- 5/19/2025
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00In the sixth year of Elizabeth I's reign,
00:09a young ambassador was summoned to the Queen's Palace
00:13for what turned out to be an unexpectedly intimate encounter.
00:21The ambassador was led through a series of rooms.
00:25Each one took him closer to the heart of the palace
00:29and to the heart of the Queen.
00:35First, he was led through the public rooms,
00:38where the general court gathered.
00:44Then he passed through into the presence chamber,
00:48which was for select courtiers only.
00:52And then the Queen herself emerged
00:56and led our man astonishingly into her bedchamber.
01:03Once inside, they talked of politics for a while,
01:07and then she led him over to a little cabinet and opened it.
01:14Inside the cabinet were some mysterious objects
01:18enclosed in paper.
01:20Elizabeth picked out one of these objects,
01:23she carefully unwrapped it,
01:25and then she revealed to the ambassador
01:28one of her most treasured possessions,
01:31a tiny, exquisite painting.
01:39What the Queen showed the young man was a miniature,
01:45a small, precious portrait meant for her eyes only.
01:53Discrete, private, even intimate,
01:56like so much in the Elizabethan Renaissance,
01:59this was an art that looked inwards,
02:02the art of a people obsessed with secrets.
02:09This was an age when poets wrote in codes.
02:14When artists filled paintings with mysterious symbols.
02:23And even buildings spoke in riddles.
02:29In this series, I argue that Britain had a renaissance
02:33as exciting as anything in Europe.
02:37A renaissance with its own style.
02:41Sometimes eccentric.
02:44Often dazzling.
02:47And peculiarly British.
02:50And in the Elizabethan age,
02:52we discovered a new sense of who we were
02:56and our place in the world.
03:11The year 1564, the year the ambassador called on the Queen,
03:16was a special year in the history of the Renaissance.
03:22It was the year that Michelangelo,
03:24the last great figure of the Florentine Renaissance, died.
03:28And it was also the year that the Queen was crowned.
03:32It was the year that the Queen was crowned.
03:35It was the year that the Queen was crowned.
03:38It was the year that the Queen died.
03:40And it was also the year that William Shakespeare,
03:43the greatest figure of the British Renaissance, was born.
03:46Now, it was a coincidence, of course,
03:48but it was a revealing coincidence.
03:51And for me, it symbolises a baton being passed,
03:54the moment when the British finally acquired the confidence
03:58to take the Renaissance their own way.
04:03In 1564, the country was at a crossroads.
04:09Isolated in Catholic Europe,
04:11Protestant England cut its ties with the continent
04:15and turned in on itself.
04:19And it was not long before a distinctive native art form emerged.
04:26In that year, a dashing young man was working as an apprentice in London.
04:32His name was Nicholas Hilliard.
04:36He had become the first great British painter.
04:40Although he didn't start out as one.
04:46Nicholas Hilliard was from a family of goldsmiths.
04:50His grandfather was a goldsmith.
04:52His father was a goldsmith.
04:54His uncle was a goldsmith.
04:56Two of his brothers were goldsmiths.
04:58He married the daughter of a goldsmith.
05:00And not wanting to rock the boat, Hilliard also became a goldsmith.
05:07Hilliard was apprenticed to the Queen's personal jeweller.
05:12And when he began to paint miniatures,
05:14he brought the painstaking precision of the goldsmith to his work.
05:20He set up a small studio in the city.
05:23And before long, the capital's guildsmen, lawyers and aristocrats
05:28were clamouring to have him paint their portraits.
05:32For Hilliard's intricate work
05:34was head and shoulders above the competition.
05:38And unlike anything seen on the continent.
05:42He was very skilful, very talented.
05:45He was the first portrait miniaturist
05:47to really create jewels on the painted surface.
05:51No miniaturist has done that before him.
05:53So, Alan, do you want to show us what you've got in your box?
05:56Alan Derbyshire was a goldsmith.
06:00Alan Derbyshire, at London's Victoria and Albert Museum,
06:04knows Hilliard's techniques like the back of his own hand.
06:08So this is a portrait miniature by Nicholas Hilliard.
06:12She's smiling at us.
06:14Unknown woman, we don't know who the sitter is.
06:16Right.
06:17We can place it under the microscope
06:19and have a look at the techniques that Hilliard used.
06:21Let's do that. OK.
06:22Oh, this is exciting. Oh, and it's coming up there. Yep.
06:25I think one of the key things Hilliard did
06:27when he was painting these miniatures,
06:29he has almost a three-dimensionality to them. Right.
06:31You can imagine the 16th century when someone picked up a miniature,
06:34they would have held it in the hand and turned it with candlelight
06:37or the light coming from a window or something,
06:39and they get a real sense of the structure
06:42and the texture of the miniature. Yes.
06:44What Alan finds most striking about Hilliard's pictures
06:48are the exquisite painted jewels.
06:51This is the earring, and that's a pearl, a drop pearl.
06:55And you can see this has been created using lead white,
06:58and the black dot would actually have been a silver highlight.
07:02He must have had incredible eyesight,
07:04an incredibly steady hand as well. I think so.
07:06I mean, sometimes I wonder whether some of those touches
07:09were placed using magnification of some kind.
07:11And here we've got what remains of a ruby.
07:14So do you think you've figured out how he painted his rubies?
