The new series on Renaissance painting, written and presented by Matthew Collings, begins with an artistic investigation into one of the most radiant and beautiful images in all of art history, The Madonna of the Meadow, painted in 1505 by Raphael.
Renaissance art has become part of the 21st-century heritage industry but when Raphael was alive, it was a startling new form of visual expression, and Raphael's vibrant 'realism' was striking and fresh. It became the model for western art for the next 400 years, right up until the birth of Modernism.
As much as it was a cultural 'rebirth', the Renaissance was also a revolution in ideas about reality. Matthew Collings sets out to remind us of how radical Renaissance paintings were when they were made, as well as opening our eyes to what is still truly great about them. In this programme he deconstructs The Madonna of the Meadow with the help of the very latest high-resolution digital technology, which allows him to explore the inner secrets of Raphael's painterly effects with a clarity and at a level of detail never before seen on television.
As Matthew says, it is a journey 'to the other side of an illusion', revealing how Raphael created the alluring images that were so appealing to his wealthy Renaissance clients - including the Pope - and which entranced artists for centuries after his death. Matthew explains the secret to Raphael's vibrant colour harmonies, which the artist grasped intuitively, long before the advent of colour 'theory'; and Raphael also knew how to exploit colour effects to create the impression of extraordinary depth in his paintings.
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In the second programme of his new series on Renaissance painting, artist and writer Matthew Collings steps into the mysterious invented world of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, painted c.1505.
This imposing work, full of strange and fantastical details, contains one of the most famous images in all of art: a man with a tree for a body, who gazes out at us from the section of the painting representing hell. The tree-man's face is generally thought to be the artist's self-portrait but, like almost everything else about Hieronymus Bosch - including the meaning of this, his most famous painting - no one knows for sure.
Using the latest high-resolution digital technology, Matthew Collings is able to explore this extraordinary painting in minute detail and unravel some of the arcane messages that Bosch has woven into it through his use of symbols and unsettling inversions of scale - giant birds drop fruit into the mouths of nude humans, slithering creatures invade paradise, a devil-bird devours a man whole.
Just as the images in Bosch's painting were unusual for the Renaissance, his technique was also unconventional for the time. Bosch worked quickly with gloopy blobs of thick paint to conjure up the fine details of a fish's eye or the spines on the back of a porcupine from a few brushstrokes. The liveliness of Bosch's technique is one of the qualities that makes his painting seem strangely modern.
The Garden of Earthly Delights reflects the new way of thinking about the world that the Renaissance ushered in - ideas about free will and morality that challenged the old religious order and which posed a question: perhaps heaven and hell are not places your soul might end up in, but states of being that are always inside you?
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Matthew Collings concludes the series by looking at the invention of Renaissance painting.
The Baptism of Christ by Italian master Piero Della Francesca showed the household names of the High Renaissance how to use the big new trick of Renaissance painting - illusionism and perspective. Without him their achievements would have been impossible, but change came so rapidly in the Renaissance that the qualities that made Piero famous in his own time quickly went out of fashion.
The Baptism was bought for the National Gallery in 1861 and later Cezanne and Picasso saw him as the real deal: the authentic, honest Renaissance, a model for modern painting. Now he is so in tune with secular modern taste that a tourist trail links his work in the beautiful hills of Umbria, Tuscany, and a few galleries around the world who own a precious panel by him.
Collings follows his trail and hunts down the forensic detail in the highest-resolution images of paintings yet seen on television.
BBC2. 16-30 October 2010. 3 x 60 minutes on one disk.
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