- 5/19/2025
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00:00When most people think of the Renaissance, they think of Italy, a sun-kissed realm of popes,
00:11piazzas and palazzos, a place filled with hugely talented artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo,
00:20a generation who, in the 15th century, left the Middle Ages behind and created a glorious new
00:28kind of art, more inventive and more exuberant than anything seen before.
00:34When most people think of the Renaissance, they don't think of Britain. While the Italians were
00:48busy building a modern world, the British were still stuck in the medieval mud. The
00:55Renaissance is supposed to have passed us by. But that isn't true. The British did have a
01:05Renaissance and it was bold, it was beautiful and it was utterly brilliant. Yet, for some reason,
01:11we've all but forgotten it. In this series, I want to rediscover our forgotten Renaissance,
01:18a dazzling movement that flourished from around 1500 to the Civil War, 150 years later.
01:26It gave us our first great paintings, our first stately homes, our earliest scientific breakthroughs
01:40and, perhaps, the finest writer of them all. A movement that catapulted us out of the Middle
01:47Ages and laid the foundations of a modern British culture that still shapes us today.
01:53This series isn't about kings and queens or Tudors and Stuarts. It's about the painters,
02:00sculptors, poets, playwrights, composers, inventors, explorers and craftsmen who,
02:07together, revolutionised the way we saw the world. And this episode is about how it all
02:14got started. How a handful of brilliant European artists brought the new ideas of the Renaissance
02:21to Britain. How we learned from their techniques, experimented with their ideas and, through them,
02:28began to develop a voice of our own.
02:44OK. So, the story of the British Renaissance doesn't actually start in Britain. It begins in
03:03Florence, when an Italian sculptor accidentally kick-starts our own artistic revolution. Pietro
03:11Torrigiano was proud, arrogant and extremely competitive. He was childhood friends with
03:19Michelangelo, but rather than admiring the great man, like everyone else, he was pathologically
03:25jealous of him. Things came to a head one day when both men were in a chapel studying some frescoes.
03:36So they were next to each other, sketching, when Michelangelo apparently made some snide remark.
03:48And that's when it happened. That's when years of jealousy bubbled over. That's when Torrigiano
03:58snapped. Clenching my fist, I gave him such a punch that I felt the bone and cartilage in his
04:07nose crumble like a biscuit. He will remain marked by me as long as he lives. Torrigiano permanently
04:20disfigured Florence's favourite son. He was left with only one option. To flee the city and take
04:29his talent elsewhere. Sometime in about 1507, Torrigiano fetched up in what was reported to be
04:42Europe's most philistine backwater. A grubby, dirty, uninspiring little place at the end of
04:50the known world. England. When Torrigiano first arrived in England, it must have felt like he'd
04:59stepped back into the past. The Renaissance had been raging in Italy for almost 200 years, but
05:06here there was absolutely no sign of it whatsoever. After 150 years of bloody wars and infighting,
05:16the British hadn't had time for a Renaissance. They hadn't even had time for art. In Britain,
05:22artists weren't celebrities like they were in Italy. They were anonymous workmen, paid the
05:29same as plasterers and ironmongers. And as for art, well, the British didn't really know what
05:36art was. They didn't even have a word for painting. If a painting was on canvas, it was called a
05:43cloth, and if it was on panel, it was called a table. But Torrigiano wasn't without work for long.
05:54In 1512, the young King Henry VIII, who fancied himself as a patron of new ideas,
06:04gave this exotic Italian artist a very special commission. Torrigiano was offered a staggering
06:14£1,500, that's more than a million pounds in today's money, to make and work well, cleanly,
06:21surely, workmanly, curiously and substantially, those are the words in the contract, a very
06:28special artwork. It would be his masterpiece, and it would be unlike anything the British had ever seen.
06:34Torrigiano's piece was commissioned for Westminster Abbey, a place that pretty
06:48much summed up where England was artistically, still stuck in the Middle Ages.
06:54With its stylised saints and pointed Gothic arches, it was thoroughly medieval.
07:05But what Torrigiano came up with was emphatically different.
07:12In a quiet chapel at the back of the Abbey, inside an ornate chamber,
07:22is the tomb of King Henry VII and his wife, Elizabeth of York.
07:42Their life-size effigies rest on an imposing tomb chest,
07:46that's decorated with biblical figures and saints.
07:51It's a revolutionary piece of work, and I think it's revolutionary for two reasons.
08:01First, Torrigiano did it all. He conceived it, he designed it, he modelled the figures,
08:09he cast the bronze, he carved the stone, he gilded the surfaces, he did absolutely everything.
08:17And if that doesn't seem particularly unusual today, in his time it was unheard of.
