sensitive young Soul so it's a good job Caravaggio
1:31:08
wasn't one of [Music]
1:31:14
those Caravaggio was from Milan his proper name was Michelangelo maresi but
1:31:20
he grew up just east of Milan in the small town of Caravaggio so that's what they began calling him when he fetched
1:31:28
up in Rome in 1592 he was farless motherless penniless
1:31:34
hungry angry and very difficult oh so
1:31:41
difficult Caravaggio had trained as a painter in Milan but that meant nothing
1:31:46
here Rome in the 1590s was already packed with painters on the make from
1:31:52
all over Italy they flocked hungry for work desperate to succeed every one of them looking for a
1:31:59
gimmick in their art a Twist something that made them Stand
1:32:05
[Music] Out carav Jo lived in 10 different
1:32:10
places in his first year in Rome 10 it was a Restless fraught uncomfortable
1:32:16
life because if you were at the bottom of the artistic Heap as he was unnoticed with no reputation then the only way to
1:32:24
make a living was out here in the streets Hawking your art in the markets
1:32:29
selling it to passers by for a pittance his first biographer complains that he
1:32:34
was churning out heads for a groer piece he'd do three of them in a day now I
1:32:40
don't know how much a growth is worth but it can't be
1:32:47
[Music] much one of the first pictures we know that carajo sold somewhere out here for
1:32:53
a few grand throat perhaps showed a boy with a flower in his hair being bitten by a
1:32:59
lizard the most unusual subject what could it possibly
1:33:07
mean Caro's real teacher was out here the street there's a famous story which
1:33:14
I don't think is true but which must have been invented for a reason of someone showing him a statue by the
1:33:20
great Greek fidas and asking him what he could learn from it nothing replied
1:33:25
Caravaggio ignoring the statue and turning instead to the people in the street nature he said is my only
1:33:35
teacher what's certainly true is that Caravaggio had begun putting outrageously real people into his
1:33:42
pictures characters from the street the gypsies who told your fortune and stole
1:33:47
your money the routs from The Tavern soldiers drinkers card sharps Hustlers
1:33:55
people who'd lived they Sid James's and Judy denes
1:34:00
rather than Brad Pitts and Cameron dizis and among this fabulous cast of
1:34:06
character actors the swy and worried face of carajo himself began popping up
1:34:12
in the
1:34:19
action all these Hustlers and artists who'd slunk into Rome looking for work
1:34:24
were desperate to find someone rich and powerful enough to take them under their wing and protect them Caravaggio found
1:34:32
just such a sugar daddy right under his nose a few hundred yards away from where he was flogging his pictures in the
1:34:39
streets Cardinal Francesco Maria Delmon Delonte was immensely cultured
1:34:46
and kindly he had a particular passion for music and collected castros as well
1:34:52
as painters Caravaggio painted an Exquisite series of musicians for Del
1:34:58
Monte with carefully observed musical instruments that would have come from the Cardinal's own
1:35:05
collection now music has always played a very ambiguous role in art it was
1:35:11
Shakespeare who said If Music be the food of Love play on and music has
1:35:17
always stood for a pleasure a wonderful moment in life that happens but then
1:35:24
passes and the message of that painting produced for Cardinal Delonte that life is short but death
1:35:32
that follows it is eternal [Music]
1:35:54
it must have been Del Monte who got Caravaggio his most prestigious commission so far here in the Church of
1:36:00
s Luigi de franchese the French church just 2 minutes away from Del Monte's
1:36:10
Palazo the first of these was unveiled in 1600 these are the paintings that made
1:36:17
Caravaggio famous and you can see why straight away no one else had ever made
1:36:23
religious art like this before usually the stories of the Bible
1:36:30
are set out there somewhere in the clouds in the distance but this this
1:36:35
looks like an eyewitness account from someone who was actually
1:36:41
there this is St Matthew being chosen by Jesus Matthew was a tax collector but
1:36:48
Jesus has tracked him down to this Gloomy Tavern and reminded him of his
1:36:54
[Music] vocation the most Sensational thing about this picture is that it's set in a
1:36:59
simple Roman Tavern of the kind that Caravaggio and his cronies used to frequent the in of the blackamore the in
1:37:06
of the wolf they're all around here and the characters in the picture they're caravaggio's buddies too Street types
1:37:14
Tavern goers they had no business being in a Bible painting but because they are
1:37:20
there they make it feel so terribly real
1:37:27
on the other side of the chapel we see the other end of Matthew's story his
1:37:32
martydom he's in a Roman bath house being
1:37:39
murdered but can you see that face illuminated in the Darkness at the back the one with the haunted sweaty
1:37:48
expression that's carajo himself putting himself into his own picture as he was
1:37:53
want to do with Caravaggio the action always feels
1:38:00
personal he knew about violence he knew about street fights and soon he would
1:38:06
know about murder [Music] too I won't bore you with all the police
1:38:14
records relating to the young Caravaggio in Rome if I had to provide you with a full list of his misdemeanors we'd be
1:38:21
here all night he was constantly in trouble with the police getting into fights insulting passers by owing people
1:38:30
money stabbing people being stabbed himself this was an unusually cussed
1:38:38
personality caravia was fond of wearing his sword in the street which was illegal and fond of pulling it out when
1:38:45
anyone said anything to him which was even more illegal and all this violent foreplay
1:38:51
came to a head in May 16 6 in this street when two gangs of armed men
1:38:57
confronted each other just here the leader of one of the gangs was ranoo tomasoni a bicos man about the
1:39:06
taverns who liked to fight the other gang was led by
1:39:11
Caravaggio Ruto and Caravaggio had apparently quarreled over a tennis match
1:39:17
and now they went head to-head in a thuggish street squabble with swords
1:39:22
which Caravan won by slashing Runo to death when he was down thus Caravaggio became the only
1:39:30
great artist ever to commit murder what a grim claim to
1:39:42
fame the police never caught him though he fled from Rome and never came
1:39:48
back there was still great art in him lots of it but from now on it was
1:39:53
painted on the move the murder brought him even greater
1:40:02
notoriety people began to hunt about for his earlier works the stuff he'd hawked
1:40:07
in the streets those heads he'd churned out in threes for a groer Time among
1:40:13
these was a most mysterious painting of a boy being bitten by a lizard and the
1:40:20
question began to be asked what did it really
1:40:25
[Music]
1:40:34
mean let's take a closer look at this picture it's so interesting what's going
1:40:39
on in there the lizard's been skullking about among the fruit and the
1:40:45
flowers the boy put his finger in there and the lizard bit him the boy's wearing
1:40:52
an off the shoulder tunic and there's a rose in his
1:40:58
hair the sheer effeminacy of his outfit identifies him as bacus Roman god of
1:41:05
wine and pleasure who's often shown as a very Girish boy because bakus was the
1:41:12
naughtiest of the Roman gods he drank too much his followers
1:41:17
were notorious for their debauched behavior their drunken orgies of AO painted a number of these
1:41:25
basses and what an anxious unhealthy and pale Bunch they
1:41:39
are I've always been terribly fond of this great bacus that hangs in the of Fitzy it's the most decadent of all of
1:41:46
them and that's saying something because caravaggio's basses are a most decadent lot what I love about about this
1:41:53
painting if you look closely is that all its subtle meaning is conveyed in the details look for instance at that glass
1:42:00
