- 5/19/2025
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00:00By the early 1600s, Britain had undergone a cultural revolution.
00:08The medieval world had been left behind,
00:11as new ideas from Renaissance Europe transformed the houses we built...
00:19..the pictures we painted...
00:22..and the literature we wrote.
00:25But we had done more than import a foreign Renaissance.
00:30We had also created our own.
00:34One that in many ways reflected the British character.
00:38Inquisitive, down-to-earth, often eccentric,
00:43and usually a bit rough around the edges.
00:47A Renaissance rooted not only in art, but in ideas and discovery.
00:54But now came the inevitable.
00:58A battle.
01:00A battle between the foreign Renaissance, which had achieved so much,
01:05and the British Renaissance, which promised so much.
01:09Now, this battle would not just be about the future of British art.
01:13It became part of a battle about the future of Britain itself.
01:17Where would we stand? Who would we stand with?
01:20And what, ultimately, would we stand for?
01:24On one side, a royal court in love with an elegant, luxurious foreign style.
01:32On the other, a group of British artists, poets and scientists
01:37who were making their own attempts to unlock the secrets of the world.
01:54I'm waiting for a very special book to arrive.
02:05The library that owns it has agreed to bring it out just for me.
02:13Inside that box is a defining work of the Renaissance.
02:19And I've wanted to see it for years.
02:27It's a treatise written by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio.
02:33But I'm more interested in who owned it.
02:37At the beginning of the 17th century, this book was bought by a man
02:44At the beginning of the 17th century,
02:47this book was bought by a young British carpenter
02:51and he became instantly infatuated with it.
02:55He read it countless times and scribbled his thoughts all over its pages.
03:04But the young man's most remarkable and revealing annotations are here.
03:11This, for me, is one of the most evocative pages in the British Renaissance
03:17because here the book's young owner practices his own signature
03:21over and over again like some kind of anxious, excitable schoolboy.
03:26But it's not any old name he's signing.
03:29This man's name was Inigo Jones
03:32and Inigo Jones went on to become the first great British architect.
03:38But this page has another surprise.
03:42He's not only signed his own name,
03:45Jones also, it seems, has attempted to forge the signature of Palladio himself.
03:50It's almost as though he's trying to emulate Palladio
03:53and, in fact, these two faces up here may well represent the two men,
03:57the great old Italian architect and the young British carpenter.
04:03So why is this so revealing?
04:06Well, I think this is the moment when Inigo Jones decided to give up carpentry,
04:11to become the British Palladio
04:13and to bring pure classical architecture to Britain.
04:24In Renaissance Italy, the buildings of ancient Rome
04:27had inspired a revival of classical architecture,
04:32an architecture of columns, domes and pediments,
04:37symmetrical and perfectly proportioned,
04:40a style with which the British had only ever flirted.
04:48Inigo Jones was determined to change that,
04:51to make British architecture as wholeheartedly classical as anything in Italy.
05:01And he got his big break as the result of an unfortunate accident.
05:07The new king, James I, was out hunting with the queen.
05:12One of the party fired a shot into the trees
05:15and, by a stroke of luck, it hit a deer.
05:19The hunting party was delighted
05:22until it discovered that the victim was not, in fact, a deer
05:26but actually the king's favourite dog, Jewel.
05:30When James saw the body, he went berserk.
05:33And then he was informed that the culprit was, in fact, his wife, the queen.
05:40The queen was publicly humiliated.
05:43James was desperate to make amends
05:46and she saw her opportunity to make some demands.
05:51What she really wanted was a brand new house in Greenwich.
05:55The king immediately agreed to build her one
05:57and that's when she made a final demand.
05:59Only one man could possibly design her house.
06:03Inigo Jones.
06:07In October 1616, the queen's favourite architect
06:11began work on a brand new house.
06:18When he'd finished, he had produced one of the most radical buildings
06:22in the history of British architecture.
06:30This is the first completely classical building in Britain
06:35and, above all, it's radical for what it rejects.
06:38No half timber, no gargoyles, no spires, no clock towers,
06:42no fancy Gothic carvings.
06:44The whole history of native architecture has been thrown into the dustbin.
06:49This is instead a pure white chunk of Italy
06:53that has somehow found itself on the banks of the River Thames.
06:57At the time, it was so alien, so unusual,
07:00that many people thought it was a practical joke.
07:05But if the exterior was a surprise,
07:08nothing could prepare them for what lay inside.
07:15So this is the Great Hall, right in the centre of the building
07:19and it's really the epicentre of this structure
07:22and it's really a revolutionary room
07:24because gone are all the rambling, wonky, higgledy-piggledy,
07:28woodeny-paneldy rooms of the Tudor age.
07:31This space is a mathematically perfect cube,
07:3440 feet by 40 feet by 40 feet.
07:42And it is built on top of a mathematically generated floor design
07:47in Belgian and, of course, Italian marble.