08:24In Britain, most tombs, indeed most artworks, were made by anonymous artisans.
08:29But Torrigiano was no medieval craftsman, he was a Renaissance artist.
08:40The second revolutionary thing about this tomb is its style.
08:44It is Renaissance through and through.
08:47It's made from white marble and gilt bronze,
08:50the materials that Donatello and Michelangelo would have used.
08:53It's adorned with columns and acanthus leaves that hark back to the classical ruins of Italy.
08:59The figures of the king and his wife are lifelike, their hands bulging with veins and dimples.
09:06But for me, the most Renaissance thing of all about this tomb are these cheeky little chappies.
09:13They're called putti, and they're Italian cherubs.
09:16And they were two a penny in Italian Renaissance paintings,
09:20but they were completely new in this country.
09:23MUSIC PLAYS
09:35All in all, it's like a little piece of the Renaissance
09:39has been beamed down into the Middle Ages.
09:43Isn't it?
09:47Torrigiano's tomb marked a turning point in British art.
09:51It brought a modern style to a medieval country.
09:55It proved that artists were much more than mere craftsmen,
09:59and it showed that art itself could finally take centre stage in British life.
10:06Our Renaissance had begun.
10:14In the few years since Torrigiano had come and gone,
10:17England had begun to change dramatically.
10:20Under Henry VIII, it was peaceful for the first time in decades,
10:25and its economy was booming.
10:28It was now a land of opportunity,
10:31and it wasn't long before the finest minds of the Renaissance came knocking.
10:41Artists poured into Britain from all over Europe.
10:46But none of them would have a greater impact
10:49than the brilliant Swiss-German painter Hans Holbein.
10:56Hans Holbein arrived in England in the autumn of 1526.
11:02He was just 29 years old.
11:05He came with no friends and family, he didn't speak a word of the language,
11:09and he had virtually no money.
11:11But Holbein had big ambitions.
11:16Holbein had made his reputation as a portrait painter
11:20in the Swiss city of Basel,
11:22a place that was now being torn apart
11:25by the struggles of the Protestant Reformation.
11:30He would be the first artist to bring the new techniques and ideas
11:34of the Renaissance portrait to Britain,
11:37a place where portrait painting was almost non-existent.
11:46Holbein would look closer and harder at British faces
11:50than anyone had done before him.
11:55He would capture their idiosyncrasies and their imperfections,
11:59and in doing so, he would make us think differently
12:02about each other and ourselves.
12:09Holbein's genius is best seen not in his finished works,
12:14but in intimate pictures that he hoped few would ever see.
12:22Today, they're housed at Windsor in the Royal Collection.
12:29These are some of Holbein's preparatory drawings for his portraits,
12:34and these really are some of the most breathtaking artworks
12:38I've ever seen.
12:40They were made 500 years ago,
12:42and these people look like the people you see on the streets today.
12:50In fact, these are portraits of a new class of people,
12:54merchants and scholars and courtiers,
12:57the people who had taken over from the Church
13:00as the new patrons of art.
13:04This is Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, when he was about 15 years old,
13:09and it is alarming how present he feels.
13:13He stares right out at us, right through us,
13:16and it almost feels that if you look at him long enough,
13:19you'll see him blink,
13:21and if you lean in close enough, you'll smell his breath.
13:26Howard was executed, beheaded a few years after this portrait was made,
13:31yet on this piece of paper, he'll always be alive.
13:40This is the courtier Sir Richard Southwell.
13:44He was a famously unpleasant man,
13:46and I don't think Holbein liked him either.
13:49He looks pompous and humourless.
13:52His nose is flared with self-regard,
13:54and Holbein has made sure to include some scars under his throat
13:59that he got from an infection of the lymph nodes.
14:02But the best bit is this little line in German,
14:05a note from Holbein to himself,
14:08which he describes as the eyes rather yellow.
14:15And Holbein's women are just as fascinating.
14:18Beautiful, ethereal, and so elegantly anxious.
14:24You know, one of the most impressive things about these drawings
14:27is the technique.
14:29It is so economical.
14:31A simple outline of pen and ink,
14:33a tiny touch of blue chalk for the eyes,
14:36a tiny stroke of pink chalk for the lips,
14:39and Holbein lets the paper do the rest.
14:42And it's that delicacy that enables him to capture the fragile,
14:46the fleeting, the transient quality of life itself.
14:52Holbein's drawings are the first really lifelike faces
14:56in the whole of British history,
14:59and they mark the beginning of a major British tradition,
15:03a once-and-all preference for reality over beauty
15:07that has persisted ever since.
15:11But I think they're even more important than that.
15:17Holbein's portraits contain seeds of a new idea.