07:17We think we've got a good idea, yeah.
07:19The first thing he would have done is take some silver paint.
07:23Why would your foundation be silver?
07:25So it's going to act as a reflector. Right.
07:27So it gets the light shimmering through the jewel. Exactly.
07:30Yeah. And then we're going to burnish it,
07:32using a burnish made from a little animal tooth.
07:37So now we need to take the body of the ruby.
07:40Now, that's made by mixing turpentine resin with the pigments.
07:47Silly me thought that Hilliard's miniatures were painted with paintbrushes.
07:51He's got a needle as well. Yep.
07:54So you're just dropping it on top of the silver. Yep.
07:58And what you might see as well,
08:00you're getting a little tail of the varnish.
08:04So that's gone back into a nice globular shape now.
08:07So can we take a look at your handiwork under the microscope?
08:10It's not going to be as good as Hilliard's, but we can have a look.
08:13That is incredibly impressive, actually.
08:16It's not bad.
08:19And Hilliard was clearly a very clever man.
08:24Hilliard's miniatures were not intended for public display.
08:29They were private gifts,
08:31exchanged between lovers, held close to the heart.
08:36And Hilliard filled them with a secret symbolism
08:40that the Elizabethans adored.
08:44Now, this is one of Hilliard's most perplexing images.
08:50It shows a man, a very elegant young man,
08:53clutching an anonymous hand from the clouds.
08:57Now, we don't know who he is,
08:59although virtually every man in Elizabethan England has been a candidate,
09:02including, actually, the young William Shakespeare.
09:05But we're pretty certain about its meaning,
09:08that this miniature is a gesture of devotion.
09:13It has a Latin inscription on it,
09:15and it reads,
09:17ATICI AMORES ERGO,
09:20eloquent because of love.
09:24Now, it's probably some kind of in-joke.
09:26It's probably this man saying to the owner of that hand,
09:29I'm crazy about you, and I can't stop talking about it.
09:35But Hilliard's most recognisable miniature is surely this one.
09:40The Young Man Amongst Roses, painted in 1587.
09:47Now, I'm going to make a confession.
09:50If I could steal any artwork from any art gallery,
09:54it would probably be this one.
09:57And like so many of these miniatures, it is a declaration of love.
10:01This man is clutching his heart.
10:04Now, we don't know for certain who he is,
10:08but we're pretty sure who he's in love with.
10:11You just have to follow the clues.
10:13So, he is surrounded by white roses,
10:17and white roses were the flowers of the Queen.
10:21And he is wearing black and white clothes,
10:24a rather fetching black fur jacket and some white tights.
10:28And black and white were the colours of the Queen.
10:31So, this man is in love with Queen Elizabeth.
10:36But there's a problem.
10:39He is clearly in his early 20s,
10:42and when this picture was painted, Elizabeth was not only in her 50s,
10:46but Virgin Queen, famously unavailable.
10:49And that's why, at the top, there is a motto in Latin that reads,
10:53My praised faith brings suffering.
10:57In short, he's lovesick.
11:01Hilliard's little miniatures are a world away
11:05from the extravagant frescoes and vast statues of the Italian Renaissance.
11:12Intimate, private, coded,
11:15they have a distinctly British discretion.
11:20But not everyone wanted to be discreet.
11:23The Elizabethans didn't just want coded portraits in their pockets.
11:28Increasingly, they wanted them on their walls.
11:39Elizabethan portraits have always had a special place in their hearts.
11:46Elizabethan portraits have always had a bad press.
11:51Again and again, they've been compared to work by the great Italian masters,
11:56and again and again, they've been found wanting.
11:59They've repeatedly been branded provincial, primitive and second-rate.
12:04Yet I think they were, in their own way, masterpieces of the Renaissance.
12:09We just need to look at them differently.
12:15These were pictures for Britain's newly rich.
12:23And neither artists nor subjects cared if they looked lifelike.
12:32Take the Chumley sisters.
12:35They look like they've just been assembled from a flat pack.
12:40But for the artist, it was pattern, not personality, that counted.
12:48The Elizabethans also crammed their portraits
12:51with Latin inscriptions and arcane symbols.
12:55The results were often very odd.
13:00This picture celebrates the marriage of two devout Christians,
13:04complete with special guest.
13:10But above all, Elizabethan portraits told stories.
13:16The stories of their Renaissance sitters.
13:22Now, I want to ask you about this one.
13:24This is one of the most unusual Elizabethan paintings that survives.
13:28Yeah, this is a portrait of Henry Unton,
13:31who is an ambassador and a soldier under Elizabeth I's reign.
13:35With a very big head. A huge, great head.
13:38I think what's lovely about this picture
13:40is that it's commissioned by his wife after his death.
13:44It's a visual obituary, if you like, of Unton's life.
13:48It starts off right down here.
13:51He's been born here and this is his mother.
13:54And then you next see him when he goes up to Oxford
13:57and there he appears again.
13:59Is this him sitting in the window?
14:01He's sitting in the window and he's at Oriel College in Oxford in the 1570s.
14:05And then he goes to Venice, across the Alps,
14:09but later on, in the 1580s, he fights in the Low Countries
14:13and there is an encampment and a battle,
14:15fighting with the Earl of Leicester.
14:17And then he becomes ambassador to France and you see France here.