07:51You know, this room is around 400 years old
07:55and at the same time I feel like I'm standing
07:58in a modernist, minimalist space.
08:03Yet perhaps the biggest treat lies just beyond the hall.
08:10This is the first self-supporting spiral staircase in the country
08:15and, for my money, it's the most beautiful staircase in Britain.
08:21MUSIC PLAYS
08:32In fact, the whole building is like a stairway to heaven,
08:36an ideal home constructed out of harmony, proportion
08:40and impeccable Italian taste.
08:43I absolutely love this place
08:46and you know what amazes me most about it?
08:49The Italian Renaissance took hundreds of years
08:52to get classical architecture just right
08:54and Jones, Jones went and did it in just a few months
08:58with his very first building.
09:10Jones didn't intend to stop there.
09:13He drew up plans to rebuild the whole of the Royal Palace at Whitehall,
09:17the grandest Renaissance complex in Europe.
09:22Only one part of it was ever built,
09:24an Italianate chamber known as the Banqueting House.
09:30King James liked Jones's grand vision.
09:33It suited his insanely grand idea of himself.
09:37On the ceiling, here he is, being lifted up to heaven
09:41by a cluster of angels and transformed into his very own god.
09:48MUSIC PLAYS
09:51For the extravagant Stuart court,
09:53there was only one kind of Renaissance worth having,
09:57the Italian one.
09:59James and Jones fantasised about rebuilding Britain
10:02in the image of Renaissance Italy.
10:05But in doing so, they were turning their backs
10:08on a whole other Renaissance,
10:10one that was flourishing far away from the court in the real world.
10:17MUSIC PLAYS
10:22Britain, and especially London, in the early 1600s,
10:26was a dynamic place.
10:30The city's population had quadrupled in less than 100 years.
10:39It attracted craftsmen and innovators and radicals.
10:44Fertile ground for a very different kind of culture
10:48than the one dreamed of by Jones and his king.
10:54One of these innovators was William Harvey.
10:59The son of a sheep farmer from Kent,
11:01Harvey went on to make one of the most important
11:04scientific discoveries of all time.
11:07In 1604, Harvey arrived in London to work as a doctor.
11:13Every morning, while commuting to St Bartholomew's Hospital,
11:17he passed the meat market at Smithfield...
11:23..where every morning, the butchers of London
11:26would slaughter their animals.
11:32Harvey watched closely,
11:34how the butchers killed, hung and sliced up their animals,
11:37and how the blood dripped and drained out of the carcasses.
11:41It wasn't exactly cutting-edge scientific research,
11:44but it sowed a seed in his mind,
11:47a seed from which his own Renaissance revelation would grow.
11:53Harvey became obsessed with how blood moved around the body.
11:58And he began to doubt the traditional way
12:01Since antiquity, the theory of one man had been all but unchallenged.
12:06The ancient Greek philosopher Galen claimed that blood
12:10was manufactured by the heart and the liver
12:14and then consumed by the other organs.
12:20Harvey decided it was time to put this theory to the test.
12:25William Harvey was a workaholic,
12:28an insomniac and a coffee addict.
12:32So, after dinner, when his wife and almost everyone else in the city
12:37went to sleep, he went to bed.
12:43He was a man of his word.
12:46He was a man of his word.
12:49He was a man of his word.
12:52After he'd gone to sleep, he went to work.
13:01He equipped a scientific chamber in a private corner of his house,
13:06and it was here that he experimented through the nights.
13:12Harvey's chamber must have been a sight to behold.
13:15It was filled with virtually every single animal he could get his hands on.
13:19It was filled with birds, rabbits and rodents,
13:22and running all over the place were sheep and pigs and goats.
13:27Now, every evening, Harvey would select
13:30just one of these unfortunate creatures,
13:33and then he would begin to experiment on it.
13:39As he examined the animals' organs,
13:42Harvey became convinced that Galen was wrong.
13:46It wasn't constantly made by the body.
13:49It was recycled. It circulated.
13:56I'm going to offer myself to a modern doctor
13:59to recreate Harvey's most famous experiment.
14:03Roll your sleeve up for me.
14:05Oh, it sounds ominous. It does, doesn't it?
14:07It always makes people a little nervous when they come to the doctor
14:10and they're asked to roll their sleeve up.
14:12Good, and I'm going to put a tourniquet around it.
14:15We would have called this a ligature.
14:17It seems even more ominous.
14:19Absolutely. So we're tightening this up,
14:21and you can see already what's happening,
14:23is that the veins are starting to become much more visible in your arm.
14:26They are, aren't they? Absolutely.
14:28So if we take this vein here, for example...
14:31That's a big one, that one. That's a big one.
14:33So what he did was that he emptied the vein completely of blood,
14:38and then by releasing the finger nearest to the heart,
14:43the vein didn't refill.
14:45But when he released the finger furthest away from the heart,
14:49the vein did refill.
