Solving Art's Greatest Mysteries With Waldemar | Art Mysteries Marathon | Perspective

hello this is valdemar nuschak art critic producer and presenter of documentaries thanks for watching perspective youtube's home for classical art [Music] [Music] [Music] 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 someone being killed in one of the corridors here at the louvre in paris this chap is the keeper of an ancient secret and if he dies the ancient secret dies with him so he crawls along the long corridor and seeks out the most famous painting in the louvre and there he scrolls a secret message on the glass that protects the mona lisa [Music] now the mona lisa has long been a magnet for mystery addicts and fruit cakes you want mysteries she's got loads of them the mystery of her elusive identity the mystery of her elusive smile it's even been said she's a projected self-portrait of leonardo as a cross-dresser even her eyebrows are mysterious why hasn't she got any [Music] but there is one mystery concerning the mona lisa that can actually be solved and we're going to do it in this film it's perhaps the deepest mystery of all and that is why out of all the countless old masters gathered in all our museums why did this particular one become the most famous painting in the world now that's a mystery worth solving the mona lisa is 500 years old she was painted in florence in around 1503 in paris they've recently been celebrating her birthday 500 years old it's a good age but the first thing to grasp about the mona lisa's ridiculous fame is that it's rather new for 300 years after she was painted the mona lisa was almost entirely unknown just a handful of people in history had ever seen her or even heard of her she only started to become famous about 150 years ago and really really famous this famous in the 20th century so her fame is rather new so by the way is the fame of her creator leonardo da vinci today we think of leonardo as the greatest genius of the renaissance scientist mathematician anatomist the man who not only painted the mona lisa but who also invented flying machines submarines and bicycles and it's just not true i'm not saying that leonardo didn't vaguely imagine some of those things but i am saying that he never actually built any of them leonardo almost discovered lots of things but only almost his tragedy is that he never went the final mile the bit that counts well leonardo was not that celebrated one of the problem is that leonardo did not paint very much whereas rafael was on production line one after the other um michelangelo the did the whole ceiling after all on walls of the sistine chapel i mean you know huge project in four years which is what apparently uh you know it took leonardo to paint you know this tiny portrait um so if you wanted a you know lots of work you're not going to ask him you know the famous drawing that people always say is him the old man with the big biblical beard and the all-seeing eyes well there's no actual evidence it's leonardo just our wishful thinking because this old man with the big beard reminds us of some great biblical leader doesn't he moses perhaps or even god so the next thing to get clear in our minds is that leonardo da vinci is chiefly like this a work of fiction before we tiptoe any further into the conceptual quagmire that is the mystery of the mona lisa i think we need to find out a tad more about the real leonardo [Music] olives they're everywhere on this hill in fact just about the only thing that's up here is olive groves we're about two kilometers out of vinci little tuscan town of vinci place called anchiano about 20 miles out of florence and this little tuscan hill house is the house whereas leonardo da vinci was born in 1452 his father was a notary a lawyer called sarpyro da vinci and his mother all we know about her is that she was called katarina and leonardo was their illegitimate son minada's father bought this house from the friars that used to own it he was working for them as a lawyer and it's hardly changed since then it's just two very basic little rooms really lovingly preserved in their original state of decrepitude but look at this just above the window on the front a lion wearing a helmet that's the coat of arms of the da vinci family original fireplace leonardo the ghastly likeness i think coat of arms again it's rather spooky feeling actually it's such a humble place for such a big brain to have been born leonardo's artistic career is so frustrating he's always starting things and never finishing them he spent the first 30 years of his life in florence yet all he had to show for all this time was a couple of pictures one of them is this gorgeous portrait of jennifer de benchi she's rather glum why in italian geneva means juniper so the halo of juniper around her head is a coded clue to her identity from the start leonardo could make his women feel mysterious [Music] here's an early madonna and child that hangs in the hermitage in russia what a ghastly multi-pounded jesus look at the size of him i don't like her expression either it looks forced to me say cheese cheese these early experiments with different women's expressions had such mixed results that leonardo soon settled on one he knew he could rely on an expression he always used you know it already it's that mysterious smile playing on a woman's lips whether they're the virgin mary or a girl off the street leonardo began giving his women the same look the mona lisa's mysterious smile was an expression he was churning out [Music] for the next 20 years leonardo worked in milan as the in-house genius for the local dukes starting lots of things finishing none of them except this the last supper the famous masterpiece that's been falling off the wall ever since he painted it because the technique he used was so lousy after 20 years in milan he returned to florence he was already in his 50s when a commission came his way that would finally lead to his most famous achievement a portrait of a plumpish florentine merchant's wife named lisa gerardini there are lots of extraordinary surprises in the story of the mona lisa but perhaps the earliest of them is that that story begins here in this grim little florentine street called the villa de la stuffa now this is the street in which lisa gerardini who is traditionally thought to have been the florentine lady who posed for the mona lisa actually lived she was married to a florentine cloth merchant called francesco del giacond and that explains why in france she's known as la giacond why in italy they call her lagiaconda and why rather confusingly the rest of us call her mona lisa madonna lisa it's what everybody would have said to her madonna lisa becomes mona lisa thus in this grim little florentine street populated these days chiefly by florentine low life the great legend of the mona lisa was born for some reason leonardo never handed over the mona lisa to francisco del giacondo and his wife probably because he never considered her finished he was such a fiddler leonardo's career was now on the slide in italy he was out of fashion and his reputation for not finishing things preceded him wherever he wandered internationally what fame he had was due entirely to his much copied comic grotesques of ugly old men and big-nosed jews they're rather racist really it was the french king francois the first who saved leonardo by taking him in when no one else would have him francoise invited the 64 year old multitasker to work for him in france in this chateau at amboise on the loire leonardo brought the mona lisa with him and no doubt fiddled with her some more when he died here three years later in 1519 the mona lisa entered the french royal collection and to all intents and purposes disappeared for 300 years and then the first great break for the mona lisa the first great career move as i would put it the french revolution what what the french revolution does apart from minor things like abolishing the monarchy and and so on is to transform the louvre into a museum so at least she's now gone from you know semi-obscurity to a proper proper place another thing is napoleon napoleon took a shine to many women and one of these was mona lisa and indeed for i think four years the mona lisa was removed from public viewing and was in napoleon's bedroom and then it was put back in the louvre and has remained there ever ever since [Music] you know before napoleon carried the mona lisa away to his bedroom hardly anyone had seen her and no one thought of her as this figure of mystery and allure she was a portrait by leonardo and that's it but now that she was in the louvre and the louvre was open to the public she was ready to fall into the clutches of the public imagination so her ludicrous journey to global fame could finally begin hang on to your hats because we are taking you on it when we left you the mona lisa had just got to the louvre and people could finally see what she looked like they liked what they saw but had trouble agreeing on what it was then as now everyone found something different in the mona lisa in the middle of the 19th century some intellectuals and writers begin to discuss the mona lisa as the most formidable example of the femme fatale this is when the smile becomes mysterious and enigmatic there is no mention of an enigmatic smile with with monolidism and basically until about 1850 mona lisa is a cheerful housewife from 1850 onwards she is a castrating female [Music] you won't believe some of the silly things that began to be written about her by the feverish blokes of the 19th century let me read you something here it's perhaps the most famous passage ever written about the mona lisa by an eccentric english epicurean called walter peter who was obsessed with her she is older than the rocks among which she sits he gushed in 1873. like the vampire she's been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave and been a diver in deep seas it just goes on and on i mean this isn't art history this is stalking the mona lisa had begun to drive men mad thus the mona lisa entered the creative imagination of the 19th century where she would have stayed famous among writers and art critics and that's about it if something else hadn't happened something sensational something that turned her into a public celebrity well of course you needed an event you need the thought opportunity and that occurred in the shape of an italian workman um vincenzo perugia who stole the painting in august 1911 and kept it for two years in his bedsit not far from the louvre near the stove the mona lisa is a piece of wood so you can imagine the possibility the terrible possibilities and that made the world press [Music] every day for three four weeks there was something about the mona lisa the police can't find it the security of the louvre is terrible with the director of the department of paintings had to resign you know it was it became a sort of course celeb so people could see the mona lisa nearly every day as they were having their breakfast [Music] so why would anyone be so stupid as to steal the mona lisa various conspiracy theories were aired at the time and indeed people have been airing them ever since the likeliest answer is that the entire mad plot was the handiwork of an argentinian forger called eduardo de valfierno valfielno's crazy idea was to produce a handful perhaps six or seven copies