franciscan brown knotted cord [Applause] why is he upside down why is he writing on himself in blood why are they nodding off and why is he staring so darkly

here we present a video on the baroque and its presentation in the context of the art history history of our people. these videos are very interesting and have made us more interested in the history of their own lives. however, even in modern age the experts are still Revising the history by people like Caravaggio; as our u.s. experts believe, they do not actually create all the magnificent structures of the past century but instead constructed upon the reconstructed stones of the previous civilization that vanished

here is much 

 

Tangential evidence in term of maps and artworkifacts suggest our history could be indeed changed and those those previously developed were far more technologicalally advanced

despite the fact that there is an immense amount of information about history, it is still difficult to understand how this has been accomplished.

 

Section 1: 

a new art, the magnification of text and poetry, is an essential part of this work. it has been shown that there are many classical arts in the world, but little is known about the nature of its kind. we have recently discovered the best art historian -aerator by westernemar which was found to be one of the most enthusiastic and explicit Art he historian narrator ever. here we present a case of a young man with a history of historical science who presented with his passion for reading and writing.

 

dominicans or the mercedarians and the carthusians

then so much of what's going on in so many amazing spanish baroque paintings

will go over your head [Music]

why for instance is he upside down why is he

writing on himself in blood why are they nodding off

and why is he staring so darkly at that

[Music]

to help you out i've prepared a handy pilgrim's guide to the spanish religious

orders you'll thank me for this this one here he's a franciscan brown robes knotted

cord for a belt franciscan [Applause]

sometimes the clothes get more ragged and patched but they're still Franciscans

he on the other hand is a dominican black cow white robe

dominican quite often seen in the americas

converting the indians or sometimes whipping off their robes and

flagellating themselves dominicans [Music]

the ones in the black robes are benedictines remember black robes

benedictines they don't appear in art as often as the

others they're the moody silent ones [Music]

so did you get all that franciscans brown dominicans black and white

benedictines all black now you're ready for the spanish baroque

[Music] now you're ready for francisco de

zorbaran spain's spookiest baroque artist

he was born here in fuente de cantos the fifth stop on the via de la plata

so his understandings were small town understandings and his rhythms were the rhythms of the

pilgrimage [Music]

these days zubaran is reasonably well known but at the start of the 20th century he

was completely obscure in fact most spanish art apart from velasquez was under explored and

undervalued i think it was so dark so strange

so catholic that we just didn't get it and in particular we didn't get zoberan

[Music] these are let's face it bizarre and

unsettling images uncomfortable funerals

impossible deaths

[Music]

the zoberan family house on the main square in fuento de cantos

it's quite a posh house now must have been really posh in the 17th century

zobran's father was a prosperous textile merchant from the north basque country

who moved down here because southern spain particularly andalucia was experiencing this boom in new religious

building and there's so much money here for the priests and their new outfits so

there's a lot of work for the zorbarans [Music] many years later francisco de zorbaran

painted a mysterious series of christian martyrs

beautiful female martyrs all of whom were dressed in modern clothes they're some of the

most beautifully painted and exciting clothes in 17th century baroque art

and people said that zorbran was using his father's textiles in these paintings advertising

them using these christian martyrs just to show off what his dad had for sale

[Music]

zurbaran's main employers were the spanish religious orders the mercedarians the carthusians

the benedictines the dominicans and the franciscans

[Music]

one day pope nicholas v visited assisi he wanted to see the crypt where saint

francis was buried and at five in the morning he went down into the crypt with a band of monks and all they had with

them was torches and as the torchlight spread around the dark crypt suddenly

they saw saint francis standing there 200 years after his death

still as fresh as if he just stepped out of a bath untouched unblemished as if time hadn't

touched him so abram went on to do many other things

but monks were his speciality monks were where his genius was best

expressed and it's not just the vividness with which he illustrated their uncanny

stories but that sense you get with him that zorbaran's monks are so convincingly

full of god full of worship full of thought

no painter has painted human belief as convincingly as this

the baroque pilgrim trudging dutifully the 600 miles from seville to santiago

de campostella would have had regular encounters with the spanish baroque

and waiting for them at the end of the trudge was an eye-catching eruption of baroque

architecture [Music]

you know chaucer's wife of bath came on the pilgrimage to santiago it's been the

most famous pilgrimage route in europe for a thousand years but it was the baroque era that shaped

the town itself and gave santiago de campostella its memorable and exciting

look the cathedral here to which thousands of

busy pilgrims scuttle daily is a baroque wedding cake in the churrigiresque style

which as far as i can tell consists chiefly of adding things to places when there isn't really room for

