The Dark Side of the Renaissance - Leonardo, Bosch and Art's Wildest Visions

I once made a film with Leni Riefenstahl, the notorious German film director who made propaganda films for the Nazis. And she told me that Hitler told her that he decided to join the Nazi party while looking down on the world from a mountain. Now, I don't know if that's true, but I do know that mountains have a powerful effect on people. Mountains cloud your judgment. They heighten your emotions and intoxicate you. And in Renaissance times, the times we're looking at, they intoxicated that especially disquieting Renaissance presence, Leonardo da Vinci. When Leonardo pops up in Renaissance films, he's always presented as this great gatherer of knowledge. Leonardo, artist and scientist, the leading genius of the Renaissance. And of course, he was very clever and all that, but he was also driven, unsettling, imbalanced. And that's the Leonardo we'll be looking at in this film. Personally, I can't see how Leonardo ever managed to pass for a scientific genius. One look at his paintings tells you there was something strange about him, something peculiar and visionary. So in this film, a film about the darkness that enveloped the Renaissance as it hurtled through the 16th century, we'll be celebrating Leonardo the fiery visionary and not Leonardo the brilliant scientist. And then when we're done with Leonardo, we'll turn to all the other wild-eyed eccentrics who began popping up in the Renaissance in increasing numbers. Hieronymus Bosch, Archimboldo, El Greco. The Renaissance is supposed to be the first modern age of reason. But look how packed it really was with unreason. We have to start here, of course, with the world's most famous painting. Painted in around 1504, the Mona Lisa has spent half a millennium confusing people. I must have seen her a hundred times. And I still can't tell you what that mysterious look on her face is trying to convey. It's all deliberate. Leonardo the cunning so-and-so is playing mind games with us. With most portraits, you look at the sitter. With this one, the sitter looks at you, staring slowly into your thoughts as if she knows what you're thinking. That's why she's got that irritating smirk on her face. The famous Mona Lisa smile. Damn it, she knows everything. Apart from these psychological games, which are brilliant and way ahead of their time, what I really admire about her is that she's not classically beautiful. This isn't a Renaissance dolly bird or a stand-in for Venus. This is a smart older woman, independent and strong. When you admire the Mona Lisa, you admire her mystery, not her cuteness. And that's where the mountains come in. These fabulous Leonardo mountains. The landscape here is really important. Usually in art, the landscape helps to place the sitter so you know where you are. But with the Mona Lisa, the opposite happens. Leonardo's mountains echo her sense of mystery and amplify it. Smuggled into Renaissance art are timeless moods that belong in Lord of the Rings. The same thing happens all over his art. The pictures play mind games with you. This is the Virgin of the Rocks, also in the Louvre. And again, what a puzzling picture with all this strange pointing going on. And another stupendous and thoroughly mysterious mountain landscape. Like a clever whodunit that will never solve, the art of Leonardo da Vinci keeps us guessing, speculating and suspecting. It's true of so much of his art, as if he's deliberately stoking up the sense of mystery to keep us interested. And very often, it involves mountains. In Windsor Castle, in the Royal Library, there's a remarkable set of drawings. The so-called deluge drawings. Made towards the end of his life, in around 1514. And all of them have this turbulent, apocalyptic power to them. When I first saw these deluge pictures, I assumed they were scientific drawings, in which Leonardo was recording the effects of a particularly fierce storm. And we now know that in 1513, there really was a terrible landslide here in Bellinzona. Near the Swiss border with Italy. And that Leonardo may have witnessed the damage, as the mountain crumbled and slid into the valley. And guess what? Just recently, in 2012, it happened again. In this same valley. You can see it on YouTube. The Bellinzona landslide. It's very dramatic. So this was something that actually happened. It looks imaginary, but it wasn't. It's the same with another drawing in the Royal Library in Windsor, called the cloudburst of material possessions. In which all sorts of garden implements are falling out of the sky. Rakes, bottles, umbrellas. You can see that on YouTube as well. A few months ago, it happened near Venice, when a tornado struck the Veneto. And