of wine he's holding in his hand look at its surface can you see those carefully
1:42:06
painted little ripples what can that possibly mean I'll tell you what it
1:42:11
means he's had too much wine the night before he's woken up and his hand is
1:42:18
shaking and everything here underlined this basic message that too much wine
1:42:25
too much of anything too much of any good thing is bad for
1:42:33
you these basses have always been some of carav Jo's most mysterious pictures
1:42:39
painted in Rome in the 1590s for Cardinal Del Monte they've always been fiercely
1:42:45
misunderstood in particular people have been interested to find out whether they are all self-portraits or not in the old
1:42:53
days art historians were agreed they looked at these dark faces with their arched eyebrows and those puffy little
1:43:00
mouths of theirs and they said these are all carago himself well maybe but what's
1:43:07
undoubtedly true is that even if these are not specifically self-portraits they are evocations of himself pictures in
1:43:14
which his Spirit plays the leading role and in a couple of cases I'm sure it's
1:43:19
him
1:43:25
how do you think an artist trying to produce a face like that would have proceeded I'll tell you how he would
1:43:31
have proceeded he would have got himself a mirror looked at himself in that mirror made that Fierce expression and
1:43:38
then painted it this surely is caravaner
1:43:43
[Music]
1:43:50
himself whenever I look at boy written by a lizard which is as often as I can I get the feeling that Caravaggio has set
1:43:58
out deliberately to pull me into the picture it's just you and the boy in the
1:44:03
dark a onetoone drama he's so close so touchable just an arms length
1:44:10
away if you look at something like the boy with a lizard there's a petulance about the the way he starts back that
1:44:17
makes you feel as a very spoiled person um somebody not used to coping with the
1:44:23
difficult things um it's not a sympathetic face at all uh and I think
1:44:28
that's also part of the interest that you you wonder really what on Earth this
1:44:33
boy was doing um and I think I don't think I'm the only person that feels it's he probably deserve this come up
1:44:42
Us in the vase in front of the boy there's a rose and there's another one
1:44:47
in his hair now you know about roses you've bought them at your florist they're so
1:44:53
gorgeous in the shop the queen of flowers and then you bring them home and they Wilt two days in the vase and their
1:45:01
kaput caravaggio's beautiful rose has a gorgeousness that's so
1:45:08
[Music]
1:45:14
shortlived the vase is glass expensive stuff in caravaggio's day precious
1:45:20
fragile you spend all this money on it yet look how easily it
1:45:26
breaks Here Today Gone Tomorrow there's a lovely reflection in
1:45:33
the vs of a window the thing about Reflections is that they're fragile too
1:45:40
the Sun goes behind a cloud and they [Music]
1:45:46
disappear the rose the glass the reflection they're all shortlived
1:45:52
temporary just like that and they're gone a bit like life you might say one minute
1:45:58
you're a young boy who loves to party and I speak here from personal experience and the next you're a clapped
1:46:05
out old [Music]
1:46:16
man but what about the lizard what's he doing in the picture indeed what's he
1:46:21
doing in all the many pictures in which he appears have you ever bought a new car
1:46:27
gone out on the motorway with it and suddenly realized that everybody else seems to be driving one it certainly
1:46:33
happened to me and it's an illusion of course all it really means is that you've noticed it for the first time now
1:46:40
the lizard in art is rather like that once you found one in a picture they seem to pop up
1:46:47
everywhere the best place to look for them is at the bottoms of still lives around the foot of the Vine bars on the
1:46:53
top of the table here's a good example of just one of those situations this is
1:46:58
a painting by one of caravaggio's more mysterious contemporaries he's known only as the Hartford Master it's an
1:47:05
absolute Treasure Trove of vegetable painting and that's what you see first of all when you look at it then look
1:47:12
more carefully right in the middle skullking about again in the darkness a
1:47:17
pair of lizards locked in gladiatorial combat
1:47:23
so what are these lizards doing there skullking about in the darkness of so many Still Life
1:47:30
paintings well there Echoes of the most famous of all the biblical Stories the
1:47:35
story about man's expulsion from Paradise if you remember Adam and Eve
1:47:41
were thrown out of paradise because they listened to Satan's Temptation and did things they shouldn't have done Satan
1:47:49
came down to Eve as a snake well in Caro's time times the snake has become a
1:47:56
lizard if you look the boy with a lizard most people looking at that picture would actually feel that the lizard was
1:48:02
a great deal less evil than the boy I mean most of us think on the side of the lizard in this one um which is quite an
1:48:08
odd achievement um and that's clever about car that he takes this convention
1:48:14
of man and snake which from the earliest myths is about evil and sex and turns it
1:48:21
all around and leaves you very very uncertain about what you think about it all there's something else we need to
1:48:29
examine the actual finger that's being bitten by the lizard does this finger have any
1:48:37
particular meaning the middle finger is our Prime
1:48:43
insult today and it was referred to by the Romans as digitus impudicus with an
1:48:48
impudent finger of all the Italian gestures that we study what we discover is that this gesture the digitus
1:48:55
impudicus is probably the most ancient of them all when we curl the other fingers back in order to emphasize the
1:49:02
middle digit everything else curls back and looks rather like a scrotum so it's it's Prime candidate for
1:49:10
any kind of emasculator phallic gesture so substitute penis in that sense oh
1:49:15
very much so absolutely today it's a rather emasculator gesture it says look
1:49:21
what I'm going to do to you and it can can be used playfully in the ancient world that wasn't the case it was
1:49:26
extremely serious and it was used in a slightly different fashion this is how it was done Palm down and it was a way
1:49:32
of saying see that person there I'm not pointing at them with my index finger to indicate who they are I'm telling you
1:49:39
that they have a homosexual inclination it's a gay gesture that person there is
1:49:48
homosexual carago and homosexuality is a wasp's name and I'm steering clear of it
1:49:55
but whichever side of the Court this boy plays from his finger has certainly
1:50:01
strayed and been bitten as a
1:50:07
result the message is obvious watch out where you stick you're digitus impudicus
1:50:12
because this is a painting about Temptation it's a painting that sets out to remind us of the brevity of sensual
1:50:20
pleasure look how quickly it fades like the flower like the reflection like
1:50:26
youth [Music]
1:50:32
itself but there's one more thing we need to think about that's
1:50:37
crucial okay boy bitten by a lizard is a warning about the transience of Earthly
1:50:42
Pleasures a reminder of the shortness of life it's all of those things but here
1:50:48
in Rome where it was painted that message has a particular person
1:50:54
here in Rome wherever you turn a corner you encounter irrefutable evidence of
1:51:00
how quickly Good Fortune can [Music]
1:51:07
fade kavaj Jo could have painted any young man having his finger bitten and
1:51:12
made the same point about the passing of Youth but he deliberately painted bakus
1:51:18
the Roman god of wine who drank too much and lived too too fast why well look
1:51:25
around you here this is what became of the Roman Empire when decadence set in
1:51:33
carav Jo's picture was a warning to his own
1:51:38
times this is what happens to you if you don't watch
1:51:45
it there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of
1:51:51
them
Ep 6: Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa."
