Waldemar Tells The Story Of The Rococo | Before Bedtime (Full Series) | Perspective

foreign [Music] [Music] laughs the Rococo age occupied most of the 18th century that went from roughly 1700 to roughly 1790 or so you can't really be much more precise it's not a precise movement more of a tendency a tone an inclination Rococo's reputation tends to be freely and unserious when you think of Rococo art you think of this don't you or this or this [Music] but it wasn't just frilly in pink Rococo was all sorts of other things as well and what I want to do in this series is convince you of its wider achievements you punch it's determination it's intoxicating Beauty [Music] yes it was brilliant pink at times but not always Never for Nothing this first film is about the exciting impact of travel on Rococo art [Music] that's why I'm stomping up this very long Rococo staircase in Germany towards that very lovely Rococo church at the top travel was one of the great inventions of the Rococo age of course people have traveled before but far fewer of them and not with the same crazy enthusiasm travel has one of life's most exciting pleasures the Rococo idea I've got three books here I'm sure you've heard of Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift published 1726. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe published 17 19. and these little Delights here 1001 Arabian Nights with Aladdin Shahara zard Alibaba translated and published in France in 1717. so that's three of the most famous travel Adventures of all time and every one of them a Rococo book [Music] so travel had a big impact on the Rococo and that impact influenced art in various ways I'm stomping through Germany with my trusty Pilgrim stick in Rococo times pilgrimage became such a powerful creative Force especially here in Bavaria ah Bavaria what a place great Rococo art in every direction that's the nymphomberg in Munich a fabulous Rococo Palace and in there lives a man who some think should be the king of Britain this is him Francis II of England and Scotland or as they call him here France Duke of Bavaria now he's descended from James II the last Catholic King of England who was overthrown by William and Mary but James's followers the jacobites as they're called have never given up hope that one day the king over the water as they called him the rightful King of England and Scotland France Duke of Bavaria will one day regain the English throne [Music] dream on all you jacobites it'll never happen [Music] the Dukes of Bavaria have always been much too Catholic to rule written in Bavaria Catholicism is the state's religion defended fiercely against the wicked Protestants in the North and all this glorious Rococo architecture dotted about Bavaria by its madly Catholic jukes was aimed at that particularly energetic Rococo Traveler the pilgrim [Music] pilgrims were the Duke's primary audience they're spending bankrolled the entire Rococo expansion Pilgrim on the trail was a traveling money box [Music] thank you and politically the more Catholic Bavaria became the less opposition there was to its Catholic Dukes so the Protestants were shoved out sometimes brutally and the Catholics hampered enticed seduced by some of the most heady and exquisite architecture ever constructed [Music] this is vits and heilingen in Northern Bavaria the Basilica of the 14 holy helpers to give it its official title and slap in the middle there they are the 14 Saints who made this church an extra special Bavarian destination all pilgrimage churches have something in them that attracts the pilgrims a reason to go there had 14 reasons Story Goes that on the 24th of September 1445 a Shepherd saw a baby crying in a field exactly here but as he stooped down to pick the baby up it suddenly disappeared later he saw it again this time with a red cross on its chest so he knew immediately it was the baby Jesus the final time the baby appeared it was accompanied by 13 other babies and this time the baby spoke to the shepherd and it said we are the 14 helpers and we wish to erect a chapel here where we can rest so that's what happened the locals erected a chapel on this exact spot and the Miracles began pilgrims began to flock here in their thousands and in this field by a river where previously there was nothing this great pilgrimage church was built I love the way religion can turn nowhere into somewhere what a power that is I mean this was just a field on a hill now look at it to build the new church they brought in an architect of Genius [Music] baltazar Neumann and adverts and heiligan Neumann gave us his Rococo masterpiece [Music] a building that twists hither and thither across the cosmos before plunging down so dramatically to the great shrine at its Center as for the pilgrims they couldn't have been better served when you came to vets in heiligan one of these 14 Saints was sure to help you so if you suffered from migraine like me you prayed to Saint Denis here the patron saint of headaches and if you were having a baby there was Saint Margaret to help you with your childbirth a saint for every occasion all this is spectacular that's obvious but why is It Rococo and what does Rococo actually mean [Music] well I don't know if you remember series I did about the Baroque age and how I explained the difference between the Renaissance and the Baroque with two pearls now this Pearl here the round one that's like the Renaissance perfect precise what about the Baroque well Baroque comes from the Portuguese word barroco which means a misshapen Pearl so that's like this one Blobby organic bulging so that's the Renaissance and that's the Baroque but what about the Rococo well they're a cocoa that was like the arrival in arts of the entire sea bed Rococo is actually a combination of two words the French word which means shell work like those ornate effects with shells you get on grottos and fountains and at the end Coco comes from barroco again that so often happens with the names of art movements it was originally an insult the new style was so over the top said the critics so shapeless it was like crazy shell work the Baroque gone mad Rococo Rococo implies an art that's shapeless and overloaded an art without sensible or logical boundaries and it's definitely true sometimes the Rococo went too far in its search for freedom and looseness but other times the results were glorious breathtaking [Music] some of the world's most exciting Interiors a Rococo Interiors oh how they fidget and Shimmer and twinkle but if the rokoka was only a style of gorgeous interior that wouldn't be enough to be genuinely significant the fidgety and playful spirit of the Rococo needed to infiltrate all the other Arts as well particularly painting so it made a beeline for this especially popular Rococo destination where reality feels dreamy and dreams feel real [Music] a shimmering City Venice [Music] you can come to Venice for all sorts of excellent Rococo reasons to read a bit of Casanova for instance he was Venetian of course to listen to Vivaldi who was born in this square and baptized in that church [Music] but since this is a film about travel the first thing we need to do is to tackle the definitive travel artist the incomparable can a letter we're often guilty of underestimating caneletto he's famous yes but in top art historical circles the suspicion lingers that he was just a painter of postcards but he wasn't he really wasn't caneletto was a brilliant tinkerer with reality an artistic Master Chef who turned the raw ingredients of Venice into irresistible new recipes now of course Venice is really beautiful [Music] as this nowhere is and of course the venetians can be very charming and Lively but they're never as charming and Lively as caneletto's venetians all this needed to be concocted [Music] it was actually born there where that hotel is in 1697. his father Bernardo canal was a painter of stage scenery very well known worked in carnival shows and theaters so to differentiate himself from his dad the son began calling himself canaletto little Canal or Canal Junior [Music] there are only two portraits of him this is one of them a little Canal's first pictures of Venice as theatrical as anything his dad ever designed this is the island of San Miguel the cemetery island of Venice and just look at all the Thunder and drama which the young caneletto called down from its scuppers his first caneletos are so unexpectedly Gothic foreign [Music] today it's a pleasant place to hang out but you wouldn't want to hang out in caneletto's Rio mendicante it's too tense and grubby and attracts the wrong sort of people oh don't worry it was only water I was just trying to evoke canaletto's first moves [Music] but then lo and behold transformation suddenly in about 1728 1730 caneleto's art grows sunny Lucid it's as if his output has come out from behind a cloud revealing a new Venice brighter grander [Music] sunnier [Music] what happened is that he found himself a new market the English market and he adapted his art to suit it Canada's Sunny new Venice was aimed chiefly at those privileged English Travelers who'd embarked upon that awful circuit called The Grand Tour The Grand Tour was a kind of Gap year for the rich and landed an educational holiday for those Rococo Travelers who could afford it and in Florence Rome Naples they explored the ruins and the art galleries but in Venice they explored the gambling dens the brothels the Rococo's never world [Music] in Rococo Times Venice was a very naughty place if you've read any Casanova at all you'll know that in real life the grand tourists came here for the gambling the dressing up the sex but in art they wanted another kind of Illusion a Venice full of sunlight and lucidity so beautiful it could never have existed and that's what caneletto began painting for them an imaginary Venice with the stains removed [Music] so how did he get that real look that sense of the truth such a marvelous feature of his art well use one of these camera obscura dark chamber in Latin if ever wondered where the word camera comes from it comes from this [Music] history have you View Camera Obscura in their work but none as bitterly as caneletto it's basically a pinhole camera which throws an exact image onto this screen and you can then Trace around it for a precise record of the scene [Music] Naval dockyard in Venice the arsenali it's hardly changed since caneletto painted it with those big lions there and the dramatic Towers [Music] yourself [Music] I'm not very good at this but canaletto was because of the shape of the camera obscura you only do like half the scene at once so after you've done this half here caneletto would move the camera obscure over and do the other half and then put the two parts together for the whole scene with such marvelous results [Music] back in the studio he'd improve the proportions put in some perfect weather and add some of those fabulous little canaletto people who Scamper so charmingly about his art [Music] first he records reality then he Tinkers with it starting with the truth he ends up with a fantasy and that's the Rococo for you a rhino yes a rhino why because it's a very Rococo site in Rococo times this particular rhino rhinoceros unicornis the Great Indian rhino went from being an animal that hardly any European had ever seen to one that hardly any European had not seen [Music] they called it Rhino Mania suddenly Rococo art was overrun by rhinos also it seemed in fact it was the same Rhino painted lots of times her name was Clara and she arrived in Europe from India in 1741 and spent the rest of her life on a kind of grand tour