all this stuff began falling out of the sky. So all this can really happen. Nature can tear the world apart and reorder it. It's scientifically observable and provable. But there's something else going on here. If you look at the top, see? Leonardo's written something in his famous mirror writing. And it actually says, on this side, Adam. On this, Eve. Adam and Eve. The first man and the first woman in the Bible. Who committed the first sin. What have they got to do with any of this? They've got everything to do with it. Because what we've really got in these tremendous deluge drawings is an intense and pessimistic religious vision disguised as science. Here's another of the deluge drawings. A hurricane sweeping across the sky. Uprooting the trees. Drowning the horsemen. And look, up in the clouds, hidden in the billows. An angry god is driving the storm. Look over here in the corner, see? There's a cloud load of trumpeting angels blowing the final chord. We've seen angels like this before in this series. Back in film two, when we visited the Sistine Chapel. And saw Michelangelo's Last Judgment. Where another cloud load of trumpeting angels is playing the final tune. These deluge drawings may look like accurate observations of nature. Things that Leonardo actually saw. But what they really are, are fantastical envisionings of the final apocalypse. The end of the world. This isn't the handiwork of a particularly clever scientist. It's the handiwork of a particularly pessimistic visionary. In the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, exquisite knowledge had turned into exquisite despair. Scratch the surface of the Renaissance, just about anywhere. And the pessimism comes bubbling up like Saudi crude. It's true of many Renaissance hotspots. But it's especially true of this one. When it comes to pessimism, even Leonardo has some way to go. To match the despair of Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch was almost an exact contemporary of Leonardo's. Just a couple of years older. He was born around 1450, died 1516. So this pessimism they shared, was the pessimism of their times. As the 15th century turned into the 16th. Art, the truest evidence there is of these things. Got weirder and weirder. Darker and darker. This is supposed to be an age of enlightenment. So where did the enlightenment go? Bosch was born over there in Sertogenbosch. Or Denbosch as they call it now in Holland. He was christened Hieronymus van Aachen. But just as Veronese came from Verona and da Vinci came from Vinci. So Bosch came from Denbosch. His most famous picture, the Garden of Earthly Delight in the Prado. That extraordinary theme park of sin. Is a triptych packed with so much bad news. That I can't deal with it all at once. So I'm going to do the three panels separately. The one on the left shows us Paradise. Where God has just created Adam and Eve. So there they all are standing under a dragon tree. And because this is Paradise, Satan is there as well. But he's in disguise. He's usually shown as a snake. But Bosch reinvents him as an owl. Lurking in his cubbyhole at the centre of Paradise. The owl, the dragon tree, they're all symbolic details. And the picture is jam-packed with them. It took us three hours to film it in the Prado and we still didn't finish. Bosch was part of a large family of painters, the Van Arkhans. Who worked communally in a house by the market in Denbosch. With everyone chipping in. They all lived and worked in a studio on the square here. And that is where the Garden of Earthly Delight would have been painted. While the left-hand panel shows us Paradise. The central panel is a picture of Disneyland. Oops, sorry, no it isn't. It's just that it looks like it. With its Cinderella castles and its Sleeping Beauty fountains. And all that romping and revelling in the grass. What it actually shows is Paradise a bit later on as it were. Once the humans and the animals have settled in and spurred on by Satan. Begin doing what humans and animals always do. When you let them off the leash. Show a man a woman and he'll sin with her. Show a woman a man and she'll tempt him. Or so Bosch is telling us. As he warns us in excruciating and marvellous detail. Of the unstoppable dangers of lust. Because Bosch's art is so strange. Some very daft suggestions have been put forward to explain it. Particularly that middle panel. It's been claimed that he used hallucinogenic drugs to imagine this. Renaissance LSD perhaps. And Freudians have outed him as a repressed sadomasochist. Another popular idea is that he was a member of a secret religious cult. And that his art was smuggling wicked heretical ideas. Into the Renaissance. But of course he wasn't any of