1:51:58
[Music]
1:52:21
I don't know if you've read this it's in all the bestseller lists don't bother if you haven't it's so silly it starts with
1:52:29
someone being killed in one of the corridors here at the Lou in Paris this
1:52:34
chap is the keeper of an ancient secret and if he dies the ancient secret dies
1:52:40
with him so he crawls along the long Corridor and seeks out the most famous
1:52:46
painting in the Lou and there he Scrolls a secret message on the glass that
1:52:52
protect s the Mona
1:52:59
Lisa now the Mona Lisa has long been a magnet for mystery addicts and fruit cakes you want Mysteries she's got loads
1:53:06
of them the mystery of her elusive identity the mystery of her elusive
1:53:13
smile it's even been said she's a projected self-portrait of Leonardo as a
1:53:18
crossdesser even her eyebrows are mysterious why hasn't she got
1:53:25
[Music] any but there is one mystery concerning the Mona Lisa that can actually be
1:53:32
solved and we're going to do it in this film it's perhaps the deepest mystery of
1:53:37
all and that is why out of all the countless Old Masters gathered in all
1:53:43
our museums why did this particular one become the most famous painting in the
1:53:48
world now that's a mystery worth solving
1:53:58
the Mona Lisa is 500 years old she was painted in Florence in
1:54:03
around 1503 in Paris they've recently been celebrating her
1:54:09
birthday 500 years old it's a good [Music]
1:54:17
age but the first thing to grasp about the Mona Lisa's ridiculous Fame is that
1:54:22
it's rather new for 300 years after she was painted the Mona Lisa was almost entirely
1:54:29
unknown just a handful of people in history had ever seen her or even heard of
1:54:34
[Music] her she only started to become famous about 150 years ago and really really
1:54:44
famous this famous in the 20th century so her Fame is rather new so by the way
1:54:52
his the fame of her Creator Leonardo da Vinci today we think of Leonardo as the
1:54:59
greatest Genius of the Renaissance scientist mathematician anatomist the
1:55:05
man who not only painted the Mona Lisa but who also invented flying machines
1:55:11
submarines and bicycles and it's just not true I'm not
1:55:17
saying that Leonardo didn't vaguely imagine some of those things but I am saying that that he never actually built
1:55:24
any of them Leonardo almost discovered lots of things but only almost his
1:55:31
tragedy is that he never went the final mile the bit that
1:55:37
counts well Leonardo was not that celebrated um one of the problem is that
1:55:43
Leonardo did not paint very much whereas Raphael was on production line you know
1:55:48
one after the other um Michelangelo the did the whole ceiling after all walls of
1:55:55
a cistin chapel I know you know huge project in four years which is what
1:56:00
apparently you know it took Lardo to paint you know this tiny portrait um so if you wanted to you know
1:56:08
lots of work you're not going to ask him you know that famous drawing that
1:56:14
people always say is him the old man with the big biblical beard and the allseeing eyes well there's no actual EV
1:56:22
Ence it's Leonardo just our wishful thinking because this old man with the
1:56:27
big beard reminds us of some great biblical leader doesn't he Moses perhaps
1:56:34
or even God so the next thing to get clear in
1:56:39
our minds is that Leonardo da Vinci is chiefly like this a work of fiction
1:56:47
before we tiptoe any further into the conceptual Quagmire that is the mystery
1:56:52
of the Mona Lisa I think we need to find out a tad more about the real
1:57:01
[Music] Leonardo all
1:57:07
it they're everywhere on this hill in fact just about the only thing that's up
1:57:13
here is Olive Groves we're about 2 kilometers out of
1:57:18
Vinci little tuskan town of Vinci place called anano about 20 miles out of
1:57:25
Florence and this simple little tusen Hill
1:57:31
House is the house in which Leonardo da Vinci was born in
1:57:38
1452 his father was a notary a lawyer called s Pio DaVinci and his mother all
1:57:45
we know about her is that she was called Katarina and Leonardo was their illegitimate son
1:57:52
lardo's father bought this house from the Friars that used to own it he was working for them as a lawyer and it's
1:57:59
hardly changed since
1:58:06
then it's just two very basic little rooms really lovingly preserved in their
1:58:12
original state of decrepitude but look at this just above the window on the
1:58:17
front a lion wearing a helmet that's the coat of arms of the The DaVinci
1:58:32
Family original fireplace
1:58:39
Leonardo ghastly likeness I think coat of arms
1:58:50
again it's rather feeling actually it's such a humble place for
1:58:56
such a big brain to have been born Leonardo's artistic career is so
1:59:04
frustrating he's always starting things and never finishing them he spent the
1:59:09
first 30 years of his life in Florence yet all he had to show for all this time
1:59:14
was a couple of pictures one of them is this gorgeous portrait of janev De Beni
1:59:23
she's rather glum why in Italian genevra means Juniper so the Halo of juniper
1:59:30
around her head is a coded clue to her identity from the start Leonardo could
1:59:37
make his women feel [Music]
1:59:44
mysterious here's an early madon and child that hangs in the Hermitage in
1:59:49
Russia what a ghastly multi pounded Jesus look at the size of him I don't
1:59:56
like her expression either it looks forced to me say cheese
2:00:05
cheese these early experiments with different women's Expressions had such mixed results that Leonardo soon settled
2:00:13
on one he knew he could rely on an Expression he always used you know it
2:00:19
already it's that mysterious smile playing on a woman's
2:00:25
lips whether they're the Virgin Mary or a girl off the street Leonardo began
2:00:30
giving his women the same look the Mona Lisa's mysterious smile was an
2:00:37
expression he was churning [Music]
2:00:50
out for the next 20 years Leonardo worked in Milan as the in-house genius
2:00:56
for the local Dukes starting lots of things finishing none of them except
2:01:02
this the last supper the famous masterpiece that's been falling off the
2:01:07
wall ever since he painted it because the technique he used was so
2:01:15
lousy after 20 years in Milan he returned to Florence he was already in his 50s when
2:01:22
a commission came his way that would finally lead to his most famous
2:01:27
achievement a portrait of a plumpish Florentine Merchant's wife named Lisa
2:01:35
gerardini there are lots of extraordinary surprises in the story of the Mona Lisa but perhaps the earliest
2:01:41
of them is that that Story begins here in this Grim little Florentine street
2:01:46
called the Via deua now this is the street in which Lisa Gerard who is traditionally thought
2:01:53
to have been the Florentine lady who posed for the Mona Lisa actually lived
2:01:58
she was married to a Florentine cloth Merchant called Francesco Del gond and
2:02:03
that explains why in France she's known as lond why in Italy they call her Londa
2:02:10
and why rather confusingly the rest of us call her Mona Lisa madona Lisa it's
2:02:16
what everybody would have said to her Madonna Lisa becomes Mona Lisa
2:02:22
thus in this Grim little Florentine Street populated these days chiefly by
2:02:27
Florentine low life the great legend of the Mona Lisa was
2:02:36
born for some reason Leonardo never handed over the Mona Lisa to Francisco
2:02:41
Del jondo and his wife probably because he never considered her finished he was
2:02:47
such a fiddler lonardo's career was now on on the slide in Italy he was out of fashion
2:02:55
and his reputation for not finishing things preceded him wherever he wandered internationally what fam had
2:03:03
was due entirely to his much copied comic grotesques of ugly old men and big
2:03:09
noosed Jews they're rather racist
2:03:15
really it was the French King fransis the first who saved Leonardo by taking
2:03:21
him in when no one else would have him franois invited the 64-year-old multitasker to work for him in France in
2:03:29
this Shadow at ambis on the lair Leonardo brought the Mona Lisa with
2:03:34
him and no doubt fiddled with her some more when he died here 3 years later in
2:03:41
1519 the Mona Lisa entered the French Royal collection and to all intents and
2:03:47
purposes disappeared for 300 years
2:03:52
and then the first great break for the monaa the first great career move as I
2:04:00
would put it um the French Revolution um what what the French Revolution does
2:04:06
apart from minor things like abolishing the monarchy and and so on is to transform the Lu into a museum so at
2:04:13
least she's now gone from you know semi obscurity to a proper proper place
2:04:22
another thing is Napoleon Napoleon took a shine to many women and one of these
2:04:27
was monaa and indeed for I think four years the monaa was removed from public
2:04:34
viewing and was in Napoleon's bedroom um and then it was put back in the Lou um
2:04:41
and has remained there ever ever since you know before Napoleon carried
2:04:48
the Mona Lisa away to his bedroom hardly anyone had seen her and no one thought
2:04:53
of her as this figure of mystery and Allure she was a portrait by Leonardo
2:04:59
and that's it but now that she was in the Lou and the Lou was open to the public she was ready to fall into the
2:05:06
clutches of the public imagination and so her ludicrous journey
2:05:12
to Global Fame could finally begin hang on to your hats because we're taking you
2:05:18
on it [Music]
2:05:28
when we left you the Mona Lisa had just got to the lou and people could finally
2:05:33
see what she looked like they liked what they saw but had trouble agreeing on
2:05:38
what it was then as now everyone found something different in the Mona Lisa in
2:05:46
the middle of the 19th century some intellectuals and writers
2:05:51
begin to discuss the monaa as the most
2:05:57
formidable um example of the F fatal this is when the smile becomes
2:06:04
mysterious and enigmatic there's no mention of an enigmatic smile with with
2:06:10
a monaa I mean basically until about 1850 monaa is a cheerful housewife from 1850 onwards she is a castrating female