them but somewhere within this crazily writhing

sculpture-encrusted fantasy facade me thinks me sees the remnants of

spain's islamic past [Music]

inside the great pilgrimage church at santiago the baroque's love of glitter

has been spectacularly unleashed

guilt may have driven the spanish baroque but gold was what paid for it

the stupendous wealth of the american colonies was flooding into spain

and then into the pockets of the catholic church which spent it as the catholic church so often did

on art

you know there's never been an art movement as a depth as the baroque was at absorbing local influences taking

them all in regurgitating them and then spitting them out at the other end as something

that looks unmistakably baroque you can't imagine this building in italy

or france or perish the thought england it's obviously from around here

i'm up here this way over here

i'm up on the colonnade of saint peter's cathedral in rome high above the crowd looking down on all

these catholics [Music]

not many people are allowed up here you know what the vatican's like it's been ruling the catholics for 2000 years so

there's no need to be nice to me but i told them what i wanted to do up here and they agreed immediately

because they could see as well that this is the best place to do what i wanted to

do which is to understand properly at last

that great sprawling ungainly but glorious art

movement the baroque [Music]

the baroque age doesn't have a nice clear outline

it sprawled across the 17th century and beyond

it wasn't a tidy movement but it spawned some of our greatest art

[Music]

the architect of this astounding square jan lorenzo bernini was one of the key

players of the baroque understand bernini and you understand the whole

thing and what he invented here in this piazza was this huge

colonnade that encircles you gathers you up

it's like a giant pair of arms now 300 000 people can fit in here

that's three times more than wembley stadium and every single one of them

gets this big hug from bernini's piazza

[Music] so that's the first thing the baroque

does it goes after you and ingratiates itself with you

other art movements sit there on their pedestals and arrogantly assume you'll

be interested in them but the baroque knows you better

it gets off the pedestal and hunts you down

another of its ambitions is to impress you with its bigness its grandeur its drama

would you look at the size of that

and when it fell into the hands of intense geniuses it became dark and edgy

got all psychological on us and blurred the divide between art

and reality and when painting wasn't enough the baroque roped in all the other arts

to work on you as well architecture sculpture

music everything at once it was after you

so it threw the kitchen sink at you

what we're going to do in this series is follow the baroque from saint peter's to saint paul's from rome where it all

began to london where it fetched up eventually because another of the things that makes

the baroque special is its range it went everywhere

and basically spent the entire 17th century traveling about

and the really cunning thing about it is that wherever it went it adopted the local customs

and changed and the first place we're going to visit is up here

in northern italy trento

[Music]

trento in the italian dolomites is a pretty town which i recommend for

walking holidays and mountain views [Music]

but don't let its modern tranquility fool you because the great war started up here

a war of art [Music]

the baroque is best understood as a fight back a marvelous display of

counter punching by a waspish church that had come out fighting

[Music]

when martin luther nailed his 95 thesis onto the church door in wittenberg in

1517 and launched the protestant revolt against what he called the sink of roman

sodomy the popes the cardinals he wasn't just taking on the catholic

church luther was taking on the whole of italy

the entire southern mediterranean world view and all that goes with it

the colors the fruitiness the passions [Music]

in those days trento was in austria not in italy and it was here that the mighty council

of trent met in 1545 to plot the fight back

[Music] a wild boar has invaded the vineyard

complained pope leo the tenth memorably the baroque's task was to hunt that boar

down and dispatch it

for nearly 20 years the council of trent met here in the cathedral trento to plan

the catholic riposte and art was involved from the start

[Music] the lutherans had been against art

they saw it as a regrettable vanity that led to the worship of false idols

terrible waves of iconoclasm had torn across northern europe destroying

paintings burning statues but the catholic church

had always believed in art it relied on it it knew that people like

to see what they're worshiping they like images

and that gave art tremendous power

[Music] great prophet is derived from all sacred images declared the council

and when we kiss the sacred image and prostrate ourselves before it we adore

christ if anyone shall teach contrary to these

decrees concluded the council scarily let him be anathema

anathema anathema [Music]

like the map baroque of course it was produced in amsterdam in 1617

by willem blau the finest and busiest of the baroque map makers

blau would later be employed by the east india company to chart the new world

that was being discovered at this time but first he drew europe see

the big capitals of europe at the top london paris amsterdam

and down the sides what people were wearing in these fashionable new capitals look there are the english in

their silks and over here those baroque heroes

the poles the feathers in their hats so the baroque fight back began

up here in trento but it's epicenter the place where the

fireworks really went off was down south

in rome

the eternal city had a fight on its hands as the clock ticked over from the 16th

century to the 17th its architecture grew prouder louder

showier and bulged up through the roman skyline

but as i said the baroque went after you with all the arts at once

and while architecture and sculpture were frolicking in the roman sunshine

the art form that needed the most drastic attention painting

chose another path [Music]