those things. Bosch was a fierce and inventive Catholic. A religious pessimist who looked around at the world about him. And didn't like what he saw. In Bosch's time Sir Tegenbosch had about 18,000 people living in it. And of those 18,000, 2,000 or so were religious folk. Monks, friars, nuns. So this was an unusually religious town. And these unusually religious moods are his moods. It's been suggested that a version of the Garden of Earthly Delights. Used to hang here in the cathedral in Sir Tegenbosch. But the nudity was too much for later times. So it was replaced. Some of the strange architecture in the garden. Was inspired by this new font for baptising children. Which arrived in the cathedral in 1492. Bosch converted it into an ungodly blue totem. That the locals are worshipping in their religious Disneyland. Full of guilt and terror. Set free in paradise. Mankind gets straight down to the business. Of forgetting the true God. So the central panel is packed with sinners. And all that sinning can only lead to one place. Hell. And that's what's depicted in the right hand panel. Hell is Bosch's speciality. He painted the most imaginative and terrifying scenes of punishment and distortion. To be found anywhere in art. I don't need to describe them. You can see what they are. The only thing that needs pointing out perhaps. Is that this is Renaissance art as well. Just as Renaissance. As the Mona Lisa. The darkness of Hieronymus Bosch. The sweaty guiltiness of his art. All that punishment and sin. Isn't confined to Renaissance painting. It's a feature too of Renaissance ceramics. And particularly of the remarkable plates. Made in Renaissance France by Bernard Palissy. Palissy was a French Huguenot. A Protestant. He was born in around 1510. And died aged about 80. In the Bastille prison. They locked him up because he was fiercely religious. And refused to denounce his Protestant faith. We're not sure where Palissy learned to make his remarkable Renaissance plates. He seems to have been largely self-taught. They say he was trying to recreate Chinese porcelain. But I don't think I buy that. It's obvious surely that Palissy's plates have a dark side. A typical Palissy will have a snake in the middle. All around be lizards, snails, frogs. Things that slither and creep and come out of the deep. They're spectacularly realistic. And ahead of their times. He made them using plaster moulds. Taken from real snakes and lizards. He collected in the marshes. Why would anyone in Renaissance France be making plates like these? In art snakes, lizards, frogs have a very dark history. They've been victimized. Picked out of the animal kingdom. And turned into symbols of death and evil. When Carpaccio painted his fabulous Saint George and the Dragon. In the Scuola San Giorgio in Venice. He littered the ground around his hero. With symbols of darkness, mutilation and mortality. Also in Venice. Why is this young man painted by Lorenzo Lotto. Being examined so intently by a lizard. Because the lizard's job in the painting. Is to remind the young man that youth is short. And death is waiting. It all starts in the Bible. Which is packed with prejudicial views of reptiles and amphibians. When a plague descends on God's chosen people in Exodus. It's a plague of frogs. And right at the start in Genesis. When Satan tempts Eve in the Garden of Eden. He does it disguised as a snake. So these aren't any old religious issues. These are the critical ones. The only reason we have to die at all. According to the Bible. Is because we sinned in paradise. And why did we sin in paradise? Because a snake tempted Eve to commit the first sin. And Bernard Palisi, a religious extremist. Who died in the Bastille for his beliefs. Would have known all about the terrible meaning of snakes, frogs and lizards. And that's why he put them into his revolutionary ceramics. It's a kind of Renaissance action art. What do you do with a plate? You put food on it. God's bounty. And you eat it. And as you eat it. The lizards. The frogs. The snakes. Begin popping up. And reminding you that earthly pleasures don't last for long. And that the devil is always there. Always ready. Always lurking. In the marvellous Renaissance action art of Bernard Palisi. Something new appeared in the world. Ceramics that pack a punch. And the pessimism of the Renaissance. Found one of its most inventive outlets. The deeper you go in the late Renaissance. The weirder it gets. Especially if you stray into Renaissance Prague. The unlikely bailiwick of this notoriously peculiar Habsburg emperor. Oh okay then. This isn't really Rudolf II. And he didn't really have an edible chestnut for a chin. Or a pear for a nose. But this is a portrait of him. Painted