of all the big European capitals London Warsaw Paris Berlin and everywhere Clara went the artists of the Rococo flocked to see her this fascinating armored Beastie appears in more art than any Rococo king or hero [Music] Clara's story was pure Disney when she was just a few months old her mother was killed by Indian Hunters but the poor little Rhino was saved by a Dutch chap from the East India Company who brought her up in his own house until she was too big to fit into it [Music] sold her to a passing sea captain who brought her back to Europe and that's when Clara set off on her grand tour Venice she was painted by Pietro longy that cheeky Observer of Venetian Society who admired the way she pooped and the Striking contrast she offered to the masked ladies of the carnival in France she stayed in Versailles with Louis XV and was painted life-size by Jean-Baptiste udri and she's said to have inspired the latest French hairstyles [Music] but the Clara I like best is the one preserved by the Germans who put a large Turk on her back and pretended she was domesticated and deep inside she wasn't foreign presented as this great Age of Enlightenment when science triumphed and Linnaeus classified the natural world and all that but if you look at the art of the period that all these strange animals that keep popping up in it you'll notice a definite taste for the inelegant and the primitive the clumsy and the oversized [Music] the Rococo could have chosen any bird it fancied to put above its fireplace it could have chosen the peacock or the resplendent quetzal but no it chose the ostrich all over the Rococo age these unexpected animals keep popping up I mean why put an ostrich above the most important mantle piece in the grandest room in your Palace it's as if the Rococo famous for its elegance and its sophistication was looking for the opposite in the animals it favored in England the great horse painter George Stubbs did a fabulous sideline in wonky beasts here's his zebra a white pony with black stripes painted on and no that's not a giant hairbrush it's a yak and I love stubbs's magnificent cheetah in the Manchester City Art Gallery but basically it's just an extra large Tabby isn't it remember this was still the pre-darwinian world David Attenborough hadn't even been born yet all this was genuinely strange genuinely new and exciting this isn't science it's not biology or zoology this is the opening of a fabulous goodie box filled with exotic sights and wondrous spectacles for the best part of three Millennia European art had relied on the same limited catalog of images now suddenly a whole new Consignment of them had arrived at the port and to record it to do it justice the Rococo needed to invent a new art form the resplendent art form that is fancy porcelain to be honest I'm not usually an admirer a fancy porcelain it's too frilly for my tastes I'm a mugman by Instinct but what changed my mind what really opened my eyes to the power of porcelain was what they produced up there in the albrechtsburg castle foreign that fabulous Turk sitting on a rhino with the brooding portrayal of Clara that was made in here so was this and this when you say the word myson you say so much [Music] it all goes back to one man Augustus the strong ruler of Saxony king of Poland and a man obsessed with China they called him Augustus the strong for two reasons one because he was a brute of a man who could bend a horseshoe with his bare hands and two because Augustus was a legendary Seducer of women [Music] estimates vary about how many illegitimate children Augustus fathered but it was somewhere around the 350 or 360 mark amazingly though this huge appetite for women wasn't augustus's most debilitating weakness somehow he found time for another terrible Affliction because Augustus was also addicted to Chinese porcelain the French called his illness but that makes it sound gentler than it was when it came to porcelain Augustus was deranged [Music] the addiction was so severe that Augustus once swapped an entire Regiment of Saxon dragoons for 48 Chinese vases and to house this enormous collection he'd amassed he built himself a fake Oriental Palace and filled it with twenty thousand rare and expensive examples of Chinese porcelain China wept the court mathematician lamenting the state of the national finances has become the bleeding bowl of Saxony Europeans have been lusting after Chinese porcelain for centuries not just because it was so delicate and refined but also because porcelain was thought to have Magic Properties people believed it could resist fire and repel poison that made it particularly attractive of course to a King as unpopular as Augustus the strong who was frittering away the national fortune on Chinese pots [Music] solution was to stop importing expensive porcelain from China and to start making it here in my son but that was easier said than done the Chinese had been making porcelain since the 6th Century but the secret of how it was done was zealously guarded various European despots desperate not to be poisoned by their subjects but had a go at reproducing it and failed but none of them was as fanatical as Augustus the strong to help him realize his dream and start making his own porcelain Augustus imprisoned yes imprisoned a young Alchemist called Johann Friedrich Burtka [Music] he's the heroic one the one with his shirt off amazingly bertger actually did it he worked out that the secret of porcelain was to bake the clay at exciting new temperatures and by 1710 here of the albrechtsburg castle in Maison porcelain was being manufactured in Europe for the first time the real Alchemy begins when you start painting this hard white porcelain bake it put color on it that's when it bursts into life with this exciting Rococo vividness [Music] colors have never been as explosive as this before in art sculpture had never been this nimble this wasn't just the production of porcelain in Europe this was the invention of a new art form with new rules and new possibilities [Music] and it was so portable and compact with porcelain the Rococo imagination became internationally Unstoppable Intrepid nomadic [Music] it began traveling wildly across the continent crazily imagining all the different worlds out there different animals different people different excitements India China Japan [Music] all these far away locations were jumbled together to form one rich and gorgeous imaginary Kingdom a porcelain Orient filled with Rococo goodies [Music] this taste for a mythical Orient a Fantastical new world that existed only in the Rococo imagination wasn't confined to porcelain it's seeped out into all the other Arts as well with spectacular results [Music] when Augustus the strong built his Japanese Palace on the banks of the Elba to house his porcelain collection he was trying to imitate the powerful Oriental Emperors he'd heard about in the garbled stories about the east circling through the courts of York foreign none of these people had actually been to the east or had actually visited China it was all hearsay and rumor Augustus had heard somewhere that Oriental potentates built special palaces for their porcelain so that's what he did he'd heard that the Emperor of China drank from a porcelain cup to guard against poison so he did the same now why did the Germans become the most fanatical China lovers in Europe I don't know but they did and here at San TSU C Frederick the great of Prussia built himself this Splendid and unlikely approximation of a Chinese Pavilion [Music] of course nothing in China actually looked anything like this you'd never get a Chinese building with a gold statue on top of a man holding an umbrella [Music] or with life-size gold figures of musicians playing invented instruments or with a roof supported by Middle Eastern palm trees [Music] no one in China had ever built a building like this this was a European invention and that's the thing about shin wazuri as they called this Oriental illness it wasn't about China at all but about Europe what we're actually watching here is the freeing of the European imagination an unleashing of sensuous European desires and I think this freeing of the European it these dreams of paradise thinly disguised as images of the East constitute a glorious Breakout by the European spirit a joyous dash for freedom and excitement which should be recognized as one of the Rococo's greatest achievements the Wurzburg residents Palace of the prince Bishops of birdsburg Wurzburg is quite a small town and this massive Palace feels as if it's a couple of sizes too big for it it was designed by that man again baltazar Neumann giant of the Rococo Neumann became the court architect in Wurzburg in 1720 and this was his first official Commission before that he'd been in the Army designing cannons so he came late to architecture and promptly designed this the prince Bishops of Wolfsburg had plenty of money plenty of power and plenty of artistic ambition this Vault when you enter is a very strange space it feels too low for its width like an underground garage or something but it's actually a brilliant piece of engineering [Music] with this import antly shallow Vault Neumann created enough space for a horse and carriage to turn around here without hitting anything without hitting any columns that's very clever and because he squeezed all this space down here made it so low he created more space on top for that the grand staircase at woodsberg walking up here mounting this staircase is a fantastic piece of Rococo drama as you ascend you gradually become aware of something momentous happening above you and this extraordinary spectacle begins to open up this film is about travel and we've watched the impact of different kinds of travel on the Rococo the grand tour with caneletto the great Bavarian pilgrimages travel in the mind to all those exotic places but there's another kind of travel that was crucial and that's the journeys made by artists from one place to another from country to Country spreading their influence like migrating birds spreading their seeds this Fresco here this Monumental achievement of the German Rococo was painted by an Italian a Venetian the greatest Fresco painter of the 18th century the incomparable teapolo oh it's the largest continuous ceiling Fresco ever painted truly remarkable achievement by an Italian in Germany when teapler arrived here in 1750 lured out of Italy by huge amounts of Wurzburg money he got over 60 times what a Master Mason would earn in a year all this was Bare plaster came about eat this that's all we're looking up at the sky it's Dawn and Apollo the god of the sun is about to set off in his Chariot across the heavens [Music] so the sun's rising and it's rising above the whole world the four continents that were known at the time they've been painted around the edges and as you come up the stairs the first continent you see is America that's her there embodied by a topless Indian riding a crocodile and I like this Rococo Superman with another casual Croc thrown over his shoulder on the left as you come up the stairs Africa there she is riding a camel oh and look there's another ostrich with a monkey pulling its tail the longest wall is up there Asia and she is riding an elephant with that ridiculous trunk like the hose of a vacuum cleaner remember the world was still being mapped in the Rococo age there was still a sense of Discovery out there and you sense it in teapolo he pretends he knows all these exotic places and animals but he doesn't [Music] so there's Europe up there the most developed of the continents and she's surrounded by