Why Venetian Art Looks So Different Secrets of the Renaissance Revealed

As you can see, I'm in Venice. This is film three of the Renaissance Unchained, and in it I'm hoping to discover why Venetian art was so different from everyone else's. How did they end up painting this? Or this? Or, God forbid, this? To find out, I need to start where everyone starts when they come to Venice. In Saint Mark's Square. There's a painting of this square from exactly here by Gentile Bellini, one of the famous family of painters who did so much for Venetian art. It shows a procession passing in front of Saint Mark's Cathedral, and they're carrying a famous relic, the relic of the true cross, part of the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified. Or so they thought. But the real subject of the picture is the chap kneeling here in the crowd. He's a merchant from Brescia called Jacopo de Salis, who's just found out that his son has fallen over and broken open his head. The doctors say he's going to die, so Jacopo is praying to the true cross to save him. And when he goes home the next day to Brescia, he finds that his son has made a miraculous recovery. Now apart from recording this great miracle, Bellini's painting gives us a vivid insight into the social fabric of Renaissance Venice. Standing over here are some merchants from Greece. We know they're Greeks because of their hats. Only the Greek merchants wore black wide-rimmed hats. Up in the windows, there's a line of elegant ladies hanging out oriental carpets, and a couple of them are veiled. Mysterious travellers from the Islamic East. Over here, two Arab traders have turned their backs on us. And round about here, there's a trio of Turks, merchants from Constantinople, come to do business with the infidel. Turks, Greeks, Arabs, nowhere else in Europe, did the East meet the West as intimately as it did in Venice. In Venice, no one cared where you came from, as long as you were selling something. Something else you can see clearly in the Bellini painting, particularly when you get back here, is how the outline of all this, the entire piazza of San Marco, was borrowed from the layout of an Islamic mosque. St Mark's Square is a Venetian version of the Great Mosque at Damascus. The golden mosaics, the colonnades, that clear sense of a rectangle. It's all there. Now another of these paintings of the True Cross, this one by Carpaccio, is set around here, near the Rialto Bridge. The Rialto, the market of Venice, was an oriental bazaar, transferred from Cairo to Italy. Silk, spices, slaves, they were all on sale in the Rialto. And all these foreign presences seeped into the art that was made here and changed it. Something else they were importing here in Venice was pigment, bright new colours from around the world. In Venice, the colours of the East arrived in art, in quantities and concentrations that had never been seen before. From China, there was cinnabar, ground down to make bright red vermilion. From Russia, malachite, which made such glowing and dense greens. And then, most precious of all, from Afghanistan, lapis lazuli, which they used to make the colour they called ultramarine, which comes from oltre mare, over the sea. Because that's the other unique influence working on Venetian art, its location. You know, Venice is made out of 116 islands, all of which have been connected up like a quilt to create this thin strip of solidity, sandwiched between the sky and the sea. There's nowhere else like Venice, floating off the coast of reality. And these delicate, whispery, fragile moods soaked into Venetian art and made it unique. There's a word for this mood you get in Venetian art, poesie. It's a sort of poetry, but with mystery thrown in, so you're never sure what you're looking at. The master of this poetic mood, this delightful imprecision, was the painter christened Giorgio Barbarelli, better known to us now as Giorgione. I can't show you a picture of him because we don't know what he looked like. He was born in Castelfranco in around 1477, revolutionised Venetian art, and then died young in his early 30s, probably killed by the plague. And that is just about all we know about him. Except, of course, what we learn from his art, which is always beautiful and always mysterious. With Giorgione, there are many questions and very few answers. Fortunately, you're in good hands here because this series has been on his case. And in this film, we're going to solve some of the mysteries of Giorgione. In particular, we're going to get to the bottom of his most famous painting, the notoriously elusive Venetian masterpiece known as the Tempest. Nine out of ten art historians will tell you that the Tempest doesn't have a meaning. But I think they're wrong. So what you've got in the Tempest is three figures, a man, a woman, and a baby. He's standing, she's sitting there naked, and the baby has just been born. Behind them, there's a walled city on one side and some ancient ruins on the other. But the big clue to the Tempest's meaning is up in the sky, where a white bird sits on one of the roofs and a bolt of lightning is crashing down from the clouds. There's one story, and only one story, that fits all these details. And it's told in here, in Hesiod's Theogony, a thunderous classical poem about the origins of the gods. Hesiod tells of a young man called Iasion who