by his remarkable court painter Giuseppe Archimboldo. Even in this strange stretch of creativity that is late Renaissance art. Archimboldo stands out. The Renaissance always liked puzzles. Tricks. Complexities. But with Archimboldo this taste for conundrums. Reached a startling climax. Although he was Italian from Milan originally. Archimboldo came into his own. If that's what this can be called in Prague. Where he found himself at the end of the 16th century. Working for Rudolf II. Plenty of people have plenty of views on what Archimboldo was trying to do. He's an alchemist say some. A magician say others. Or perhaps an occultist. It was actually simpler than all that. He was just a man of his times. If you poke about in the recesses of late Renaissance art. Step just a little bit off the beaten track. You'll find lots of signs. Of an appetite that had arisen for mutation and strangeness. Look at this thing. Commissioned by Rudolf II from his favorite jeweler. Abraham Yamnitzer. It's the beautiful Daphne. Turning into a tree made of coral. As the laws of nature are usurped by the laws of art. And speaking of nature. What about this unexpected Renaissance plate. At the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It's another disguised portrait. Made up this time of interlocking penises. That caption actually reads. Everyone looks at me as if I were a dickhead. Oh yes. The Renaissance. Rebirth of civilization. So Archimboldo wasn't going against the Renaissance grain. When he began painting these extraordinary heads. He was continuing a Renaissance tradition. And while he was at it. He was throwing in some sneaky satire. This librarian made completely of books. Is having a little dig at all the showy Renaissance book collectors. Who pretended they were learned. Because their shelves were heavy with unopened books. His beard is made out of the fur tails. That these learned Renaissance types used as dust whisks. And the curtain. That's the curtain that sealed off the reading area. In the great man's private library. Shh it seems to say. Scholar at work. There's so much clever pictorial invention. Going on in Archimboldo. See this plate here for instance. Full of excellent kitchen produce. Look what happens when through the magic of television. We turn it upside down. So Archimboldo was brilliant and inventive. And you have to wonder. How he managed to get as good as he did. While working for the impossible Rudolf the second. All of the Habsburgs were problematic. Centuries of inbreeding had seen to that. But when it came to eccentricity. Rudolf the second was in a league of his own. In art he developed an uncontrollable appetite for the erotic. And filled his castle walls with the paintings of Bartolomeo Spranger. A sly eroticist from Antwerp. Who knew exactly where to press Rudolf's buttons. Rudolf would arrange his pictures on chairs. So he could transport them around the castle. And look at them wherever he wanted. And the other unusual place he put them. Was up on the ceiling. And he'd lie down on the ground. And look up at his art. And there he'd rest. Gazing up at Spranger's Venus tempting Adonis. A renaissance moment so naughty. That even the dog knows what's going on. And here's his Venus in Vulcan's forge. I hear it gets hot in there. Very hot. His other great passion. Apart from erotic art. Was alchemy. He invited most of the notable alchemists in Europe. Here to Prague. With instructions to search for. The Philosopher's Stone. This legendary substance was said to turn lead into gold. And it brought you what Rudolf II most desired. Immortality. He had his own private alchemy laboratory. Where he conducted increasingly dangerous experiments. In this desperate search for eternal youth. To this day Prague enjoys a regrettable reputation. For alchemical experiment and occult tinkering. It's the European capital of Hocus Pocus. And it has Rudolf II to thank for that. Another of Rudolf's eccentricities. Was to lead his life entirely by the horoscope. The stars ruled his every move. And to mark his commitment to the cosmos. Rudolf commissioned this painting. From the great Tintoretto in Venice. The origin of the Milky Way. So sure was he that the stars governed everything. That anyone seeking an audience with him. Be they Pope or Emperor. Had to have their horoscope done first. To make sure they were suitable. And to prove that his immortality was written in the stars. Rudolf commissioned his own personal horoscope. From Nostradamus. Unfortunately Nostradamus came back with bad news. The stars were not predicting immortality. So Rudolf did what any sensible. All-powerful Renaissance despot. Obsessed with magic and alchemy would do. He changed his