2:06:28
you want believe some of the silly things that began to be written about her by the feverish Bloks of the 19th
2:06:35
century let me read you something here it's perhaps the most famous passage ever written about the Mona Lisa by an
2:06:42
eccentric English epicurian called Walter Peter who was obsessed with
2:06:48
her she is older than the Rocks among which she sits he gushed in
2:06:54
1873 like the vampire she's been dead many times and learned the secrets of
2:06:59
the grave and been a diver in deep seas it just goes on and on I mean this isn't
2:07:04
art history this is stalking the Mona Lisa had begun to drive men
2:07:14
mad thus the Mona Lisa entered the creative imagination of the 19th century
2:07:20
where she would have stayed famous among writers and art critics and that's about it if something else hadn't happened
2:07:28
something Sensational something that turned her into a public
2:07:33
celebrity well of course you needed an event you needed phot opportunity and
2:07:38
that um occurred in the shape of an Italian Workman um Vincento peruja who
2:07:45
stole the painting in August 1911 and kept it for years in his bed seat not
2:07:53
far from the Lou near the stove the moral is a piece of wood so you can
2:07:58
imagine the possibility the terrible possibilities and that made the world
2:08:06
press every day for 3 four weeks there was something about monaa the police
2:08:12
can't finded it the security of the lure is terrible the director of the Department of paintings had to resign
2:08:18
you know it was became a sort of co-b so people could see them on Aisa nearly every day as they were having their
2:08:27
breakfast so why would anyone be so stupid as to steal the Mona Lisa various
2:08:35
conspiracy theories were aired at the time and indeed people have been airing them ever since the likeliest answer is
2:08:42
that the entire mad plot was the handiwork of an Argentinian forger
2:08:47
called Eduardo De Valero Val Yo's crazy idea was to
2:08:53
produce a handful perhaps six or seven copies of the Mona Lisa while he had it
2:08:59
in his hands and then to sell these copies on to some very very gullible
2:09:04
American millionaires now this has never been proved what's certain is that if you
2:09:10
were a very gullible American millionaire you would hardly have popped up afterwards and said yes I bought one
2:09:15
of these and undoubtedly there were these very special copies floating around the European art world after the
2:09:22
theft however once Valero had done his dirty deed and produced his copies he no
2:09:28
longer had any real need for the painting itself so he handed it back to his accomplice peruja and peruja was
2:09:36
stuck with the Mona Lisa a painting that the whole world was looking for what was
2:09:41
he going to do with [Music]
2:09:46
it peruja must have realized that the painting was far too hot to do anything anything within France so he came back
2:09:53
here to Italy and he HED up in this hotel in Florence which used to be
2:09:59
called the Tripoli Italia but which not surprisingly has now changed its name to
2:10:04
the Gonda because it's in this hotel that the Great Lost painting was finally
2:10:12
found peruja contacted a Florentine antique dealer called Alfredo Jerry and
2:10:19
offered to sell him the Mona Lisa for half a million L inevitably Jerry contacted the Italian
2:10:27
police 3 days later they came here to the hotel and arrested vinchenzo
2:10:35
peruja when they got inside Peru's room they found the Mona Lisa tucked away in a suitcase underneath his bed and when
2:10:43
they asked him why he'd stolen her peruja replied that it was an act of patriotism all
2:10:49
along all he'd ever really wanted to do was to ensure that the great Florentine
2:10:55
Beauty was returned to her rightful home peruja was set down for a year for
2:11:02
stealing the Mona Lisa which doesn't seem very much does it but one thing's certain no matter how famous the Mona
2:11:09
Lisa was before peruja and his cronies stole her from the lube this prior Fame
2:11:15
was as nothing compared with the enormous Global notoriety that the
2:11:21
picture acquired once all those newspapers and all those columns had stopped writing about the Great Theft of
2:11:27
the Mona Lisa and so our plump Florentine housewife finally became an
2:11:35
International Celebrity at the age of 400 because of the robbery everyone now
2:11:41
knew what she looked like and everyone wanted to know more about
2:11:47
her in 1919 the notorious d artist Marcel Duchamp proved she'd really
2:11:54
arrived by taking the Mickey out of her giving her a mustache and a goatey and
2:12:00
adding the letters El oou in French a naughty pun which means she's got a hot
2:12:07
ass or as we might perhaps say today a hot booty there's not any single moment to
2:12:15
where the monaa becomes the world most famous painting there are building blocks there are Stepping Stones the
2:12:21
being in Paris is an important thing being painted by Renaissance genius is quite important being a f fatal or being
2:12:27
described as a castrating woman who do you no harm being stolen was a great
2:12:33
Stroke of Luck being mocked by futurist and avanguard artist was also very
2:12:40
important and being regularly exploited by the advertising industry in order to
2:12:45
sell everything from um fridge magnets uh hotels
2:12:52
um flights um and condoms even um you know all that is is a tremendous asset for um
2:13:00
for a girl I can't face going into detail about the subsequent growth of the
2:13:06
monalisa tat industry it's too horrible to witness instead let's just visit the
2:13:13
house of the world's biggest hoarder of Mona Lisa memorabilia and Savor some of
2:13:19
the highlights of his collection
2:13:24
[Music] my house has become somewhat of a Mona Museum a shrine if you like I have
2:13:32
gathered together some of the most beautiful items I have in my collection like this wonderful photomosaic here
2:13:38
although the reflection is a bit irritating these magnificent cushions these camic tiles from
2:13:47
China and this is American it's called the giggling
2:13:53
monalisa and this Persian rug it's a bit amateurish but still it's
2:13:58
magnificent and this is something I made myself it's based on William T but as
2:14:04
you can see the arrow has missed its Target once you're famous for being
2:14:12
famous all you can really do is become more famous still it's the golden rule
2:14:18
of modern celebrity in the case of Lisa gerardini proves it so
2:14:27
clearly so that's cleared up the mystery of how the Mona Lisa got
2:14:32
famous what it doesn't explain is how she ever managed to be obscure in the
2:14:38
first place how can a painting as wonderful as this ever be
2:14:44
[Music] obscure go on forget everything you've
2:14:49
ever heard about her forget the teacups and the posters just go and look at her
2:14:55
properly you'll enjoy it there are a million stories in the
2:15:02
world of art this has been just one of them
2:15:08
[Music]
Ep 7: Edouard Manet's "D;jeuner sur L'Herbe"
2:15:28
[Music]
2:15:35
1863 was such an important year in the history of the world in America where
2:15:42
the Civil War was raging slavery was abolished and President Abraham Lincoln
2:15:48
promised his country government of the people by the people for the people in
2:15:54
England the first underground line was opened between Paddington and faringdon
2:15:59
in Switzerland the Red Cross was founded and here in France this went on
2:16:07
show and caused the biggest Scandal the world of art had ever
2:16:14
witnessed idiotic wretched shocking incoherent childish rage the papers of
2:16:22
the day taking huge offense at manise deio lab the picnic on the
2:16:30
grass they didn't like the nude they didn't like the men they didn't like the color scheme they didn't like the
2:16:37
[Music] [Applause]
2:16:44
composition what upset them most though was this provocative way in which the men in this picture were dressed but she
2:16:51
wasn't Not only was this woman flagrantly naked but worse she didn't
2:16:58
give a damn no she just looked right back at her audience with that
2:17:03
extraordinary stare of hers and dared them to disapprove it was almost as if
2:17:09
she was accusing [Music]
2:17:18
them our own Dante Gabriel Rosetti the prolite would later write a horrified
2:17:24
letter home about this French idiot named man; who must be the greatest and
2:17:30
most uncritical ass who ever lived
2:17:35
[Music] nasty they were all wrong of course
2:17:41
people invariably are when they get all worked up about an artwork but very few pictures can claim to have changed the
2:17:48
course of Art single-handedly this however is one of them I'll just spell
2:17:53
it out for you without this picture there wouldn't have been impressionism and without impressionism there wouldn't
2:18:00
have been Modern Art and we'll talk about all that what
2:18:08
Manny was trying to do here what he achieved why this thing had the impact it did but on a more personal note can I
2:18:16
also question the eyesight of all those critics who in 1863 found this woman
2:18:24
ugly who complained about her figure and laughed at her were they all
2:18:31
blind this woman isn't ugly this is one of the most desirable and alluring women
2:18:36
in art and when Manny found her his art found a reson
2:18:47
de here she is and her
2:18:53
again who was she you'll find
2:18:58
[Music] out the thing that that uh bothered
2:19:07
people uh with the deune I think I think I mean from all this
2:19:13
distance is the look of that woman there she sat on the lawn uh with these men
2:19:20
men in their you know student Garb um young men and uh she could care
2:19:29
less was outrageous I think I think that must have driven people men who wrote
2:19:35
about her [Music]
2:19:45
crazy man; was the son of a very rich and very prominent French judge
2:19:51
AUST man; he was called he was a holder of the leion Don and here at the pal de
2:19:57
Justice manise Senor was at the top of the judge's tree and held one of the
2:20:03
most important legal positions in France his mother was a genuine Blue