the council of trent instructed its artists to get out there and grab

people's attention but how do you do that

one very effective trick is to make dramatic use of the dark and turn

painting into theater

[Music] that was the strategy of the baroque's greatest revolutionary

a pictorial genius who made damn sure that the religious message of the

counter-reformation came after you like a spotlit rottweiler

this master of dramatic darkness was of course michelangelo medici de caravaggio

who deserves our sympathy as well as our admiration poor caravaggio for 300 years he was

completely forgotten his reputation in tatters and then the 20th century

rediscovered him and began misunderstanding him in such terrible

ways [Music]

what rubbish has been spouted about caravaggio even sensible commentators on sensible

tv channels have insisted on seeing him as a knife mad predatory homosexual who

went berserk in baroque rome the ripper of roma

this demonic image of caravaggio annoys me like nothing else in the baroque

world as if a sex mad out of control roman crazy could really have painted

this [Music] thank heavens recent research into

caravaggio has begun correcting all this nonsense and we can start seeing him again for

what he really was the most important religious painter of the counter

reformation caravaggio did everything the council of trent demanded of its

artists he created a vivid new religious art that spoke to the people in a language

they could effortlessly a language that moved them and changed

them [Music] before caravaggio came along religious

art was set somewhere out there somewhere distant and fluffy but he made

sure it took place right under your nose here now

close enough to touch

the cast list changed too real people rounded up in taverns and

markets and chosen for their characterful faces replaced the

impossible gods of old there's that old bloke from the market

and that beautiful waitress from the tavern these are people you recognize from the

streets people you can touch and whose plight touches you

[Music] it's as if caravaggio has set himself

the task of completely reinventing religious art and he uses every baroque

trick in the book to get your attention the way this basket of fruit is about to

fall over so you want to reach in and push it back or the apostles hands shoved out into

your face it's all so real so tangible

so believable [Music]

the churches of baroque rome are filled with magnificent free helpings of

caravaggio just go in pretend you're praying and feel his power

here in the church of santa maria del popolo where he began working in 1600 he

pushes a horse's backside into your face so uncouthly and ensures you will not

miss the dramatic calling of saint paul taking place at the horse's feet

[Music] on the other wall saint peter is being crucified upside down

did you ever see such sweaty effort such tugging such pulling such pain

look how different it all was from the usual way of spreading the religious message

caravaggio's art was so tangible so vivid so cinematic that the roman clergy

which was used to an altogether rosier religious palette found him a challenge

some of his greatest paintings were rejected by the churches that had commissioned them

this one here was originally going to hang in saint peter's jesus and mary stamping on the snake of

sin was he a little too human for them

was she a little too sexy [Music]

even his great death of the virgin was rejected by the monks mary they spat looked like a bloated

who'd been pulled out of a river but i don't think she does

she just looks like a real woman

and in my book caravaggio was the best painter of convincing mary's the world

of art has seen are they too beautiful for their own good

maybe do i mind that not at all

[Music] while the clergy complained the public

responded and understood caravaggio's lesson his darkness his drama

seeped out of rome and infiltrated the international baroque at an astonishing

speed and wherever it fetched up in spain in flanders

in holland it transformed the local art

[Music] it's a strange name for an art movement

don't you think ba rock what does it mean where does it come from

if you think of the renaissance that's a very clear idea renaissance is french

for rebirth the rebirth of civilization

but barack it actually comes from a portuguese word barroco

which means a misshapen pearl

like this one all these portuguese explorers were

setting off around the world and they were coming back with gorgeous pearls in

all shapes and sizes [Music] now this pearl is not the rock

this is like the renaissance perfectly formed

delicate so civilized precious

this one however the baroque pearl is blobby

exuberant misshapen difficult to handle

and exciting in a deformed kind of way so

this is the renaissance this is the baroque

[Music]

nowhere was this baroque outline more obvious than in the bendy direction now

taken by architecture [Music]

rome is basically a baroque creation

i know it's got the great ancient ruins and the fine renaissance palaces

but the default architecture here the stuff that gives the city its main mood

is baroque [Music]