14:22So this top bit, this is like his CV.
14:24It is, absolutely.
14:25This is all the kind of wonderful public work that he's done
14:28in the service of the Crown.
14:30And what you see in this little room here
14:32is this tragic scene of Unton's death.
14:34And he's in his deathbed and this is the hearse
14:37and the horses, which are draped in black, as you can see here.
14:41And then it's coming into the house
14:43and then you have the funeral procession along here.
14:47All these remarkably haunting figures in black.
14:50This isn't just a painted portrait, it's a painted biography, isn't it?
14:53Exactly.
14:54And that's why when people criticise Elizabethan portraits
14:57and they say, well, they're not creating great likenesses,
15:00this is a different kind of likeness, but it's an extraordinary likeness
15:03to be told in the space of just one panel.
15:05And it's absolutely charming.
15:07When would you get this much detail, visual detail, about someone's life?
15:10You often hear through letters and things what people did,
15:13but actually seeing this is absolutely extraordinary
15:16because it captures a real flavour of the Elizabethan period.
15:20But for me, the most intriguing of all Elizabethan portraits
15:26is virtually unknown.
15:29For years, this beguiling Renaissance image
15:33has been locked away in the stores of the Northampton Art Gallery.
15:40So this is a portrait of a young woman
15:45So this is a portrait of one of Queen Elizabeth's favourite courtiers,
15:50Sir Christopher Hatton.
15:52But it's very much more than a portrait
15:55because Hatton, with his marvellous moustache, of which I'm very jealous,
15:59is surrounded by a complex array of figures, inscriptions and emblems.
16:05So up here on the right, that is a coat of arms.
16:08And it has, if you look closely, the golden hind.
16:11That's where Francis Drake got the name for his famous ship.
16:14And down here, we have an artist painting a painting of Hatton.
16:18So there's a kind of picture within a picture here.
16:21So at first sight, this painting seems to be
16:24a kind of great big British Renaissance status symbol.
16:30But it's more than that,
16:32because this painting isn't just a portrait of Hatton's present.
16:36It's also a portrait of his future.
16:39Surrounding Hatton are personifications of the seven planets.
16:43And outside them, the 12 signs of the zodiac.
16:47So this is, essentially, Hatton's horoscope.
16:50And his destiny is very promising indeed,
16:53because underneath here, an inscription,
16:56the speech bubble, if you like, reads,
16:59''Destined for eternity.''
17:01But don't be fooled by the optimism,
17:04because this great confident image of a Renaissance figure
17:07is completely overturned when you look at the other side.
17:22So here, on the back, is a figure of Father Time, Tempus.
17:27And underneath him are the three ages of life.
17:31On the left, youth is represented.
17:35On the left, youth is represented by a dancing couple.
17:39Now, Hatton was a famously good dancer,
17:41perhaps the best dancer in England.
17:43Middle age is represented by a woman unrolling the thread of life.
17:48And on the right, death is represented by an urn.
17:52But even more astonishing is this inscription down here,
17:55because at the very end of that inscription,
17:57the painting reveals its true purpose.
18:00''Hoc me vestibulo posuit debuit hoc pigros solicitai viros.''
18:05''I was put in this room as a lesson to rouse lazy men.''
18:10And this painting would probably have hung
18:13in the entrance hall of Hatton's house,
18:15and it would have greeted his visitors with the message,
18:18''Come on, guys, seize the day. You haven't got long before you die.''
18:24Hatton's portrait proves that British Renaissance painting
18:28was far from primitive and backwards.
18:32It was rich and clever and sophisticated.
18:37Art for an urbane and educated society.
18:47But the Elizabethans loved complexity in all art forms.
18:51They were obsessed with double meanings, treble meanings,
18:55and trebled in riddles, puzzles and wordplay.
19:00Cleverness permeated absolutely everything they did.
19:06So, this is a poem by the celebrated Elizabethan writer Sir John Davies,
19:11and it essentially describes the British Renaissance itself
19:15as a golden age that is healing all the world's problems.
19:19So, who is responsible for this golden age?
19:22Who is responsible for this Renaissance?
19:25Well, there is a code in this poem that provides us with the answer.
19:30All you have to do is look at the first letters of every single sentence,
19:35and they spell ''Elizabetha Regina''.
19:39Queen Elizabeth.
19:43Davies' code was not just a display of intelligence,
19:47it was a pledge of allegiance.
19:53But Elizabeth's golden age had a darker side.
19:59Clever codes began to be used
20:01to conceal things from the Queen and her agents.
20:08And one Elizabethan rebel turned disguise into an art form.
20:15Thomas Tresham was rich, well-educated and well-connected.
20:20He was undoubtedly one of the cleverest men in England,
20:24and he could easily have been one of its most powerful.
20:27But there was a catch.
20:29Tresham was also a devout and unwavering Catholic,
20:34and he paid the price for it.
20:37With Catholic Spain threatening to invade Protestant England,
20:41English Catholics became potential enemies of the state.
20:45For most of his adult life, Tresham lived under surveillance,
20:50and he spent the best part of 20 years in prison.
20:54Yet Thomas Tresham's will could not be broken.
21:00Now, in the many years he spent locked up in prison,
21:03away from his home, away from his family,
21:06Thomas Tresham was busy planning, drawing, plotting
21:10an audacious and dangerous act of defiance.