14:51So what that shows is that the blood travels
14:55only in the direction of the heart through the veins.
14:59So it's one way. Exactly.
15:01And that's really important, so it's not going in both directions.
15:04And what does that mean for Galen's theory?
15:07It's the opposite to what Galen thought.
15:09Blood wasn't just going in one direction,
15:11it wasn't just going away from the heart, it was returning.
15:14So it meant there was a circulation system in place,
15:17there was a recycling of the blood,
15:19it was returning through the veins back to the heart.
15:23Harvey's experiments confirmed that Galen was wrong,
15:28and he showcased his conclusions
15:30in a series of dramatic public performances.
15:36One of them started with a live dog
15:39being brought into a packed lecture theatre.
15:43When everything was ready, Harvey stepped forward.
15:47He picked up a knife, he paused, he looked about the room,
15:52and then he plunged his knife into the dog's chest.
15:57Now, the dog writhed in agony as Harvey exposed its heart,
16:02and he made sure that everyone here saw that heart beating, pumping,
16:07beating inside its body.
16:10And then he picked up his knife again,
16:12and then very delicately he cut the artery next to it.
16:17Now, as soon as he did this, blood spurted across the room.
16:22People in the front row were showered with it.
16:24Everyone was astonished by the ferocity of the pulsations.
16:28Chaos ensued.
16:30And then finally, when everyone calmed down, Harvey said this.
16:35I am obliged to conclude that in animals,
16:38the blood is driven round in a circuit,
16:41with an unceasing circular movement,
16:44and that this is a function of the heart,
16:47which it carries out by virtue of its pulsation.
16:59Harvey's discovery changed medical history.
17:03No modern operation would be possible without it.
17:07But at the time, his rejection of ancient wisdom
17:10almost amounted to blasphemy.
17:13William Harvey had done the opposite of many of his Renaissance peers.
17:18He had rejected rather than embraced antiquity.
17:21But that rejection is what makes him such a pillar of the Renaissance,
17:26because the Renaissance was also about experimenting.
17:29It was about looking at the world afresh,
17:31and about having courage in your own convictions.
17:45At the Stuart Court, however,
17:47this cultural and intellectual revolution was largely ignored.
17:53For they were too busy enjoying themselves.
17:57One night, the audience at the court of King James I
18:02were treated to an astonishing spectacle.
18:06In front of them appeared an expanse of sea with moving waves,
18:11on which rode six sea gods, half man, half fish,
18:16astride giant seahorses,
18:18all contained within a vast shell of mother-of-pearl.
18:24And if that wasn't enough, beside them,
18:26huge sea monsters carried 12 torchbearers
18:30whose lights flamed with burning seashells,
18:33and everyone was wearing coral, seagrass, silver and pearls.
18:39It was incredible, and, of course, utterly ridiculous.
18:48All this to amuse and flatter the king,
18:51who himself often took a starring role.
18:57These masks, as they were called,
18:59were often based in the Italian style on classical mythology.
19:05The costumes were gorgeous.
19:08The special effects extraordinary.
19:11The sets more elaborate than anything seen before.
19:16And the man who designed them and drew these sketches
19:20was Inigo Jones.
19:25What a waste of his talents
19:27to be masterminding such sycophantic drivel.
19:32What a betrayal of the native theatrical renaissance
19:35that had, of course, given us Shakespeare.
19:40From the magic of a Midsummer Night's Dream
19:44to the ethos of King Lear.
19:47Shakespeare's theatre had reached out to a mass audience.
19:52The new court masks weren't progress.
19:55They were empty pageantry for a profligate elite.
20:01This extravagant theatre, much of it paid for by the public purse,
20:06had absolutely nothing to do
20:09with the lives of people outside the court.
20:12The only time they got a look in was when, in one mask,
20:15their justifiable grumblings were dismissed as giddy fury.
20:21It would be a few years yet
20:23before that giddy fury would boil over into revolution.
20:33With the great minds employed by the court
20:36to make fripperies like this,
20:38it's no surprise that the creative heart of Britain lay elsewhere.
20:49Far away, in the Suffolk countryside,
20:52lived one of the great eccentrics
20:54and one of the most brilliant figures of the British Renaissance.
20:59Chances are you've never heard of him.
21:02Nathaniel Bacon.
21:08Nathaniel Bacon was born near Bury St Edmunds in 1585,
21:13the son of a baronet.
21:16He enjoyed a privileged start in life,
21:18and things got even easier when he married a wealthy widow.
21:24Bacon became something of a playboy.
21:27He had so much money and so much time
21:30that he took his fancy.
21:32He had dozens of different hobbies, and one of them was painting.
21:37Now, he didn't paint much,
21:39but when he did paint, he was brilliant at it.
21:42In fact, to my mind, Nathaniel Bacon
21:45was one of the most original artists of his generation.
21:51Despite only being an amateur,
21:53Bacon made some of the most ambitious self-portraits in British art.