musicians listening to a concert [Music] and all the other Arts are in attendance as well look there's painting with the palate he has just finished that portrait floating up to heaven of the man who commissioned the great teapolo Prince Bishop Carl Philip Von griefenclaw this Europe scene is particularly interesting because it includes portraits of all the artists who worked on this great staircase so sprawled beside the cannon up there his baltazar Neumann the architect blow himself is over here in the corner looking rather strained the next to him his son Dominico tiepolo His Brilliant Apprentice [Music] that figure standing on the edge of the parapet the haughty one in the white cloak that's Antonio bossi another traveling Italian and a stucco genius perhaps the greatest there's ever been and he did all this three great creatives one great opportunity equals a gigantic Rococo achievement thank you all this traveling about by Rococo artists led to some unexpected confrontations very unexpected I mean who could ever have imagined that the great caneletto would come to London and paint this View and then turn around and paint this one caneletto arrived in London in 1746 and he lived here for nine years so what the hell was he doing here well back in Venice the market for his pictures had dried up the English just weren't traveling as much as they used to so the mountain decided to come to Mohammed he was also Keen to invest some money in stocks and shares he was a Venetian after all so money was important to him and London then as now was Europe's Financial hub right from the start he was up to his old Rococo tricks again in canalettos London the Thames is always wider and grander than nature intended [Music] and look how the skies are clearer and sunnier the London smog filled Skies ever were and how all those playful boats bobbing across the river seem to have inherited some of the happy Associates of the gondola when he first got here Westminster Bridge the First new bridge across the Thames since the Middle Ages was still being built and in typical canaletto fashion he couldn't resist painting it the city in flux had been one of his favorite subjects from the start new bridge New View and a playful new bucket swinging across the Vista adding a cheeky note of incompletion there are lots of things I like about caneletto but his sense of fun is right up there critics like to have a go with his English pictures he was basically painting venison Thames they complain and it's true he was but that's because he was a Rococo artist and Rococo artists paint with their spirits not just their brushes at first he concentrated on these magnificent River views the Thames was his Grand Canal and London was modified into somewhere he knew but then the Curiosity kicked in he began prowling the back streets painting gripping vistas of a city in flux from about here in Whitehall he painted the view from the first floor window of Richmond house which isn't there anymore but which stood where I am now [Music] Ricky scruffy low slung this is London behind the scenes an urban sprawl looking for a form I recognize the steeple of Saint Martins in the fields in the background and that's about it London was changing furiously and the Rococo Gods had fixed it for the great caneletto to come to England and to paint what may be his finest picture [Music] this is where he lived in SoHo at the center of the Italian Community caneletto was up on the first floor this is the other portrait of him painted in London when he was about 50. and look how boyish he looks how charming and up for it [Music] when he finished with London he began scouring the rest of England for views here's Eaton College looking extra tall in the afternoon sun [Music] and in this Moody view of the old bridge at Walton he lets some genuine British weather into his art at last but his most fruitful wanderings across England brought him here to Warwick Castle when caneletto got to Warwick the castle was in the middle of an ambitious rebuild the owner Francis gravel Earl of Warwick had decided to make his castle look more Gothic and then to place this Gothic Castle in a Rococo Garden designed by the celebrated capability Brown capability Brown liked to make his Gardens look natural as if nature had created them rather than him and in caneletto's first view of Warwick you can actually see a new Hill being put in a few years later when the alterations were more or less finished the Earl of Warwick invited caneletto back and this time he painted this Splendid View before capability Brown's new trees got in the way [Music] and then he painted this view which is even better [Music] these gorgeous views of Warwick Castle in the sunshine feel so vivid and real but of course they aren't the only place you get Skies like that in England is in your dreams and that's what's so exciting about the Rococo's passion for travel so much of the best voyaging was done in the mind [Music] back in Bavaria meanwhile a humble Pilgrim is back on the plod I'm afraid I've been very naughty boy because I've saved the best till last there's so many lovely things to see in Rococo Bavaria but most people will tell you the loveliest of them all is that church on the horizon the Visa or Meadow Church plop down here in the middle of nowhere [Music] that makes it so special but when you look at the outside as well with its gentle Simplicity and that gorgeous apricot color like a tasty apricot sorbet [Music] imagine being an exhausted Pilgrim who's tramped all the way through Bavaria and then on the horizon deliberately positioned against the hills so you can't miss it a lovely pilgrimage Church of nice beckoning irresistibly [Music] this is here because one day a girl in the village saw this wonky statue of Jesus crying and that was that within a few months these had become a must-go pilgrimage destination two local Brothers the zimmermans were commissioned to build this Rococo masterpiece [Music] just look at it how light it feels didn't substantial if you blow at it it might all blow away it's all done with stucco painted plaster the Rococo secret ingredient so light and adaptable [Music] see those columns stucco see those Saints stucco see that roof Ducker with stucco you can defy gravity what shape do you think that vault is it looks like a huge expanse of Dome doesn't it but if you go outside again out here into the meadow and if we look up at that roof from outside we'll see that it's actually an ordinary sloping roof straight-sided made of wood so all that bulging space in there all that billowing Heaven inside let's go back in and have another look has actually been painted on a simple pointy roof is that Rococo Ingenuity again I'll show you how they did it on this diagram so that's the roof there and suspended from it the Vault hanging down by a simple rope so it weighs nothing it's a brilliant Rococo illusion and up on the ceiling painted by Johann Baptiste Zimmerman the Illusions continue with an enormous message of Hope the resurrected Jesus is sitting on a rainbow that most hopeful of symbols and is pointing that the cross so we know he's already saved us with his sacrifice [Music] but look over here the Throne of judgment it's empty Jesus hasn't sat down on it yet so there's still time for us to mend our ways but not much time [Music] because over here gates of eternity are still closed Heaven hasn't actually opened for business yet old father times completed his journey but who goes in and who doesn't is still up for grabs so imagine you're a Rococo Pilgrim and you've traveled all this way and you come in here into this gorgeous space you must have thought you'd already arrived in heaven but then you look up and instead of Salvation there's this enormous choice what's it to be sinner salvation or damnation do you repent or don't you that's the Rococo for you it's full of honey traps bless me Father for I have sinned it's 35 years since my last confession I've done all sorts of terrible things father where should I start in the next film we'll be looking at that archetypal Rococo subject pleasure and asking why the Rococo produced some of the most sensuous art ever made that's the Rococo and pleasure the next film in the story of the Rococo [Music] thank you first sign Mighty Palace of the French Kings and a crucial Rococo hotspot I wanted to come to Versailles to read you this it's an important Rococo document and it sums up what this film is about now if you're an American you might be thinking that's not a Rococo document that's the Declaration of Independence and of course you're right this is the document with which America declared its independence from Britain on the 4th of July 1776. but this is a Rococo document not just because of its date but because of what's in it what Thomas Jefferson wrote In Here embodies what this film is about particularly the famous second sentence the one about all those unalienable rights that we all hold according to the Declaration of Independence all of us have an unalienable right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness [Music] now life and Liberty of course they're obvious but the pursuit of happiness when did that become an unalienable human right when will we put on Earth to be happy I'll tell you when in the Rococo era that's when this isn't just the Declaration of Independence this is a Rococo Manifesto [Music] thank you ah [Music] [Applause] [Music] the Rococo pursued happiness in various ways and various places as you'll see in this film but of course the first thing you need to get right when you pursue Happiness Is Love okay The Pursuit Of Love fueled the Rococo age like petrol fueling a fire [Music] love ought to be so uncomplicated or isn't it a meets B they like each other and live happily ever after but of course it hardly ever works out that way the pleasures of Love shouldn't be complicated but they are love shouldn't be a Battleground but it is to its credit the Rococo age knew this [Music] recognized love for what it really was a powerful intoxicant [Music] too weak and helpless like an illness no one knew this better than the most wistful of the Rococo's many observers of love The Genius of painted flirtation Antoine water [Music] as they call him in Paris was from northern France valencien on the Belgian border so his Origins were actually Flemish we know that his father was a humble roof tiler and that water arrived in Paris in about 1702 and that's about all we know vato is usually credited with inventing a new genre of painting called the FED Gallant there's no exact English translation of fet Gallant it's a kind of garden fate devoted to love a festival of outdoor flirtation [Music] in a fit Gallant dreamy couples stroll across a dreamy landscape of parks and trees [Music] music's playing hearts are fluttering secrets are being swapped in the background there's often a playful statue of some Greek or Roman god ready to come to life booming in the distance unheard by anyone in the picture but ringing out clear as a Bell to us is a loud warning beware love is on the loose this is votto's masterpiece it's one of the key images of the Rococo [Music] it used to be called the embarkation for sithira these days there are arguments about what it actually shows sithira was the Mediterranean island on which Venus the goddess of love was supposed to have been born the legend goes the Kronos the Titan castrated his father Uranus ruler of the universe and through his testicles into the sea and the sperm from Uranus's testes gave birth to Aphrodite or Venus as the Romans called her Who Rose up out of the waters