2:20:09
Blood her Godfather was the king of Sweden and in fact the current Kings of Sweden are all descended from him so
2:20:16
with a father who presided over the pal de Justice and a mother mixed up with
2:20:22
royalty man; came from an unusually distinguished
2:20:28
family he was the eldest son born In 1832 and as so often happened in such
2:20:35
situations his father hoped he'd continue the family tradition and become a lawyer while Edward himself dreamt of
2:20:43
the opposite he dreamt of becoming an
2:20:48
artist with man; more than with most artists the choice between
2:20:53
respectability and rebellion was so very
2:20:59
[Music]
2:21:05
loaded man; chose Rebellion he signed up as an apprentice in the studio of a
2:21:11
flashy and immensely popular academic painter called Thomas Couture a peddler
2:21:17
of huge fleshy pompous phant es packed with ancient
2:21:23
nudes this one shows the day after the night before at a Roman
2:21:29
ory it's soft porn done with oil paints but because the girls were dressed or
2:21:36
rather undressed As Romans Couture was forgiven in man's world this was
2:21:44
acceptable but this was shocking the deab is just frankly
2:21:50
provocative it was obviously completely immoral for a modern dressed woman to be seating naked with two fully clothed men
2:21:57
if you had River gods and nymphs and so on of course that was absolutely fine but not people who were absolutely
2:22:02
obviously explicitly contemporary in their clothes rather surprisingly Man's father
2:22:10
accepted his son's decision to become an artist and generously provided the money
2:22:15
for Manny's upkeep and education can't have been easy for AUST man; to
2:22:23
sponsor and fund his son's rebellion and it certainly wasn't in character so let
2:22:29
me plant some seeds of Suspicion here about his reasons for doing it perhaps
2:22:35
AUST man wasn't as respectable as he pretended to be perhaps Edward knew
2:22:41
something about his father that the father didn't want others to know
2:22:47
perhaps Manny Junior had something on Manny [Music]
2:22:58
senior this is man's wife Suzanne lanoff when Manny was a teenager this
2:23:05
Suzanne who was from Holland joined the family as a piano teacher she gave piano
2:23:10
lessons to man; and his brothers now something very mysterious
2:23:16
happened with Suzanne because in 1852 she gave birth to a baby and this
2:23:22
baby a boy called Leon went on to appear in many of Manny's [Music]
2:23:29
pictures and because man eventually married suzan 10 years later it's always been assumed that leyon was man's
2:23:38
[Music] son but what if he wasn't what if
2:23:45
someone else were the father what if someone else made Suzanne lanoff pregnant what disgrace this would have
2:23:52
brought to the family if it had come out who among the mayonnaise needed most
2:23:59
to preserve an aura of respectability around
2:24:07
himself a lot of very convincing circumstantial evidence points to AUST
2:24:13
man; being the father of little Lon and not Edward and if he was as I he was then
2:24:21
the painting of dejuno Leb begun in the year of AUST man's death would have been
2:24:27
informed by a highly personal understanding of the shallowness of
2:24:33
respectability and the power of lust and the prevalence of
2:24:39
hypocrisy oh yes I'm going to tell you everything that went into the making of this picture but some of it you may not
2:24:46
want to know [Music]
2:25:02
[Music] first thing to note about deun is that the scene man is showing us
2:25:09
is actually illegal men and women weren't allowed to bathe together in man's time and they
2:25:16
certainly weren't allowed to go naked in public when they did go bathing in the river
2:25:23
they wore very proper swimming costumes and were separated by big wire
2:25:29
fences so everyone seeing Deon would have known immediately that man; was
2:25:35
deliberately teasing the law mocking it and the person who would have known this
2:25:40
more clearly than anyone else had he still been alive to see it would have been Man's father
2:25:49
[Music] the most obviously and outrageously illegal participant in this outdoor orgy
2:25:57
which is what people would have thought they were looking at was that wonderful nude who sits there on the left and
2:26:03
stares out at us so implacably I've already admitted how much I
2:26:09
personally admire oh okay I fancy the naked woman in Deon SOB well her name
2:26:16
was victorine and her story is fascinating Victor was born in Paris and uh
2:26:24
she lived in a workingclass neighborhood I can't imagine her uh just
2:26:30
being a model I think that uh the passivity of modeling is not something
2:26:38
that suits or goes with the the look of that
2:26:44
woman some Dreadful stories exist of Victor
2:26:50
people seeing her outside the World's Fair begging for money or being drunk uh
2:26:56
for for me that was always a reading you know how these people knew her as man's model which is fairly close
2:27:04
to being a prostitute and so then when they see her again they read all of that into it and
2:27:10
have her dead at you know uh 50 practically so when we learned that she
2:27:15
was a painter and exhibited at the salon and uh even late in in her 80s when
2:27:21
asked by someone doing a census what she did and she identified herself as an
2:27:27
artist I think it was a vision she had of herself so in a way her life I don't
2:27:33
know I suppose you could say her life was ordinary but I find it rather extraordinary that first of all that
2:27:39
this workingclass girl could have ever imagined herself an artist how did she ever get the idea that that's what she
2:27:45
could do I love her for that I do I just love her
2:27:53
man; was supposed to have met victorine at the pal dece where his father
2:27:59
presided over the courts manise senia's task was to rule
2:28:04
on domestic affairs patrimony suits Affairs of illegitimacy and
2:28:10
inheritance victorine was a part-time model and a street singer so she was
2:28:16
exactly typical of the kind of women who were always being brought before manise
2:28:21
Senor accused of enticing this man or that man so there's a perfectly
2:28:27
reasonable chance that man; met victorine while she was appearing before
2:28:33
his father on some misdemeanor or other what a splendid irony that
2:28:40
is I definitely think there was chemistry of a sexual kind
2:28:46
between uh Miran and man even if Were Gay which I think she
2:28:52
[Music] was he talks about going to a party and
2:28:58
uh you know victorine being there with her girlfriend and uh their arms around each other and so on so whereas I never
2:29:06
used to think of the two of them uh sexually engaged I think they could have
2:29:11
been sexually engaged without ever having sex let me put it that
2:29:17
way it's inevitably been whispered that man; fell in love with victorine and
2:29:22
certainly her looks did something to him as they do to me he painted her obsessively and
2:29:29
gloriously for a decade here she is in a matador's
2:29:36
costume Manny had made specially for him by a Spanish tailor in
2:29:47
Paris this is her as a street singer leaving
2:29:54
work and here is a lady of the night who just said goodbye to her respectable and
2:30:00
two-faced Parisian lover how do we know he's respectable
2:30:06
and Too Faced because brilliantly man's given victorine a monacle to
2:30:15
brandish it can't be her monacle women didn't wear them old men whose eyesight
2:30:22
was going wore monocles old men whose eyesight was going kept Mistresses on
2:30:27
the side they sent poses of flowers to indicate they were
2:30:33
coming they feigned respectability in the daytime and then searched out what
2:30:38
they really wanted at [Music]
2:30:47
night this is man's other famously scandalous
2:30:53
picture Olympia she's called it's victorine again so lovely so Brazen
2:31:00
what's happening in this picture is that Olympia a cazan is greeting her next
2:31:05
client me or you or whoever's looking at the picture because we've just arrived
2:31:11
and we've brought her a bouquet of flowers just look at the expression on
2:31:19
victorine face what thoughtfulness what
2:31:24
sadness what [Music]
2:31:33
pity and here's an interesting detail see this bracelet it's apparently a
2:31:38
bracelet that man; gave to his wife and inside it was a lock of his hair I what
2:31:45
to make of that I'm not sure but I think it underlines how man's art becomes
2:31:51
extra personal in matters of sexual desire and respectability and the
2:31:56
keeping of Mistresses and I think we have to bear that in mind when we go outside again and take a closer look at
2:32:03
dejun suab there was a lot of anxiety about
2:32:10
the morality of women in Paris in the 1860s what people were most afraid of
2:32:15
was the sense that you couldn't tell who people were you couldn't tell the difference between respective people and
2:32:20
non-resectable people so all the way there was a sense that you couldn't read Modern
2:32:27
Woman so here's victorine naked Brazen a Bish a Lorette a prostitute and
2:32:34
opposite her lounging about is Man's brother Gustav who's playing an art
2:32:40
student in the picture we know he's supposed to be an art student because he's wearing a silly hat a type of
2:32:47
indoor Fez much favored by students the second man is man's
2:32:54
brother-in-law Ferdinand lanoff the brother of Suzanne lanoff Ferdinand was
2:33:00
a sculptor so these are real life artistic types pretending to be
2:33:05
fictional artistic types and flouting the law orgiastic in a studenty
2:33:12
way the question is
2:33:18
why man told us that the original inspiration for the deun was a terribly
2:33:23
famous painting that hangs in the Lou of a concert champet an outdoor music party
2:33:30
involving a pair of costumed musicians and a pair of naked
2:33:39
Muses in man's time the painter of this old Mish menaja cat was believed to be
2:33:45
the great Geon more recently tishan is said to have done it whichever of the
2:33:51
two it was the mood is luxurious sensual Venetian and very
2:33:58
decadent two men who are dressed Frolic with two Muses who aren't not