21:57He spent several years surrounded by some of his many interests.
22:03Bacon didn't just flirt with traditional things like portraiture,
22:06he was always looking to invent new things too.
22:09And as it happened, he may well have invented
22:12an entirely new kind of British art.
22:19Bacon's remarkable invention is a small picture
22:23you can see in the back rooms of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
22:32And this is it.
22:35A tiny little picture of some trees in a field.
22:40And we're pretty sure it's by Nathaniel Bacon,
22:43because right in the middle of this tree are his initials, NB.
22:48Now, I'll be honest, it's a strange little thing,
22:51and not the most beautiful,
22:53but I think this may well be one of the most important paintings
22:59in the history of British art.
23:02Because this, I think,
23:05is the very first landscape painting ever made by an Englishman.
23:09And if it is, it is the ancestor of Gainsborough and Constable
23:13and Turner and Nash.
23:15This little object is the beginning of an incredible tradition.
23:22MUSIC PLAYS
23:32Bacon's innovative painting found inspiration
23:35in what would become perhaps the ultimate British obsession.
23:39Gardening.
23:45This is the annual county fair at Oxford in Surrey.
23:52Nathaniel Bacon would have absolutely loved this place.
23:55It is just filled with incredible produce.
23:57I mean, look at the size of that cabbage.
24:02Bacon himself pioneered new ways of growing produce
24:06and managed to grow things like no-one else in England.
24:13Bacon was famous for his pears, which apparently were to die for.
24:18He also produced extremely rare white Milan turnips.
24:23But without doubt, Nathaniel Bacon's pride and joy were his melons.
24:28Cantaloupe melons.
24:37In fact, Nathaniel Bacon was so inspired by what came out of his garden
24:42that it became the basis of what I think is his masterpiece.
24:49This painting now hangs in Tate Britain.
24:52Like the landscape before it, it has no precedent in this country.
24:59It is perhaps the first still life in British art.
25:07Now, this painting depicts an almost uncontrollably buxom cookmaid
25:12surrounded by a smorgasbord of fruit and veg.
25:17And amid this cornucopia of produce
25:21are some of Nathaniel Bacon's very favourite specimens.
25:25So, over here, his world-class pears,
25:29his famous white turnips,
25:32and, of course, his really famous cantaloupe melons,
25:35one of which is shown cut open,
25:37so we don't mistake it for anything less impressive.
25:39And in the background, you can even make out the way
25:42that Nathaniel Bacon grew his melons.
25:45These are his hotbeds, and this woman over here,
25:48she's probably his cook, bringing one of the melons back for lunch.
25:52The spread continues.
25:54We have runner beans, turnips, squashes, pumpkins, cucumbers,
26:00but the pièce de résistance is surely this array of gigantic cabbages
26:06that seem to overtake the room like a kind of science fiction monster.
26:12And, partly, he's just showing off.
26:14He's saying, look what I can grow.
26:16But I think it's more than that.
26:18I think by painting melons and cabbages
26:22and worldly things like bosoms on such a monumental scale,
26:25Nathaniel Bacon is making a statement.
26:28He's saying, these things are just as important
26:31as the gods and heroes of the Mediterranean,
26:34that the Renaissance may well be found in Roman ruins,
26:38but it can also be found in your own back garden.
26:43MUSIC FADES
26:53And that was the point about the homegrown Renaissance.
26:57It was less about fantasies of ideal beauty
27:00and more about looking in new ways at reality.
27:08Bacon had found a heroism in nature.
27:13Harvey had revealed the hidden mechanics of a human body.
27:17And one remarkable man would explore nothing less
27:21than the secrets of the soul.
27:31Robert Burton was a private, unassuming and unworldly man.
27:37Robert Burton spent all of his career,
27:40most of his life, here in Oxford.
27:43He never travelled, he never married, he never really had much fun.
27:47Yet he did something far more interesting.
27:50Burton devoted his entire career to just one Herculean labour.
27:56Burton wanted to produce a definitive account
27:59of the human condition itself.
28:02And he chose to focus on one particular emotion, melancholy.
28:10For Burton, melancholy meant all forms of sadness,
28:14from feeling a bit glum to severe depression.
28:17And not one for shortcuts, Burton amassed an enormous personal library
28:22of almost 2,000 books and began reading.
28:27Many of these books are kept here, in his old college, Christchurch,
28:32where Bacon was himself a librarian.
28:35They contributed to his life's achievement,
28:38one huge bestseller, The Anatomy of Melancholy.
28:45So this is it.
28:47All 723 pages of it.
28:50And I want to begin with the first page.
28:53All 723 pages of it.
28:55And I want to begin with the frontispiece,
28:58because even Burton's frontispiece is comprehensive.
29:01Up here are two different features of melancholy.
29:05Jealousy, on the left, and solitude, on the right.
29:09And down here we have the lovesick man, surrounded by his love letters,
29:13the man made miserable by religion and superstition.