and floated to sithira painting by Botticelli The Birth of Venus chose exactly this moment Venus the goddess of love floating to sithira in a seashell in the Votto painting Venus is over here and typically he's turned her into this rather ambiguous statue is she real or isn't she stone or flesh we know it's Venus because of all these Cupids buzzing around her Cupid was Venus's son the god of desire and if he fired one of his arrows at you well that was it you had to fall in love so that's why all these pilgrims are here most Pilgrims go in search of God but not this lot votto's pilgrims are searching for love the question is are they coming or going it used to be thought that these pilgrims of Love were setting off for sithira that's why the painting was called the embarkation but that doesn't really make sense does it why would they be setting off for the island of love when they're already in love I mean look at these two here so the latest thinking is that this is a departure not an arrival Venus has presided over an intoxicating visit to her Island by a boatload of pilgrims and now the visit's over the boat is waiting it's time to go home so despite all the venuses and the cherubs this is actually a rather gloomy picture according to Legend sithira was the only place on Earth where perfect love could be found so what Votto is actually showing us is the end of perfect happiness that's why she's looking back so wistfully at where she's just been she knows she'll never have all this again for me there's almost a religious Dimension to votto's Gloom all these Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve fated never to find the perfect happiness they're looking for and that's what's so interesting about Rococo art it goes on and on about happiness and pleasure but deep inside it seems instinctively to know that in the twinkling of an eye it could all be over [Music] In The Garden of Love The Pursuit of Happiness took place Outdoors against the beautiful backdrop of nature what happened therefore to the Rococo when it went indoors to achieve indoor happiness the Rococo had to invent a new kind of architecture a new way of living in comfortable new spaces created specifically for the pursuit of pleasure in places like this [Music] Sans Souci in Potsdam Prussia the pleasure Palace of Frederick II or as he's most usually called Frederick the Great now I'm polish so I'm deeply prejudiced against Frederick the great he's the Prussian King who organized the partitioning of Poland tore up my country and shared it out with the Russians in war and politics Frederick was ruthless but in private he was more complex more interesting it is actually Frederick who designed this Palace the Palace of Sans Souci [Music] this is the original design he sketched out for it and as you can see it's all on one level a palace with the ease of access of a bungalow those stairs to climb up direct access to the gardens an architecture of ease and pleasure Frederick named his Palace a French name which means without worry at the foot of the great Bungalow there's a handy Vineyard all this pleasure at his doorstep Frederick designed the decoration as well those figures up there the big ones those are bakanties followers of Bacchus the god of wine and look he's put the name of the Palace San Souci right in the middle between two of them but it's written rather strangely it actually says full stop so why the comma why the full stop [Music] it's very puzzling but also very typical because Frederick loved playing word games [Music] it was his Rococo way of having fun written up on the front of his Palace was a message to the world that no one could understand forget Bletchley Park forget the Enigma machine this is a German code that's really tough to crack hundreds of great brains have had a go at it but I think the secret is not to aim too high okay songs is French for without that bit's easy but the French word for comma well that comes from the Latin virgole which means little Rod or little stick and of course a little stick a little rod can have sexual connotation so salsville has a naughty twist to it I told you not to aim too high now so see that means worry so that's straightforward again but the French word for full stop that is also used in literary French Posh French as a way of suggesting a negative so instead of saying something isn't something you say in Posh literary French something is not something else there's one other bit of information that's important Frederick is thought to have been gay he had no children his marriage was sexless and a rumor doing the rounds claimed that when he was young he contracted a sexual disease from a male lover and after that his little Rod never worked again [Music] women weren't allowed into San Souci no women was a strict house rule so what that code up there the Way San Souci is written what it actually seems to be saying is without a little rod worry stops only the Rococo could have come up with that [Music] inside Sans Souci the Rococo Revolution gently continues to lead the new Rococo way of life you needed new Rococo spaces [Music] this is the music room for all you did was play music and listen to it Frederick was actually a very decent composer he played the flute and wrote numerous concertos you're actually listening to One now the dining room another Rococo specialty of course they've been big drafty banqueting Halls before but this idea of a room created specially for the pleasures of eating with all the different courses served on gorgeous pieces of Crockery that was a Rococo idea the bedroom when it comes to the pursuit of pleasure the bedroom was of course especially important before the Rococo age the bedroom was a room for sleeping in but now well now it became a room full of pleasurable possibilities what we're actually watching here is the invention of modern living freely bedrooms elegant dining rooms single level living in a bungalow there are cocoa was so prescient it even invented the home studied [Music] study was now seen as one of life's great Pleasures people started having libraries at home as Voltaire put it probably In This Very Room because he stayed here once study delivers us from the burden of our leisure [Music] Casanova [Music] do you know what the Greek word for beautiful is omorfi and the only reason I know that is because of Casanova here during one of his interminable searches for love Casanova encountered a young Irish girl called Louise o Murphy a Murphy was the daughter of an Irish Soldier who'd somehow ended up in France Casanova saw her naked one day and was so struck by her teenage beauty he had her picture painted and on this picture he says he added the inscription oh morphe beautiful in Greek a pun on her name oh Murphy like most of what Casanova wrote the omorphy story is obviously nonsense he just made it up but Louisa Murphy isn't nonsense she definitely existed the proof is this Infamous painting of her by Francois Boucher court painter to Louis XV the picture nicknamed the blonde odalisk hangs at the outer pin Echo Tech in Munich and chose luizo Murphy sticking out her bottom brazenly the real louiso Murphy was Louis xv's teenage mistress she bought him children gave him her best years and then he dumped her so nothing remarkable there a typical story of the French Court but boucher's portrait is remarkable for its sheer licentiousness [Music] art has given us plenty of nudes before but none of them was quite as Shameless and direct as this [Music] Boucher is often viewed as the Rococo's most typical painter particularly by those who don't like the Rococo as Louis xv's official artist he was the go-to painter in the Rococo's naughtiest moments do I like his work no do we have to deal with it yes [Music] because Boucher is freely nudes and pink bottomed goddesses Mark the arrival in art of a new type of sensuality [Music] crude pink and artificial in boucher's art nothing looks real it's like Rococo manga a cartoonish World in which the pursuit of pleasure has had all its complications removed no doubt no guilt no hesitation just desire raw and color-coded a plastic pink foreign Boucher painted another notorious female portrait in the same pose as Louisa Murphy it hangs in the Louvre now and this one is nicknamed the brunette odalisk this time the woman in the picture is boucher's own wife poor Madame Boucher has spread eagled herself for him and pulled up her night's dress so distressed was the French encyclopedist didero by this notorious image that he accused Boucher of prostituting his own wife degradation of taste color composition character expression and drawing have all kept pace with moral depravity one of the main subplots of this series apart from showing you all the different sides of the Rococo is to prove to you that the Rococo age invented the modern world if I show you a vorto that doesn't really do it does it vorto's too subtle and elusive to whispery and gentle but if I show you a Boucher well that's us isn't it pleasure without consequences nudity without modesty desire without boundaries get yourself down to your local news agent have a look at the top shelf and I think you'll find those are our preferences too but just because Boucher painted so many subservient women mean that all the women of the Rococo were subservient they weren't thank you [Music] right we're going to have a general knowledge quiz on this table I have three things and I want you to tell me what it is that connects them so the first thing is the champagne glass in that baby sham shape what they call a coup de champagne so that's object number one next Elvis in his pomp note the hairstyle that's the clue and finally this bottle of nail polish pink nail polish a particular kind of pick so pink nail polish Elvis and a champagne glass what connects them easy peasy right a bit All You Stephen fries out there cut it straight away what connects all these objects is that momentous Rococo presence the infamous The all-powerful Madame de pompadour Louis xv's favorite mistress the first and greatest of the gond horizontal just in case you didn't get it Elvis's hairstyle here all piled up in a Teddy boy Cliff that's called a pompadour it's how Madame de pompadour wore her hair brushed up from the front an uplifting Style [Music] and this color here that's very specifically pompadour pink pink was her favorite color it was particularly popular in the sea of porcelain Factory on which she lavished so much of her attention and the nation's money Madame de pompadours Pink became one of the Rococo's definitive colors this according to Legend this type of champagne glass the flat type the the champagne this is supposed to have been inspired say the French by the shape Madame de pompadour's breasts which were cupped gently like this Madame de pompadour is supposed to have met the French King Louis XV at a fancy dress ball in February 1745 in the famous Hall of Mirrors in Versailles Madame de pompadour came as a sexy shepherdess while the King bizarly was dressed as a tree so he didn't even have to lure her into the bushes to have his Wicked way with her he was the bushes [Music] oh by the end of the evening she'd climbed into his branches and that night the courtyard saw her carriage parked outside the Royal Apartments where it stayed for the next 20 years [Music] well Madame de pompadour seemed to realize straight away that she set about becoming the most powerful woman in France and then the most powerful woman in the world was that she could use art to shape Her Image and maintain her power foreign [Music] she was just the daughter of a failed