of the mona lisa while he had it in his hands and then to sell these copies on to some very very gullible american millionaires now this has never been proved what's certain is that if you were a very gullible american millionaire you would hardly have popped up afterwards and said yes i bought one of these and undoubtedly there were these very special copies floating around the european art world after the theft however once val fierno had done his dirty deed and produced his copies he no longer had any real need for the painting itself so he handed it back to his accomplice perugia and perugia was stuck with the mona lisa a painting that the whole world was looking for what was he going to do with it [Music] perugia must have realized that the painter was far too hot to do anything within france so he came back here to italy and he holed up in this hotel in florence which used to be called the tripoli italia but which not surprisingly has now changed its name to the geoconda because it's in this hotel that the great lost painting was finally found perugia contacted a florentine antique dealer called alfredo jerry and offered to sell him the mona lisa for half a million lira inevitably jerry contacted the italian police three days later they came here to the hotel and arrested vincenzo perugia when they got inside perugia's room they found the mona lisa tucked away in a suitcase underneath his bed and when they asked him why he'd stolen her perugia replied that it was an act of patriotism all along all he'd ever really wanted to do was to ensure that the great florentine beauty was returned to her rightful home perugia was set down for a year for stealing the mona lisa which doesn't seem very much does it but one thing's certain no matter how famous the mona lisa was before perugia and his cronies stole her from the louvre this prior fame was as nothing compared with the enormous global notoriety that the picture acquired once all those newspapers and all those columns had stopped writing about the great theft of the mona lisa and so our plump florentine housewife finally became an international celebrity at the age of 400. because of the robbery everyone now knew what she looked like and everyone wanted to know more about her in 1919 the notorious dadar artist marcel duchamp proved she'd really arrived by taking the mickey out of her giving her a moustache and a goatee and add in the letters elash or orku in french a naughty pun which means she's got a hot ass or as we might perhaps say today a hot booty there's not any single moment where the mona lisa becomes the world's most famous painting there are building blocks there are stepping stones so being in paris is an important thing being painted by renaissance genius is quite important being a fan fatale or being described as a castrating woman would do you no harm being stolen was a great stroke of luck being mocked by a futurist and avant-garde artist was also very important and being regularly exploited by the advertising industry in order to sell everything uh from fridge magnets uh hotels um flights um and condoms even you know all that is a tremendous asset for for a girl i can't face going into detail about the subsequent growth of the mona lisa tat industry it's too horrible to witness instead let's just visit the house of the world's biggest hoarder of mona lisa memorabilia and savor some of the highlights of his collection oh sure [Music] my house has become somewhat of a mona lisa museum a shrine if you like i have gathered together some of the most beautiful items i have in my collection like this wonderful photo mosaic here although the reflection is a bit irritating these magnificent cushions these ceramic tiles from china and this is american it's called the giggling mona lisa and this persian rug it's a bit amateurish but still it's magnificent and this is something i made myself it's based on william tell but as you can see the arrow [Music] once you're famous for being famous all you can really do is become more famous still it's the golden rule of modern celebrity in the case of lisa gerardini proves it so clearly [Music] so that's cleared up the mystery of how the mona lisa got famous what it doesn't explain is how she ever managed to be obscure in the first place how can a painting as wonderful as this ever be obscure go on forget everything you've ever heard about her forget the teacups and the posters just go and look at her properly you'll enjoy it [Music] there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them [Music] we will [Music] [Music] you know that scene in the first bond movie dr no where a glistening ursula andres emerges from the sea in a skimpy bikini right in front of the excited sean connery of course you remember it it's one of the most famous arrivals in the movies well what you may not know is that the inventor of james bond ian fleming had a particular quattrocento painting in mind when he imagined this unforgettable scene it's a revolutionary painting produced in florence in about 1485 of another goddess coming out of the sea not a screen goddess this time but an ancient roman one botticelli's venus the most celebrated nude goddess in art her face instantly recognizable because this venus has infiltrated popular consciousness to an unusually deep level she's everywhere [Music] but hold on a bit ursula andres was meant to be sexy and stirring in that beefy swiss way of hers she was after big desires and sweaty passions that's definitely not what botticelli's venus is trying to do the venus doesn't do sweatiness she is to ursula andres what an orchid is to a t-bone steak she's delicate fragile modest and i've always thought there's something of the lady die about her that shy tilt of the neck the little look down the fetching nervousness but if botticelli never had in mind the full-blooded arousal of all those who looked at his sensationally famous venus arriving naked on the beach which he didn't what exactly was he after [Music] the real trouble with the birth of venus is that we just know it too well now and so we have no way of trying to arrive back at the moment in art and in western culture when it didn't exist because if we could get back to that moment then we would understand in a very visceral as well as intellectual way what a revolutionary painting it was and in some ways still is botticelli's real name was alessandro di mariano divani philippe he was born in florence where that house is behind me in 1444 in the parish of all saints onisanti his father a leather worker was 50 when sandro was born his mother was well over 40. that's late even by modern standards in renaissance times it was asking for health troubles little sandro was the philippe's fourth son the runt of his litter all his life people would say about him sandro bello amal sacro sandro is handsome but unhealthy he was always pale apparently and don't you think that some of this inherent paleness found its way into his art [Music] there are two recorded explanations for why alessandro de philipe came to be called botticelli the more boring of the two is that botticelli is a corruption of the word batigello which means someone who beats gold when botticelli was a teenager he was apprenticed to a florentine goldsmith and may indeed have been just such a battygello or goldbeater his art always maintained a most fruitful relationship with gold that's certainly true gold pops up in his paintings in lovely and interesting ways [Music] but the explanation which i prefer for the origin of the name botticelli is that it comes from his elder brother giovanni a successful city banker who was notoriously fat and therefore nicknamed botticella which means a barrel or a tub thus his sickly younger brother became little barrel botticelli it could be true what's sure is that when he was in his mid-teens little barrel gave up goldsmithery and began his apprenticeship as a painter and that delicacy of his that slight sickliness which contemporaries remembered about him gave him an advantage when it came to producing pictures of rare florentine exquisiteness is there not something highly strung and frangible about all his art as far as we can tell these big botticelli paintings were basically furniture paintings it may seem an odd way to regard them these great cherished multi-million pound masterpieces but they were part of interior decoration high-minded interior decoration of people who were very educated and [Music] these are elite pictures for a very small circle of people and they certainly were not for public consumption this is the street in which botticelli lived and worked until his death and behind me is the house in which he must have painted the birth of venus one of botticelli's neighbors in this street gave his name to a country you may have heard of america he was amerigo vespucci the great navigator the vespuccis were the richest and most powerful family in this locale and botticelli was soon working for them in italian vespa means wasp that's why those annoying little scooters that buzz around italian cities at night right outside my hotel as a rule are called vespas the wasp was the vespucci family's symbol see the wasps going into the hole in the tree there they're an indication that this intriguing body chelly was painted for the vespucci family and she's curious she's one of the many women in botticelli's art who at some point in their history have been identified as a portrait of simonetta vespucci simonetta was a much admired florentine beauty who married into the vespucci family and there's a persistent rumor in art that she was also the model for botticelli's venus but there's no evidence for this of any kind in any case botticelli's women have a certain interchangeability to them a group look i really doubt whether this is simonetta vespucci but what is intriguing is that this woman although she's managed to hang on to all her clothes is also a venus she's shown here with mars the god of war whom she's tamed by exhausting him how well what do you think today we all know venus is the goddess of love i'm your venus i'm your fire what's your desire and all that but that's not how she began originally venus was a minor roman goddess charged with the safe keeping of town gardens and vineyards the goddess of allotments if you like it was only when this minor horticultural deity of the romans took on and absorbed the identity of aphrodite the greek goddess of love that she grew into the potent and popular mythological starlet so many have since desired [Music] botticelli's most significant patrons were not in the end the vespucci but an even wealthier and more powerful florentine family those fabulously potent firenze bankers the medici who essentially ruled the city and this rather gloomy rural retreat was owned by one of the lesser medici lorenzo de pier francesco de medici essentially this was his summer house and somewhere in here we don't know where botticelli's birth of venus used to 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 that it used to hang somewhere in this gloomy rural retreat alongside yet another of botticelli's remarkable love nest of venuses i hope you're feeling clever because this painting takes a lot of keeping up with it's called la primavera the spring and it features venus again she's the one standing in the middle rather quietly but we know it's her because