21:14It was an act that, in my opinion,
21:16would result in some of the most fascinating
21:19and perplexing architecture of the entire Renaissance.
21:32When Tresham returned home from prison in 1593,
21:36he started to build this lodge for his rabbit warrener
21:40in a secret corner of his estate in Northamptonshire.
21:45But it wasn't really a lodge for his rabbit warrener.
21:49It was a stunningly elaborate architectural code
21:53that spelled out his Catholic defiance.
21:58Now, there's one instantly recognisable thing about this building.
22:02It's obsessed with the number three.
22:05So it's triangular, so it has three sides,
22:08and each of these sides, each of these walls, is 33 feet long.
22:12There are three sets of windows, and each of these windows
22:15is constructed out of the three-sided triangle
22:18and the three-parted trefoil.
22:20There are three storeys, and on top of those storeys,
22:23there is a roof that's constructed of three gables,
22:26each of which has three sides.
22:31And in case all of that escapes you,
22:34here above the door is the Latin phrase
22:38and that means the number three bears witness.
22:42Now, why this obsession with the number three?
22:45Well, it could be just a play on words.
22:48Tresham's nickname was Trez.
22:50But I think it's more than that,
22:52because three is also the number of the Holy Trinity.
22:57God himself was threefold.
23:00Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
23:04But this wasn't just a Christian trinity,
23:07it was a Catholic trinity.
23:10Throughout the building are coded references
23:13to Catholic beliefs and rituals.
23:16The letters beneath the angels
23:18are a secret code for Catholic prayers.
23:22And the chimney is filled with symbols
23:25of the forbidden Catholic mass.
23:35Now, Tresham wrote his Catholic faith
23:38deep into the fabric of this building,
23:41and it really is one of the most cryptic structures in Britain.
23:45It is filled with secrets, with riddles, with codes,
23:48many of which are yet to be deciphered.
23:51But for Tresham, this was only the beginning.
24:05BELLS CHIMING
24:11After yet another spell in prison,
24:14Tresham embarked on an even more ambitious building project
24:18in Northamptonshire,
24:20a retreat for himself and his family.
24:23It may well be my favourite building in the country.
24:28It is called Liveden New Build.
24:35Now, in many ways, the most remarkable thing about this building
24:39is that Tresham never finished it.
24:42In September 1605, construction work here ceased
24:46and it never started again.
24:48So what we're actually looking at is essentially a building site,
24:52a Renaissance masterpiece that's been held
24:54in a kind of suspended animation for more than 400 years.
25:04Despite its incomplete state,
25:07Liveden is still packed with hidden religious meanings,
25:11many of which relate to the Passion of Christ.
25:16So all around this ground-floor frieze, there are these emblems,
25:20and all of them refer to the Passion of Christ.
25:23So here we have the 30 silver pieces surrounding the money bag.
25:27That was the money that Judas was paid to betray Christ.
25:30There are the spears, the lantern.
25:32There's the cross to arrest Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.
25:36There's the garment that was taken by the Roman soldiers.
25:40And finally, there is the crucifix,
25:43with the ladder, with the nails,
25:46with all those things that were used to kill Christ.
25:50So we have the whole story of the Passion
25:52told around the perimeter of this building.
25:56Above the frieze are inscriptions in Latin
26:00that celebrate Christ's sacrifice.
26:03But this is only to scratch the surface.
26:06As with the triangular lodge before it,
26:09the meaning of this building is embedded within its structure.
26:14Now, this building is made up of five equal squares,
26:18and that was for a reason.
26:20Five was the number of wounds that Christ suffered.
26:23Two in the hands, two in the feet, one in the abdomen.
26:26But Thomas Tresham took it further.
26:28Take a look at this bay window.
26:30There are five sides of this bay window,
26:33and each of these sides is five feet long.
26:36Five times five is 25, and 25th was Christ's birthday.
26:45And from the air, the meaning of Tresham's building is complete.
26:50Based on the form of a cross,
26:52its shape reminds the heavens
26:54that its owner is always thinking about the crucifixion.
27:02Liveden Newbuild would have been
27:04one of the great Renaissance buildings in Europe.
27:08But Tresham's unlucky life came to an unfortunate end.
27:14On 11th September 1605, he died.
27:20In terrible pain and in huge debt.
27:24And that is why he never finished his masterpiece.
27:33Thomas Tresham had a miserable life,
27:36but, for me, he embodies everything that's wonderful
27:39about the British Renaissance.
27:41Its cleverness, its quirkiness,
27:44its desire to hide rather than reveal,
27:47and, above all, its stubborn but brilliant rebelliousness.
28:07Tresham was one of the most ingenious men in Britain,
28:11but he was not the most ingenious.
28:14His prize should surely go to a Welshman called John Dee,
28:19the man who would lead the country out of its isolation.
28:24Dee was what one might call a Renaissance man.
28:28Mathematician, astrologer, scientist, secret agent.
28:33And he also liked to dabble in the supernatural.
28:39John Dee is famous today for his magic,
28:43for his master ball,
28:45and for his apparent ability to communicate with angels.
28:50Now, I personally don't believe a word of all that,
28:54but Dee was a brilliant showman.
28:59As a young man, Dee staged a production of a Greek play
29:03at Trinity College, Cambridge.