Parisian financier but in art she could become something else something new in art Madame de pompadour could become a captivating Rococo presence [Music] her favorite portraitist Boucher again was particularly skilled at portraying her he shows her playing a piano or reading a book [Music] Beauty yes but also brains notice how in most of Bush's pictures of her she shows you this side her best side but in this one unusually she's looking straight at us and what's really interesting about the way Bushey portrayed her is how unregal she looks how informal by this time 1750 her power was absolute pompadour said more people to the Bastille than any French King [Music] she started Wars she changed world history but in boucher's art she's such a light and delicate and kittenish presence one of the chief functions of these pictures was to keep the king interested he was paying for them all after all so that coquettish tone they have that shy thing looking out through the big eyes that's not aimed at you or me that's aimed at Louis XV the most powerful woman in Europe is saying I'm only a delicate Little Flower so come and protect me you big hunk of a king [Music] elsewhere in the Rococo the female cast of this exciting age was achieving a different kind of power religious power foreign in Venice and inside are a couple of Beautiful altarpieces One by Chima de conigliano and the other by Lorenzo Lotto but we're not going to see them because they were painted in the Renaissance and this is a film about the Rococo [Music] so instead we're going next door to the squala Grande [Music] these squalash or charitable organizations set up to help the poor so if you are homeless in Rococo times you came in here and it puts you up not bad for a hostel is it this particular squala Grande was set up by an organization of charitable women called the lay carmelites they weren't actually nuns they were friends of nuns associated with a Carmelite Order and their main task here was to make these scapulas the scapula is a Catholic Talisman something you wear around your neck to ward off evil and keep you on the straight and narrow it's just two bits of cloth connected at the sides and you wear it around your neck like that under your shirt why is that one as a kid but I'm afraid I strayed from the straight and narrow and this is a recent purchase if you wear a scapula The Story Goes and lead a Pious life you're sure to go to heaven the Virgin Mary herself has guaranteed it this entire building the whole squalor was funded on the proceeds of selling these things they were very popular as you can imagine free ticket to heaven anyway the reason I brought you in here is because there are cocoa Masterpiece we're here to see is all about it's by tiapolo the greater ceiling painter of the Rococo we saw him in film one of this series the one about travel working for the rich and famous in Bavaria here in his hometown of Venice in the squala Grande de camini he's working for God and the scapula [Music] what the ceiling actually shows us is the moment the Virgin Mary handed the first scapula to a saint called Saint Simon stock [Music] he's the old boy with the beard on the left who's being handed the scapula by a handsome angel [Music] O's most haughty Madonna a grand dam of the Skies looks down her nose at us in that Venetian Way while stock The Grateful Carmelite saint reaches out pathetically for her gift like a Down and Out in a doorway asking for a couple of Bob gov do you know where we're actually meant to be where all this is set it's actually Cambridge in England because that's where the Virgin Mary appeared to the English Saint Saint Simon's stock on July the 16th 1251. asking for a favor from her and she gave him the scapula with the words whosoever dies wearing this scapula shall not suffer Eternal fire [Music] if you wear one of these you're sure to be saved so the carmelites did really well out of the scapula lots of people wanted one and in 1749 to mark this great success was commissioned to paint this ceiling so why are we here with our scapulars and our unlikely Saints Tales because this is an excellent place to witness the Pleasure Principle at work in the religious art of the Rococo has set his action in the cool and calm light of dawn sky is blue the sun tints the clouds a gentle pink the lighting of teapolo's Skies is delightful this is the ceiling of the nearby Church of the jizuati it was cleaned just recently look how cool and refreshing the skies are tiepolo took religious art out of the Thunder the storms and explosions of the Baroque and relocated it in the cool calm delicious light of a Venetian Dawn it's one of his greatest achievements they've lit a lot of fires in here in the past 300 years so it's all yellower than it should be but you can still feel this new airiness of tiapolo's religious Vision in the Baroque age religious art tried to all you into submission in the Rococo it's enchants you entices you seduces you tiapolo's art is a religious Honey Trap with perfect weather conditions beautiful religious babes and if you wear one of these a shortcut to Heaven who could resist all of that where's the ladder I want to go up there [Music] Venice France Germany you expect the Rococo to have fetched up in those places don't you as we saw in film one it was an artistic impulse hell-bent on travel so sooner or later it had to arrive in Britain as well the British aren't naturally Rococo types of course but this wasn't some Willow the Wisp art movement that flutters briefly and it's gone the Rococo looks fragile and delicate but it turned out to be Unstoppable it was a sandstorm of pleasure that blew in everywhere even the dur and cold-blooded britons couldn't keep it out forever so they got here eventually and look what it gave us Gainsborough the most dashing quick fingered loose wristed painter Britain has ever produced Gainsborough could paint anything he was that good he did Landscapes that are so breathy and healthy and British he painted men of power and gave them an air of interesting complexity and he painted himself to as a modest chap with strong eyes [Music] so he did all that that but there are two things he did Killy well the first is paint women which he did with breathtaking brother I think this one's my favorite Countess Howe of Kenwood house it's her pink dress that intoxicates me and the fact that she looks so much like Helen Mirren but wait this could be my favorite too Mrs Robinson at the Wallace collection look how much character he finds in that exceptional Rococo face oh here's to you this is Robinson this is Sophia Charlotte Digby lady Sheffield she just got married hence the big Rococo get up and look how she casually dangles her arm making sure we can all see her wedding ring [Music] Charlotte Digby knows we're looking at her but she pretends she doesn't it's brilliant pictorial Psychology from a painter who obviously knew a thing or two about women and their Rococo desire to express themselves through their clothes [Music] and look at her feet Ving you can almost hear all those extravagant silks rustling as she Glides towards us a bouquet on the move this movement the strolling the gliding was new for three thousand years portraits had basically stayed still the artist plonked The Sitter in front of you and you examined them that was the deal Gainesboro though was different [Music] Gainsborough got his sitter strolling towards us heading for our space ambling through the parks and even dancing to the pleasurable new beat of the Rococo [Music] it's a bit like television presenters in the old days you plonked them in front of the subject and they stayed there but these days your modern presenter is often on the move and sometimes has to throw in some serious walking foreign thing Gainsborough was particularly good at was children my but Gainsborough was good at children [Music] the Rococo invented childhood as we know it before the Rococo came along children were seen as many adults humankind in its imperfect early form in a world where half of all newborns died before they were five childhood was seen as something you survived the quicker you grew out of it the better [Music] wasn't until the Rococo years that childhood began to be recognized as something precious which needed to be protected and enjoyed a brief and beautiful moment of innocence and freedom as Russo the influential French philosopher and champion of childhood put it to all those parents afraid their kids were now doing nothing is it nothing to happy nothing to run and jump all day give nature time to work before taking over her business [Music] I think this is my favorite painting of children in the whole of Art there are a couple of picassos that are in this sort of league but nothing else [Music] these are actually gainsborough's own daughters Margaret on the left Mary on the right she was five and she was six the two girls skipped through a wood Chasing a Butterfly Margaret reaches out to grab it while Mary the older one holds back I love that yellow dress she's wearing it's a Triumph a flashing Rococo brush Strokes as it's dashingly done doesn't mean it's Carefree yes the Rococo chased after pleasure but it wasn't always blind to the consequences look where the butterflies landed a thorn bush uh oh when Margaret grabs it she'll prick her hand so what we've got here is a doting dad who happens to be an artist of Genius warning his daughters of the dark reality that lies ahead when childhood finishes this begins tragically the symbolism of the butterfly and the thorn bush turned out to be horribly pertinent [Music] it's almost as if Gainsborough had some kind of premonition his beloved daughters pop up often in his art and you can watch their lives unraveling in these exceptionally tender pictures this one here Mary made a disastrous marriage to a German oboe player called Johan Christian Fisher that's his music you can hear playing [Music] decent composer Dreadful husband [Music] the marriage lasted a year by which time poor Mary had begun to lose her mind [Music] Margaret meanwhile remained a lifelong spinster and when her sister's life fell apart she moved in with her and the two of them lived out their old age together how spooky that Gainsborough managed somehow to Intuit all this [Music] back at Versailles the adults of the Rococo were also having trouble growing up welcome to the world's largest dolls house this is the fake Village built at Versailles for Marian Antoinette the notorious queen of Louis XVI it was built between 1783 and 1787. and every single inch of it is a fantasy the hamo de la Ren the Queen's Hamlet as it's called was meant to look like a village in Normandy with these dinky half-timbered cottages and the useful front Gardens filled with picture book cabbages [Music] most of the fake Village actually worked this Dairy here was a functioning Dairy and once the servants had washed down the cows for her Marie Antoinette would do the milking a elf using porcelain buckets made specially for her by the sand factory [Music] in real life of course Marie Antoinette didn't have a rural bone in her body she was the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor an Austrian Arch Duchess bred and brought up to rule the plebs but that was in real life in the Queen's Hamlet this extraordinary full-size rural theater set the Austrian Arch Duchess could play it being a modest milk made tending her flock oh the queen would wonder about her Village dressed as a simple country girl in a plain muslin dress and a straw hat she actually lived in this extra large Cottage here The Bijou two-story Cottage