meets the goddess Demeter at a wedding in Crete. They have a fling in a nearby field, and she gives birth to a baby. That baby is Plutus, the god of wealth and good fortune. Alas, Zeus, the father of the gods, notices the mud on Demeter's backside and knows what she's been up to. Angry and jealous, he throws a thunderbolt at Iasion and kills him. And that's what's happening in the Tempest. The angry Zeus has thrown a lightning bolt from heaven. Iasion, the uppity mortal, the wedding crasher, is about to be killed by the father of the gods. And the baby the stork has brought them, Plutus, the god of wealth, is about to be left fatherless, vulnerable, exposed to the vicissitudes of fortune. So it's an allegory, not just about keeping your zipper zipped, particularly at weddings, but about the fragility of good fortune, the fickleness of fate. Look how easily the wealth of today can become the ruins of yesterday. So the Tempest is a fabulous piece of Venetian self-awareness. A thin sliver of solidity sandwiched between the sky and the sea is reminding itself of its prodigious vulnerability. The vulnerability of Venice made the city especially attentive as well to the messages of religion. One of the best things about Venice is that so much of the art here is still in the place for which it was painted. Not in a museum, not in a gallery, but still here, hanging where it's supposed to hang, doing what it's supposed to do. In the church of the Madonna dell'Orto, there's much to see. And two of the biggest canvases painted by the marvellous Tintoretto loom mightily over both sides of the altar. On the left, the wayward Israelites are collecting gold to make the false idol they plan to worship, a golden calf. This woman here is even giving away her earrings to be melted down for the idol. On the right, Tintoretto has painted the most thunderous scene of divine retribution in Venetian art, his last judgement. If you make false gods, this is how you will be punished. The waters of Venice will crash down around you and the end will come in a tsunami of death. In the church of the Madonna dell'Orto, the art points a finger at you and warns you. This, by the way, is where Tintoretto was born, just 100 feet away from the Madonna dell'Orto, his local church. That's why it meant so much to him. And only in Venice can you find such a revealing and intimate context for Renaissance art. The church of Santa Maria Gloriosa, commonly known as the Frari, is a huge religious space that does something powerful to your senses. And it was in this tremendous context that another Venetian giant, the great Titian, painted his most awesome altarpiece. There it is, Titian's Assumption. 22 feet high, the biggest altarpiece in Venice. And of course, it had to be that big to have the right kind of religious impact on this huge and thrilling space. The Assumption shows the Virgin Mary going up to heaven at the end of her time on Earth. A feast celebrated annually in the Frari on August the 15th. So Mary is being received in heaven. The angels are greeting her with celestial music. And God himself is welcoming her to his realm. Down below, meanwhile, back on Earth, the apostles are filled with anxiety and awe at her departure. In her glowing red robes, Titian's Mary is a pulse-quickening presence. Until now, no-one in art had used colour as excitingly and bravely as this. So it's a great artistic moment. But, more importantly, a great religious moment. Now, an interesting thing about the Frari is that the high altar here is at the west of the church and not the east. In most Catholic churches, it's the other way round. The high altar is at the east of the church, because that's where the Holy Land is and where the sun rises. Now, when the Frari was first built in 1338, it also pointed to the east. But when the Franciscans enlarged it in 1492, they swapped round the orientation. So it now pointed to the west. Why they changed it is unclear. What isn't unclear is the impact the change had on the art in here, and particularly on Titian's assumption. In the revelations of St John the Apostle, he's the one in red, we read that there appeared in heaven a woman clothed with the sun. And that woman, clothed with the sun, was Mary. To evoke that moment, Titian has silhouetted her against a glorious golden background. It's an effect called contrajour, against the light. And its religious function is to separate the heavenly realm that Mary has just entered from our world, the corporeal world, where the apostles still are. But this golden light isn't just painted. Because of the new orientation of the church, the evening light now floods through the windows as well, and combines with Titian's painted light to bathe Mary in a miraculous golden glow. It's a stupendous religious moment. High above the altar of the friary, art and light have been deliberately combined to create a visual miracle. Every night here in Venice, but especially on the night of August the 15th, it's as if the assumption is really happening before us. Given the mood of Venice, its relationship to light, there's something very appropriate about the fact that the city's most celebrated export was glass. Glass is sort of there and sort of not there. Just like Venice. Until the 13th century, the finest glass imported into Europe came from the Islamic world, notably from Syria. But