2:34:05
surprisingly this great painting has set many French imaginations
2:34:11
racing the actual composition of deanb was based on a print by Mar Antonio
2:34:17
raymondi of Raphael's Judgment of
2:34:23
paradise so man is deliberately misquoting the Old Masters taking on
2:34:28
Raphael taking on Joon revisiting their scenarios and updating them Deon lab
2:34:36
shows us what geon's concert champet would have looked like if it had taken place by the sen in
2:34:43
1863 rather than somewhere golden in Arcadia in the 16th century it would
2:34:50
have looked ridiculous uncomfortable and
2:35:00
illegal thus this naughty painting is an outrageous updating of the past filled
2:35:06
with deliberate shocks for instance what is that woman at the back actually
2:35:16
doing in geon's concert champet she's a lovely mythological Muse drawing a
2:35:23
caraffe of water from a sacred well in Man's painting she's become a
2:35:29
woman in a shift who's wed into the river and who cups the water with her
2:35:35
hand now I don't know if you've ever been on a beach with some French women if you have you'll know that they keep
2:35:41
running into the water to have a pee it's an unfortunate National habit for
2:35:47
the French the entire Mediterranean is a giant outdoor bday and anyone looking at
2:35:53
Man's painting in the 19th century would have realized that GE Jon's water
2:35:59
bearing Muse has become a woman having a pee this deliberate sacr continues all
2:36:06
around the picture look how sloppily the remains of the picnic have been dumped on the
2:36:12
grass see in the corner there's a frog skullking in the grass a frog gone we in
2:36:19
French was students slang for a prostitute so this picture hasn't just
2:36:26
set out to update one of the great themes of the Old Masters the outdoor concert it set out to have a laugh at
2:36:34
the old Master's expense to rub our noses in the absurdity of what the Old
2:36:39
Masters showed [Music]
2:36:46
us look up there in the middle can you see it it's something people
2:36:52
usually Miss it's a bullfinch a common bird of the parks yet look how
2:36:58
uncommonly it's flying here with its wings stretched out like that flying
2:37:04
over the center of the composition there's only one other bird
2:37:10
in art that flies like that right there in the middle the sacred Dove that
2:37:15
represents the Holy Ghost in so many Renaissance
2:37:26
baptisms so we have here a flying bullfinch replacing the Holy Ghost and
2:37:31
coming down to a woman having a pee this isn't just a deliberately
2:37:38
shocking picture it's also a deliberately sacrilegious one a picture
2:37:43
hellbent on transgression by an artist who's lost his submissive respect
2:37:49
respect for the past and who's deliberately elbowing the Old Masters out of the frame and replacing them with
2:37:56
the harsh truths of the modern
2:38:02
world it takes great arrogance to paint a picture like this it takes hpar and
2:38:09
frenchness but above all I suggest it takes an intense sense of personal
2:38:15
disappointment of being let down by the past of no longer believing in a world you
2:38:22
thought you could trust and man; had good reason to feel
2:38:30
like that [Music]
Ep 8: Jan van Eyck's "The Arnolfini Portrait"
2:38:59
if you want to find stolen paintings don't go looking in the houses of
2:39:04
robbers and burglar go to a museum here at the National Gallery in
2:39:11
London for instance there's a very very famous painting that shouldn't really be
2:39:16
here because to put it blunt ly it was [Music]
2:39:26
nicked the National Gallery acquired the so-called Arn orini marriage in
2:39:32
1842 from a Scottish soldier who fought in the peninsula war in
2:39:38
Spain before the peninsula War the painting belonged to the Spanish royal
2:39:44
family after the peninsula War it belonged to the Scottish
2:39:50
Soldier you work it out this is war
2:39:59
booty and if I were a member of the Spanish royal family I'd be on the phone
2:40:04
every day asking for it back because not only is this one of the world's most famous pictures it's also one of the
2:40:12
most gloriously mysterious
2:40:17
[Music]
2:40:23
what exactly is it that Yan vanike has painted here something meaningful is
2:40:29
obviously going on but what can it be art historians have tied themselves
2:40:36
into knots trying to unravel the mystery round and round and round they
2:40:46
go there have been hundreds of interpretations but so successfully has
2:40:51
this masterpiece of puzzlement confused its interpreters that the most
2:40:56
fashionable Theory currently doing the rounds is that there is no mystery to it
2:41:02
that it's just a portrait of Mr and Mrs arnoldi and that's it that's what it
2:41:07
says here the national gallery's own catalog no secret setup no mystery no
2:41:16
hidden meaning but that has to be wrong the Arnold
2:41:21
marriage must have a hidden meaning the pictures packed with symbolism and
2:41:27
frankly you'd have to be blind not to notice it look for instance at this
2:41:32
fruit here on the window sill it says in the catalog that the
2:41:37
fruit is only here to indicate that the man in the picture is wealthy he's a
2:41:43
rich Merchant and Rich Merchants flaunt their wealth by leaving oranges which
2:41:49
were are expensive scattered casually about the room what
2:41:54
poppycock all you have to do to see that this fruit must have some deeper symbolic meaning is to look at other
2:42:02
pictures by Yan vanike look what's on the window sill of
2:42:07
this Madonna and child from Frankfurt is she trying to show how rich
2:42:12
she is look at the window sill of the in Hall Madonna
2:42:19
why would this Virgin Mary be flaunting her
2:42:25
wealth she isn't in Van ik's madonas the fruit arranged so pointedly on the
2:42:32
window sill is a deliberate reminder of those notorious biblical events in the
2:42:37
Garden of Eden that led to us being thrown out of
2:42:43
paradise when Adam took a bite out of the fruit being profer to him by Eve he
2:42:48
committed the first first sin and ensured the fall of Man the fruit on the
2:42:53
window sills of vanik madonas reminds us of the consequences of our inability to
2:43:00
resist [Music]
2:43:07
temptation there's also a tree full of cherries visible through the window of
2:43:12
the anor's room and that isn't accidental either cherries were the
2:43:18
traditional fruit of paradise they represented what we've lost what we
2:43:23
could have had that's why the Infant Jesus is brandishing handfuls of
2:43:29
cherries at us enthusiastically in the recently rediscovered Madonna of the
2:43:34
cherries by use Van Cleave the baby Jesus has come down to
2:43:40
earth to atone for our sins by dying for us and because of his ultimate sacrifice
2:43:47
it'll be cherries all round found for us again in
2:43:53
heaven my point is that these cherries in the arnor's garden and the fruit
2:43:59
arranged so pointedly on the arnor's window sill is there for a reason
2:44:05
everything in this busy painting is there for a reason so let's be braver
2:44:10
than the catalogers of the National Gallery let's take the difficult path
2:44:15
not the easy one and have another go at cracking the code of the arnoldi
2:44:22
[Music] marriage not much is known about the painter Yan
2:44:28
vanike we know that he worked for the Dukes of burgundy in the 1420s traveled
2:44:34
here and there and ended up in Brugge as the city's greatest
2:44:40
artist Brugge today is the Premier tourist destination in
2:44:46
Belgium and one of the best preserved Medi Vil cities in Europe but in Van
2:44:52
ik's time here the 1430s this delightfully preserved
2:44:57
chocolate box town was the most important trading port in northern Europe Brugge was International busy and
2:45:06
very very [Music]
2:45:11
rich in the 1430s Brugge must have been a very Cosmopolitan Place goods were
2:45:17
transported from all over Europe and uh found their way here from the Baltic region and further
2:45:25
out east came for instance uh Furs and all sorts of uh animal skins from uh the
2:45:33
Mediterranean came things like uh spices uh exotic foods um but also uh textile
2:45:42
and textile was the main business of Brugge among all these precious stuffs
2:45:47
being exported from and Brugge all around Europe perhaps the most valuable of all in the long run was oil paints
2:45:56
which was said to have been invented here by vanike himself it wasn't true of course all painting developed gradually
2:46:03
in various places but it is true that vanike was the first Great Master of the
2:46:09
new medium and this made him internationally famous
2:46:15
[Music]
2:46:23
it's said that this is his self-portrait and I believe it this is a man who knows
2:46:29
what he [Music] wants the thing about oil paints is that
2:46:36
they could achieve amazingly convincing illusionistic effects painters could
2:46:42
paint things with them that looked miraculously real and no one was better at this than Yan of
2:46:51
Ike one of the reasons this stubbornly mysterious picture has proved so enduringly fascinating is because vanike
2:46:59
involves you in the action so cunningly at the front of the picture
2:47:05
the mysterious couple seem to be greeting you as if you've just entered the room and they've been waiting for
2:47:13
you at the back of the picture the famous wool mirror so perfectly painted
2:47:20
not only shows the back of the couple as you'd expect but also two more figures
2:47:25
entering the room it's been said that the first of these is vanik himself but surely it
2:47:34
must also represent whoever's looking at the picture whoever's just stepped into
2:47:39
the room in other words you
2:47:47
[Music] we can confidently identify the two
2:47:53
people in the painting as Mr and Mrs Arnold feni their names appear in a
2:47:58
couple of early documents misspelled but still recognizable the Arnold fi were a family
2:48:05
of Italian Merchants from Luca in Tuscany who settled in Brugge and traded
2:48:11
in Precious materials Fabrics silks and
2:48:16
gold vanike painted the distinctive man in the picture
2:48:22
twice and for a long time he was thought to be Giovani di arigo arnoldini but