[Applause] this beautiful little baroque secret is

a courtyard designed in the 1630s by a genius of the roman baroque called

boromini francesco boromini

in my opinion was the single most exciting architect there's ever been

a genius a man of twisted brilliance

the picasso of architecture

this tiny courtyard he designed for the church of san carlo in rome

is almost gothic in its brooding intensity

i don't know if you can feel it in the film but in the flesh you can certainly

sense the solemnity this sparse profundity of this tiny

little space and remember architecture speaks to the body not just

the eyes

boromini was so inventive can you see the balustrade up there look at the

actual balusters the way some of them bulge at the top and others bulge at the

bottom what for the renaissance would never have done something as wayward and playful as that

but boromini was a rule breaker by instinct and that makes him

totally baroque

so this is the cloister around which the monks would walk and read their bibles

now look at the church

it's like walking into a stoney piece

of sculpture

i've been in here scores of times i never miss it if i'm in rome

and i've stared and stared at this remarkable interior but if you ask me to draw what's

happening to the walls in here i couldn't do it it's too complicated too fidgety

too inventive but what i can do

is to try and draw a plan of the building because it's completely crazy

what boromini is trying to do here is to blend two completely different shapes

out here there's a kind of blunt greek cross

so a greek cross with the ends taken off

but in the middle all that becomes

a perfect oval so this is the edge of the church or this

seemingly chaotic going in and out but underlying it

as you can see is this perfect bit of geometry

made up of rectangles

made up of triangles and these circles here

and that's what boromini always does he builds this exact mathematical basis and

then he just ruffles it up like someone messing up your hair

[Music]

i've seen geometry as madly busy as that on the great domes of islam

but never in a christian church

boromini supplied baroque architecture with something dark and emotional

it's feminine principle it's yin but every yin of course needs a yang and

in baroque rome the undisputed king of yang was jan lorenzo bernini

the great bernini was everything that boromini wasn't handsome

rich haughty a smooth operator who charmed the kings

and the popes as architect

as sculptor as painter the man could do everything

and the raw spirit of the baroque coursed through his veins as fiercely as

the water spouting from one of his fountains

where boromini was almost certainly homosexual and he died this terrible

death he committed suicide threw himself on his sword and took a long time to die

bernini was a ladies man through and through and bernini would never have dreamt of

killing himself because that would have deprived the world of his flamboyant

genius [Music]

by bernini it's just a couple of hundred feet up the road from boromini's san carlo

but it seems to come from a different architectural planet

boromini invented the curved church facade that bends the front of the

church out into the street but bernini he got really good at it too

and then out here another curve going the other way

and that's the baroque for you it twists this way and that always on the move like a restless dragonfly

[Music]

walking into bernini san andrea is like walking into a piece of theater

[Music] bernini fills his church

with rich color [Music]

look at that lantern up there that gold of lantern you put yellow glass up there so when

the sun shines it's as if the whole interior is being flooded with this gorgeous golden divine light

[Music]

bernini's church has this very specific storyline for you to notice and follow

so saint andrew the patron of the church is being martyred here he's heading up

towards heaven there and right at the very top in the lantern he's being welcomed into heaven the

little cherubs are even standing aside to make room for him so you can go up there it's a very theatrical effect very

different from anything boromini ever tried to do

the baroque had a taste for theatricality that's why it liked bernini so much

and if you want to witness some truly stupendous baroque theater

then follow me into saint peter's [Music]

an extraordinary creation in front of us is bernini's bald aquino

put up under the transect between 1624-1633

now you have a good look at it you tell me is that sculpture or is it architecture

or is it a combination of the two so it doesn't really matter

i go for the last option that's what you get with a baroque

all the dividing lines get blurred [Music]

do

the coronaro chapel in santa maria de la vittoria which many people consider to be

bernini's masterpiece including bernini

it shows the spanish saint saint teresa of avila

at a moment when she's having a vision an angel has come down to her from

heaven and he's piercing her heart with a flaming arrow

real was the pain to me that i moaned out loud several times

and yet it was so indescribably sweet that i could not wish to be released from it

when the angel withdrew his spear i was left with a great love of god

[Music] what he's done here

is create a kind of theater in the church

on either side sitting in these boxes is the family that commissioned the corner chapel the

cornaro family up there on the right with a little beard looks a little bit like shakespeare that's federico cornaro he's

the one who actually paid for it all so the conaro family has gathered to

witness this miraculous event at the center

[Music] the other thing that people always pick up on about this work

is this look on saint razor's face this open-mouthed

moaning look now what berlin is trying to do here

is to find some sculptural form for this religious ecstasy that she's feeling

but the 20th century in particular has misinterpreted that look on her face all sorts of smutty remarks have been

made about her ecstasy what kind of ecstasy is it wink wink

i really disagree with all of that imagine trying to find a sculptural form

for something as difficult [Music] as a young woman being overpowered by the love of god