29:06His opening scene was unforgettable.
29:10The seats were packed with students and academics,
29:13all waiting for the show to start.
29:16And, by God, did it start.
29:20The lights revealed an actor
29:23climbing onto the back of a huge mechanical beetle.
29:29And if that wasn't enough, the beetle then took off
29:32and flew around the room.
29:37The audience must have thought it was magic,
29:39because Dee had actually produced the illusion
29:42with mirrors, ropes and pulleys.
29:46And Dee's ingenuity would not go unnoticed.
29:53He soon became an adviser to the Queen herself,
29:57and on 28th November 1577,
30:01he brought her an astounding proposal.
30:05Today, it's kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
30:10Now, Dee's proposal would be of momentous importance
30:13to British history.
30:15It would come to define our national ambitions
30:17as well as our identity for the best part of 400 years,
30:21and it would prove to be a turning point in the British Renaissance.
30:28Dee outlined his proposal in a book,
30:32and the title page, which Dee himself designed,
30:35cloaked that proposal in yet another fiendish Renaissance code.
30:41And this is it.
30:48And, of course, it's deliberately confusing,
30:51probably because Dee didn't want the Queen's enemies
30:54to decipher its contents.
30:56So there is a phrase that translates as
30:59More is concealed than revealed,
31:01and that may well be a defining characteristic
31:04of the British Renaissance.
31:06So, what does it show?
31:08Well, here is Queen Elizabeth with her courtiers,
31:12and above her is the moon, with a slightly funny face,
31:16ten stars, the sun,
31:19and to the right, this thing called the Hebrew tetragrammaton,
31:23which was the sacred four-letter word of God.
31:26You can see here that it is filling her sails with wind.
31:30And underneath, this is probably the New World, the Americas.
31:35There is a woman here on her knees with an inscription in Greek
31:39that says, Send forth an expedition.
31:42And above her is this semi-naked woman,
31:45a figure of opportunity, beckoning Elizabeth on.
31:48And there are all these other symbols,
31:50symbols that hundreds of years later we still haven't yet deciphered,
31:53like this piece of wheat that's upside down
31:56and this skull that's half out of the image.
31:59So what is John Dee saying?
32:02Well, I think he's telling Elizabeth to build a navy,
32:05to send that navy around the world,
32:07to challenge the French and the Spanish,
32:09to lay claim to the New World,
32:11to bring Protestantism to the uncivilised, to form colonies.
32:15John Dee is telling her to create a British Empire.
32:23Dee was, in fact, the very first to use the phrase British Empire.
32:29His idea would be a turning point in British history
32:32and a turning point in the British Renaissance.
32:38Dee's proposal unleashed a wave of exploration.
32:42This was the moment when Britain took the lead
32:44in the discovery of new worlds,
32:47the moment we stopped looking inwards and started looking out.
32:54In 1580, Francis Drake became the first Englishman to sail around the world.
33:00Other explorers voyaged to Africa, the Arctic and the Americas.
33:07And their travels inspired a new generation of artists,
33:11scientists and craftsmen.
33:15One of the finest was the mathematician and instrument maker
33:20Emery Molyneux, who had his workshops in South London.
33:25Emery Molyneux had accompanied Francis Drake
33:28on some of his voyages around the world, so he really knew his stuff.
33:32And after his return, he secured funding to embark on a remarkable project.
33:39He did years of research.
33:42He met with navigators and explorers.
33:45He collaborated with mathematicians, cartographers, artists.
33:51And eventually, Emery Molyneux produced something
33:54no Englishman had ever produced before.
33:59A globe.
34:02James Bissell Thomas is a globe maker
34:05who still uses the techniques that Molyneux pioneered.
34:10We know he used papier-mâché.
34:13Flour makes a very good glue,
34:15so it's something that the Tudors would have had.
34:18And I know that Molyneux, on his smaller globes,
34:21which were used on ships,
34:23in order to avoid dampness of the globe,
34:26these flour globes he was making actually withstood that.
34:31We've got one here which is actually dry.
34:33It's looking really good. I love this Shakespeare on the front.
34:36There he is.
34:38The next stage is the joining of the globe and applying the plaster.
34:42Straight on down to the...
34:44Just down here? Yeah. OK, let's go.
34:46In fact, James, if you can hold that...
34:48OK, I'll hold it.
34:50And if you can hold that, I'll hold it.
34:53In fact, James, if you can hold that...
34:55OK, I'll hold it.
34:57And it fits extremely well.
34:59Right. Here we go.
35:01So, the world is complete. It is.
35:03It is like playing God, isn't it?
35:05You are the master of the universe at this moment, James.
35:07Exactly. Just in the space of a minute,
35:09Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, united.
35:11Indeed. It's cast in plaster, so it will dry quickly.
35:14It is a very easy way to make a good spherical globe.
35:20Now, once this is fully covered...
35:22If I can take that down a sec.
35:24You will then end up with a beautiful plaster sphere.
35:27Then, once it's dried, you then apply the gauze.
35:29You stick each one on individually?
35:31That's right. And due to the talent of the engraver,
35:33they all align beautifully.
35:35So, with Molyneux's globe, with this engraving,
35:37how long would the engraving have taken?
35:39I think the engraving would have taken, yeah, a good year.