as Venice got richer and richer with all that busy trading, so more and more precious glass was needed for the dining table. With its excellent contacts in the east, Venice had a head start when it came to making Renaissance glass and soon became famously good at it. Since 1291, Venetian glass was made on that island there, Murano. The traditional explanation for this isolation is that the dangerous fires of the glass furnaces were safer on their own island. But recent research has suggested that the real reason the Venetians sent their glassmakers to Murano was because they wanted to keep their secrets secret. So they locked them away on an island where no one could reach them. Knowing how the Venetians are about money, I'm inclined to believe the second version. Anyway, this was where glassmaking was concentrated and where its secrets were kept. By the time the Venetians turned their talents to it, glass already had an exciting cultural history. The Romans had made it, the Islamic world. But it was in Venice that a taste developed for glass that was particularly pure. And see-through. Glass, as you know, has this intimate relationship with light. The two of them, light and glass, play beautiful games with each other. And here in Venice, in the early days of the Renaissance, this magical relationship was intensified with the discovery of a new type of glass called cristallo. Cristallo was the invention, they say, of a famous glassmaker called Angelo Baroviere. And what was unique about it was that it was completely see-through and pure, like rock crystal itself. And that's why they called it cristallo. Now, I love all that mythic stuff about glass and its relationship to light. And, of course, there's something particularly appropriate about Venice becoming the capital of glass. But the invention of cristallo by Baroviere needs to be understood as a scientific innovation, not a mythic one. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single Renaissance product that pointed more firmly to the technological future than cristallo. To control the temperature of the furnaces, they used this stuff called soda ash, made from desert plants harvested by the Bedouins of Syria. And the silica that was used wasn't your standard desert sand, but especially pure quartz crystals found in mountain rivers. And with these slow improvements and careful technological refinements, Baroviere finally arrived at a glass that was totally see-through and pure. All that effort for something that was hardly there. And because cristallo was so fragile, very little of it has survived. If you want to see how beautiful Venetian glass was, you have to look for it in Venetian art. See what Mary Magdalene is using to carry her oil in Giovanni Bellini's gorgeous altarpiece in San Zechariah. Or look what the servants are serving in Veronese's astounding Supper at the House of Levi. Even in paint, the delicate magic of Venetian glass still speaks to us through the ages. This is the Ponte de Tete in Venice, and I'm afraid Ponte de Tete means bridge of tits. Sorry, but that's what it means. The story goes that in an effort to straighten out the burgeoning gay population of Renaissance Venice, the Venetian authorities instructed the city's prostitutes to take their tops off on the bridge of tits in the forlorn hope that their feminine charms would straighten out the wayward boys. Sex really was an issue in this city. They reckoned there were 12,000 prostitutes working in Renaissance Venice out of a population of 100,000. So one in 10 inhabitants was on the game, and many of the travellers who came here came for the sex. It was Venice that invented the reclining Venus, the goddess of love stretched out naked on a bed just so she can be ogled. The first of these reclining Venuses was painted by Giorgione, the great sleeping Venus in Dresden. As with all Giorgione's art, there's an air of mystery about her that fills your thoughts with endless speculation. But the master of the Venetian Venus, the keenest painter of the subject, was Titian, the arch sensualist of Venetian art. Even in his religious pictures, Titian makes very little effort to disguise his notorious passion for women. In real life, he was the scourge of the studio, notorious for pleasuring his models. And in his mythologies, all that desire and naughtiness comes pouring out like water from a fountain. There's a room at the Prado Museum in Madrid that's filled entirely with these sensual imaginings by Titian. Most of the reclining nudes are Venuses, but the one I'd like to focus on is Danae. Why? Well, that's pretty obvious, isn't it? I think Titian's Danae is the most outrageously sensuous picture in Renaissance art. Danae was the beautiful daughter of the king of Argos. One day, a prophet tells the king that he's going to be killed by his daughter's son. So he locks Danae up in a vault where no one can reach her. Oh, yes, they can. Zeus, the randiest of the gods, sees Danae in her cell and desires her. And handily disguised as a shower of gold, he comes down to her and impregnates her. Later on, outside the picture, as it were, she has a son, Perseus, and this son kills her father, the king. So the prophecy comes true. Sex, gold, a beautiful princess. The Danae story was popular all round the Renaissance. But what I want to focus on here is Zeus, the master of disguise