there's cupid her son firing off arrows of love above her head [Music] over here very important figure because the picture really moves from this side to the other side over here blowing out his cheeks is zephyr the god of the west wind now zephyr is blowing away winter and therefore as it were ushering in the spring and as you can see he's chasing this nymph here she's cloris zephyr fell in love with cloris but cloris wasn't interested he took her anyway and what's happening is that the act of taking claus results in her transformation because she changes into flora the goddess of spring [Music] venus as we said is in the middle with cupid above her and she's attended by her usual attendance the three graces joyously dancing and over here finally is mercury waving his wand at the clouds to dispel them and therefore preparing for the spring again now he is probably a slightly disguised portrait of lorenzo de medici lorenzo the magnificent as he was called if it is him he's the one who commissioned this picture and if he commissioned it he probably did it because one of his cousins lorenzo de pierre francesco de medici who lives in the villa de castello was getting married and this painting was meant to be an encouragement to him and indeed it was meant to provide advice about fertility and how to bring out the best in your bride it could be that the bride was a touch reluctant like cloris and that she had to be forced into the marriage but even if she was it results in all this in this astonishing blooming wonderful flower-filled spring this is one of the world's greatest ever evocations of fertility [Music] now remember this used to hang two alongside the birth of venus in the villa de castello so are there any clues here to the kind of meaning we should be expecting from the birth of venus of course there are [Music] the mona lisa has mystery the venus de milo has a great body but botticelli's venus has the whole package mystery the great body hair that could drive a man wild with entanglement and something else an x factor i've been puzzling over what this x factor might be for a couple of decades now coming over to florence trying to work out why this particular woman toots so many people's horns and i've come to believe that what gets us in the end is her vulnerability sure all us guys want to jump into that picture with her and study some latin but we also want to protect her to wrap that cloak about her she's come out of her shell on this blustery day so cold so fragile so hesitant and she looks so exposed she needs us botticelli's venus makes us feel wanted that amusing english poet alexander pope who was much taken with beautiful women wrote once about a particularly gorgeous lady at court has she no faults then somebody asks him in the poem yes she has one i must aver replies pope when all the world conspires to praise her the woman's death and does not hear doesn't that remind you of botticelli's venus she's outrageously beautiful yet so embroiled is she in her own thoughts that she appears to be deaf to our praises and can't even hear our tongues hitting the tabletop at the sight of her when you first look at her you think she's beautiful but when you actually study her there are two particular things that are sort of wrong with her it is to do with her left shoulder if you think about it and actually study the painting her left shoulder is uncomfortably low i'll do this quasimodo in interpretation you can see it actually sort of does that down there but the neck and the shoulder together do look slightly strange when your eye concentrates upon them um and for me the strange bit is looking at her foot as it stands on the shell where there's some sort of bump in that way that slightly old ladies get bumps when they try and put their slightly large feet into small shoes and my eye is often drawn to that and and then i think i forgive him she's been on the shell a long time and you know maybe she's got cramp or whatever but funnily enough it's not an anatomically beautiful body but it is um an aesthetically incredibly pleasing one she was painted in around 1485 maybe for lorenzo di pierre francesco again what is obvious is that this modesty she has that shyness the lady die look is definitely intentional we know this because her pose is based directly on a roman statue owned by the medici the so-called venus podica or modest venus this roman venus covers herself up and hides her bits she symbolizes the sort of modesty that florentines demanded of their women particularly when they entered into marriage so although botticelli's venus is naked indeed she's the first great mythological nude of the renaissance and she's nearly life-sized to boot despite all that the effect botticelli wanted to convey with her was surely one of modesty not of exposure though i don't think botticelli's birth of venus is meant to be erotic there is no doubt that she does open the door in western art to the nude as carnal and you only have to go 50 years down the line to tischen painting the venus of urbino where you have a beautiful naked woman lying on a couch incredibly aware of her own erotic teasing and sort of saying i am available sexually and there begins such a great and terrible history of western art and the female nude which is about men looking at her and her needing to be desired now i don't think botticelli did that with venus i think that face still has the self-containment of the knowledge of some spirituality to it but certainly once the cat is out of the bag once the clothes are off the body you can't control where it goes [Music] this is hesiod's theogony it's the classical text that most clearly describes the birth of venus it's a hell of a story blood curdling uranus the god of the sky was being a beast to his mother and lover gaia the earth so gaia persuaded their son chronos a titan to sneak up on uranus while he was making love to gaia and to cut off his testicles kronos then chucked these genitals into the sea he locked them off with the flint and threw them from the mainland into the great wash of the sea water and they drifted a while on the open sea and their spread into a circle of white foam and from this circle of white foam grew a girl venus or aphrodite as she was first called thus venus was the nautical fruit of uranus's frothing testicles [Music] now unless my eyes are failing me completely none of this bears any relation to anything we can see in the body jelly we've got naked venus in her shell the shells in the sea and she's surrounded by a cluster of mythological figures but surely no one here is being born no frothing no castration no testicles yet if this isn't the birth of venus as we've been misinformed for hundreds of years what else could it be [Music] let's have a close look at all this nature on show here this excellent horticulture there's plenty of it and it's all meaningful this little plant here between her legs that's an anemone a lovely spring favorite which according to legend only grows when there's a warm wind so the ancients used to call it the wind flower [Music] and lo and behold up here in the corner is our old friend zephyr bringer of the warm wind and an inveterate blower [Music] zephyr isn't only blowing the anemone to life look at all those roses pouring out of his mouth as well the rose is specifically venus's flower the ancients believed that it only came into being at a very important moment the first time venus set foot on dry land we've got the land here all right these are orange trees the ancient symbols of the medici and this figure here she's probably one of the horray the embodiments of the seasons she's the horray of spring i warrant look at these gorgeous corn flowers painted on her dress and see here she's wearing a girdle of roses the horay is handing a cloak to venus so that the modest venus can cover herself [Music] so what does it all mean well it means that the painting seems to celebrate an important arrival an arrival that brings fertility is it therefore another marriage painting joyously commissioned to celebrate the arrival in the medici family of another fertile bride i think so but that's conjecture what's certain is that this isn't the birth of venus it's her disembarkation she's arrived somewhere on her shell and when she touches the land it blooms what could this be then well i think it's in here again hesiod's theogony having been born of uranus's testicles and drifted across the sea venus made her way to sea washed cyprus and stepped ashore a modest lovely goddess and about her slender feet the grass grew so the painting we've been calling the birth of venus ought properly to be called venus having been born of uranus's testicles arrives in cyprus and makes things grow but for some reason that title never caught on [Music] there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them [Music] so [Music] [Music] there are paintings whose meaning is a mystery there are painters who led mysterious lives but only rarely very rarely do we encounter an utterly mysterious painting by an utterly mysterious painter that's the case with the tempest the masterpiece by giorgio de castel franco better known to you and me as giorgione [Music] the tempest hangs in the academia gallery in venice a city packed with great pictures but so precious is the tempest that they wouldn't even let us into the same room to film it this is an icon of western culture and is possibly the best conserved of georgiona's works still in existence entire books have been written about the content of this painting which can be interpreted at various different levels for 500 years the tempest has led its many admirers on a wild goose chase to this day there is no agreement about what we're actually witnessing when we look at it who is she who is he what are they doing and where are they although giorgione is considered perhaps venice's greatest painter he wasn't actually from venice he came from the venetian mainland the veneto as it's called a land of dark hills mysterious mists and silhouetted castles whose poetic presence always haunts the backgrounds of his art [Music] castel franco where young jojo was born in 1477 is a pretty medieval city surrounded by a moat we know giorgio came from a humble family that he was tall and imposing which is how he got his nickname giorgioni big george big george's earliest work in castel franco is now in ruins it's a puzzling freeze of musical instruments and astronomical diagrams painted in the house of a local nobleman like so much of georgioni's art the castel franco freeze seems to speak to us in riddles at an early age he left castelfranco for venice where he quickly made his mark with these mysterious fantasies filled with poetic longing for the veneto but there's a problem we know giorgione's art was revolutionary that he had many followers and was much copied but we don't know exactly what he painted none of his work is signed not even the tempest unlike other painters of renascence italy very little is known about him except for the date of his death and a few dates of of some of his paintings but when we know the date the painting is lost and when we have the painting we have no date with one exception there is only one painting in vienna and laura which is dated on the back of it at 1506 so it's a it's a very mysterious painter we know almost nothing about georgio and his life we know that