in her virtual ammo Marie Antoinette could be someone else no longer the much hated queen of France wasting the nation's money on fancy fripperies but a simple country lass leading a simple Country Life the usual way to understand all this crazy rural escapism is to see it as a display of decadence the grotesque Rococo descent into falsehood and hedonism Marie Antoinette and her Versailles milk Maids drifting further and further away from reality thank you so part of something bigger something more prescient a prediction if you like of how the world would go these days lots of people pour out of the city and into the countryside fantasizing about the rural way of life the hamo de la Ren in Versailles is a giant version of the country cottage somewhere to flee at weekends from the pressures of City living [Music] to the Cotswolds Marie Antoinette could afford to make the Cotswolds come to her this great rural Grand Design of hers wasn't just an escape it was also a vision of the future [Music] did you know that the word School comes from the ancient Greek surely which means leisure time or play it's like Plato says here in this famous laws games and play are a crucial part of our education it's where we really learn about life but that was in ancient Greece I'm not so sure the same thing applies to Rococo France the Relentless make-believe which characterizes the Rococo's Pursuit of Happiness and pops up so often in its art doesn't seem particularly educational to me more like a way of being naughty without making it obvious I don't know if you've ever played hot cockles it's a Christmas game it's very popular in the Rococo the rules of hot cockles are basic to the point of being inane one person lays his head on the lap of another person while someone else spanks them from behind on the bottom oh uh the point of the game is to Guess Who spanked you and if you get it right you get to spank them next [Music] so it's a silly game but the reason the Rococo liked it and why that quintessential Rococo painter Jean honoree fragonar painted it was because hot cockles had a powerful erotic undertone men get to lay their heads in the laps of women and women get to lay their heads in the laps of men and then they spank each other I wonder why that caught on in Rococo France fragonar was a pupil of bouchers specialized in Sly paintings of Rococo people having fun but he wasn't all bad look at the way he uses that exciting new Rococo color yellow was the most exciting user of yellow art had so far seen not so good however is the clunky eroticism that distinguishes his art his most famous picture the swing is spectacularly naughty it's just not immediately obvious [Music] who doesn't love a swing swings provide such childish and innocent pleasure but not in the Rococo in Rococo times anyone looking at fragonard's swing would have known immediately what was really going on here [Music] the movement of the swing up and down was a notorious sexual illusion as for the lover on the ground well what can he be looking at it would be her underwear except of course that in Rococo times there was no underwear [Music] another telling joke in the swing is that the chap on the ground the one looking up the girl's skirt is in the exact pose of Michelangelo's Adam on the Sistine ceiling and we all know what happened to Adam when he took a bite of Eve's Apple so all these games the Rococo played which fragonar painted so slyly weren't really games at all they were pretenses deceits secret ways of being naughty a world obsessed with having fun was losing its moral bearings and no one was certain anymore where real life ended and fantasy began [Music] [Applause] what's real and what isn't where do the games stop and real life begin the Rococo era never could tell the difference this is a very Rococo location perhaps the most Rococo location in London Madame two swords and that's Madame Tussaud herself wax artist extraordinaire that's her self-portrait as a young girl Madame Tussaud was taught wax modeling by a doctor her mother worked for he took her under his arm and shared his forensic skills with her she got so good at it that in 1780 she was appointed art tutor to Louis xvi's sister Madame Elizabeth and for the next 10 years she lived in Versailles and watched its downfall [Music] when the French Revolution broke out in 1789 Tucson was also arrested but she talked her way out of it and began making Death Masks of those who'd been sent to the guillotine the wax models she made of the decapitated heads were put on these poles and then paraded through the streets like Flags she made Louis xvi's death mask and this one here is Mary Antoinette this then was where the pursuit of happiness would eventually lead and how very Rococo of the Rococo that even in death it couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy so far in this series I've been enjoying the pleasures of the Rococo the good news but you can't drift as far away from reality as the Rococo did without losing your bearings and in the next film we'll be looking at what happens in Rococo art when reality creeps out and darkness Creeps in [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] so far in this series we've concentrated on the good news from the Rococo travel pleasure The Pursuit of Happiness although it lasted most of the 18th century the Rococo was Art happy hour when much fun was held by many unfortunately there's a downside when you spend as much energy as the Rococo did running away from reality there comes a time when unreality becomes the norm well Common Sense gives way to Madness and the Darkness sets in and that's what this film is about The Madness of the Rococo the monsters that crawl out of the dark when reason has had too much to drink and the artistic imagination goes on the prowl we're going to see some very queer things Goya for instance was there ever an artist who explored the dark more energetically than Goya [Music] or Messer Schmidt France savior messerschmidt from Austria what kind of a sculptor in what kind of an age produces art s and then there's love ah yes long [Music] observer-in-chief of Venetian decadence who looked in the mask and found another list it's all that's coming up as we explore Rococo's dark side but first we're going to Britain where the madness flourished particularly fiercely and where some very strange people made some very strange appearances in some very strange art oh allow me to introduce you to Sir Francis dating fantasist and inveterate Rococo dress her up this believe it or not is dashwood too in his guys as a Turkish sultan and here he is again as the pope worshiping a topless goddess [Music] what's the maddest of these mad Rococo depictions of Sir Francis dashwood it's surely this one painted by William Hogarth dashwood as a monk pretending to be Saint Francis of Assisi in most countries a man like this would be arrested and put into a mental home but in Rococo Britain he was encouraged to enter politics held several important government posts and eventually became Chancellor of the exchequer dashwood's career has a familiar ring to it he went to Eaton painted here by caneletto where he made was important bullet friendships he was a Tory and in his younger days before he became Chancellor of the exchecker dashwood was a key member of various drinking clubs including the most notorious of them all the help [Music] the hellfire club was a gentleman's club with a religious bent its members who included many of the leading politicians of the time dressed up as monks and they called themselves brother they met in these spooky caves in West Wickham were they managed somehow to combine anti-catholicism with drinking watch and winching no one knows for sure what the hellfire club got up to down here it's all very mysterious but some information did seep out dashwood dressed as Saint Francis would leave the pretending months through a series about rage religious ceremonies [Music] then they're all getting immensely drunk and turn their attention to the prostitutes that invited along to their black ass so here we are slap in the middle of the so-called Enlightenment yet here is half the government dressed up as monks drinking themselves stupid and chasing after pretend nuns in a cave that's why I love the Rococo it's completely body according to rumors Hogarth was also a member of the hellfire club he was definitely associated with it in some way very strange portrait of dashwoods Saint Francis Hogarth shows the chancellor of the exchecker worshiping a crucified instead of a Bible he's reading a pornographic novel and the fruit at his feet has taken a naughty form and looks like [Music] is usually thought of as the first truly Great British painter and who looked more like his pug than his pug did was another run Coco frequenter a drink [Music] in 1732 he became a Founder member of something called the sublime order of roast beefs a patriotic eating club and drinking Club when Mighty roast beef was the englishman's food it nobled our hearts and enriched our blood our soldiers were Brave and our cultures were good [Music] [Music] our fathers of old were robust out and strong and kept open house with good cheer all day long Burpee rude tone you get in hogarth's art it's the tone of the tavern in the modern world you still get it at football matches all that swearing smocking of the opposition the jingoism oh Sully those owners which once Shawn in Fame it's all good fun they say [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign the devil is always in the details and in Calais gate his most famous picture there's a lot going on that's very unpleasant ballet gate or the roast beef of old England as it's properly called shows a busy French street with Hogarth himself lurking in the crowd you can actually see him there in the picture about to be arrested and all this is based on a real event in 1748 Hogarth went over to Calais and while sketching the city Gates he was detained as a spy by the French police disinfuriated him immensely and as soon as he got back to London he got his revenge quite painting this picture now the city walls were part of Calais defenses and the British had only just finished their War With The Fringe so drawing the city defenses at such a time was very foolish of course he was going to get arrested but what's really unpleasant here is the religious nastiness of this picture the dark anti-catholic ideas that are being expressed here Hogarth the set is seen in the build-up to Easter lent when French Catholics were not supposed to eat meat so the British taverns hungry for the roast beef of old England had to import it specially from home and this great slab of British beef has just arrived at the port this fat french fryer here fingering the side of beef he's quite funny and these hungry French soldiers having to make do with a thin gruel they're pretty funny too but what isn't so funny is what's going on in the rest of the picture but here at the front on the left there are three hideous nuns worshiping her dried out fish the fish remember was a traditional symbol of Christ so this comic fish's face is a giggling and perverse reference to the true face of Christ that was said to have been left on Veronica's veil when she wiped his dying face in a Catholic mass at the climax of the mass the moment of communion the holy wafer and the Goblet of wine become the body and blood of Jesus it's the center of Catholic belief this idea of transubstantiation and that is what Hogarth is mocking here at the back of the picture a Catholic priest outside a Tavern is handing out the communion