29:17And over here, right in the centre, is Robert Burton himself,
29:21holding his book, holding this book, in fact.
29:27And then, inside, Burton anatomises every possible cause, symptom
29:34and even cure of the many different kinds of melancholy.
29:39All of this material is organised in members,
29:42and then those members are divided into subsections,
29:46into sub-subsections, into sub-sub-subsections,
29:50and, of course, into sub-sub-sub-subsections.
29:53And some of it is extremely complicated.
29:56He talks over here about the causes of melancholy.
30:00So he talks about supernatural causes, so God causing melancholy,
30:04and he talks about natural causes, so things that are coming from the body,
30:07from the emotions, from the humours.
30:09He talks about melancholy of the head, melancholy of the body,
30:13and melancholy of the emotions.
30:15And he talks about symptoms of melancholy,
30:18so body problems, wind, dry brains, hard belly, thick blood,
30:23whatever thick blood is.
30:27You'd be forgiven for thinking that this vast book is just a bit bonkers.
30:32It is, but only a bit.
30:34It's also witty, wise and written with real human empathy.
30:41His passage on marriage is one of my favourites.
30:45Every lover admires his mistress,
30:47though she may be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled,
30:51pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced,
30:55have a swollen juggler's platter face,
30:58and he goes on for the whole page describing how ugly this woman might be.
31:03And then, at the end, he writes this.
31:06If he love her once, he admires her for all this.
31:10He takes no notice of any such errors or imperfections of body or mind.
31:16What an amazing thing, 400 years ago.
31:19And Robert Burton's saying, doesn't matter how ugly your wife is,
31:23if you love her, you love her.
31:30There's something particularly poignant about this whole vast endeavour.
31:35Burton himself suffered from melancholy,
31:38so in some ways it's an autobiography.
31:43I think this man must be the nearest character we have to Robert Burton today.
31:50He's devoted his own life to producing a multi-volume commentary on the anatomy,
31:56which now threatens to be even longer than Burton's enormous tome.
32:03Martin, why was melancholy such a big thing in the 17th century?
32:07Well, I think it was partly to do with increasing self-consciousness
32:11and that people became more aware of themselves
32:14and therefore of their own feelings.
32:17But in some ways in the 17th century, then, melancholy had some cachet.
32:21Oh, yes, yes.
32:23Particularly if you were a lover.
32:25Of course, if you were a lover,
32:27you really needed to be miserable about the woman you loved.
32:32It was quite important because it showed you had feelings.
32:36In some ways, could we think of him as the ultimate Renaissance man?
32:40Yes. Not just because he'd read everything.
32:43That would be a medieval trait as well.
32:46But because he was so on the ball, he was interested in new thinking.
32:50Very much so. He was interested in the voyages of discovery,
32:54interested in America, what was going on in Peru.
32:58His mind was everywhere, and I think that was quite unusual.
33:02Throughout this book, there's a great sense of humanity
33:05through every single page. Do you get that feeling as well?
33:09Yes. I think that he wanted to console, he wanted to amuse,
33:14he wanted to give the melancholy person a sense of what a wide world it was.
33:20In some ways, Martin, you seem like a modern-day Robert Burton.
33:23Oh, I try not to.
33:25I think I'm grumpier.
33:27You're grumpier than Burton.
33:30This is what the melancholy man wrote about his own life.
33:37I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary private life.
33:43I never travelled but in map or cart.
33:47I have no wife nor children to provide for.
33:50I have little. I want nothing.
33:54All my treasure is in Wisdom's Tower.
33:59I find those words so humbling,
34:03because the modest man who wrote them
34:06had quietly and selflessly produced
34:09one of the greatest books in the English language.
34:13A mood of melancholy hovered over the artists and scientists
34:18of this increasingly introspective age.
34:23And in its dark shadows, poets found inspiration.
34:29One of its most famous poets,
34:31the poet who wrote the first book on the English language,
34:36was one of the greatest poets of this or any time.
34:44His picture hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
34:48We do not know its artist,
34:50but it is one of the first paintings of a writer in British history.
34:58This is the man who wrote the first book on the English language.
35:04This is John Donne.
35:07He's only 23, he's so young he can't even grow a full moustache yet.
35:12Yet despite his youth, he's already suffering from melancholy.
35:20All the symptoms are there.
35:22He's crossing his arms in a kind of morose way,
35:25he's pouting his lips, he's wearing all black,
35:29and even his collar is in an anxious state of disarray.
35:33But there's another clue here, another symptom,
35:36one that almost no-one ever notices.
35:39Here, between the collar, is a little stream of smoke.
35:45And that, believe it or not, is actually the vapour of melancholy,
35:50rising from his abdomen, where it's produced,
35:53all the way up to his head.
35:56I'll be honest, it doesn't look promising for young John Donne.
36:01But he does see a way out through the gloom.