2:48:28
Recent research has suggested it may actually have been his cousin Giovani di
2:48:34
Nicolo arnolfini who arrived in Brugge in 1419 we know that this Giovani Den
2:48:41
Nicola was married we also know that his wife died
2:48:48
[Music]
2:48:56
Jandy was conspicuously prosperous and in Brugge in the 1430s a huge proportion
2:49:03
of a man's wealth was tied up in his clothes well he's wearing a f lined
2:49:11
velvet garment known at the time was a Hulk and it seems to be made of purple
2:49:17
Crimson velvet which would make it extraordinarly expensive um but her dress the white fur
2:49:25
if indeed as has been suspected that the fur is the fur of the squirrel then it's
2:49:30
only the belly fur and you're talking literally hundreds if not thousands of animals going into one of those gowns
2:49:37
alone and they were environmental disaster areas from our point of view and by the end of the 15th century the
2:49:44
far trade in Europe seems to more or less have wiped out the local wildlife and they were very lucky to find the new
2:49:50
world who an exploit so the anoris are dressed up to
2:49:55
the nines in their finest finery why would that be it was an art historian called Irwin
2:50:03
panovski who came up with a theory in the 1930s that what vanike is actually
2:50:08
showing us is the Arnold F's marriage panowski claimed that vanik
2:50:15
himself and the other chap you see reflected Mir ously in the mirror were the two witnesses at the wedding and
2:50:22
that the picture was actually intended as a legal document which is why it sports that
2:50:29
huge rumpold of the Bailey signature at its Center Yan vanike was
2:50:36
[Music] here unfortunately to arrive at this fabulous Theory panoi needed to twist
2:50:43
around some of the evidence and in a couple of instances actually make stuff up and I reckon that today's fashion for
2:50:51
insisting that the painting is nothing more than a portrait of a rich Flemish Merchant and his wife is an embarrassed
2:50:59
reaction by Modern Art historians to panov's creative tinkering with the
2:51:06
facts but in dismissing all of panov's theories about the anolini marriage are
2:51:12
we perhaps chucking out the baby with the bath water indeed isn't the issue of the baby
2:51:19
the first thing that needs to be considered here and don't tell me that there isn't
2:51:26
a [Music]
2:51:44
baby it says here that Mrs Arnold FEI is isn't pregnant it says here that this
2:51:52
lovely bulge in her stomach is just the way her dress was cut a fashion of the
2:51:57
times well I don't buy that and I don't believe that anyone looking at her with
2:52:03
genuinely open eyes can miss this protective gesture of hers she's
2:52:09
pregnant all right and this pregnancy is the key to the picture's meaning
2:52:15
[Music]
2:52:22
pregnancy is such a critical and ubiquitous human condition that you'd have expected art to be packed with
2:52:28
images of pregnant women after all what could be a more important family event
2:52:34
to celebrate and record than the expected arrival of a new baby and indeed there are lots of
2:52:42
pregnant women in art rather amazingly however they tend
2:52:48
to get overlooked I don't think I've puzzled
2:52:54
over any picture as much as I've puzzled over the so-called Arnold marriage it's
2:53:01
a maddening thing it sends you all over the place looking for Clues and one day
2:53:06
by chance it sent me here to the huge and Grand Metropolitan Museum in New
2:53:13
York I was walking through this room and I saw this
2:53:20
you want evidence of pregnancy this is evidence of pregnancy it's by use Van
2:53:26
Cleave who worked in antp so close to Brugge this is vancleave's
2:53:32
anunciation the Angel Gabriel has come to tell Mary that she's about to become
2:53:37
the mother of Jesus Christ what a big
2:53:42
moment isn't this space familiar isn't the bed familiar aren't those C handles
2:53:48
familiar isn't the window familiar isn't the mood
2:53:54
familiar this anunciation Bears such an obvious and tangible resemblance to the
2:54:00
anolini marriage that it might almost be the same setup you encounter the same arrangement
2:54:08
in other heartfelt enunciations by artists who followed vanike a similar room a similar bed a
2:54:17
similar atmosphere spere of a proclaimed [Music]
2:54:23
baby now of course the aror marriage doesn't show the angel Gabriel coming
2:54:29
down to the Virgin Mary and telling her she's about to have Jesus but look at this it's just too
2:54:37
similar to be a coincidence van ik's Masterpiece is trying to plunge us into
2:54:43
atmospheres exactly like these the warm and holy atmospheres of an impending
2:54:53
birth so I've come up with a blunt and honest and No Nonsense title for Van
2:54:59
ik's Oho complicated Masterpiece let's get to the point here
2:55:05
we should call this the arnoldi pregnancy [Music]
2:55:21
this is a selection of portraits by Marcus giret the younger who worked in England in the late 1500s but whose
2:55:28
father was an immigrant from Brugge it's only recently been noticed
2:55:34
that all the women in these portraits are pregnant why was Marcus getts the
2:55:41
younger commissioned to paint all these pregnant women because birth in geet's day was an
2:55:47
event briming over with fatal significance pregnancy was something not
2:55:54
only to be celebrated but also to be feared there was a perception that the
2:56:01
mortality rate in child birth was much higher and women approach child birth
2:56:06
some with a lot of anxiety you know you would it would be a period pregnancy
2:56:12
would be a period in which you would do spiritual exercises you would be thinking about the possib strong
2:56:17
possibility of dying in child birth so it made me think that that might be an aspect of
2:56:24
the of the portraits if the woman died in child birth there would be a record
2:56:30
an image of her it would take its place in the Family Portrait
2:56:35
Gallery thus life and death are intertwined in the pregnancy portraits
2:56:41
of Marcus's geets as they must somehow be intertwined in the Arnold F marriage
2:56:51
a brave freethinking art historian thinks she's found the
2:56:58
answer many people challenged the suggestion that the woman is actually pregnant because of a painting by vanik
2:57:04
which showed St Catherine of Alexandria who's obviously a virgin Saint in a
2:57:09
similar dress and pose and therefore it was argued that it was impossible that um a person could be shown in that uh
2:57:17
same po and dress and necessarily be pregnant on the other hand St Catherine
2:57:23
of Alexandria was mystically married to Christ and so therefore um it does
2:57:28
actually make sense that they could if if not literally pregnant perhaps a suggestion of pregnancy is
2:57:35
[Music] intended there was a discovery uh in the archives in Florence which is a letter
2:57:42
from Mrs Arnold's mother and in this letter she mentions and it's dated 143 3
2:57:48
the year before this picture is dated she mentions that her daughter Costa had
2:57:54
died I decided that it might be possible to think of it another way which is that
2:57:59
this woman in the picture was actually uh portrayed posthumously that is to say she's
2:58:05
actually dead by the time the painting is is completed and uh at first it seems very
2:58:12
far-fetched but in fact when looking at a lot of the details in the painting I think that uh it's very con convincing
2:58:18
that this was in fact the case so I would argue that it's very
2:58:24
likely Mrs arnoldi died in childbirth um and there are other reasons to think
2:58:29
that behind her over her right shoulder um you can see the back of a chair which
2:58:35
has uh the image of a St Margaret praying uh behind the dragon which is
2:58:41
her attribute St Margaret was the patron saint of pregnant women
2:58:46
[Music] the uh scenes around the convex mirror
2:58:53
are illustrations of the passion which seems very uh interesting in terms of the division of Mr arnolfini and Mrs
2:59:00
arnolfini that is the dead scenes on her side the living scenes on
2:59:06
his similarly if you look at the um Chandelier up above there is again a
2:59:12
contrast of the lit candle still on the left side where Arn arnoldi is and on
2:59:17
the right his wife stands underneath a candle that's gone out I would argue
2:59:23
that in light of this idea that she this is a posist image of U Mrs arnoldini
2:59:29
certain um aspects of the painting that were mysterious seem much more
2:59:36
straightforward so Mrs arnoldini may have died in childbirth and Mr arnoldi may have
2:59:44
chosen to memorialize her in this poignant masterpiece piece by Yan van
2:59:50
[Music] Ike anini presents his wife to us with
2:59:57
that touching gesture of his as if she were still alive why does he do that
3:00:04
because I think the painting is trying to understand her death and the baby's
3:00:09
death in intensely religious terms by comparing their sacrifice with the
3:00:15
ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ Christ crucified on the cross up here in
3:00:20
the mirror right in the middle of the
3:00:33
picture the fruit in the window reminds us of those regrettable events in the Garden of Eden that brought death into
3:00:41
the world and robbed us all of eternal life and see these funny shoes patterns
3:00:48
they're called they're for wearing Outdoors you slip them over your other shoes well Mr Arnold feny has discarded
3:00:57
his so very pointedly despite what's happened to him
3:01:02
he has no plans to wander further he's promising his Fidelity to his wife and
3:01:10
to his faith and Van Ike because he was a genius manages to indicate all this with
3:01:18
Oodles of clever symbolism but he also captures The
3:01:24
Haunting self-absorption and all that repressed sadness and even anger in the
3:01:31
face of Mr
3:01:39
arnoldi there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them Please polish
Here is a cleaned, polished, and structured synthesis of Waldemar Januszczak’s series "Every Picture Tells A Story", organizing the core theses, iconographical clues, and historical contexts across all eight featured masterpieces.