with the morals of a dog. Now, a large chunk of Greek mythology is devoted to the sexual conquests of Zeus. The Venetians couldn't get enough of them. And another story painted by Titian was Europa and the bull. Europa, who gave her name to Europe, was a high-born Phoenician princess. But Zeus decided he wanted her. So he disguised himself as a bull. And when she got up on his back, the bull thundered into the sea. And abducted her. And it wasn't just Titian and the Venetians who enjoyed all this donning of disguises by the randy Zeus. The entire Renaissance seemed much taken with the possibilities. Here's Michelangelo's Leda and the Swan. The original was lost, so this is a copy by Rosso Fiorentino. Zeus has come down to Leda disguised as a swan. Why a swan? Well, this is a family film, so you'll just have to imagine it. But the most cunning of Zeus's many disguises is the one he adopted to seduce the lovely Io. Painted here by Correggio. To get to Io, Zeus transformed himself into a cloud. And took her when she didn't even know she was being taken. Now the Renaissance was supposed to be this great rebirth of civilisation. A triumph of knowledge and all that. So how come it was so interested in the bed-hopping antics of Zeus? Well, one answer, the obvious answer, is that it wasn't really a rebirth of civilisation at all. And that the forces coursing through the Renaissance were the same old darknesses that have always coursed through us humans. Something else that Venice was importing from the east in immodest quantities was cloth. Silks, satins, damasks. The textiles of the east brought a glistening gorgeousness to Venetian art that was exciting and new. The silk was imported mostly from Persia and then woven here in Venice into these famously sumptuous designs and sent off around Europe to dazzle everyone lucky enough to see it. We know this because it's recorded superbly in Venetian art. Look at the snazzy robes in which Titian dresses Joseph of Arimathea in his great entombment at the Prado. Is that really the right gear for an entombment? But the cloth painter supreme among the Venetians was Paolo Veronese whose gorgeous fabrics look as if they've been woven not just from silk but from light itself. Veronese's art is like an advert for Venetian textiles. He painted all sorts of pictures, mythologies, dining scenes, portraits and in all of them what's going on seems less important than what everyone's wearing. In Veronese every stretch of silk plays its part. Whether you're Saint George going to his martyrdom or the lovely Andromeda chained up for the monsters, what you're wearing needs to shimmer and shine and single you out. It's even true of Veronese's contribution to the most boring genre in art, the political allegory. What is it about big buildings that makes our rulers insist on filling them with so many yards of jingoistic guff? This is the ducal palace from which Venice is run and it's packed with political pictures and wonderful dresses. This oval painting here is Veronese's apotheosis of Venice and there's Venice herself imagined as a beautiful blonde who's going up to heaven dressed in virgin white. Back on earth meanwhile, on the balcony below, the citizens of Venice have turned up to cheer and look what they've thrown on for the occasion. No wonder they're all so happy to be living in Venice. It wouldn't be if you could wear dresses like that. On the catwalk of Venetian politics, Veronese had no equals. Veronese could paint all kinds of cloth but a particular favourite of his is through here. It's Europa and the bull again. Zeus is up to his old tricks. He's absconding with Europa and look at the sly way he's licking her foot. A bull with a foot fetish. How very Venetian. But the star of the picture isn't Zeus or the cherubs or Europa. It's that dress she's modelling. See how it's pink and yellow at the same time? That's a Venetian speciality. Here, I'll show you. This is shop silk, what they call in Italian cangente. You can see it better outside. It's woven from two colours that change before your eyes and this cangente silk is all over Renaissance art. Here's Bellini's beautiful Feast of the Gods in Washington. A divine barbecue to which all the deities have been invited. So they've all dressed up for the occasion. Especially Mercury who sits at the front getting noticed in his blue and purple tunic and his splendid cangente socks. But it wasn't only Venetian artists who enjoyed painting the miracle cloth. The most prodigious cangente painter of all was Michelangelo. Look up at the Sistine ceiling in Rome and you'll be amazed how many of the prophets and ancestors up there have turned up for the end of the world in their best cangente clobber. In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo paints a world where nothing is solid. A cangente world of shifting hues and changing colours. In previous films in this series, we've seen how various saints were depicted in the Renaissance and why. In film one, there was Saint George and the dragon. In film two, John the Baptist in his animal skin. And Saint Peter with his key. In Venice though, the saint who seemed best to capture the city's sensuous tone was that alluring biblical concoction, Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene has never been real. She's always been a plaything of the Renaissance imagination.