he lived in this square in venice that he played the loot beautifully that he was very handsome that women liked him and that perhaps as a result he died young [Music] it seems that his handsome looks and his beautiful loot playing brought him to the attention of a certain venetian lady she caught the plague giuliani while conducting this illicit affair with her caught it too he died in 1510 aged little over 30 but he'd done enough he'd changed the course of art [Music] like no one before him giorgione was to feed the venetian appetite for melancholy ambiguity it's an appetite to the inhabitants of venice seem to inherit with their mother's milk the city itself a floating labyrinth decaying before our eyes is a puzzle waiting to be solved people like to look up and discover in the same place different things that they have possibly never seen before this happens even to us phoenicians whenever we look up or look around we discover something new we'd know more about giorgione a lot more if what he painted on the outside of this unnaturally blank building hadn't crumbled into the water this used to be the warehouse of the german merchants in venice once it was completely covered with frescoes by giorgioni today it's venice's main post office and only this tiny decayed fragment remains the tempest was painted just before giorgione's horribly premature death in 1510 we know it was probably commissioned by gabrielle van dramen a member of one of venice's most powerful families this is vendramin as an old man painted by titian who was always thought to have been giorgione's pupil but notice the cross in this painting it's terribly important [Applause] this cross which still exists behind this golden door was thought to contain a fragment of the actual cross on which jesus was crucified yet one day to the city's horror it was dropped accidentally into this canal in venice and sank to the bottom no one could find it until gabrielle's famed ancestor andrea van dramen plunged into the water and fished it out it was a miracle or so the venetians believed their cross was safe the miracle of the cross gave the vandramin family great fame in venice though you wouldn't know it today i tracked down the family palace and found it to be a simple hardware store looking around at the nuts and the bolts it was impossible to imagine that in this building giorgione's tempest was to hang largely unseen for 400 years we don't know how gabrielle van dramen came to acquire the tempest he probably commissioned it directly from the painter twenty years after georgione's death a visitor to vandraman's palace remembers seeing a little landscape with a storm with a gypsy and a soldier by giorgio of castelfranco already the tempest's real meaning was lost so perhaps it never had one tempest is a very mysterious painting and this is probably by the very fact that there are different interpretations of it one of them being that it has no meaning at all this is one interpretation like the others from some contemporary sources we gather that the sort of patterns like gabriele benjamin who owned the painting in the in the 1520s loved to have guests in their homes and to show them some paintings like this and to and to play with them whether they would understand or not this is the reason why many many scholars including myself the vast majority of scholars including myself believe that the meaning was intended whether we are able to understand it or not but that the meaning was intended ben drammin never sold the tempest he left a will forbidding his heirs from selling it too for the next 300 years hardly anyone saw it one visitor to venice who did was the poet lord byron it became his favorite painting and obsessed him byron believed the tempest was a portrait of giorgione himself with his family tis but a portrait of his son and wife and self he wrote but byron had a taste for other people's wives and he fell in love with the woman he took to be giorgione's spouse such a woman love in life he drawled in 1932 the italian state finally bought the painting and it's hung in the academia ever since daring all comers to guess its true meaning interpreting the tempest has become one of the great cottage industries of art history but somewhere out there there's a solution and that solution must lie in the painting itself guess what i think i found it [Music] so what do we see in the tempest the setting looks much like castel franco itself underneath a stormy sky with lightning in it there's a beautiful mother suckling a baby and a most handsome young man tall finely dressed who seems to be her partner so was byron right is this giorgione and his family no it isn't although we know so little about georgioni we do amazingly know what he looked like he painted a self-portrait in which he pretends to be king david slaying the giant goliath not all the picture has survived but the face that remains is clearly not the young man in the tempest so who is he and was byron right or wrong about what he said the soldier is in fact a comrade of the song if you look at the socks you will see that there are different colors the comrades of the sock were private associations very common in the venus of that time of young hedonists who got together to act plays enjoy themselves accompany wedding processions but just because the chap in the tempest is dressed as a fashionably loose venetian it doesn't mean that's what he represents venetian art like to set things in the present to take the bible or the tales of the gods out of the distant past and make them real oh how they like their costumes just as byron does also hanging in the academia is this huge masterpiece by one of georgione's descendants veronese it's called the feast in the house of levi and it too is a painting with a checkered history the feast in the house of levi isn't its original name its first name was the last supper and what it actually shows is the most famous dinner ever eaten we don't recognize it these days because christ and his disciples are wearing contemporary clothes and because many of the characters in the painting aren't really supposed to be there there's no mention in the bible of dwarfs and jesters attending the last supper so could the tempest like veronese's feast at the house of levi be a secret religious painting professor salvador cetis believes it is what i did is basically to read all the literature on on the painting and to see what is meaningful in painting what is not which means the the man the woman the child the columns which are there a serpent which is hidden in a bush the lightning in the sky but since the lightning was widely used as a symbol of god in jones time i assumed that there was an equivalence between god and lightning and it's a definite possibility that this is that that actually the tempest represents adam and eve were the first born child kind actually and the serpent would be an allusion to the original sin so all all different elements would be explained but there's a major flaw in this surprising adam and eve theory when the painting was cleaned that serpent which professor settis claims to have located under this bush turned out to be nothing more than the root of a tree can this really be the garden of eden i've looked at it on many occasions for many hours and never once felt any religious atmosphere over at the academia they prefer the simplest of all explanations which of the many interpretations of the tempest's meaning do you think is probably closest to the truth none of them none of them none of them i like michael is one best of all a storm with a gypsy who is feeding her child and a shepherd so everybody else has been wrong i don't know [Laughter] if the painting isn't your journey's family if it doesn't mean nothing at all if it isn't a religious image what can it be well there is one area in which the artists of venice specialized and took particular delight the stories of the gods mythology above all a lot of fun was had enjoying the antics of zeus the god of thunder a master of disguise whose appetite for good-looking mortals was clinton-esquely insatiable here's giorgione's pupil titian showing zeus disguised as a shower of gold coins making love to the surprised danny [Music] zeus had a different disguise for every affair to seduce the nymph callisto he took the form of another woman diana the huntress a stimulating example of girl on girl mythology to make it with eo he came down as a barely visible cloud of excitement [Music] and it wasn't just girls he went for attracted by young ganymede zeus turned into an eagle and had his violent way with the boy that lightning in the background of the tempest must surely indicate the presence of zeus the god of thunder and thrower of lightning bolts but he's not seducing the woman in the picture is he she seems to be the partner of the handsome young man so what is zeus doing here after 500 years of mystery i think i've cracked giorgione's code there is a story and only one story which fits snugly with what we see in the tempest it's outlined here by homer in the odyssey the most celebrated of all classical poems it concerns demeter the goddess of fertility who made things grow this is her with her clothes on but i think giorgione's painted her in the tempest with her clothes off according to homer demeter met a handsome mortal at a wedding called iasian even though she was a goddess and he was human they made love in a plowed field and had a baby that baby was plortus the god of wealth zeus demeter's brother and complicatedly her former lover who often enjoyed the embrace of mortals himself was so angered by this illicit relationship between demeter and iasian that he killed iacion with a lightning bolt smote him with his bright thunder says homer the tempest shows the moment just before zeus's deadly revenge that's why the atmosphere is so charged demeter has given birth to the god of wealth but the asean is about to be hit by a deadly thunderbolt his crime he was a mortal who made love to a god and we're like the audience at a christmas pantomime who can see what's going to happen and who want to shout look out look out once you know the picture's overall meaning every little detail falls into place demeter's unexpectedly blonde hair there's not too many blondes in venice is described by homer who calls her fair trest demeter golden-haired demeter poryasion has a broken column behind him that's bad luck broken columns even in cemeteries today represent a life cut short in classical art plotus the god of wealth was often shown as a baby boy in the arms of a woman but the cleverest clue so easy to overlook is the mysterious white bird perched on the roof behind one of demeter's attributes the things that appear in pictures next to her so you know it's her is a crane this beautiful white bird fly south in the spring to rear its young so it represents fertility like her but the crane has another role in mythology it's renowned for standing on one leg so during the renaissance they believed that in its other foot it held a stone and if it ever fell asleep that stone would drop hit it on the other leg and wake it up and so the crane became a symbol of vigilance always look around you be prepared for what happens next it's exactly the kind of message that a rich man like gabrielle van drameen whom plortus has so favored would keep on the walls of his study as