how do you convey that what do you show well i'll tell you the answer

that's what you do

this is art dazzling you with miracles in bernini's hands stone comes alive and

stops behaving like stone he could turn rock into flesh

women into trees his work is filled with movement and

restless transformation the cornaro chapel is a fusion of

sculpture painting marbling gilding even the real light of god has

been roped into achieving this great baroque effect

[Music]

if you're investigating the baroque this is a position i recommend

because from here you can see the baroque properly

[Music] the baroque loved painted ceilings

filling the air above you and around you with remarkable sights was a very

baroque ambition of course painted ceilings had existed

in italian art for centuries the sistine chapel was just the best known example

but they're difficult to do the barack however was never afraid of

effort whatever it took whatever it cost the baroque was up for it

and it developed such a fierce appetite for the painted ceiling

when the art is all around you and above you it creates this other world into

which you've stepped a new reality think of it perhaps as a kind of 17th

century virtual reality because these painted ceilings

blur the divide between the art and you

this is the first great painted room of the baroque age these days

it's the french embassy in rome and they've kindly let us in because the french are such fine people

but back in the baroque age this fine palace belonged to cardinal eduardo

farnasy one of the most powerful clerics in rome

and in 1597 at the very dawn of the baroque era

farnazy commissioned a young painter from bologna anibale karachi to come to rome with his

brothers who are also artists and to paint this [Music]

cardinal eduardo farnesy should have been a man of god and perhaps in his

public life he was but in his private life back here in his

palace he seems to have unleashed his sinful side

and what he commissioned anibale karachi to paint in the piano nobile of the

fondazi palace is a room filled with stories about the mad love

affairs of the gods

wherever you turn in here pagan gods are loving other gods in a divine orgy of

love and conflict and role-playing and naughtiness

karachi has somehow managed to celebrate 20 different divine love affairs

simultaneously on this one ceiling and to do that he's employed a cunning

optical trick each of the love affairs is taking place

inside its own picture and all these pictures have been crammed

onto the roof where they're held wrongly in place by a

busy assortment of cupid's nudes and statues

and then it gets even more complicated because all these cherubs refuse to stay

outside the action so they get involved

sometimes they're inside the picture other times they're outside the picture

time and space are being played with by a master stenographer

they're being pulled out of the true in this glorious jumble of realities

this room was to be hugely influential and what the karachi invented here

was to become one of the main ingredients of the baroque

we dart about in this series going here and there with me telling you this and

that trying to grasp the baroque but to be honest there's a much easier

way all you have to do to understand the baroque

fully and perfectly is to come in here

and look up at that

that is the baroque [Music]

we're in the jesuit church of san ignacio it was built to celebrate the

canonization of ignatius loyola the founder of the jesuits

that's him up there on the cloud in 1626

pope gregory xv officially made ignatius a saint

and all this could begin

the jesuits liked to keep things in house kept down the costs and ensured that the

opinions being expressed by the artist were jesuit opinions

so for this church they got in the jesuit lay brother from trento

padre pozzo [Music]

potso was a master of illusion he was the best there's ever been at

making small spaces look huge [Music]

his influential book on achieving these amazing optical illusions was read by

everybody through the ages they even say that cecil b demille consulted it when

planning his biggest cinema moments because padre pozzo was a wonderful

movie maker born 300 years early

pozzo's first work in here was this dark illusionistic dome which unlike a real

dome was cheap and easy to repair you just got someone in and repainted it

[Music] the little dome was so convincing the

jesuits decided to unleash pozzo on the rest of the church

all that is basically a flat roof the entire sky has been painted every cloud

every architrave every column what potso's done here is to use his

baroque magic to open up the roof and create this stupendous shortcut to

heaven and right in the middle floating up on a cloud is saint ignatius

himself he's going up to heaven where jesus is waiting to greet him

and see that glorious light emanating from the wound in jesus side

that's the light of divine revelation pouring out of jesus and into saint

ignatius then it's being scattered further to the

four corners of the earth to asia with that rather wonky camel

to africa with what i suppose must be a crocodile

europe rather tame in comparison and america

where a bare-chested red indian amazon looks down at a roaring cougar

all these were places that the jesuits had their missions

it's what my daughter might call a rather cheesy bit of jesuit propaganda

but what fantastic theater what ambition

what scale what excitement [Music]