36:05Above his head, there is an inscription in Latin
36:08that translates as,
36:10"'Illuminate the darkness, O Lady.'"
36:15And I think he's saying the only cure for melancholy is women.
36:26As a young law student,
36:28John Donne pursued his self-prescribed cure with enthusiasm.
36:33He was a notorious womaniser,
36:36and some of his poems read as witty, elaborate seductions.
36:42Take The Flea, for example.
36:48Donne's with a woman.
36:50He wants to make her happy.
36:52Donne's with a woman.
36:55He wants to have sex with her.
36:57She's not interested.
36:59So, he points to a flea.
37:02Now, this flea has already bitten both of them,
37:04already sucked both of their blood.
37:08Mark but this flea, and mark in this
37:11how little that which thou deniest me is.
37:14It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
37:17and in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
37:23Donne's tactic is to say,
37:25look, our body fluids have already been mixed,
37:28so in one way we've already had sex,
37:31so we may as well do it for real.
37:35Suffice to say, the young lady's not convinced by his reasoning.
37:39She squashes the flea, and with it, Donne's hopes.
37:44But it was a clever try.
37:53When Donne finally married,
37:55he settled with his wife in a tranquil spot
37:58in the Surrey countryside.
38:03They lived together in this tiny summer house on the riverbank.
38:08It was a blissful time.
38:11But his poetry kept its wit,
38:14and his poetry kept its meaning.
38:17It was a blissful time.
38:20But his poetry kept its wit and energy and directness.
38:25This is how he begins his poem, The Good Morrow.
38:29I wonder by my troth what thou and I did till we loved.
38:35Were we not weaned till then,
38:38but sucked on country pleasures childishly?
38:43If ever any beauty I did see which I desired and got,
38:47t'was but a dream of thee.
38:50And now good morrow to our waking souls,
38:53which watch not one another out of fear.
38:56For love, all love of other sights controls,
39:01and makes one little room an everywhere.
39:07God, I love that poem.
39:10It's so real, so direct, so intimate, so modern.
39:16It begins with Donne waking up next to his lover,
39:20and you can just imagine him turning over to her in bed,
39:23stretching his limbs and saying,
39:26I wonder by my troth what thou and I did till we loved.
39:30He's saying, what the hell were we doing before now?
39:33What a waste of time life was before we met.
39:36And that is such a universal sentiment.
39:39No one who's ever been in love has surely felt that way.
39:43But the poem also embraces the excitement of its age,
39:48the great Renaissance era that produced it.
39:53The Good Morrow was written amid the great age of discovery,
39:57and John Donne knew about all those voyages around the world,
40:00but here he rejects them.
40:02He's saying, they can discover new countries,
40:05they can discover new continents, they can discover new worlds,
40:08but the only world that matters is our little world,
40:11with the two of us inside it.
40:25But John Donne's honeymoon did not last long.
40:29In 1617, his wife Anne died.
40:34She was only 33 years old.
40:39Donne was virtually destroyed by Anne's death.
40:43The love of his life was gone, and decades before her time.
40:48He was grief-stricken, but he felt guilty too.
40:52He knew that he'd given her a life of hardship and poverty.
40:56And, you know, he promised that he would never be with another woman ever again.
41:00And as far as we know, he kept that promise.
41:09After his wife's death,
41:11Donne's restless spirit found a new consolation.
41:15Religion.
41:17In 1621, this former libertine became dean of St Paul's Cathedral.
41:24But his melancholy came back to haunt him,
41:27and prompted a new obsession.
41:30Death.
41:32Particularly his own death.
41:35In fact, Donne's poetry became saturated with it.
41:42John Donne wrote so much poetry about death,
41:45but his attitude towards it became increasingly odd.
41:49How about this for the start of the poem?
41:53When I am dead, and doctors know not why,
41:57and my friend's curiosity will have me cut up to survey each part.
42:03Death is an autopsy.
42:06I'm convinced on reading these that after his wife's death,
42:10all John Donne really wanted to do was to die himself.
42:15And I think he wanted to die in order to be reunited with her.
42:24Lonely, heartbroken and increasingly ill,
42:28Donne would not wait long for his wish to be fulfilled.
42:33In his late 50s, he developed cancer.
42:37But he had one last artistic gesture to make.
42:44On his deathbed, Donne wrapped himself in a shroud.
42:52He closed his eyes, turned to the east, to the rising sun,
42:56and then asked an artist to draw him.
43:04The drawing showed Donne as if already dead.
43:11And when it was completed, he hung it beside his bed
43:14and gazed at it through the last days of his life.
43:21As Donne finally died, he did something extraordinary.
43:25He took up the very same pose.
43:29And in doing so, his real death became identical to the drawing.
43:41The drawing was later passed to the great English sculptor
43:45Nicholas Stone, who used it as the basis for a mesmerising statue.
43:50It is now in St Paul's Cathedral.
44:00Here is Donne, posed exactly as he was when he was drawn,
44:05and pretty much just as he was when he died.