a constant reminder of the fickleness of wealth here today gone tomorrow the tempest is a warning watch out because you never know where or when the lightning may strike it's a good message for gabrielle van drameen it's a good message for all of us [Music] there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them [Music] [Music] [Music] the english countryside is a deceptive terrain it looks so sweet so friendly so innocent but it's none of those things anyone who's listened to a few episodes of the archers will already know that dark stuff happens in the english countryside sharp of tooth red of claw it's a deadly battleground the great english painter thomas gainsborough certainly knew this he was a country boy born and bred a suffolk lad [Music] gainsborough recognized that beneath the deceptively innocent surfaces of outdoor england unpleasantness was thriving lives were being ruined greed was being shown voila gainsborough's masterpiece of outdoor englishness his famous double portrait of mr and mrs andrews summer corn glistening in the sun fluffy clouds scudding across the sky english oaks dotting the horizon and sitting in front of it all like a pair of giant spiders in the middle of a web mr and mrs andrews him with his big gun and his nonchalance she with the most puzzlingly unpleasant expression in the whole of gainsborough's art [Music] if this woman invited me up to spend the weekend at her big country house i don't think i'd accept something's going on here it's a pretty scene it's mary england but something's going on here [Music] this is gainsborough's town sudbury in suffolk where mr andrews and gainesboro probably went to school together it's a tea and cakes town these days somewhere ye oldie on the tourist circuit but when gainesboro was born here in 1727 this was a real slab of rural england a cloth town in serious decline daniel difer came and visited sudbury quite early 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 people were really the rich ones he said so it was quite a depressed town and sudbury has always been an earthy little working town and its main industry has been weaving and indeed the gainesville family were concerned with that not only against his father but also his very much more successfully his uncle but it was quite a shaky business i think they made velvet here wool of course sudbury surrounded by sheep and interestingly silk this is gainsborough's garden and this beautiful old survivor is a mulberry tree planted here in 1610. it would have been handy for the gainsboroughs to have a mulberry tree in the garden because mulberry trees are what silk worms feed on and the gainsboroughs were in the cloth trade gainsborough's father was a trader in fine materials and so in a way was his son if you ever get a chance to examine closely a portrait by gainsborough in his prime have a good look at the clothes they're wearing the silks the satins the brocades the lace he had a genius for painting precious fabrics he knew about them from birth and loved them dizzily i think picture after picture by gainsborough at his best is a glorious advert for his father's calling even mrs andrews the baddie in this picture gets an outfit to die for pale blue silk in an outrageous expanse not what you'd usually wear if you're out killing pheasants i get the feeling in a lot of gainsborough's pictures that he liked the clothes more than he liked the people wearing them he was notoriously unimpressed by his sitters when he was painting sarah siddons the most celebrated actress of her times the elizabeth hurley of the georgian age he suddenly exploded damn your nose there's no end to it and behind the backs of his sitters he was even more scathing yes he he was known to complain about his sitters but i think being a portraitist is really a considerable problem that you have all these people who by definition want to look better than they probably do um and that having that day in day out of about eight people a day must be a considerable problem and most portraitists got very very bored um with self-important people rushing through their studio all day gainesboro hated doing fashionable portraits the cursed face business he called it his tragedy was he was so damn good at it they only have one part worth looking at said gainsborough of the fashionable types he painted and that is their purse so he sniffed the air and headed for where the biggest purses were gathered he moved to bath where all the celebrities of georgia england would visit to take the waters and to have their likeness done by thomas gainsborough the mario testino of his age he ended up in london naturally the most fashionable portrait painter in england who was usually forgiven his little rudenesses because he captured a likeness better than anyone else he had the gift all right gainsborough had the fastest hands of any painter this country's ever produced he painted like an expert swordsman and the rich have always been able to take a bit of rudeness from their artists in return for some breathtaking immortality he realized that he had to cover a vast amount of canvas in order to compete with people there are one or two records of head and shoulder portraits which he completed in one hour 40 minutes and that is going at sensational speed there's records of him getting drunk for a fortnight and then doing a skirt of a great full-length portrait in a night so i think he used that speed to good effect so that he could get drunk for a full night and also so that he could get through the acreage of canvas and compete in a real way gainesboro was the youngest of nine children his father the cloth merchant fell on hard times and was bankrupt young thomas wasn't going to enter the cloth business he had another talent 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 trying to steal pears from his garden and drew him so convincingly that the neighbors recognized this scoundrel immediately and nabbed him young gainsborough was also naughty another story which i do believe is that he used to forge his own sick notes for school and captured his parents handwriting perfectly from his days of forging sick notes at school and throughout his life gainsborough was a subtle subversive always doing things on the sly at the age of 18 he got married in secret to the illegitimate daughter of a duke he's got her pregnant she brought in 200 pounds a year which was very useful and which gainsborough began to supplement busily by painting some of the most memorable portraits in british art [Music] this is the house the gainsborough's lived in it's an estate agents now and no one seems to know what went on in which room but it could be that this is the spot in which gainsborough painted mr and mrs andrews these days the picture hangs in the national gallery and is famous the world over as gainesboro's earliest masterpiece but until 50 years ago no one outside the andrews family even knew it existed the national gallery didn't buy it until 1960. so here's an interesting question why was this painting kept so secret for so long [Music] andrews inherited half of the estate from his father aubry's it was called his wife brought in the other half when they married in 1748. so although it wasn't strictly speaking a marriage of convenience it was certainly a most convenient marriage which left both of them twice as rich as they had been so far so normal here are two small town moneybags celebrating the union of two big time purses but something went wrong in the making of this much-moneyed wedding portrait i often watch people walking past this entertaining picture and enjoy it a lot but it's amazing how often they miss two crucial things about it one is how frightening mrs andrews is but the second is that it's unfinished if you look closely at that brown splodge in the middle of her lap something's missing the picture is incomplete gainsborough never had his final say in this painting he meant to show something here but never did what was it and why did he never put it there [Music] why is mr and mrs andrews unfinished these are the questions that need to be asked here you have a painting that's famous the world over as the perfect image of rural england but just as paradise had a snake in it so mrs andrews had on her lap something that never got painted something that someone somewhere didn't want us to see and i'm sure i know what it is the single most aggressive and destructive act ever perpetrated by the government of britain on its rural folk was the long and drawn-out passing of the enclosure acts which took the common land away from the people the defense around it and gave it to the landlords it was unforgivable it ruined the livings of so many country people gainsborough's heart always went out to them the poor had his sympathy not the rich and the landed like mr and mrs robert andrews this is the exact spot on which gainsborough painted his wonderful picture you must recognize that oak behind me this big fat english oak which is exactly the same tree although it's thicker now than it was before and over there of course is that beautiful slab of the english countryside which is behind mr and mrs andrews in the picture still i think really recognizable now mr andrews is standing just about here he's been out hunting so he's holding his shooting rifle non-surely under his arm mrs andrews she's sitting here demurely with her legs crossed i've seen this picture so many times in the national gallery but it wasn't until i came here and stood in this spot that i realized something incredibly interesting about it which is that behind gainesborough in the painting hidden from sight is the house in which mr and mrs andrews actually lived now that's significant not just because you didn't know it was there in the painting but also because it explains one of the great mysteries of mr and mrs andrews which is why she is dressed in this flamboyant outfit of flowing pale blue silk while he is wearing his scruffy shooting gear obviously what's happened is that he's been out doing the shooting while she has been waiting for him indoors and has now come out to meet him just a few hundred feet away from the house to sit on this bench the biggest change in the landscape of course is this huge row of trees behind me there's a forest down there now that isn't in the gainsborough picture now that was planted deliberately by one of the later owners of the house apparently they built a council estate at the bottom of the hill so the owner decided to try and mask it and he planted this huge forest in between it and him the corn's gone of course it's all been grassed over now but if you look carefully you can actually still see the echoes of these furrows there's little bits of them left and what's interesting about the furrows is that they're what's left over from this revolutionary new use of an implement called the seed drill now this seed drill was the very latest in agrarian technology it made harvesting the corn so much easier and mr andrews was very proud of being a pioneer in its use the sea drill wasn't widely taken up initially wealthy landowners were keen to use it as it was a public demonstration of how wealthy and how advanced they were it wasn't received widely by the majority especially the farm workers in fact they could see with this change with mechanization coming in that actually their jobs would be a threat