[Applause] [Music]

something in here i want to show you it's a little baroque gym a secret it's more work

by padre potzer

so it's a kind of illusionistic colonnade all painted by pozzo

showing the story of the life of ignatius because we're in the jesuit college deep inside somewhere not sure

exactly which bit of it now what's amazing about this is that you can get really close

to the pozzo painting and see how it's done for example

can you see the two figures over there holding up an urn on the left right i'm going to point it out to you stay there

say that these two fingers here come over here

look at that that's how wide they have to be

so all of these figures or the architecture has been corrected

so that it only looks right from one place i call it pozzo's work

you have to stand on a particular spot for it to look good

someone asked potzer about that once they said what's the point of doing one of these things when you only see it

from one place that means only one person at a time can see it properly and he said

that's their problem my job is to paint it their job is to understand it

[Music]

so here in rome a revolution had been launched painting had been reinvented

sculpture transformed architecture revolutionized

and it was time for the baroque to spread its wings

soon enough it would arrive on the doorstep of most of the known world and become the first truly global art

movement but first there was the rest of italy to conquer

down here in naples for instance all sorts of baroque darknesses were

stirring [Music] i don't want to go down there i'm scared

but the story of the baroque leaves me no option [Music]

there's a book that's very popular now i'm sure you've heard of it a thousand places to see before you die

by patricia schultz naples isn't in it but it should be

because that title about seeing places before you die is taken from a line by

goethe see naples and die wrote goethe ambiguously in the 18th century after

he'd spent some time here but what exactly did he mean is he saying that naples is so beautiful

that once you've seen it you'll die happy or is he saying that naples is so

dangerous that if you come here the chances are you'll end up dead

in caravaggio's day this was the second biggest city in europe after paris

half a billion people were squashed into naples most of them

out of work living in slums one in ten of the inhabitants was some

sort of cleric a priest a nun so religion

and wickedness had carved up naples between them and the two of them

were operating here in tandem

caravaggio turned up in naples in 1606. he'd gotten into an argument in rome

over a tennis match and murdered his opponent now he was on the run

[Music]

at that time naples was a spanish colony separate from the rest of italy

so all sorts of ruffians thieves murderers and good for nothings turned

up here fleeing from the italian authorities

caravaggio's reputation got to naples before he did

and he was soon at work here at his usual breakneck speed painting some of his greatest pictures

[Music] the moment he reached naples his art

seemed to grow darker rome may be where the baroque was born

but naples was where it learned to scream and how

this is the pio monte de misericordia

it's the home church of another of these strange little

confraternities that were so busy in the baroque

the misericordianists dispense charity to the poor so as you

can imagine they were very busy in naples

caravaggio painted this soon after he arrived he was only in naples for less

than a year but see what he achieved [Music]

there's a school of thought which believes that this picture the seven acts of mercy is the greatest religious

painting of the 17th century and i'm not about to disagree

we're on a street corner in naples there's a prison

on the right and over here out of sight there's a tavern

the original idea was to paint each of the seven acts of mercy in a

separate altarpiece in the chapel caravaggio has combined all of them

in one picture

now you'll be thinking what the hell are the seven acts of mercy good question

basically they're seven human kindnesses that you can and should perform for your

fellows and i'm sure that you do

first you have to bury the dead and that's going on here see

there's the little feet of a fresh corpse being carried away

another act of mercy is to clothe the naked and saint martin here has cut his

cloak in half and presents it to a naked beggar you also have to help the sick and the

infirm and that's going on down here too because the naked beggar is also a lowly

pulling himself along on the ground

you also have to visit those in prison as she's doing over here and you're meant to feed the hungry as

well and this kindly daughter is giving suck to her own imprisoned father

it's a startling sight the charitable are supposed to offer

shelter to pilgrims he's a pilgrim you can tell from the shell in his hat so

the innkeeper here is offering him a room for the night finally the thirsty must be given

something to drink so samson in the gloom is gulping down the contents of an ass's jaw

so there you have it seven acts of mercy all recorded in one baroque tornado of a

composition [Music]

caravaggio wasn't the only law breaker to seek refuge in naples

there were many others including a spanish painter and caravaggio worshipper called giuseppe

ribera or as the locals called him la spanoletto the little spaniard

this little spaniard ribera was a quarrelsome devil

he came to naples to flee his creditors in rome

and because naples was under spanish control then

ribera had his pick of rich spanish clients

for most of his career he painted in the caravaggio manor dark brooding religious

art sweaty and guilty but his spanish roots began to show soon

enough and his taste for the macabre was legendary

this is ribera's infamous bearded woman whom he painted more than once

ribera liked bearded women [Music]

and this deceptively cheerful smiling boy is actually a with a club

foot when you notice his deformity the smile on his face takes on a different meaning

[Music]

ribera was the main mover in a nasty little organization a kind of

mini mafia called the cabal of naples

he got together with two other local miss koreans a vicious greek called corenzio

and a fine neapolitan painter caracciolo who deserves

a much better reputation than he's got because caracciolo

painted some magnificently dark neapolitan pictures

so these three ribera corenzio and caraciolo

began beating up and murdering

all their rivals [Music]