35:42And he was doing it with such limited technology at the time.
35:45And it is beautiful.
35:47I think the most important thing is that they've stood the test of time.
35:51They're still standing today.
36:00In 1592, Emery Molyneux released the first printed English-made globes
36:07and the largest the world had ever seen.
36:11I've come to Petworth House in Sussex
36:14to see the earliest surviving example.
36:20It's believed that this globe once belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh
36:24when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
36:29This is the first British-made globe in history,
36:33and the thought that Walter Raleigh poured over this very object
36:37400 years ago in the Tower of London
36:39is enough to send shivers up the spine.
36:45My very favourite thing about this globe
36:47is the fact that there's virtually no Britain left on it.
36:50And I think the reason for that was that Walter Raleigh's fingers,
36:53and many fingers after him,
36:55kept pointing at the bloody country, saying,
36:57that's Britain, that's where we are.
37:03But this isn't really a piece of cartography.
37:05What it really is is a piece of propaganda.
37:08And I'll show you why.
37:10Round here, there are two little lines.
37:13A little blue line with the initials TC,
37:16and a little red line with the initials SFD.
37:19TC was Thomas Cavendish, SFD, Sir Francis Drake.
37:24So these lines actually chart rather painstakingly
37:27the route that those two men made as they voyaged round the globe.
37:31So this globe is really a perfect opportunity
37:34for the British to show off.
37:39And right round here, there is a great big British coat of arms
37:44planted over North America.
37:47So this globe is a symbol of a newly confident nation.
37:50But it's more than that.
37:52Because for me, this globe also reflects
37:54an entirely new Renaissance worldview,
37:56a new way of seeing the world.
37:58No longer a world as a mysterious, boundless place
38:01that's so much bigger than us,
38:03but a place that is finite, a place that one can own,
38:07a place that one can manipulate,
38:09and a place that can be traversed...
38:13..with a single finger.
38:22But explorers weren't the only ones out exploring.
38:26Artists were globetrotting as well.
38:29And one of them was John White.
38:32He may have had an ordinary name,
38:35but what he did was anything but.
38:40Now, John White was given the commission of a lifetime,
38:44perhaps even the commission of a generation.
38:47He was asked to make drawings of all the unfamiliar,
38:50all the exotic plants, animals and people
38:53that he encountered in the Americas.
38:56Now, the drawings that he made would be of momentous importance
38:59and momentous originality,
39:01but they would almost destroy him in the process.
39:06HE BREATHES HEAVILY
39:13In July 1587, White landed on the east coast of America
39:19to found the first British colony in the New World.
39:24HE WHISTLES
39:32White wasn't alone.
39:35He brought 115 nervous settlers with him,
39:39and among them was his son-in-law and his 20-year-old daughter.
39:44Now, it must have been an exhausting journey for them all,
39:47particularly for his daughter, who was heavily pregnant,
39:50but White was convinced this would be a fresh start for the family,
39:54a place to find wealth, to find comfort,
39:57and maybe even to find happiness.
40:02A month after their arrival in Indian Territory,
40:06White's daughter gave birth to a girl.
40:09They called her Virginia,
40:11the first English child to be born in the Americas.
40:21And John White's drawings of this New World
40:24caused a sensation in the Elizabethan court.
40:28Those drawings are held in the British Museum.
40:34They are not only the first British artworks of the New World,
40:38they may also be the first watercolours in British history.
40:43And they are breathtaking.
40:46Now, there was nothing too small for John White to paint.
40:50Now, this is surely one of my favourites,
40:53this most delightful image of fireflies,
40:56and I love the way that John White has arranged them on the page,
40:59three of them just staring at each other,
41:01and in the middle, this inscription which, to me,
41:03reads more like poetry than anything else.
41:05A fly, which in the night seemeth a flame of fire.
41:10And here we have these exotic creatures
41:15that John White would have encountered.
41:18The loggerhead turtle.
41:23The pelican.
41:26And this unforgettable image of the flamingo.
41:33They are such sensitive portraits of these very unusual animals,
41:39but you shouldn't be too fooled by that,
41:41because pretty much the first thing John White did
41:44after he painted these animals was eat them,
41:47and flamingo was one of his favourites.
41:49He thought the tongues were delicious.
41:55But White's most remarkable images
41:58are of the native people he met there, the Algonquin Indians.
42:09Now, this is probably the most fascinating
42:13and certainly the most macabre.
42:15It depicts the Algonquin equivalent of a charnel house,
42:19and it is filled with all the dead bodies of chiefs.
42:23But it isn't quite what it looks,
42:26because these bodies have actually had their skin pulled off,
42:29the flesh taken out, sun-dried,
42:32and then put into these little boxes by their feet.
42:36Then the skeletons were covered with leather
42:39and the skin pulled back on.
42:42And what's remarkable about this is this is John White
42:45glimpsing something that no-one from Europe had ever seen before,
42:49looking right into the most private, intimate parts
42:52of the Algonquin lifestyle.
42:56Now, this is a portrait of an Indian chief,
42:59and you can tell he's a chief because he is covered
43:02by his status, the body paint, the jewellery, the feathers,
43:06and perhaps best of all, the puma tail.
43:09And it's got so many lovely details.
43:11You can see that the man has shaved one side of his head
43:14so it doesn't get caught in his bow.