mr and mrs andrews these newlyweds are showing off the fruit of their union their land and their agricultural progressiveness of course there isn't a peasant in sight and none of this was achieved by these two getting their hands dirty in any way what a painting shows to me is the importance of the new farming methods to him and there's a real statement that he's actually you know a very wealthy powerful landowner and really accepting all these new ideas and it's sort of really look at me i'm so you know really ahead of the game people say that gainsborough was having a go at the rural rich in this picture i think that's right he was these are greedy people they've snatched the land away from its rightful owners and they're parading themselves in front of it while gainsborough disapproves but there's something else going on here something more personal if gainsborough really did go to school with mr andrews i think he rather liked him mr andrews is sympathetically painted he's dim but nice lounging around on his land with his gun and his dog it's mrs andrews who worries me she's surely one of the least attractive women in gainsborough's art uptight clenched stiff she's only a teenager 18 years old but she already has the demeanor of a middle-aged rural harridan and what is that on her lap that unfinished blob of canvas i think there's only one thing it can be that must be a feather the tail feather of a pheasant eye warrant and the rest of the bird is sitting on her knee he's been out hunting he's brought the bird back she's got it on her lap on a cloth so that it doesn't bleed into her beautiful blue dress but if there is a pheasant what's it doing there is the dead bird an innocent avian corpse brought back from the morning's hunt and no more or does it have another meaning a deeper one a symbolic one gainsborough was a great admirer of dutch art and in dutch art you often find women winches shop girls wives holding up dead birds snipe duck look at this buxom butcher's maid how fiercely she clutches that look at her unsmiling determination does it remind you of anyone [Music] the fact is that most dead birds in dutch art represent a man who's fallen into the clutches of a determined woman and been plucked [Music] the bird in the hand of a buxom dutch woman is invariably intended as a warning to us guys not to let ourselves be grabbed where it hurts and all the naughty double antons involving the word are entirely intentional gainsborough a country man would have known all about these low country readings and he would i suggest have been after just such a double on tant in his picture before it was censored i think that he didn't like mrs andrews much that he was warning mr andrews of the fate of the pheasant that's fallen into her lap and been grabbed just before this picture was finished i think its secret meaning was spotted and that mrs andrews realized all too clearly how unflattering a portrait of her was being painted here [Music] the picture was never finished because the sitters finally realized what gainsborough was saying about them and didn't like it [Music] ah yes the english countryside the corn in the field the larks in the sky and the poison in the hearts of the people [Music] mr and mrs andrews is a great masterpiece of gainsborough's early work but if only he'd been allowed to complete it it would have been greater still [Music] there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them [Music] so [Music] [Music] if you want to find stolen paintings don't go looking in the houses of robbers and burglars go to a museum here at the national gallery in london for instance there's a very very famous painting that shouldn't really be here because to put it bluntly it was nicked [Music] the national gallery acquired the so-called arnolfini marriage in 1842 from a scottish soldier who'd fought in the peninsula war in spain before the peninsula war the painting belonged to the spanish royal family after the peninsula war it belonged to the scottish soldier you work it out [Music] this is war booty and if i were a member of the spanish royal family i'd be on the phone 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 most gloriously mysterious [Music] what exactly is it that jan van ike has painted here something meaningful is obviously going on but what can it be art historians have tied themselves into knots trying to unravel the mystery round and round and round they go there have been hundreds of interpretations but so successfully has this masterpiece of puzzlement confused its interpreters that the most fashionable theory currently doing the rounds is that there is no mystery to it that it's just the portrait of mr and mrs arnolfini and that's it that's what it says here the national gallery's own catalogue no secret setup no mystery no hidden meaning but that has to be wrong the arnolfini marriage must have a hidden meaning the pictures packed with symbolism and frankly you'd have to be blind not to notice it look for instance at this fruit here on the windowsill says in the catalogue that the fruit is only here to indicate that the man in the picture is wealthy he's a rich merchant and rich merchants flaunt their wealth by leaving oranges which were expensive scattered casually about the room what poppycock all you have to do to see that this fruit must have some deeper symbolic meaning is to look at other pictures by jan van ike look what's on the windowsill of this madonna and child from frankfurt is she trying to show how rich she is [Music] look at the windowsill of the inc's hall madonna why would this virgin mary be flaunting her wealth she isn't in vanites madonnas the fruit arranged so pointedly on the windowsill is a deliberate reminder of those notorious biblical events in the garden of eden that led to us being thrown out of paradise when adam took a bite out of the fruit being proffered to him by eve he committed the first sin and ensured the fall of man the fruit on the windowsills of van nyx madonnas reminds us of the consequences of our inability to resist temptation [Music] there's also a tree full of cherries visible through the window of the arnolfini's room and that isn't accidental either cherries were the traditional fruits of paradise they represented what we've lost what we could have had that's why the infant jesus is brandishing handfuls of cherries at us enthusiastically in the recently rediscovered madonna of the cherries by us van cleave the baby jesus has come down to earth to atone for our sins by dying for us and because of his ultimate sacrifice it'll be cherries all round for us again in heaven my point is that these cherries in the arnold feeny's garden and the fruit arranged so pointedly on the arnold finney's windowsill is there for a reason everything in this busy painting is there for a reason so let's be braver than the cataloguers of the national gallery let's take the difficult path not the easy one and have another go at cracking the code of the arnolfini marriage not much is known about the painter jan van ike we know that he worked for the dukes of burgundy in the 1420s travelled here and there and ended up in bruges as the city's greatest artist bruges today is the premier tourist destination in belgium and one of the best preserved medieval cities in europe but in van ike's time here the 1430s this delightfully preserved chocolate box town was the most important trading port in northern europe bruges was international busy and very very rich [Music] in the 1430s bruges must have been a very cosmopolitan place goods were transported from all over europe and found their way here from the baltic region and further out east came for instance furs and all sorts of animal skins from the mediterranean came things like spices uh exotic foods but also textile and textile was the main business of bruges among all these precious stuffs being exported from bruges all around europe perhaps the most valuable of all in the long run was oil paints which were said to have been invented here by van ike himself it wasn't true of course all painting developed gradually in various places but it is true that van ike was the first great master of the new medium and this made him internationally famous [Music] it's said that this is his self-portrait and i believe it this is a man who knows what he wants [Music] the thing about oil paints is that they could achieve amazingly convincing illusionistic effects painters could paint things with them that looked miraculously real and no one was better at this than janna van ike one of the reasons this stubbornly mysterious picture has proved so enduringly fascinating is because van ike involves you in the action so cunningly at the front of the picture the mysterious couple seem to be greeting you as if you've just entered the room and they've been waiting for you at the back of the picture the famous wall mirror so perfectly painted not only shows the back of the couple as you'd expect but also two more figures entering the room it's been said that the first of these is vanek himself but surely it must also represent whoever's looking at the picture whoever's just stepped into the room in other words you [Music] we can confidently identify the two people in the painting as mr and mrs arnold feeny their names appear in a couple of early documents misspelt but still recognizable the arnold feeny were a family of italian merchants from lucca in tuscany who settled in bruges and traded in precious materials fabrics silks and gold van ike painted the distinctive man in the picture twice and for a long time he was thought to be giovanni di arrigo arnolfini but recent research has suggested it may actually have been his cousin giovanni de nicolau who arrived in bruges in 1419. we know that this giovanni de nicolau was married we also know that his wife died [Music] giovanni was conspicuously prosperous and in bruges in the 1430s a huge proportion of a man's wealth was tied up in his clothes well he's wearing a far-lined velvet garment at the time as a hulk and it seems to be made of purple crimson velvet which would make it extraordinarily expensive but her dress the white fur if indeed as has been suspected that the fur is the fart of the squirrel then it's only the belly fur and you're talking literally hundreds if not thousands of animals going into one of those gowns alone and they were environmental disaster areas from our point of view and by the end of the 15th century the fur trade in europe seems to more or less have wiped out the local wildlife and they were very lucky to find the new world to go and exploit so the arnold feeneys are dressed up to the nines in their finest finery why would that be it was an art historian called erwin panovsky who came up with a theory in the 1930s that what van ike is actually showing us is the arnold feeny's marriage panovsky claimed that vanek himself and the other chap you see reflected miraculously in the mirror were the two witnesses at the wedding and that the picture was actually intended as a legal which is why it sports that huge rumpold of the bayley signature at its center jan van ike was here [Music] unfortunately to arrive at this fabulous theory panovsky needed to twist around some of the evidence and in a couple of instances actually make stuff up and i reckon that today's fashion for insisting that the painting is nothing more