44:09And, you know, I find this such a moving piece of sculpture,
44:14because here, one of the heroic figures of British culture
44:19is shown at his most vulnerable.
44:22His hands are covered in blood.
44:25At his most vulnerable.
44:27His hands are clutching his stomach.
44:30That's where his cancer started.
44:32His little knock knees are buckled under his own weight.
44:36And his entire body is tensed with the cold.
44:40And this piece is so well carved, so brilliantly carved,
44:43that if you look at it long enough, you become almost certain
44:46that it's actually moving, that the fabric is wrinkling,
44:49that the chest is breathing.
44:53And that's what this sculpture is about.
44:55It's about his death, of course, but it's also about John Donne's new life.
45:00I mean, just look at his face.
45:03Look how calm he looks.
45:05Look how content. And look at those eyes.
45:08I know they're closed, but I'm convinced they are just about to open.
45:15This is death as a new beginning.
45:23Like Harvey and Bacon and Burton before him,
45:27John Donne had brought a new spirit of energy
45:31and innovation to British culture.
45:37I think by the 1630s, we had created something very special indeed.
45:43A bold, beautiful and humane renaissance
45:46that was inescapably, stubbornly British.
45:49Yet once again, the Stuart Court wasn't convinced.
45:52Once again, and for the final time, it looked abroad for inspiration.
46:05In March 1632, a Flemish man called Antoone arrived in London.
46:13He was only 33 years old.
46:17He was only 33 years old,
46:19but he was already the most fashionable artist in Europe.
46:26This painter was not really like any painter the British had seen before.
46:32He was urbane and multilingual.
46:36He was wearing extremely expensive clothes,
46:39and he brought with him a large team of servants
46:43and a huge train of luggage.
46:50Antoone van Dyck immediately achieved celebrity status.
46:55The king gave him a substantial house on the river in Blackfriars,
46:59where he threw lavish parties for the great and the good.
47:04Within a year, he was knighted.
47:14Sir Anthony van Dyck had been born in Antwerp in 1599.
47:20He had natural talent
47:22and painted this remarkable self-portrait when he was just 15.
47:29Raised a Catholic, van Dyck absorbed all the lessons of the European Renaissance.
47:37His painting was more dramatic, more fleshy and more sensuous
47:42than anything we'd seen in Britain.
47:53The English upper classes were desperate to get a slice of this foreign sophistication
47:58and flocked to his London studio.
48:02Yet if you think that great art is the result of one man's imagination,
48:07van Dyck might surprise you.
48:11If you asked van Dyck to paint your portrait,
48:14the first thing you'd get was a price list.
48:17£50-60 for a full-length portrait,
48:20£30 for a mid,
48:22£20 for head and shoulders.
48:28Now, as soon as you were in position, van Dyck would start the clock.
48:33He'd rapidly sketch your face onto a canvas,
48:36and then, when exactly one hour was up, he'd kick you out.
48:41And then the next one would be brought in for the same treatment.
48:45Now, if van Dyck's methods remind you of your dentist,
48:49you're probably about right.
48:55And this was just stage one.
49:00Van Dyck would then hand over the sketch to his assistants,
49:04who started painting his picture for him in another room.
49:08Now, by this stage, the real sitter had long gone,
49:11but the assistants had a team of body doubles in their studio.
49:21Over several days and sometimes weeks,
49:24the assistants painted up the portrait.
49:29When the painting was virtually complete,
49:32it was brought back to van Dyck.
49:35And then, with a few flashes of his paintbrush,
49:38he gave it his own signature flair.
49:52Over the next few years,
49:54van Dyck's studio knocked out dozens of such portraits.
49:59In van Dyck's hands, his wealthy sitters were transformed.
50:05Haughty poses, magnificent outfits.
50:09The British had never looked quite so stylish.
50:15Not for nothing are these known as swagger portraits.
50:22As for my own more modest portrait,
50:25the artist who kindly agreed to sketch me
50:28just now in a mere 20 minutes is Nicky Phillips.
50:32Like van Dyck, she paints society figures,
50:35and she's a passionate admirer of his.
50:39So, Nicky, van Dyck really is the sort of prince of portraiture, isn't he?
50:43What do you think makes him such a special and brilliant portraitist?
50:47There's a sort of clarity about it.
50:49You don't feel that the paint has been overmixed
50:52or he's taken several brushstrokes to put it on.
50:55It's just there in one stroke, usually,
50:57saying everything that needs to be said.
50:59For me, when I look at a van Dyck painting, I just want to touch it.
51:02I want to touch the flesh, I want to touch the silk,
51:04I want to touch the velvet, I want to touch every single part of it.
51:08In three brushstrokes, you can tell it's silk,
51:11and that's what's clever.
51:13The translucency of the skin is extraordinary.
51:16All this underpainting gets built up and built up,
51:19and that's why I feel as though he was painting more realistically
51:23than anyone has ever done, ever, really.