15:21They mark, I think, a moment when people stopped thinking about themselves
15:25simply as types, as kings, as knights, as courtiers,
15:28and started thinking about themselves as individuals,
15:32their own unique characteristics, their own unique hopes and fears.
15:36And that, that birth of the individual,
15:39is a defining feature of the Renaissance.
15:49But the Renaissance wasn't only about looking differently at each other,
15:54it was also about looking differently at the world itself.
15:59Holbein captured this radical worldview in his most famous painting,
16:04one of the great paintings of the Renaissance.
16:10The Ambassadors.
16:14And here are the ambassadors themselves,
16:17Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve,
16:21looking proud of their achievements and even prouder of their clothes.
16:26But the first thing you notice about this painting,
16:28the most mysterious thing, the most famous thing,
16:31are not the ambassadors, but this splodge.
16:35If you look at it from this angle,
16:38you'll see it's actually a distorted but anatomically accurate skull.
16:43And it's a reminder that even rich and powerful men like these two
16:48will die like everyone else.
16:52But I don't think this picture is really about the ambassadors.
16:58I think it's about what's right at the very centre,
17:04this cryptic array of objects.
17:09On the top shelf, these objects relate to the heavens,
17:14a celestial globe, two quadrants, a sundial.
17:20On the shelf below, these objects relate to the earthly realm,
17:25a terrestrial globe, a book of arithmetic,
17:29some musical instruments and a book of hymns
17:33that's painted in so much detail I could actually sing them.
17:38These two shelves depict no less than the entire cosmos,
17:44heaven and earth together.
17:47Holbein created an image of a world in which everything can be charted,
17:51measured, quantified, understood,
17:54a world that mankind finally has mastery over.
17:59This is Holbein's most ambitious portrait.
18:03It is a portrait of the Renaissance itself.
18:10As Holbein assembled his Renaissance stage set,
18:14he spoke to his best friend for the props,
18:18a German mathematician and astronomer called Nikolaus Kratzer.
18:24Kratzer represented the other crucial aspect of the Renaissance,
18:29the spirit of scientific inquiry.
18:38Kratzer arrived in England in about 1518,
18:43and the reasons for coming remain a mystery.
18:49When one friend heard of his visit,
18:51he advised Kratzer to keep his thing secret and tell no-one who summoned him.
18:57He is to invent an excuse as far from the truth as possible.
19:05We may never know Kratzer's true motives.
19:08He may have been on a secret mission.
19:10He may have been a spy.
19:12But he was immediately employed by the king himself as the royal clockmaker.
19:22Spy or not, when Kratzer came to London,
19:25he certainly brought secrets with him.
19:28This is his private notebook,
19:31and it contains diagrams, equations and instructions
19:35for the instruments he made.
19:38It's so exciting to be looking through this book
19:41because looking through it is like peering into Nikolaus Kratzer's mind,
19:47and it was clearly a formidable mind.
19:50It was also a genuinely Renaissance mind,
19:54a mind that believed in observation and calculation,
19:57a mind that believed the secrets of the universe
20:00could be unlocked with precision engineering.
20:04And for Kratzer and his peers,
20:06nothing was quite as precise as a sundial,
20:10an instrument that harnessed the sun itself,
20:14transforming its rays into the hands of a mathematically designed clock.
20:22Joanna Migdal is one of the few people to continue the great art of dialing.
20:28As an instrument maker,
20:30how do you rate Kratzer?
20:32What was extraordinary about Kratzer
20:34was he brought the knowledge from Europe to this country.
20:38The 50 years that were after Kratzer, the dials became amazing.
20:42And so whatever he did,
20:44he just sort of changed the consciousness of understanding of sundials.
20:48So he really kick-started things in this country?
20:51Yes, I think he really did.
20:53I don't think Henry VIII would have brought him over
20:56unless he had something special about him.
20:58So do we know much, Joanna, about Kratzer as a person?
21:01One of the sundials, there's a quotation on it, I think in Oxford,
21:05where he proudly says that he and his stonemason
21:09could drink in the German style,
21:11which basically meant that they could drink anyone under the table.
21:15So he was obviously a fun-loving man too.
21:20Kratzer evidently could handle his drink
21:23because he specialised in miniature sundials
21:27and these required a clear head and a steady hand to make.
21:32Miraculously, one of them still survives.
21:38This is a delightful little sundial,
21:42handmade out of gilt brass.
21:45But it doesn't just have one dial, it has nine of them.
21:50Seven along the edge and one on each side.
21:56Each one of them is perfectly calibrated.
22:00All are set to a latitude of 51.5 degrees north of the equator
22:06and that means it was designed to work in London.