[Applause]

if you were a foreign painter taking business away from the cabal of naples

you'd better beware the cabal was particularly cruel to the followers of anibale karachi

dominikino came here to paint a fresco and every morning

the cabal would remove what he'd done the day before and then

they put sand in his paint

dominicano died in naples poisoned they say

by the cabal [Music]

poor old guido rainey had an even worse time the cabal

hired an assassin to murder him and this assassin

made a mistake and killed one of reini's assistants instead

and rene fled the city never to return

so one of his pupils was sent down here to finish the

commission and this pupil was lured onto a boat in the bay of

naples and never heard from again

the cabal of naples was wound up in 1641 but its work was done

the cheerful side of the barak had been kept out of naples

by the time the cabal was done with it the baroque had forgotten many of its good intentions

darkness violence murder horror those were naples's black gifts to the

baroque and particularly to spain where our journey continues in the next film and

where the baroque was taken to such passionate extremes

[Music]

oh [Music]

um [Music]

let's see in the last film we're over here in italy watching the birth of the baroque

and we ended up in naples down here naples was a spanish colony

and that means the next stage of our journey is over here

in spain oh my god

[Music]

so

[Music] one of the chief reasons why the baroque

was as successful as it was why it became the first global art

movement was because it was so damn adaptable

the baroque spread across europe like a wildfire and everywhere it went it

adopted the local tastes and customs and sneakily made itself at home

but when it got here to spain it didn't have

that much adapting to do the spanish were already fiercely

catholic they liked drama emotion passion

darkness they were if you like instinctively baroque

so the baroque's task here in spain wasn't really

a case of adaptation it was more like pouring petrol

on a large bonfire [Music]

the spanish baroque was hardcore the most fiercely catholic the baroque

became some of its sights will turn your

stomach and appall you but the baroque was a war remember a

battle for your heart deliberately started by the counter-reformation

and in times of war anything goes [Music]

this is the longest pilgrim trail in spain the southern route to santiago de

campostello it's called the via de la plata the silver road and i'm going to be walking

some of it for you because it takes you past so many key baroque sites

[Music]

but the first stop i want to make is that lovely tower

shimmering on the horizon seville the start of the via de la plata

[Music]

this is a cultural hot spot if ever there was one the old jewish quarter in

seville [Music] can you feel the cultural potency

bubbling up in this place this is where rossini's famous opera the

barber of seville is set and also mozart's marriage of figaro

[Music]

a bit further out is the baroque tobacco factory in which that dangerous beauty

carmen worked in bizet's opera what a grand building for a tobacco

factory what a perfect building for an opera [Music]

now all this is pertinent because remember opera is a baroque invention

and fusing the arts together like this music and theater dance and spectacle was a

very baroque thing to do but that's not why i've brought you here

i wanted to show you where diego velasquez was born in that

modest house over there in seville's jewish quarter in 1599

[Music]

velasquez spain's greatest baroque artist would later pass himself off as a

man of aristocratic bearing what a haughty presence he

affected in his own art official painter to the spanish king the

dark dignitary the maestro with the perfect

moustache but some energetic researchers have recently been digging up velasquez's past and it's been

discovered that he was in fact of jewish origin his family on his father's side

were portuguese jews who'd converted to christianity what they call around here

conversos

so velazquez the son of a converso could almost be called the first jewish artist

[Music]

the first important paintings that velasquez produced weren't portrayals of kings or

venuses or popes but humble and very realistic depictions

of ordinary life they were called

bodagons after the spanish word bodagon which means a tavern or eating house

[Music] the young velasquez painted a clutch of these bodagonis

[Music] they're brilliant things so atmospheric and tactile

[Music] you can hear the eggs sizzling

you can smell the garlic being crushed [Music]

the brock's fascination with low life bars taverns kitchens amounted to an

obsession and it shouldn't really surprise us remember one of the chief aims of the counter-reformation was to

address the hearts and the minds of ordinary people so art was encouraged to talk their

language and to set its action in their spaces [Music]

the bodhigonis have a deeper meaning realism for realism's sake was never

velasquez's only ambition he was much too baroque for that

realism's job in his art is to hook you and pull you in closer to

close enough to see the painting's real meaning

[Music] look into the background of the great kitchen scene in the house of martha and

mary and you'll see that jesus got here before you

according to the bible jesus came to visit the two sisters martha and mary

and while martha visited herself in the kitchen mary sat at jesus's feet and listened to