51:27You truly feel there is flesh there.
51:30This is the thing that is wonderful about van Dyck,
51:33is that it's both extremely realistic
51:36and yet it's clearly not how those people looked on the street.
51:40But I do still feel that it's a living being.
51:43And, you know, if you take the earlier Renaissance pictures,
51:46which were much more two-dimensional, and you take painting today,
51:49which has gone back to being quite two-dimensional,
51:53that was like the peak of realism.
51:56That's exactly how you see somebody.
51:59He brings this sophistication, this elegance, this grace, this swagger.
52:05I mean, they don't really look English, do they?
52:07I think his pictures show sophistication that perhaps hadn't arrived here.
52:11Would you like to have van Dyck paint your portrait?
52:14What do you think? I think you would.
52:26Van Dyck's greatest painting hangs here, at Wilton House in Wiltshire.
52:31It's an Italianate palace that reflected the courtly taste of the day.
52:36And no wonder.
52:38It was in part designed by the man who brought Renaissance Italy to England.
52:44Inigo Jones.
52:52This is Inigo Jones's double cube room.
52:56So-called because it actually has the dimensions
52:59of two 30ft cubes laid end to end.
53:03Now, it is a fabulous space.
53:06And one of the reasons it was designed
53:08was to showcase all of these paintings by van Dyck.
53:13The room is lined with them.
53:15There is one of van Dyck's many portraits of Charles himself.
53:19And there's his French queen, Henrietta Maria.
53:23But one of these paintings dwarfs all the others.
53:27It's the largest painting he ever produced.
53:35A portrait of the Earl of Pembroke with his entire family.
53:41This has to be the most swaggery of all swagger portraits.
53:47It actually celebrates a marriage.
53:49A marriage between the Earl's son, this dapper young man in red,
53:54who's only about 15 years old,
53:56to this heiress in silver, who's barely 13 years old.
54:01Now, if that doesn't sound ideal to us, it was ideal to the Pembrokes,
54:06because it was going to bring a huge dowry to the Pembroke family
54:10and thus to secure their already promising future.
54:13It's therefore, I think, a painting of triumph.
54:16A painting about a rich family becoming even richer.
54:20And van Dyck has even included, up in the top left corner,
54:24a bunch of cherubs, as if they're blessing the family from on high.
54:29But look closer, and that swagger begins to seem rather hollow.
54:35I think there's something very strange about that family.
54:39None of them are looking at each other.
54:42The Earl and his wife in the centre, they look downright miserable.
54:46She's crossing her arms morosely,
54:48almost as though she resents even being painted.
54:51And, in fact, when van Dyck made this picture,
54:54their marriage was all but over.
54:56Their marriage was all but over.
54:58They were actually living in different houses.
55:01And the cherubs, they're not cherubs.
55:04Some people think they're the ghosts
55:06of three Pembroke boys who died as children.
55:09And if they are, they're not blessing this painting, they're haunting it.
55:19But tragedy lay ahead, not only for the Pembroke family.
55:24Dark clouds were gathering above the British aristocracy.
55:32Many of the people van Dyck had made look so confident,
55:36so invincible, would end up perishing in battle.
55:43Their glamorous renaissance was about to end.
55:54For some years, a powerful and subversive movement had been building.
56:00Puritanism.
56:04The Puritans had one aim in mind,
56:07to return the country to a land of Christian simplicity.
56:15There was no place for the luxury and extravagance
56:18of court favourites like Jones and van Dyck.
56:24There is no welcome on these shores
56:27for the sinful, the idolatrous, the abominable.
56:31All images, be they molten, carved or painted,
56:36are to God deceits.
56:39Forsake the devil and all his works,
56:43the sinful lusts of the flesh.
56:48Their radical ideas fuelled a revolt
56:51against an arrogant and extravagant king.
56:57In 1642, king and parliament went to war against each other.
57:04Seven years later, a defeated King Charles was led to the scaffold.
57:12Here, he was executed outside the palace
57:15that Inigo Jones had designed for his father.
57:22What followed would be a new age, an age of austerity,
57:28hostile to any kind of Renaissance, native or foreign.
57:34It was the end of more than 100 extraordinary years.
57:40From foreign artists and craftsmen,
57:42we had learnt the language of the Renaissance.
57:46And we had gone on to build a Renaissance of our own.
57:52In little more than a century,
57:54we had ceased to be medieval and become modern.
58:00I think we've forgotten too many of the British painters and sculptors,
58:05poets and scientists who brought about that revolution.
58:14The Renaissance didn't only happen abroad.
58:18This series has shown that the British had a Renaissance too.
58:22It may have been different from the continent,
58:24but it was a Renaissance all right,
58:26and it changed British culture forever.
58:36We're off on the finest of journeys and living the dream
58:39with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
58:41The trip to Italy kicks off here next tonight on BBC Two.
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