22:11So to use it, the first thing you need to do
22:15is to orient these gnomons towards the north.
22:19And right at the top of it, there's a little hole
22:22and inside that hole there would have been a compass
22:25and that compass would have helped you position it exactly right.
22:29And when the positioning is right, the sun,
22:32and I'm going to use a torch because we're indoors,
22:35the sun would pass over the surface of the sundials
22:42and would help you tell the time.
22:44And the really clever thing is that actually
22:47not just one of these sundials will tell the time, but all of them.
22:51And this was completely new in Britain.
22:53There had been sundials before, there had been pocket sundials before,
22:57but nothing as showy, as complex, as sophisticated as this.
23:03And most remarkable of all, we know for whom this object was made.
23:10Right here on the stand is a little picture of a dinky cardinal's hat
23:17and that tells us that this sundial was made for Cardinal Wolsey,
23:22King Henry's chief minister.
23:24And, you know, I can just imagine the chubby figure of Wolsey
23:29pulling this out after dinner, passing it around the table
23:33and showing off his fiendishly clever gadget.
23:39Foreign technology was becoming fashionable,
23:42reflecting an appetite for scientific knowledge.
23:46An excitement that was not confined to England.
23:54Thanks to Scotland's long-running alliance with France,
23:58the Scottish Stuart kings had embraced the Renaissance with enthusiasm.
24:07Their base was Stirling Castle,
24:10part of which they restyled according to the latest fashion.
24:17They filled it with modish sculptures of European monarchs,
24:22classical heroes and lots of Italian putti.
24:30And they invited musicians, scholars and scientists
24:34from all over Europe to come and work there.
24:38One of the most eccentric was a young Italian called Giovanni Damiano,
24:45or, as the Scots called him, John Damien.
24:49John Damien was an alchemist and he divided opinion dramatically.
24:55Some people thought he was a charlatan
24:58and they accused him of murdering a priest in Italy
25:02and impersonating a doctor in France.
25:05But the king thought he was a genius.
25:09Damien was a contemporary of Leonardo
25:12and both were obsessed with the ultimate Renaissance ambition,
25:17human flight.
25:20In fact, Leonardo's famous drawings of flying machines
25:23may well have inspired Damien to embark on his most audacious experiment.
25:33It was the morning of 27th September 1507.
25:39The king had just dispatched two ambassadors to France,
25:43but as they exited, Damien entered.
25:47John Damien assembled the court and made a staggering announcement.
25:52He would beat the ambassadors to Paris.
25:56He then strapped on two large wings which he'd fashioned from hen feathers,
26:01he stepped up onto those ramparts over there,
26:04and when he had everyone's attention, he leapt off.
26:14In the end, Damien didn't quite make it to France.
26:18Instead, he landed in a dunghill near the foot of the castle...
26:25..and broke his leg.
26:28John Damien's flight could be seen as a miserable failure,
26:32but I disagree.
26:34These ramparts are really, really high,
26:37and for him to jump off them and only break his leg,
26:39well, I think he must have flown at least for a bit,
26:42which would make this one of the first human flights in British history.
26:51John Damien's grand ambitions pleased the king,
26:54but many others at court mocked and insulted him relentlessly.
27:00And in doing so, they revealed a broader tension
27:04at the heart of the British Renaissance.
27:21The British Renaissance had started brilliantly,
27:26but, as I'm sure you've noticed, it had not been very British.
27:30Its greatest sculptor had been Italian,
27:32its greatest painter had come from Switzerland,
27:35and its greatest inventor had been German.
27:38And this was not lost on the natives.
27:43For some time, Londoners had been concerned
27:46that foreigners were stealing their jobs.
27:49In 1517, this resentment had bubbled over into outright violence.
27:59It was about nine o'clock in the evening
28:02when 1,000 angry English apprentices gathered in the city of London.
28:08They broke into Newgate Prison,
28:10liberated several prisoners who'd already been arrested for race crimes,
28:14and then marched through the streets.
28:18Looting foreign craftsmen's workshops
28:20and assaulting anyone who got in their way.
28:27By 3am, the riots had been quelled, but the problem would not go away.
28:34British artists and craftsmen soon realised
28:37that they would have to move with the times.
28:48From the 1520s, a new generation began to discover
28:52Renaissance ideas for themselves.
28:59But they wouldn't simply copy Europe.
29:02They would do things differently.
29:06On the continent, the Renaissance had typically been elegant and refined.
29:11The British, however, were not a particularly elegant and refined bunch.
29:16So when we did the Renaissance, it was earthy, visceral,
29:20and at first, a bit rough around the edges.
29:26The first of these native pioneers
29:28was a young English courtier called Thomas Wyatt,
29:32captured here by none other than Hans Holbein.