Overview: Waldemar Januszczak’s Central Theses
Episode Artist & Artwork Traditional View Januszczak’s Revisionist Reading
Ep 1
Thomas Gainsborough
Mr and Mrs Andrews
Pastoral harmony of Georgian gentry Class resentment, marital entrapment, and an unfinished dead pheasant in Mrs. Andrews' lap.
Ep 2
Rembrandt
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp
Straightforward medical triumph Staged theater, Christ-like sanctification of an executed thief, with the real audience looking outward.
Ep 3
Giorgione
The Tempest
Unfathomable pastoral enigma / Adam & Eve Classical myth: Demeter, Iasion, and the impending vengeful thunderbolt of Zeus.
Ep 4
Sandro Botticelli
The Birth of Venus
The birth of classical beauty A post-birth arrival in Cyprus (Hesiod), celebrating modesty, dynastic arrival, and marital fertility.
Ep 5
Caravaggio
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
Genre study of surprise/pain Moral vanitas: Bacchus punished for sensory excess and decadent indulgence.
Ep 6
Leonardo da Vinci
Mona Lisa
Perennial universal obsession Late-emerging modern celebrity sparked by Walter Pater's decadent myth-making and the 1911 theft.
Ep 7
;douard Manet
Le D;jeuner sur l’herbe
Flawed early impressionist study Intentional parody of Giorgione and Raphael, turning sacred muses into contemporary Parisian scandal.
Ep 8
Jan van Eyck
The Arnolfini Portrait
Commercial marriage certificate A solemn, posthumous memorial for a wife who died in childbirth, laden with symbols of sacrifice.
The 8 Masterpieces Analyzed
1. Thomas Gainsborough — Mr and Mrs Andrews (c. 1750)
The Social Undercurrent: Beneath the tranquil Suffolk landscape lies the brutality of the Enclosure Acts, which dispossessed the agrarian working class. Robert Andrews is depicted as a self-satisfied landowner flaunting his mechanized seed drill and private estate.
The Unfinished Lap: The blank, unpainted patch on Mrs. Andrews’ dress was intended to hold a dead pheasant brought back from the hunt.
The Dutch Double Entendre: Drawing on Northern genre traditions where dead fowl signify cuckoldry or entrapment (vogel / bird as sexual pun), Januszczak argues the portrait subtly satirized the predatory marriage of estates—provoking the sitters to halt work before completion.
2. Rembrandt van Rijn — The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632)
The Staged Reality: Real dissections began with the foulest inner organs; Tulp’s demonstration begins artificially with the forearm musculature to showcase his manual finesse and command of anatomical mechanics.
The Sacred Thief: The pale, glowing cadaver of petty coat thief Adriaan Adriaanszoon ("Aris Kindt") is framed like a martyred Christ, elevated from public execution into eternal medical salvation.
The Missing Spectators: The boisterous crowd of hundreds who paid admission is excluded from the frame; instead, the sitters direct their gaze outward at the viewer, framing the encounter as a universal memento mori.
3. Giorgione — The Tempest (c. 1508)
Beyond the Pastoral Riddle: Discarding both the idea of meaningless decorative caprice and the Adam-and-Eve interpretation (the "serpent" having proven to be a tree root), Januszczak looks to Homeric myth.
Demeter and Iasion: The nursing golden-haired mother represents Demeter, who lay with the mortal Iasion in a plowed field to bear Plutus (wealth).
The Gathering Storm: The lightning bolt flashes from an enraged Zeus, poised to strike down Iasion for trespassing on a goddess. The broken column signifies a life cut short, while the vigilant crane on the roof serves as an emblem to patron Gabriele Vendramin on the precarious nature of fortune.
4. Sandro Botticelli — The Birth of Venus (c. 1485)
A Misnamed Arrival: In Hesiod’s Theogony, Venus is born far out at sea from the foam of Uranus’s severed members; Botticelli paints her subsequent disembarkation onto the shores of Cyprus, where her touch causes the earth to bloom.
Modesty Over Carnality: Far from modern erotic display, the pose mirrors the classical Venus Pudica (Modest Venus), designed as a high-minded celebration of bridal virtue and dynastic fertility for the Medici family circle.
5. Caravaggio — Boy Bitten by a Lizard (c. 1594–1595)
The Effeminate Bacchus: The boy’s exposed shoulder, jasmine, and rose identify him with the deity of sensual excess and theatrical intoxication.
The Vanitas Trap: The wilting rose, fragile blown-glass vase, and fleeting window reflection establish the transience of youth and sensory pleasure.
The Retributive Bite: Reaching into the foliage brings a sudden bite from the hidden reptile—a sharp moral warning that reckless hedonism brings sudden pain and ruin.
6. Leonardo da Vinci — Mona Lisa (begun c. 1503)
The Construction of a Legend: Unknown to the broader public for centuries and tucked away in royal collections, Lisa Gherardini was regarded as a standard domestic portrait before 19th-century Romantic critics (notably Walter Pater) reframed her as a vampiric, predatory femme fatale.
The Catalyst of Modern Media: Global fame was cemented only after Vincenzo Peruggia stole the panel from the Louvre in 1911. The resulting international media spectacle transformed the portrait into an omnipresent pop icon.
7. ;douard Manet — Le D;jeuner sur l’herbe (1863)
Subverting the Canon: Manet takes the revered pastoral conventions of Giorgione/Titian’s Concert Champ;tre and the composition of Raimondi’s engraving of Raphael’s Judgment of Paris, stripping away mythological distance.
Confrontational Modernity: By placing an unashamed, contemporary nude alongside modern dandies in student caps, Manet exposed bourgeois hypocrisy, transforming classical water nymphs into scandalous, flesh-and-blood Parisians.
8. Jan van Eyck — The Arnolfini Portrait (1434)
Challenging the Panofsky Orthodoxy: Rejecting Erwin Panofsky's reading of a domestic marriage certificate, Januszczak follows archival findings showing Costanza Trenta had died by 1433.
A Posthumous Memorial: The painting stands as a devotional lamentation:
The single burning candle on Giovanni’s side contrasts with the extinguished, smoking wick above Costanza.
The Passion roundels on the mirror show living scenes on his side, death and resurrection on hers.
The carving of St. Margaret (patron saint of childbirth) and the expectant drapery indicate that she died in childbed, remembered here in a promise of eternal fidelity.
To explore these analyses further:
Hidden Meaning Behind 8 Iconic Paintings
© Copyright: Юрий Слободенюк, 2026
Свидетельство о публикации №126101700847
Свидетельство о публикации №126101700847
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