birthday. Having been born in the realm of cancer. Rudolf tinkered with the cosmos. And announced that his sign was now Taurus. But the stars weren't fooled. Nostradamus predicted that Rudolf would live to 73. Unfortunately he only made it to 60. But in his weird Renaissance way. He certainly left his mark. For a brief but exciting moment. Prague became the epicenter. Of a wild wing of the Renaissance. And to this day. The strange things done here. In the name of Rudolf the second. Have not been forgotten. So perhaps he did achieve some immortality after all. All the way through this series. I've been arguing that the Renaissance. Was a wilder epoch than we're usually told. And to make this point. I've sometimes had to deal with nuances. But other times. The wildness stares you in the face. And you just can't miss it. This is the creation of Giulio Romano. Pupil of Raphael's. Who came here to Mantua. And produced this preposterous chamber of the giants. In 1532. The entire room tells the story of some uppity giants. Who are being thrown out of Mount Olympus. By Jupiter and the gods. The uppity giants. Had tried to overthrow the divine Olympians. But they failed. And this is what happened to them. So that's actually Mount Olympus up there. And there's Jupiter the king of the gods. With his thunderbolts. And on the right. In the low cut tunic. That's Juno the queen of the gods. And all the other gods are up there as well. There's Apollo with his lyre. And on the other side of the mountain. Kronos with his scythe. Next to him. With the two faces. There's Janus. What a fine name that is. Janus. Now this kind of painting is called Mannerism. At least that's what we call it now. For centuries it didn't really have a name. Nobody knew what to make of it. Mannerism has always been a tough ism to grasp. Its defining characteristics. Don't seem to define anything sensible or rational. Outrageous anatomies and weird poses. Mad colours and mysterious meanings. Peculiar storylines and twisty moods. Why would Renaissance art start doing this? In here for instance. To make a potty experience even pottier. The entire floor was originally covered in river pebbles. And that's what you walked on. It's as if common sense has been thrown out of the window. And everything has grown illogical, distorted and strange. And it wasn't just painting that was affected. It hit all the arts. This is the famous Apennine Giant by Giambologna. How about that for a garden ornament? So unexpected and gargantuan. So clearly not influenced by the Greeks. You get Mannerist metalwork as well. Mad creations in silver and gold. Like the famous salt cellar made by Benvenuto Cellini in 1543. Which lives these days in a bulletproof box in Vienna. He's the salt, she's the pepper. Everybody loves Cellini's salt cellar of course. With its exciting mix of skill and surrealism. But they don't generally love Mannerism. Purists tend to look down on it as a decline. A sign of the Renaissance going wrong. But that's not how I see it. Not at all. This is by Pontormo. One of Mannerism's acknowledged giants. It's his visitation. The moment in the Bible when the pregnant Virgin Mary visits her pregnant cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth on the right is pregnant with John the Baptist. Mary on the left is pregnant with Jesus. So this is a moment of momentous sanctity. A collision of divine pregnancies. And Pontormo has imagined it for us so unusually. There are actually two Marys in the picture. And two Elizabeths. One from the front and one from the side. And all four of them are floating in a frozen religious dance. A dance in a distant dimension. It's true of all his art. Pontormo's eerie religious pictures tinker with the logic in the world. Stretch it, recolour it. It's as if Renaissance art has given up on realism. And embraced the strange, the twisted, the heightened. These are not everyday moments. So why should they be painted in an everyday manner? What we shouldn't do is see Pontormo as a betrayer of Renaissance values. Or an aberration. All the way through this series I've been banging on about how the Renaissance was never as ordered or as stable as we've been told. It was always full of passion, idiosyncrasy and darkness. You just had to look at it the right way. Walk into the Sistine Chapel. Look up at Michelangelo. And you'll see mannerism already happening. The twisting figures. The opal fruit colours. It's all there in fledgling form. Or peer into the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. And you'll find all the weirdness you could ask for. Spooky smiles. Cryptic darknesses. Obscure meanings. Mannerism wasn't a reaction. It was a continuation. An enlargement. Instead of looking