29:38Thomas Wyatt was a playboy, assassin, spy, diplomat.
29:44He's famous for having had a secret affair with Anne Boleyn.
29:48But the real reason we should remember him is this.
29:51He was, in my opinion,
29:53the man who brought the Renaissance to English literature.
30:01Before Wyatt, English poetry was stuck in a rut.
30:06In 120 years since Chaucer, there hadn't been one original voice,
30:11and poets seemed content to translate French romances
30:15into bad English verse.
30:18But Wyatt would turn his back on archaic fairy tales
30:22and make poetry one of Britain's most dynamic art forms.
30:28And it all started with a chance encounter.
30:36It was New Year 1527.
30:39Thomas Wyatt was 24 years old.
30:42He was on the banks of the Thames
30:44when he saw a man preparing a boat for travel.
30:48Wyatt asked the man where he was going,
30:50and the man said,
30:52to Italy, for the king.
30:54Wyatt absorbed this information and then asked if he could join him.
30:59The trip would inspire Wyatt,
31:01but it would also nearly cost him his life.
31:10The two men arrived in Italy in February,
31:14on a diplomatic mission to meet the Pope.
31:19But Italy was a lot more dangerous than Wyatt had bargained for.
31:28While travelling alone to deliver a letter,
31:31Wyatt was kidnapped by mercenaries,
31:34held for ransom and finally released.
31:39Now, at this point, most people would have run home
31:42with their tails between their legs,
31:45but not Thomas Wyatt, because Wyatt was in love.
31:56While travelling around,
31:58Wyatt had seen the Italian Renaissance with his own eyes
32:01for the first time, and he loved everything about it.
32:07But nothing appealed to him quite like its poetry.
32:13And most of all, the love lyrics of Petrarch.
32:19Petrarch was a towering figure of the Italian Renaissance.
32:23In fact, many people think he actually invented
32:26the idea of the Renaissance.
32:28But he was also a hopeless romantic.
32:31Petrarch was a pioneer of the sonnet,
32:35a short poem made up of one verse and 14 lines.
32:39Petrarch pretty much reinvented the sonnet
32:42as the perfect love poem,
32:44one that could express the true complexity of emotion
32:48in an extremely condensed form.
32:50His first eight lines, they would set up the problem,
32:53which was usually a burning desire for an unattainable woman.
32:57And the last six lines, well, they would resolve that desire.
33:02It was short, it was sweet, and it was passionate,
33:06and Thomas Wyatt was smitten.
33:15In May 1527, Wyatt returned to London,
33:19wanting to breathe new life into English poetry.
33:25Wyatt took the Italian sonnet and put it to bold new use.
33:31He wrote tortured love poems for his friends in the Tudor court.
33:35They were very private, often intimate.
33:41Wyatt's poems were written by hand
33:44onto small, precious pieces of paper.
33:47They were folded, rolled up, wrapped in ribbon,
33:51and then furtively passed from person to person,
33:55tucked into a pocket or left under a pillow
33:58for a lucky lady to find.
34:03Unlike Petrarch's spiritual love poems,
34:06Wyatt's were more passionate, more pained and more human.
34:14This is a copy of one of his finest.
34:18They flee from me that sometime did me seek
34:22With naked foot stalking in my chamber
34:26Gentle, tame and meek
34:29That now are wild and do not remember
34:34What an explosive start to a poem.
34:37They flee from me that sometime did me seek
34:41It's so simple yet so powerful.
34:44It's about loss, it's about rejection, it's about heartbreak,
34:49and who ultimately hasn't felt those things in their life?
34:54And that ultimately is the most amazing thing about this poem.
34:58Thomas Wyatt wrote it 500 years ago,
35:01and you can still feel his pain today.
35:07Wyatt repeatedly explored the pain of rejection.
35:12I find no peace, and all my war is done
35:15I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice
35:19I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise
35:22From what I have, and all the world I seize on
35:25I desire to perish, and yet I ask health
35:28I love another, and thus I hate myself.
35:32I love another, and thus I hate myself.
35:35That is a great line. It's a great line.
35:38How good a poet was he?
35:40I think he was a genius.
35:42I think that you, if you spend some time with Wyatt's poetry,
35:47the more you look at it, the more impressive it is.
35:50He produced a poetry which is much more human than Petrarchan poetry.
35:55He produced a poem which actually addresses
35:58our own human feelings of frustration, entitlement...
36:02Rejection. ..of bewilderment, rejection, abandonment.
36:05There isn't anybody who could read a Wyatt's poem
36:08and not feel, yes, I have been there, I have been there.