wafer to his congregation while the English eat good old English beef the French get Jesus as a wife and right at the top in the most unpleasant detail of all a crow has landed on a cross and it's hungry beak has begun pecking uselessly but Jesus's symbolic body one shorty in France [Music] [Music] so beneath the Rococo's geology there was Darkness and beneath its beauty there was Darkness too ever wondered why women try to make their faces whiter by using make [Music] this thing goes back long before the Rococo if you were poor you worked Outdoors right so you got suntand and the moment somebody saw you they knew you were poor with paleness the opposite was true if you were pale you stayed indoors enjoying your leisure so your skin was white a condition that found particular favor in the Rococo it wasn't just the women either there were plenty of Michael Jackson's out there as well trying desperately to look less dark than they were women who really suffered and among whom the fiercest tragedies were enacted this mirror a beautiful Georgian mirror made by William lynell in 1759 this mirror used to belong to a famous Rococo Beauty called Maria gunning Maria gunning came from Ireland her family was poor so she became an actress and wowed them with her looks first in Dublin and then in London she arrived in London in 1751 she was 18 and quickly became the Angelina Jolie of her times a celebrity actress famed for her beauty [Music] when Maria went by in her carriage crowds would line the streets in the hope of glimpsing her she got so famous her Shoemaker began charging people six months just to see her shoes [Music] so it didn't take her long to find herself an Earl and in 1752 she married the Earl of Coventry and settled down to a life of being beautiful this is the actual mirror he bought for her which used to hang above the mantle piece in her dressing room [Music] every day Maria gunning would spend hours eating her face getting ready to appear before her doting her blank and soon enough that's what killed her the watch that she used was made of lead white which achieves excellent coverage but the lid began combining with the moisture in her skin to form an acid that began eating away at her face cover up these patches where her skin had fallen off Maria gunning would apply even more whiterer the Rouge on her cheeks a fashion imported from France where the country girl look became briefly popular was made from lead paste and Cinnabar a waste product of mercury mining so Rouge gave you lead poisoning and mercury poisoning [Music] as for her lipstick Maria gunning liked to use mercuric fucus seaweed extract with a particularly High concentration of Mercury so the acid ate away at her skin the lead poisoned her the mercury seeped into her veins and as the sores grew ever more visible so more and more makeup was needed to cover them she died at the age of 27 and spent her final year in a darkened room when no one could see her [Music] lovely George II guiltwood over mantle mirror given to her by her husband with its exuberant acanthus Scrolls and its brimming basket of flowers would have seen all this and the poor mirror must have thought to itself human beings a couldn't make them up back in Venice history clearly headed in for the city of Mars and the good times were now numbered ski Dutch and English had stolen the most important trade routes and Venice was no longer the gateway to the east its Naval power had crumble so as we saw in film one the one about travel Rococo Venice needed to reinvent itself as a tourist trap to attract the loose of increasingly crucial Grand tourists the serenisi man had turned itself into the International Center of European naughtiness the drinking was your Vice gambling or chasing after women and men then Venice was the place for you the best time to go was of course Carnival time when you could wear a mask be as decadent as you wanted no one knew who you are fortunately for us to record this immense social naughtiness Venice managed to produce one more great painter he was born Pierre Antonio falca but we know him better by his Rococo stage name Pietro longy fungi was the Venetian Hogarth irical nosy Parker keeping his eye on his fellow citizens but because he was a Venetian longhi could never be as burpee and Beary as Hogarth [Music] longy's tactic was to charm the truth he'd giggled and it's sweet talk until he was close enough to peek behind the mask [Music] you could wear a mask in Venice from Saint Stephen's Day as the 26th of December till shrove Tuesday so that's three months or so and also from October the 5th to Christmas so that's another three months so for nearest damn six months of the year the venetians could go about pretending they weren't who they were [Music] the Venetian mask had various purposes in the cramped streets of Venice it was a way of hiding in full view of your fellows [Music] and it was particularly useful in the gambling dens where no one knew who you were or how much you owned women wore a mask called a moreta which means the dark lady they were oval and you kept them in place with your teeth biting onto a little button inside oh so a woman in amaretta couldn't speak without her mask falling off giving away her identity and Venetian women evolved a subtle language of Silent flirtation an inclination of the head a flutter of the eyelashes the nod a wink [Music] the men meanwhile or a white mask called a bouter shaped like a face except for the bottom which stuck out like a projecting chin so you could eat and drink and gossip while wearing it the Venetian bauter wasn't just worn at carnival time it had a political role too Venetian Nobles wore them but important decision-making events so they could cast their votes anonymously please but the chief role of the Mask was to hide the darkness Within Phoenician Society had grown decadent and rotten and he didn't want everyone to know [Music] this interesting longy painting called the charlatan chose a phony doctor vlogging his Wares at carnival time in the dark arcades of the Doge's Palace but the real charlatan here is the anonymous nobleman in the foreground who makes a cruise grand for a passing woman's skirt we'll never know exactly what's going on in longy's art his symbolism is too twisted and Venetian we've lost touch with too many of its secret meanings but one thing we can be sure of is there are no heroes in his pictures no one we should look up to so what have you got [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] elongi's art the corrupt the flighty the ridiculous have elbowed out the gods and the heroes and grabbed the leading roles in Rococo Venice it wasn't the meek who inherited the Earth but the schemes the mountains the charlatans so the pleasure capital of Europe was Awash with naughtiness whatever your Vice Venice catered for it but vices cost money and if you didn't have any and got into debt then they sent you somewhere very Rococo prison the prison island of Santo Stefano busy Rococo location well the hellish history times Nero's wife Octavia was exiled here a couple of thousand years later this is where Mussolini sent his political prisoners but it got really interesting in Rococo times when Santos Stefano led the way in prison architecture prisons played a huge part in the Rococo they were crucial in literature for instance Casanova that archetypal Rococo Seducer was in and out of prison and his life story full of prison escapades [Music] the Marquis De sard was another one an archetypal Rococo Rogue who did all his best work locked up [Music] foreign specialized in prisons and here at Santo Stefano there's a unique survival of the Rococo's biggest and darkest prison idea [Music] he's one of the Rococo's weirdest presences and he's still with us well at least bits of hip-hop Bentham left his corpse to University College London and every day his Rococo skeleton goes on display encased in a pretend body stuffed with horse hair [Music] as for his head well they keep that in a box it only gets taken out on special occasions [Music] Bentham was a social philosopher constantly thinking up better ways for us to live and he invented a new way of thinking called utilitarianism utilitarianism's big idea was that usefulness brought happiness so everything should be really really useful as especially prison according to Bentham the greatest happiness of the greatest number was the measure of right and wrong so whatever made a prison work best that's what you need to do so he invented a new type of prison called a panopticon [Music] and he persuaded the English government to help him develop it and his plan was to build one of these in London exactly where Tate Britain is today and it would have looked much like this the panopticon was round and its big idea was that the prisoners on the perimeter could be spied on constantly by the guards watching the center it was all about surveillance How could a few people keep track of lots of people in a panoptagon the cells went all the way around and in the middle was an observation tower patrolled by the guards and this observation tower had blinds in it Venetian blinds as it happens so the guards could watch the prisoners but the prisoners could never be sure if they were being watched or not it's a very Sinister idea Port Bentham was trying to engineer with his Rococo panopticon was a situation in which the prisoners controlled themselves in their imaginations they always believed they were being watched so they could never feel unwatched or Bentham was right the modern world is being invented here and it's sophisticated surveillance with the CCTV Ika building doesn't have to be round anymore but the panopticon's big idea that the few can spy on the many survived once he'd invented his panopticon Bentham wanted to expand its use hospitals could be based on this model he said mad houses and even schools [Music] so as the Rococo slipped ever deeper into the Blackness of its own ending craziness of Jeremy bentham's Daft ideas cease slowly to appear so crazy and began to look more and more like the norm when the Rococo Uncorked the inner man and pushed him out onto Art's stage it made public bits of the mind that had previously remained private Vienna the Sigmund Freud would later tunnel so invasively into the human psyche what I wonder would Freud have made of the Rococo mindset that produced these were made by the Viennese sculptor France xaver messerschmidt and I know this is the Rococo and that all sorts of private fears and desires came bubbling up from the inner man but still they're particularly creepy aren't they [Music] born in the German Alps in 1736 Messerschmitt began his career as a conventional sculptor working for the Viennese Court here's his portrait of the emperor Francis the first and here's the Empress Maria Teresa competent yes special no so it was all going swimmingly he had a prestigious position at the court when suddenly something went wrong in about 1717 meters Schmidt began having hallucinations and bouts of paranoia and for no this discernible reason he began making these [Music] in 1774 he applied for a professor's job at the Vienna Academy of Art and was turned down better Schmidt they said were suffering and confusion foreign so he left for pressburg nowadays called Bratislava and for the final 10 years of his life these were all he did he called them his character his some were sculpted from Marvel others cast from lead they're basically self-portraits each one featuring a different Grimace in what messerschmidt claimed was a full catalog of the canonical grimaces of the human face 1781 a