his word when martha complained that her sister wasn't helping out

jesus stopped her mary he replied has chosen to listen

and in the end listening to the word is more important than preparing the

dinner it's that baroque message again

life is short reality is an illusion and only the word of god lasts forever

velasquez was so strikingly talented that when he was 23 he was summoned to

madrid by the king himself philip iv and told to paint the royal portrait

so he left seville never really came back

but his new employers were about to discover a splendid baroque rule

you can take a genius out of the bodega yes but you can't take the bodiga out of a

genius

the spanish kings the dreaded habsburgs were a spectacularly awful bunch

dimwitted arrogant pious deformed

but god in his wisdom saw something he liked about them and gave them most of

the known world to rule a gigantic international empire of three

billion acres spreading from italy to the netherlands from africa to the

americas but to rule you need rulers and that's

where it had got tricky their problem was the usual royal problem of inbreeding

to keep the money and the titles in the family the habsburgs had spent too many

generations marrying amongst themselves cousins uncles nephews nieces

[Music] even as greater portraitist as velazquez

had trouble telling apart the habsburg princesses

this one is philip the fourth's wife as well as his niece

she was going to marry his son but the son died young so she married the dad instead

this one is philip's daughter this one oh i give up

you need a degree in forensics to tell them apart

the most obvious physical deformity was their lower lip the infamous habsburg

lip which stuck out at an angle like that a genetic condition called mandibular

prognathism they almost all had it and that's why that old wives tale does the

rounds about why the spanish lisp it's because none of their royals could actually say grazias they could only say

graciath but even royal inbreeding as scary as

this can occasionally throw up an interesting variation and philip iv who was king here in spain

for the key baroque years 1621 to 1665

was a serious and thoughtful monarch 44 years he ruled and it said that in

all that time he only laughed at court on three occasions

philip had the lip and that pushed in habsburg face as concave as a baroque

church facade but he liked the arts and was sensitive to them

like all the habsburgs philip iv didn't do much that was right

but in choosing velazquez at his court painter he can at least be credited with

one remarkable decision velasquez brought us closer to the

spanish kings than any audience had previously been to its royals

and from this close up we get to see surprise surprise that they're just like the rest of us

flawed worried wrinkly [Music]

when the time came to paint his most ambitious offering in the field of royal portraiture velasquez adopted the usual

baroque strategy of going big but everything else he tried here was

new and revolutionary and it lifted the genre to its greatest heights

[Music] las meninas the maids

velazquez's masterpiece set inside the royal palace it's a group

shot of the royal court and many people will tell you it's the greatest baroque painting of

them all [Music]

it was painted in 1656 near the end of velasquez's life

now the reason why this picture confuses people so much i think is because

there is such a huge cast list involved when you first look at it you think oh

what's going on who are all these people so as a helpful guide to las meninas i'm

just going to introduce them all to you the key figures of course are velazquez

himself on the left he's painting away

in the middle the infanta margherita she's the five-year-old daughter of the

spanish king philip iv and his wife princess mariana of austria

there in the picture too reflected at the back in the mirror at the back of the studio

now everybody else who looks after the little princess is also in the foreground these are her two dwarfs on

the right female dwarf from germany maria baloba famous dwarf at the court italian dwarf

on the right putting a foot on the princess's great big dog the royal

mastiff playfully giving it a kick in the back and behind the princess

you see the two shadowy figures the woman on the left she's the princess's

chaperone and the figure on the right that's the princess's bodyguard

so right at the front of the picture you've got all the people who look after the princess princess herself and velazquez

painting busily away [Music] velasquez shows himself looking like a

member of the royal household himself look how haughtily he stands with that excellent mustache

and he's at work on this huge canvas on the left what is he actually painting i

think that only makes sense when you work out what's actually going on in this picture the king and the queen are

actually standing out here where the audience is now looking at the picture afresh so velazquez is painting the king

and the queen who are standing over here and the king and the queen can see themselves in the mirror perhaps

to check how they look but also because of this beautiful game of psychological

trickery that's going on here they seem to be looking out at us at the same time

[Music] but what's this picture really about

who is the focus of all this action and all this psychological towing and

throwing it has to be the infanta herself

this sweet little right at the middle of the picture

and because the habsburgs had this terrible history of inbreeding they had

nothing but bad luck in the production of children and although philip and marianna had five babies at the time

this picture was painted only one of them was alive the infanta

margherita [Music] the princess with her blonde hair and

her gorgeous white silk dress is like an angel of deliverance at the center of

this black and doomy and intense and psychologically troubling group portrait

she represents all their hopes for the future

[Music] there were only two possible sources of a commission in baroque spain you either

worked for the kings or you worked for the monks

the habsburgs had baroquely discovered the power of art

but the real rulers of spain had always known it