down on it as a decline, we should be looking up at it as a fabulous climax. Do you know how many landscape painters we've looked at so far in this series? None. Not a single one. That's partly because landscape painting was looked down on in the Renaissance, but also because the Catholic Church banned it at the Council of Trent, where all profane subjects were deemed unsuitable for art. So you had to be a real rebel to paint landscapes in the Renaissance. And that's what we've got here in Toledo. One of the fiercest rebels ever to pick up a paintbrush. In Spain, they called him El Greco, the Greek. He looks ordinary, doesn't he? But he wasn't. El Greco was actually born in Crete, which was a colony of Venice at the time. The first paintings we know by him are Byzantine icons. So stylized and orthodox, they could have been painted in the 10th century and not the 16th, which is when El Greco was actually born in 1541. At some point in his 20s, he left Crete and moved to Venice, where he worked briefly in Titian's studio. Absorbing the big colorific lessons of Venetian art and changing his style into something more Western, with a twist of Byzantium in it. By 1577, he'd fetched up here in Toledo, which was so far off the beaten track that the usual Renaissance rules didn't apply. But, and it was a big but, there was lots of money here. All that silver and gold that was being shipped over from the Americas and which the Catholic Church was busily spending on art. Here in the cathedral in Toledo, El Greco painted a sensational disrobing of Christ. Christ is about to be tortured and crucified. So the crowd is pressing in around him, eager to strip off his clothes and expose him fully to the pain. I think El Greco is one of the most exciting of all the old masters. When I was a kid, I used to cut out pictures of paintings from a magazine called Knowledge and hang them on my wall. And one of the first ones I cut out was El Greco's Saint Martin and the Beggar. I couldn't stop looking at it. Saint Martin, who's rich, meets a beggar while he's out riding. The beggar is cold. So Martin cuts his cloak in two and shares it with him. It's such a haunting picture with two figures stretched out, flickering like candles against the sky. The Renaissance hadn't seen art like this before. No one had. This is more than mannerism. This is mannerism plus extreme moods, unusual colours. Wired poses. Here in Toledo, they've recently been commemorating the 400th anniversary of El Greco's death in 1614. So they cleaned up all his pictures and we can finally see his colours as they were meant to be seen. Yellows that sing like canaries. Greens so vibrant and tangy you can taste them on your tongue. Purples so vivid Titian himself would have been proud of them. This is the hospital of Saint John the Baptist, the Hospital Tavera. And that is El Greco's baptism of Christ. Look at all these figures who've turned up to watch. Twisting, pushing, bending to get a better look. All except God himself, who's sitting up there on a cloud with his crystal ball. So he knows what's going to happen and he's not celebrating. El Greco was so remarkable and different that art history took 300 years to understand him. It wasn't to the beginning of the 20th century that he was plucked out of obscurity and recognised at last as a fabulously inventive genius. One of the pioneers of this new understanding of El Greco was Picasso, who borrowed so much from his distant master. There's a painting in New York at the Met called The Opening of the Fifth Seal and it shows that moment in Saint John's revelations when the fifth seal is opened just before the end of the world. And the Christian martyrs call up to God to avenge them for their tortures. And up in the sky, the heavens crack open as if someone has thrown a brick at them. The opening of the fifth seal used to hang around the corner from Picasso in Paris and it inspired his most famous painting, the Demoiselles d'Avignon, the picture that started cubism. Fractured planes, thrusting bodies, El Greco's spiky disruption was such an inspirational gift to the future. What I've tried to do in this series is challenge the idea that the Renaissance was neat and ordered, that the knowledge of the ancients was rediscovered and the civilisation of the Greeks reborn. A bit of that went on, but most of the time, in most corners of the Renaissance, art wasn't pursuing knowledge or remembering the Greeks. It was doing what art always does. Imagining the unimaginable and inventing things. Expressing its emotions and describing its fears. Enjoying itself and breaking the rules. So if anyone tells you the Renaissance was a period of civilised calm, go out there and argue with them.