than a portrait of a rich flemish merchant and his wife is an embarrassed reaction by modern art historians to panovsky's creative tinkering with the facts but in dismissing all of panovsky's theories about the arnolfini marriage are we perhaps chucking out the baby with the bathwater indeed isn't the issue of the baby the first thing that needs to be considered here and don't tell me that there isn't a baby [Music] it says here that mrs arnold femi isn't pregnant it says here that this lovely bulge in her stomach is just the way her dress was cut a fashion of the times well i don't buy that and i don't believe that anyone looking at her with genuinely open eyes can miss this protective gesture of hers she's pregnant all right and this pregnancy is the key to the picture's meaning [Music] pregnancy is such a critical and ubiquitous human condition that you'd have expected art to be packed with images of pregnant women after all what could be a more important family event to celebrate and record than the expected arrival of a new baby and indeed there are lots of pregnant women in art rather amazingly however they tend to get overlooked [Music] i don't think i've puzzled over any picture as much as i've puzzled over the so-called arnold feeney marriage it's a maddening thing it sends you all over the place looking for clues and one day by chance it sent me here to the huge and grand metropolitan museum in new york i was walking through this room and i saw this you want evidence of pregnancy this is evidence of pregnancy it's by yusuf van cleave who worked in antwerp so close to bruges this is vancleave's annunciation the angel gabriel has come to tell mary that she's about to become the mother of jesus christ what a big moment isn't this space familiar isn't the bed familiar aren't those candles familiar isn't the window familiar isn't the mood familiar this annunciation bear such an obvious and tangible resemblance to the annothini marriage that it might almost be the same setup you encounter the same arrangement in other heartfelt annunciations by artists who followed van ike a similar room a similar bed a similar atmosphere of a proclaimed baby [Music] now of course the arnold finney marriage doesn't show the angel gabriel coming down to the virgin mary and telling her she's about to have jesus but look at this it's just too similar to be a coincidence van ike's masterpiece is trying to plunge us into atmospheres exactly like these the warm and holy atmospheres of an impending birth so i've come up with a blunt and honest and no-nonsense title for van ike's oh so complicated masterpiece let's get to the point here we should call this the arnold feeny pregnancy [Music] this is a selection of portraits by marcus garrett's the younger who worked in england in the late 1500s but whose father was an immigrant from bruges it's only recently been noticed that all the women in these portraits are pregnant why was marcus giretz the younger commissioned to paint all these pregnant women because birth in garrett's day was an event brimming over with fatal significance pregnancy was something not only to be celebrated but also to be feared there was a perception that the mortality rate in childbirth was much higher and women approached childbirth some with a lot of anxiety you know you would it would be a period pregnancy would be a period in which you would do spiritual exercises you would be thinking about the possible strong possibility of dying in childbirth so it made me think that that might be an aspect of the of the portraits if the woman died in childbirth there would be a record an image of her it would take its place in the family portrait gallery thus life and death are intertwined in the pregnancy portraits of marcus garrett's as they must somehow be intertwined in the arnold feeny marriage a brave free-thinking art historian thinks she's found the answer many people challenge the suggestion that the woman is actually pregnant because of a painting by the nike which showed saint catherine of alexandria who's obviously a virgin saint in a similar dress and pose and therefore it was argued that it was impossible that a person could be shown in that same pose and dress and necessarily be pregnant on the other hand saint catherine of alexandria was mystically married to christ and so therefore um it does actually make sense that they could if if not literally pregnant perhaps a suggestion of pregnancy is intended [Music] there was a discovery in the archives in florence which is a letter from mrs arnolfini's mother and in this letter she mentions and it stated 1433 the year before this picture is dated she mentions that her daughter costanza had died i decided that it might be possible to think of it another way which is that this woman in the picture was actually portrayed posthumously that is to say that she's actually dead by the time the painting is is completed and at first it seems very far-fetched but in fact when looking at a lot of the details in the painting i think that it's very convincing that this was in fact the case [Music] so i would argue that it's very likely mrs arnolfini died in childbirth and there are other reasons to think that behind her over her right shoulder you can see the back of a chair which has the image of a saint margaret praying behind the dragon which is her attribute st margaret was the patron saint of pregnant women [Music] the scenes around the convex mirror are illustrations of the passion which seems very interesting in terms of the division of mr onofini and mrs arnolfini that is the dead scenes on her side the living scenes on his similarly if you look at the chandelier up above there is again a contrast of the lit candle still on the left side where on arnolfini is and on the right his wife stands underneath a candle that's gone out i would argue that in light of this idea that she this is a posthumous image of mrs arnolfini certain aspects of the painting that were mysterious seem much more straightforward so mrs arnolfini may have died in childbirth and mr arnold feeny may have chosen to memorialize her in this poignant masterpiece by jan van ike [Music] final feeling presents his wife to us with that touching gesture of his as if she was still alive why does he do that because i think the painting is trying to understand her death and the baby's death in intensely religious terms by comparing their sacrifice with the ultimate sacrifice of jesus christ crucified on the cross up here in the mirror right in the middle of the picture the fruit in the window reminds us of those regrettable events in the garden of eden that brought death into the world and robbed us all of eternal life and see these funny shoes patterns they're called they're for wearing outdoors you slip them over your other shoes well mr arnold feeney has discarded his so very pointedly despite what's happened to him he has no plans to wander further he's promising his fidelity to his wife and to his faith and van ike because he was a genius manages to indicate all this with oodles of clever symbolism but he also captures the haunting self-absorption and all that repressed sadness and even anger in the face of mr arnold feeney [Music] there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them [Music] [Music] [Music] 1863 was such an important year in the history of the world in america where the civil war was raging slavery was abolished and president abraham lincoln promised his country government of the people by the people for the people in england the first underground line was opened between paddington and farringdon in switzerland the red cross was founded and here in france this went on show and caused the biggest scandal the world of art had ever witnessed idiotic wretched shocking incoherent childish rage the papers of the day ticking huge offense at manney's designates your lab the picnic on the 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 composition [Music] [Applause] [Music] what upset the most though was this provocative way in which the men in this picture were dressed but she wasn't not only was this woman flagrantly naked but worse she didn't give a damn no she just looked right back at her audience with that extraordinary stare of hers and dared them to disapprove it was almost as if she was accusing them our own dante gabriel rosetti the pre-raphaelite would later write a horrified letter home about this french idiot named manney who must be the greatest and most uncritical ass who ever lived nasty [Music] [Applause] they were all wrong of course people invariably are when they get all worked up about an artwork but very few pictures can claim to have changed the course of art single-handedly this however is one of them i'll just spell it out for you without this picture there wouldn't have been impressionism and without impressionism there wouldn't have been modern art and we'll talk about all that what 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 also question the eyesight of all those critics who in 1863 found this woman ugly who complained about her figure and laughed at her were they all blind this woman isn't ugly this is one of the most desirable and alluring women in art and when manet found her his art found a res on debt here she is and her again who was she you'll find out [Music] the thing that that uh bothered people uh with the dejanes i think i think i mean from all this distance is the look of that woman there she sat on the lawn uh with these men and their you know student garb um young men and uh she could care less that's outrageous i think i think that must have driven people men who wrote about are crazy [Music] manet was the son of a very rich and very prominent french judge auguste manet he was called he was a holder of the legend and here at the palais de justice mane senia was at the top of the judge's tree and held one of the most important legal positions in france his mother was a genuine blue blood her godfather was the king of sweden and in fact the current kings of sweden are all descended from him so with a father who presided over the palais de justice and a mother mixed up with royalty manney came from an unusually distinguished family he was the eldest son born in 1832 and as so often happened in such situations his father hoped he'd continue the family tradition and become a lawyer while eduard himself dreamt of the opposite he dreamt of becoming an artist with manet more than with most artists the choice between respectability and rebellion was so very loaded [Music] [Music] manet chose rebellion he signed up as an apprentice in the studio of a flashy and immensely popular academic painter called thomas couture a peddler of huge fleshy pompous fantasies packed with ancient nudes this one shows the day after the night before at a roman orgy it's soft porn done with oil paints but because the girls were dressed or rather undressed as romans couture was forgiven in many's world this was acceptable but this was shocking the dejanisso lab is just frankly provocative it was obviously completely immoral for a modern dressed woman to be sitting naked with two fully clothed men if you had river gods and nymphs and so on of course that was absolutely fine but not people who were absolutely obviously explicitly contemporary in their clothes rather surprisingly manet's father accepted his son's