43:16It's an extremely unusual image, of course,
43:19but for me, this is a great Renaissance portrait.
43:23I mean, John White was painting an entirely alien culture,
43:27a culture that must have seemed un-Christian,
43:30un-civilised, un-English, and yet here in these paintings,
43:33there is no judgement and there is no racism.
43:38John White's little paintings
43:40may not look like Michelangelo's or Leonardo's,
43:44but they are just as much a result of the Renaissance.
43:49The product of a society looking afresh at the world...
43:54..with sensitivity and, above all, with curiosity.
44:00But the story of John White would end in disaster.
44:06Famine forced him to abandon his family
44:09and return to England for supplies.
44:12It would be two frustrating years
44:15before he was finally able to get a ship to return.
44:23In 1590, he arrived at the colony.
44:28But he was horrified by what he found.
44:34Nothing.
44:36That's what he found.
44:38The houses were gone.
44:41His possessions were scattered.
44:44And, worst of all, the people were gone too.
44:48There was no sign of anybody.
44:51No settlers, no daughter, no granddaughter.
44:56All John White found were ruins.
45:00And, on a tree, a mysterious inscription.
45:06The three letters C-R-O.
45:12Now, people have been trying to decipher
45:14that enigmatic code ever since,
45:17but they haven't yet succeeded.
45:20And John White certainly didn't.
45:26CHANTING
45:30John White never found his family.
45:34His colony, the very first in the Americas, had vanished.
45:39To this day, we have no idea what happened to it.
45:44MUSIC
45:52The ship on which John White first sailed to America
45:56should be as famous as Charles Darwin's Beagle.
46:01For travelling with White was another genius of a different sort,
46:05a young scientist called Thomas Harriot.
46:09Today, Harriot is almost forgotten,
46:12but he should be remembered
46:14as one of the greatest minds of the entire Renaissance.
46:20Thomas Harriot's CV is utterly mind-boggling.
46:24He was the country's leading navigator.
46:27He was a brilliant mathematician who pioneered new forms of algebra.
46:31He was the first man to truly understand the science of rainbows,
46:35and he may well have been the first recorded person in history
46:39to use rainbows as a result of tobacco.
46:43As John White was drawing the Algonquin Indians,
46:46Thomas Harriot was actually speaking to them,
46:49the first Briton to learn a native American language.
46:54But this was a language without writing,
46:57and so Harriot devised a pioneering alphabet of his own.
47:02Now, Harriot's alphabet consisted of 36 characters.
47:07This is the current alphabet,
47:09and that is because Harriot's alphabet was a phonetic alphabet,
47:13each character denoting a sound.
47:16So, this one over here, this is an ng sound.
47:21The next one, this is an ay sound, as in name,
47:25and I must say, it does look like an A and an E squashed together.
47:29And this one over here, this is a th.
47:33This is like a hard th, as in thy or the.
47:36Harriot's papers experimented with lots of different sentences
47:39constructed out of these characters,
47:41and one of his most evocative sentences is this one.
47:45This sentence translates as, if I can do it,
47:48Our Father,
47:51which art in,
47:55you can guess the final word, heaven.
47:58And this word here is which, and he has produced the beginning,
48:03and it's a very complicated sound to produce,
48:05the beginning of the word which.
48:07He begins it with an h, this is an h sound, and this is a w sound,
48:11and that's because Harriot pronounced the word which, which.
48:16So, this is Our Father, which art in heaven.
48:23Harriot was nothing if not ambitious for his new creation.
48:27He dreamed it would become a universal alphabet,
48:30one for the whole world.
48:33In a sense, it was yet another Elizabethan code.
48:37But this one wasn't being used to conceal, but to communicate,
48:42the perfect symbol of a new, expansionist British Renaissance.
48:50Harriot was a shy, retiring figure and never published his alphabet.
48:55In fact, he published hardly anything,
48:58not even what was surely his greatest discovery.
49:03And Harriot's first step towards that discovery
49:06was taken on the 17th of September, 1607.
49:12That night, Harriot, like the rest of Renaissance Europe,
49:16saw Halley's Comet soaring through the night sky.
49:22Now, Thomas Harriot was completely inspired by what he saw,
49:25and he became convinced that the real new world
49:28was not across the oceans, but beyond the skies.
49:31And to this end, he somehow managed to obtain
49:34the most cutting-edge contraption in Renaissance Europe,
49:37the telescope.
49:41On the night of the 26th of July, 1609,
49:45he did something utterly unprecedented.
49:51It was about nine o'clock when the clouds finally cleared.
49:54It was the British Renaissance, after all.
49:56And Harriot got out his telescope, pointed it at the sky,
50:00and looked through it at the moon.
50:02And then he did something no human being had ever done before.
50:07Harriot began to sketch what he could see through the telescope.
50:13And, astonishingly, Harriot's revolutionary little drawing
50:17still survives.
50:25And this is it.
50:27Harriot's first drawing,
50:29the first time anyone had drawn the moon through a telescope.
50:32This is nearly four months before Galileo even did it.
50:35And Harriot has been very precise about the labelling.
50:39Top left, the 26th of July, 1609, 9pm.
50:43That's exactly when he made this drawing.
50:45Top right, five days.
50:47That's how old the moon was when he drew it.