36:13Wyatt also didn't shy away from writing about sex.
36:17When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
36:20And she me caught in her arms long and small
36:23Therewithal sweetly did me kiss
36:26And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this!
36:31It was no dream, I lay broad-waking.
36:36But nobody in medieval poetry went to bed with anybody, only in dreams.
36:41That's why this is such a radical poem.
36:45There is a real Englishness to his poetry, isn't there?
36:48I think he is, above all, an English poet.
36:50Unlike most of the other architects of the Renaissance, he was English.
36:55You know, Torrigiano was Italian, Holbein was German,
36:59so he had a conscious desire to write in English
37:02and make English a language which was as flexible and as beautiful
37:07and a vehicle for the expression of complex ideas
37:10as Latin or as Greek or as Italian had been.
37:14Thomas Wyatt died when he was only 39,
37:17but his influence on English literature was profound.
37:21He'd taken a refined foreign art form and made it unmistakably English,
37:27less concerned with elegance than with capturing
37:30the messy quality of life as lived,
37:33setting the tone for English poets from Shakespeare to Philip Larkin.
37:45BIRDS CHIRP
37:50If Thomas Wyatt introduced an unglamorous realism to poetry,
37:54another Englishman was to do the same with painting.
37:58His name was John Betts.
38:03Like so many British artists of this period,
38:06virtually nothing is known about John Betts,
38:10but it seems he was trained by none other than Hans Holbein.
38:15Now, if that's true, it makes him a crucial figure,
38:19the first Renaissance-trained British artist in history.
38:24Only a handful of his portraits survive.
38:28One of them, of an unknown man,
38:30is the earliest British picture in the Tate collection.
38:34And this is it.
38:37It was painted in 1545, just two years after Holbein died.
38:43Now, I'll be honest, it's not as good as Holbein,
38:46but it's pretty darned good,
38:48and it's got that defining Renaissance feature,
38:51the desire to be realistic.
38:55John Betts has individually painted every single curling hair
38:59in this man's ginger beard.
39:02He's used wet paint to capture the ruffle of the fur collar.
39:08And the face.
39:10Well, for maybe the first time in British art,
39:14it's lifelike.
39:19This picture is the beginning
39:21of a home-grown Renaissance in painting.
39:25But it suggests that our Renaissance
39:27would not be about beauty, grace and endless cherubs.
39:31It would instead have a solid and earthy reality.
39:38But just as British painting was finally about to flourish,
39:43the country descended into darkness.
39:51After the death of Henry VIII,
39:53the long-standing tensions between the old Catholic Church
39:57and the new Protestant faith erupted into violence.
40:08In the 1550s, over 300 innocent men and women
40:13were cruelly and publicly burnt alive.
40:17Their crime?
40:19Being Protestant during the reign of a Catholic monarch.
40:26The new medium used to document these atrocities
40:30was the printed book.
40:33And the man who made it happen
40:35was an evangelical London printer called John Day.
40:41A man who would arguably have a greater impact
40:44on the culture of this country than any one of his generation.
40:51John Day was nearly murdered himself.
40:54He was a passionate Protestant,
40:57and during the reign of Catholicism,
40:59he was arrested for publicising the Protestant cause.
41:03But he was one of the lucky ones.
41:06Day watched in horror as hundreds of other Protestants
41:10were burnt at the stake,
41:13and he became determined to avenge their deaths.
41:18When Mary died, Day got his chance.
41:23In the autumn of 1550,
41:25John Day was approached by a writer called John Fox.
41:29Fox was a man on a mission.
41:31For some time, he'd been working on a book
41:33about the many Protestant martyrs.
41:35It would be a witness to what he believed was an English genocide.
41:41John Day immediately agreed to print the book at whatever cost,
41:45and, crucially, he insisted that it be illustrated,
41:49with nothing but the words,
41:51and, crucially, he insisted that it be illustrated,
41:54with nothing censored.
41:59It's since become known as Fox's Book of Martyrs,
42:03and it's a milestone in the history of bookmaking.
42:071,800 pages.
42:101.9 million words.
42:13The Book of Martyrs was the longest book in British history,
42:17and more than twice as long as the Bible.
42:20However, I think its real genius was not John Fox's text,
42:25but John Day's illustrations.
42:34They depict the suffering of Protestants,
42:38and they are vivid and gruesome.
42:41Burnings, torture, disembowelment.
42:50John Day used the shock tactics of modern photojournalism.
42:55But they weren't out merely to shock.
42:58They wanted to expose the truth.
43:02As in the sensational case of a supposed suicide.
43:08Richard Hunn was imprisoned after a minor disagreement with a priest.