decision to become an artist and generously provided the money for manny's upkeep and education it can't have been easy for august mani to sponsor and fund his son's rebellion and it certainly wasn't in character so let me plant some seeds of suspicion here about his reasons for doing it perhaps august mani wasn't as respectable as he pretended to be perhaps eduard knew something about his father that the father didn't want others to know perhaps manny junior had something on man a senior [Music] this is manny's wife suzanne lanehoff when manney was a teenager this suzanne who was from holland joined the family as a piano teacher she gave piano lessons to mane and his brothers now something very mysterious happened with suzanne because in 1852 she gave birth to a baby and this baby a boy called leon went on to appear in many of manny's [Music] pictures because many eventually married suzanne ten years later it's always been assumed that leon was mane's son [Music] but what if he wasn't what if someone else were the father what if someone else made suzanne leinhoff pregnant what disgrace this would have brought to the family if it had come out who among the mayonnaise needed most to preserve an aura of respectability around himself [Music] a lot of very convincing circumstantial evidence points to august manet being the father of little leon and not eduard and if he was as i believe he was then the painting of dejanescio lab begun in the year of august many's death would have been informed by a highly personal understanding of the shallowness of respectability and the power of lust and the prevalence of 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 want to know [Music] first thing to note about dejones soleir is that the scene mane showing us is actually illegal men and women weren't allowed to bathe together in many's time and they certainly weren't allowed to go naked in public when they did go bathing in the river they were very proper swimming costumes and were separated by big wire fences so everyone seeing de journee would have known immediately that manet was deliberately teasing the law mocking it and the person who would have known this more clearly than anyone else had he still been alive to see it would have been manet's father the most obviously an outrageously illegal participant in this outdoor orgy which is what people would have thought they were looking at was that wonderful nude who sits there on the left and stares out at us so implacably i've already admitted how much i personally admire oh okay i fancy the naked woman in dejonesoleb well her name was victorine murong and her story is fascinating victory miranda was born in paris and she lived in a working-class neighborhood i can't imagine her just being a model i think that the passivity of modeling is not something that suits or goes with the look of that woman some dreadful stories exist of victory people seeing her outside the world's fair begging for money or being drunk for me that was always a reading you know how these people knew her as many's model which is fairly close to being a prostitute and so then when they see her again they read all of that into it and have her dead at you know 50 practically so when we learned that she was a painter and exhibited at the salon and even late in in her 80s when asked by someone doing a census what she did and she identified herself as an artist i think it was a vision she had of herself so in a way her life i don't know i suppose you could say her life was ordinary but i find it rather extraordinary that first of all that this working-class girl could have ever imagined herself an artist how did she ever get the idea that that's what she could do i love her for that i do i just love her mane was supposed to have met victorine at the palais de justice where his father presided over the courts many seniors task was to rule on domestic affairs patrimony suits affairs of illegitimacy and inheritance victorine was a part-time model and a street singer so she was exactly typical of the kind of women who were always being brought before man a senior accused of enticing this man or that man so there's a perfectly reasonable chance that manet met victorine while she was appearing before his father on some misdemeanor or other what a splendid irony that is i definitely think there was chemistry of a sexual kind between uh miran and mene even if she were gay which i think she was [Music] he talks about going to a party and you know victorine being there with her girlfriend and their arms around each other and so on so whereas i never used to think of the two of them uh sexually engaged i think they could have been sexually engaged without ever having sex let me put it that way it's inevitably been whispered that man a fell in love with victorine and certainly her looks did something to him as they do to me he painted her obsessively and gloriously for a decade here she is in a matadors costume manny had made specially for him by a spanish tailor in [Music] paris this is her as a street singer leaving work and here is a lady of the night who's just said goodbye to her respectable and two-faced parisian lover [Music] how do we know he's respectable and two-faced because brilliantly manny's given victorine a monocle to brandish [Music] it can't be her monocle women didn't wear them old men whose eyesight was going wore monocles old men whose eyesight was going kept mistresses on the side they sent poses of flowers to indicate they were coming they feigned respectability in the daytime and then searched out what they really wanted at night this is manny's other famously scandalous picture olympia she's called it's victorine again so lovely so brazen what's happening in this picture is that olympia a courtesan is greeting her next client me or you or whoever's looking at the picture because we've just arrived and we've brought her a bouquet of flowers [Music] just look at the expression on victorian's face what thoughtfulness what sadness what pity [Music] and here's an interesting detail see this bracelet it's apparently a bracelet than manet gave to his wife and inside it was a lock of his hair i want to make of that i'm not sure but i think it underlines how many's art becomes extra personal in matters of sexual desire and respectability and the keeping of mistresses and i think we have to bear that in mind when we go outside again and take a closer look at de jones soleil there was a lot of anxiety about the morality of women in paris in the 1860s what people were most afraid of was the sense that you couldn't tell who people were you couldn't tell the difference between respectable people and non-respectable people so all the way there was a sense that you couldn't read modern woman so here's victorine murong naked brazen a bish a lorette a prostitute and opposite her lounging about is manet's brother gustav who's playing an art student in the picture we know he's supposed to be an art student because he's wearing a silly hat a type of indoor affairs much favored by students the second man is manet's brother-in-law ferdinand lanehoff the brother of suzanne lanehoff ferdinand was a sculptor so these are real-life artistic types pretending to be fictional artistic types and flouting the law orgystically in a studenty way the question is why [Music] manny's told us that the original inspiration for the dejones was a terribly famous painting that hangs in the louvre of a concert champet an outdoor music party involving a pair of costumed musicians and a pair of naked muses in many's time the painter of this old masterish menager cat was believed to be the great giorgioni more recently titian is said to have done it whichever of the two it was the mood is luxurious sensual venetian and very decadent two men who are dressed frolic with two muses who aren't not surprisingly this great painting has set many french imaginations racing the actual composition of de genesiolab was based on a print by marc antonio ramondi of raphael's judgment of paradise so many is deliberately misquoting the old masters taking on raphael ticking on giorgione revisiting their scenarios and updating them de jones uleb shows us what giorgione's concerts champet would have looked like if it had taken place by the sen in 1863 rather than somewhere golden in arcadia in the 16th century it would have looked ridiculous uncomfortable and illegal thus this naughty painting is an outrageous updating of the past filled with deliberate shocks for instance what is that woman at the back actually doing in giorgione's concert champet she's a lovely mythological muse drawing a carafe of water from a sacred well in many's painting she's become a woman in a shift who's waded into the river and who cups the water with her 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 running into the water to have a pee it's an unfortunate national habit for the french the entire mediterranean is a giant outdoor b day and anyone looking at manny's painting in the 19th century would have realized that giorgione's water-bearing muse has become a woman having a pee this deliberate sacrilege continues all around the picture look how sloppily the remains of the picnic have been dumped on the grass see in the corner there's a frog skulking in the grass a frog gone we in french were students slang for a prostitute so this picture hasn't just set out to update one of the great themes of the old masters the outdoor concert it's set out to have a laugh at the old masters expense to rub our noses in the absurdity of what the old master showed us look up there in the middle can you see it it's something people usually miss it's a bullfinch a common bird of the parks yet look how uncommonly it's flying here with its wings stretched out like that flying over the center of the composition there's only one other bird in art that flies like that right there in the middle the sacred dove that represents the holy ghost in so many renaissance baptisms so we have here a flying bullfinch replacing the holy ghost and coming down to a woman having a pee this isn't just a deliberately shocking picture it's also a deliberately sacrilegious one a picture hell bent on transgression by an artist who's lost his submissive respect for the past and who's deliberately elbowing the old masters out of the frame and replacing them with the harsh truths of the modern world it takes great arrogance to paint a picture like this it takes hood spa and frenchness but above all i suggest it takes an intense sense of personal disappointment of being let down by the past of no longer believing in a world you thought you could trust and manet had good reason to feel like that there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them [Music]

Channel: Perspective

Views: 1,586,395

Keywords: full art documentary, performing arts, art and culture documentary, hd documentary, TV Shows - Topic, documentary movies - topic, art history, Documentary movies - topic, full documentary 2022, fine art, documentary history, documentary art history, Art history, Full documentary, waldemar juszczak, waldemar januszczak, history documentary, waldemar januszczak documentary, zcz films, art history documentary, waldemar januszczak goya, waldemar history, waldemar documentary

Id: 0Rceb1dmaD0

Length: 137min 6sec (8226 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022