50:50And down here, 6-1. That's the magnification.
50:53Harriot's telescope was very primitive.
50:55He could only make the moon six times larger than it actually was.
50:58And that probably explains why, quite frankly,
51:01it looks a bit more like an overused tennis ball than a celestial body.
51:05But my favourite is probably this one over here,
51:08because underneath this delicious drawing of the moon is an apology.
51:12He writes down here,
51:14I could not get done the figure of all because I was troubled with the room.
51:18Basically, he had a cold, and no wonder he was up on the roof all night.
51:22Harriot, however, tinkered with his telescope,
51:25and his moon drawings became better and better and better.
51:31This is surely Harriot's masterpiece.
51:35And it was done with a 30 times magnification,
51:38so he'd increased the power of his hardware by fivefold.
51:41It's a staggeringly detailed map.
51:43It's a map that holds up even today.
51:45So you've got here the ocean of storms,
51:48the largest sea on the moon, 1,600 miles across.
51:51And right in this spot, that there,
51:54is right at the very edge of the Sea of Tranquillity.
51:57And that is exactly where Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11
52:01landed on the moon in 1969.
52:07Now, these drawings may not be masterful works of art,
52:10but they do remind me of Leonardo's infinitely more famous drawings,
52:15because they are about looking at the world in a fresh way,
52:19and about using two eyes, one pen and a piece of paper to do it.
52:24And surely, if the Renaissance is about anything, this is it.
52:42By 1610, the country had undergone a cultural revolution.
52:48Only a few generations earlier, it had been isolated and inward-looking.
52:53Now, however, its horizons had expanded beyond its own shores,
52:58beyond Europe, even beyond the Earth.
53:03It was from that surge of exploration, ingenuity and creativity
53:08that a remarkable, well, unique figure emerged.
53:12He was surely the greatest figure of the British Renaissance.
53:15He was probably the greatest figure of the European Renaissance,
53:18and he may well be one of the great figures
53:21in the history of Western culture.
53:24You know his name.
53:28But William Shakespeare was not the isolated genius we often imagine.
53:33He was a man alive to the upheavals and discoveries of his time.
53:38In 1610, as Thomas Harriot was mapping the moon,
53:42William Shakespeare began work on his last great play.
53:51It was a tale of magic, wonder and anxiety,
53:55and it perfectly captured the spirit of the age.
54:02The Tempest begins like a Hollywood action movie.
54:06A ferocious storm engulfs a small ship at sea,
54:10and amid the thunder, amid the lightning, amid the wailing wind,
54:14a terrified crew does all it can to stay alive.
54:18But this is no normal storm.
54:21This has been conjured by a magician called Prospero.
54:29Now, I'm convinced that Shakespeare's inspiration for Prospero
54:33was none other than John Dee.
54:36He was, after all, the real magus of Renaissance Britain,
54:39the man who could make beetles fly, the man who could commune with angels,
54:43and the man who inspired countless ships to sail these seas
54:46in search of colonies.
54:53In fact, Prospero's storm is designed to lure the ship's crew
54:57to his own private colony,
54:59an island where he has enslaved the only creature on it.
55:04Shakespeare knew about Britain's colonisation of the New World.
55:09He must have read Thomas Harriot's account of his voyage to Virginia.
55:13He must have seen John White's watercolours of the Algonquin Indians.
55:17And he must have heard all those rumours about storms and shipwrecks
55:21and vanished sailors around the seas.
55:24Shakespeare famously pillaged the facts, the fictions, the tall tales,
55:31the anecdotes and the gossip of this dramatic era.
55:36To my mind, it's impossible not to see the Tempest as a kind of mirror,
55:42however obscured or refracted, of Renaissance England itself.
55:48For like his fictional crew, this tiny little island,
55:52which had once been so insular,
55:55was now hurtling into uncharted territory.
56:01MUSIC PLAYS
56:08Shakespeare was asking and answering
56:12the great questions of Renaissance Britain.
56:15In a phrase from the play itself,
56:18what would this brave new world be like?
56:23MUSIC FADES
56:26In the 50 years between 1564 and 1611,
56:31something extraordinary happened in Britain.
56:35Its artists, writers, architects and scientists
56:38embarked on their own voyages of discovery
56:41and they took the Renaissance their own way.
56:44In doing so, they produced a Renaissance that was wayward, eccentric,
56:49often maddeningly complex,
56:51but one that was as brilliant as anything in Europe.
56:58All voyages, however, come to an end.
57:03Even the glorious voyage of Elizabethan Britain.
57:10Our revels now are ended.
57:14These, our actors, as I foretold you,
57:17are now like spirits and are melted into air,
57:21into thin air.
57:24And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
57:27the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
57:31the solemn temples, the great globe itself,
57:35yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve,
57:39and like this insubstantial pageant faded,
57:43leave not a rack behind.
57:47We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
57:53And our little life is rounded with the sleep.
58:03Next time, the British Renaissance enters its final phase.
58:09As Britain opens its doors to Europe again, a battle begins.
58:15A battle for the heart and soul of British culture.
58:28James reveals more about the secret codes and messages
58:31hidden in Renaissance pictures online.
58:34But next here on BBC Two,
58:36tonight's biggest stories in detail with Newsnight.
58:44.
Recommended
58:45
|
Up next
59:40
58:33
59:06