43:14A few days after his incarceration,
43:16he was being brought some food in his cell when he was found dead,
43:20hanging from his own belt.
43:25The authorities thought it was a straightforward suicide,
43:28but Fox and Day did their homework.
43:30They even read the coroner's report, and they thought otherwise.
43:36The report said that a fresh candle had been found
43:40snuffed out in the dead man's cell.
43:45Now, why would Richard Hunn have done that?
43:48Why would he have extinguished his candle
43:50before he tied that noose and hanged himself?
43:54For Day and Fox, that candle was a clinching piece of evidence.
44:00Someone else must have done it.
44:02Someone who wanted to cover their tracks.
44:11Fox and Day were convinced that these three men
44:14had been sent by the Catholic Church to murder Richard Hunn
44:18and then make it look like suicide.
44:25The Book of Martyrs had more impact than Day could ever imagine.
44:31It was distributed to churches, schools and even pubs,
44:35and it became the most widely read book in England
44:38for the next 200 years.
44:42This book had a profound effect on the English people.
44:46It helped forge the identity of England as a Protestant nation.
44:50And John Day's images were crucial to its success.
44:54They ensured that the English people were able to see
44:57and were crucial to its success.
45:00They ensured that all British people, literate and illiterate alike,
45:04could understand Fox's message.
45:07The Book of Martyrs is a monumental work of the Renaissance,
45:11but it is also the beginning of a distinctly British tradition,
45:15a tradition of graphically exposing injustice
45:18that runs all the way through our culture,
45:21from William Hogarth to Gerald Scarfe.
45:28By the middle of the century, British artists and writers
45:32had not just absorbed the newest ideas from abroad,
45:36they had brilliantly adapted them to their own tastes.
45:41Thomas Wyatt had turned the Italian sonnet
45:44into the classic form of English poetry.
45:48John Betts had combined Holbein's impeccable technique
45:52with an uncompromising realism.
45:56And John Day had used a Renaissance invention
45:59to teach the English people about their own history.
46:05In spite of the dark times they had lived through,
46:08they had proved a match for their continental counterparts.
46:15But that wasn't enough.
46:20Now, with the new Queen Elizabeth on the throne
46:23and the country more at ease with itself,
46:26British artists wanted to produce work
46:29that was better than anything in Europe.
46:33And that competitive spirit would lead
46:35to one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.
46:42According to one anecdote, sometime in the 1500s,
46:46an Italian song arrived in England for 30 different voices.
46:51On hearing it, one great Duke challenged
46:53the composers of England to do the same.
46:55Eventually, one English composer came back with a song
46:59not for 30 voices, but for 40 voices.
47:05His name was Thomas Tallis.
47:08He was an organist and singer for the royal court,
47:11who, over the course of a long life,
47:14composed music for virtually the entire Tudor dynasty.
47:20Thomas Tallis's greatest work was the one he produced
47:23as a result of that challenge,
47:25a motet for 40 voices called Spem in Allium.
47:31Tallis was used to composing for four, five or six voices.
47:36Composing 40 different melodies all to be sung at the same time
47:41was a huge leap, but the result, Spem in Allium,
47:45is one of the richest and most ambitious pieces of choral music
47:49in the English canon.
47:53It's so beautiful, I'm not going to ruin it by talking.
47:58ORGAN PLAYS
48:15CHOIR SINGS
48:45CHOIR SINGS
49:16David Hurley has sung Spem in Allium many times.
49:20So, David, what is it actually like to perform Spem in Allium?
49:24It's quite terrifying, actually.
49:26I mean, you either are the person that comes in first,
49:29which in itself is terrifying,
49:31or you're in choir six or seven
49:34and you have to wait around for ages for the...
49:37and work out exactly when it is you're meant to come in.
49:41When all those voices come in at that point in the music,
49:44it must be, you know, a euphoric experience.
49:47It must be wonderful. It's an incredible sound.
49:49I mean, both for the people listening
49:51and actually for the people involved,
49:53it's just this wall of sound.
49:57An ancient Renaissance version of surround sound before its time.
50:01So was there a broader, you know, feel at the time
50:04that the English were competing
50:06with what was coming from the continent?
50:08Yes, I think we had a little bit of an inferiority complex
50:13and their way of dealing with it
50:15was to make England this incredibly important place artistically.
50:19English music is very much an important part
50:22of showing how wonderful England was.
50:30In rising to the Italian challenge,
50:33Tallis had created a work that was as sophisticated
50:36as anything on the continent,
50:38but at the same time distinctly English.
50:42A breathtaking feat of virtuosity
50:44that was a sign of the country's growing confidence.
50:59By the 1560s, the British Renaissance had serious momentum.