German writer called Friedrich Nikolai visited Messerschmitt in his Studio it's the only eyewitness account of him there is a messerschmidt explained to Nikolai that he was suffering from intense pains in his abdomen the illness has since been diagnosed as Crohn's disease and to relieve these sharp pains metashmit would pinch himself hard in the stomach and then he'd record the expression on his face in these extraordinary heads there was more scattered about the studio were bits and pieces of occult imagery books on Magic thank you Mr Schmidt told Nikolai he was a follower of Hermes trisma gistus the ancient occult God whose name has given us the modern adjective hermetic according to Hermes trisma gistus our duty on Earth is to pursue a universal balance as above so below was his Doctrine unfortunately messerschmidt's sculptures had angered the spirit of proportion an ancient being who protected these occult secrets and so angry was the spirit of proportion with metashmit for making these that he began visiting him at night and subjecting him terrible torches this particular head the beak it's called is a record of one of these ghastly nights and of what happened in the mind of France saver messerschmidt when the spirit of proportion commenced his torture [Music] only the Rococo could have come up with an artistic storyline like this one oh that craze for wearing masks and costumes that we saw in longies paintings swapping identities pretending you're someone else that wasn't just a Venetian craze it caught on all over the Rococo World particularly in France [Music] oh you'll remember in the last film and we admired the art of Antoine what it is [Music] all those mysterious couples are flirting strolling searching for love who are they and why are they dressed like that [Laughter] should recognize him he's harlequin and he appears in lots of Otto paintings and so does he Piero and they're all characters from the Comedia de latte [Music] the Comedia de latte was a type of traveling theater originally from Italy was toward Rococo Europe mountain spontaneous on the spot entertainment [Music] they turn up at your village and put on a show like fairs today or the circus and the main characters were always the same Harlequin Piero but the stories were constantly changing improvised especially for the day the usual explanation for the presence of these Comedia Del Arte characters in what Ozark is that they're part of the Rococo's escape from reality a symbolic blurring of the Divide between real life and the theater [Music] there's definitely some of that going on votto's Art raises intriguing questions about the nature of reality and all that but I think the reason why the people in his pictures are wearing all these mixed up costumes is much simpler they're attending a fancy dress ball masquerades were all the rage in Rococo France they were notoriously decadent full of flirtation and Intrigue and the most popular costumes to wear at a masquerade the ones who could rent most easily off the shelf were the Camellia de lante costumes which everyone knew if you were going to a fancy dress ball in the Rococo era you hired a Comedia de latte costume and they were still popular a few centuries later as Bertie Worcester puts it in right ho Jeeves by PG Woodhouse for costume parties every well-bred Englishman dresses as Piero one walked out painting in particular his Masterpiece I think pokes about so interestingly in the deeper meanings of this Rococo identity swapping a gangly young man in a Piero costume stands before us looking nervous the costume doesn't fit properly it's too big for him looking off the peg morning suit hired cheaply for a wedding in Comedia Del Arte shows Piero the sad clown is always chasing after the beautiful Columbine she prefers The Dashing Harlequin you know how women always go for the bad boys so she rejects poor Piero over and over and over again [Music] unlucky in love unlucky in everything watto's Piero is so palpably human and vulnerable yes he's had a go at being someone else in his ill-fitting costume but he's not very good at it is he oh [Music] this isn't Humanity disguised it's Humanity revealed what we've got here and this is so brilliant is a painter who's using costumes not to escape reality but to confront it [Music] the sad clown has become a bit of a cliche but the Rococo invented him and what owes Piero first and greatest of them [Music] so it was all getting darker all over Europe the naysayers were taking over art dredging up the black stuff from their imaginations [Music] and the loudest nose could be heard in Spain when the incomparable Goya turned up on the front line of Art every now and then an artist comes along who doesn't just do things differently but who actually tears up the rule book reinvents what art can and should do Goya was one of those this first notable successes in art were the Rococo tapestries he designed for the Royal Court in Madrid they're supposed to be jolly and sweet in a typical Rococo fashion and some of them are but others aren't tapestry designs brought Goya to the attention of the Spanish royal family as with most royal families they were hungry for artistic immortality and so foolishly very foolishly they invited Goya to paint their portraits the result was a display of Royal mockery on a scale unimaginable in any other Epoch only at the tail end of the rococoya had gone away with this damning portrayal of Charles IV and his family with its Staffing determination to tell it like it is and just look what he made the next king in the line Ferdinand the seventh the ugliest King in art the desperate down chin the half-formed mouth The Wolverine sideburns If This Were Your King you'd want a republic wouldn't you [Music] Goya was born without the flattery Gene he was incapable of diplomacy and when he looked at the world around him and saw stupidity evil Darkness he just couldn't help himself he had to point it out to us [Music] in his private paintings the ones he made for himself it all comes tumbling out here's the casa de Locos the mad house a terrifying Stone jail where the crazies have taken over and all manner of unmentionable Acts are performed here's the inquisition come to church to judge the Dunces and then to torture them oh here's a procession of penitence in Holy Week who don't need the Inquisition to torture them because they're so Keen to torture themselves that's Goya there sleep slumped over his desk with all these monsters pouring out of his head the sleep of Reason produces monsters is written on the desk this was going to be the title played of the Rococo's most inventive and Brilliant torrent of Darkness the great Suite of etchings known as goya's Caprices [Music] the original copper plates from which these etchings were made are now found in the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid we get a chance to see them take it because they bring you so close to Goya the capricos are always exciting but they're particularly exciting when you press your nose against them and Savor the beautiful scratchings of goya's Bureau this is graphic art a spectacular freedom and wildness in this dark Cascade of 80 scabbarous images this describing the horrors of the world around him Goya poured out all his discipline [Music] who invented the graphic novel Goya who invented Frankenstein's monster Goya invented zombies Goya who invented scarecrows horror movies and even Harry Potter Goya [Music] pretty much every contemporary Darkness you can name is prefigured in the capricos they're astonishingly prescient and Goya knew all this about the monsters produced by the sleep of reason because they were his monsters too under the strain of all this Brilliant Invention his remarkable mind began to buckle first he started going deaf then the panic attacks began soon his own private Horror climaxed in a nervous breakdown on the walls of his house outside Madrid he began painting his famous black paintings and surrounding himself with their horror the witches and monsters were no longer a dream they were there moved into his house and living on his walls in Venice as well events have now lurched into blackness in 1796 Napoleon invaded Italy and quickly conquered the serenity [Music] the Venetian Republic which had lasted for a thousand years was abruptly terminated Napoleon carted off some of venice's greatest art Treasures to Paris as War booty a thousand years of History snuffed out just like that [Music] so for politics is what terrible times but for art they were really interesting this is the carazoniko venice's official Museum of the 18th century and those are the only two caneletos in Venice Grim ones from his early days but that's not what we're here for we're here for this now that is a strange Fresco right it was painted by Domenico tiepolo son of the great Jam Baptista if you remember in film one there was that magnificent staircase in verzberg painted by tiepolo senior and remember the two portraits in the corner on the left and on the right is San Domenico who assisted [Music] tipolo Junior domenicotiepolo was a really interesting painter too but while his father was alive no one was going to notice him [Music] poor Domenico was fated to spend most of his career in his father's shadow it was only when tiapolo senior died in 1770 but Domenico came into his own these strange frescoes were painted for the tiepolo family house The Villa zienego on the mainland and they were done for his own Amusement privately that's what makes them so telling [Music] this one here was in the entrance hall imagine you walk into the tiepalo family house and all these people turn their back on you why because they'd prefer to look at the Magic Lantern show taking place in the background in Napoleon's Venice Amusement was what the crowd craved not art so that was the entrance hall but look what tiepolo Junior painted at the back of the house a room full of pochinellas well Janella was another character in The chlamydia de latte a hunchback with a big nose deceitfulness was legendary this has to be one of the most inventive and outrageous Fresco Cycles in the whole of Italian art all these pulchinellas haven't just visited the room they've overrun it [Music] felt like a troop of monkeys in a zoo and I think that's what they're actually meant to be human monkeys clambering all over the modern world ugly itchy and ridiculous [Music] well chanella the lecturus Venetian scoundrel has taken over the Fresco spaces formerly occupied by guards and heroes where once this ceiling would have shown Apollo riding his chariot oh Jesus ascending to Heaven there's now a circus show with a bunch of pulcinellas clambering along a tightrope welcome to Domenico tiapolo to the modern world you know Pulcinella here the ugly Rococo Hunchback was the model for punch in those Punch and Judy shows you still see at the seaside and he's always hitting Judy over the head just like that [Music] and that's the thing about the Rococo it never really went away it's us in our early form in film one we saw a society that was always going on holiday in film two celebrity and pleasure became the order of the day and now in film three the clowns have taken over and nothing serious anymore the Rococo wasn't just a great creative era it was a great creative prediction foreign

Channel: Perspective

Views: 264,715

Keywords: history documentaries, art history documentaries, art and culture documentary, TV Shows - Topic, art history, Documentary movies - topic, tv shows - topic

Id: 8q4bT007D3s

Length: 179min 40sec (10780 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2023