51:04And yet, if you walked through any town,
51:07you'd be forgiven for thinking you were still in the Middle Ages,
51:11because our buildings were still resolutely medieval.
51:17That finally began to change when a few builders started to dabble
51:22in the new classical style of the European Renaissance.
51:27And they got their ideas from architectural pattern books
51:31from France and Italy.
51:34When it comes to classical architecture,
51:36there is pretty much everything here you could ever want.
51:40So, what have we got?
51:42We have Doric columns, like those used on the Parthenon.
51:46We have Ionic columns, and you can always tell an Ionic column
51:50because it has these little curls on the top.
51:53And we have Corinthian columns,
51:55Corinthian columns with their acanthus leaf capitals.
52:00There are also pediments, domes, temple fronts
52:05and triumphal arches like those built by the Roman emperors.
52:11But it took one determined, even obsessive, Englishman
52:15to bring all these ideas together
52:17and to create something that was both utterly unique
52:21and unmistakably British.
52:25His name was John Finn.
52:30John Finn was born in 1515.
52:33He was the son of a Midlands farmer, but he had grand designs.
52:39He married the Lord Mayor of London's daughter
52:42and, with his wife's fortune, bought a former prairie in Wiltshire
52:46and proceeded to turn it into his family's seat.
52:51John Finn was, frankly, pretty unpleasant.
52:55He was famously impatient and had a ferocious temper,
52:59but he was also ambitious and single-minded,
53:02and when he set his mind on something, he never gave up.
53:09He wanted a house to suit his ego.
53:12It had to be new, it had to be modern,
53:15and for John Finn, that meant it had to be classical.
53:20Finn was so determined to get his house just right
53:23that he wrote letters to his builders every single day.
53:30I would ye do not forget to mend the lanes with gravel
53:34in such places as need or require.
53:37Also, let there be haste made with the top of my tower.
53:42Further, I would ye not forget to get planks sawn for my doors.
53:47Every single detail of his house he's writing about.
53:52Must have been a nightmare employer.
53:55But John Finn's obsessive attention to detail eventually paid off.
54:01In 1568, after 30 years of building and rebuilding and rebuilding again,
54:07he finished his house.
54:10It's still standing today.
54:12It is called Longleat.
54:16And it's the first of England's great stately homes.
54:29Longleat is completely unlike the fortified manor houses of its time.
54:35It's symmetrical and it's smothered in classical features.
54:46But it's also unlike any classical building in Europe.
54:50It doesn't slavishly follow the architectural pattern books.
54:54It mixes everything up, creating an eclectic, exuberant
54:59and rule-breaking English style.
55:16Finn loved to take his guests behind the scenes of his lavish home.
55:24For he had a surprise to show them.
55:29After dinner, John Finn would lead his guests up this staircase.
55:34They can't have had a clue where he was taking them.
55:45But it was worth the climb.
55:53This is the roof at Longleat.
55:56And when John Finn's guests came up here,
55:59they must have been completely overwhelmed.
56:02It must have been like nothing they'd ever seen before,
56:05because it's filled with columns and statues and domes,
56:10and John Finn's land stretches out for as far as the eye can see.
56:15It's utterly amazing.
56:18And back then, it must have felt like the entire Renaissance
56:21had been assembled and then set down on top of one house.
56:26But John Finn had another trick up his sleeve.
56:34He would present his guests with a very special work of art,
56:38exquisitely designed sculptures, some of them covered in gold.
56:43They were phenomenally fashionable and phenomenally expensive.
56:50These are sugar sculptures,
56:53and they would have appeared at any self-respecting Renaissance banquet.
56:58And they are exquisite little things.
57:01And the best thing of all is everything here is edible,
57:05even the plates.
57:09Mmm.
57:11But that was just the icing on the cake.
57:15Longleat itself is a seminal masterpiece,
57:18impossible without foreign inspiration,
57:21yet like so much in our Renaissance, quintessentially British.
57:30It was 60 years since Pietro Torrigiano had stepped foot on English soil,
57:36and Britain was no longer a cultural backwater.
57:40It was on the verge of becoming a cultural superpower.
57:44And this was only the beginning.
57:49Next time, as the nation's confidence grows,
57:52its artists turn away from Europe completely.
57:56They fill their paintings with secret signs
57:59and their buildings with riddles.
58:02And finally, they set sail, taking their Renaissance to the New World.
58:14For 300 years, they ruled England as a mighty dynasty.
58:18Tomorrow night, another chance to see the first part of
58:21Tale of Royal Intrigue and Conflict, the story of the Plantagenets at 8.30.
58:26Next tonight, BBC Two carries the torch for sport relief.
58:32Subtitling by SUBS Hamburg
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