The 10 Masterpieces That Built the Renaissance
For centuries, painting in Europe had looked up, not back. Then, in a handful of Italian cities, a few artists wanted the old world of Greece and Rome back: its bodies, its buildings, its stories. Almost none of it had survived.
This is the story of ten works, from The School of Athens and The Last Supper to Michelangelo's David and the Mona Lisa, and of the moment Europe set out to rebuild a past it had never seen. Where each one was made, where it hangs today, and what the painters were really looking at when they made it.
CHAPTERS
0:00 The moment Europe rebuilt its past
0:37 The picture that means antiquity
2:01 What Rome actually painted
3:37 One point, and a hole in the plaster
5:04 A painting rebuilt from a paragraph
6:35 When the only model is marble
8:07 The inventory was rubble
9:47 The arm they invented
11:16 White is what is left
12:49 Where the argument stops
14:26 Thirty years on, the same trick
17:10 Every caption is still telling you the wrong story
THE TEN WORKS
1. Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509-1511 - Vatican Museums, Vatican City
2. Cubiculum from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, about 50-40 BC - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
3. Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1495-1498 - Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan
4. Sandro Botticelli, The Calumny of Apelles, about 1494-1495 - Uffizi, Florence
5. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, about 1485 - Uffizi, Florence
6. Andrea Mantegna, Saint Sebastian, about 1457-1459 - Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
7. Laocoon and His Sons, unearthed in Rome in January 1506 - Vatican Museums
8. Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504 - Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence
9. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, about 1503-1506 - Louvre, Paris
10. Titian, The Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1523-1526 - Museo del Prado, Madrid
IMAGE CREDITS
The Calumny of Apelles: photo by Armin Kleiner, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
David: photo by George M. Groutas, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.
Laocoon and His Sons: photo by Wilfredor, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Boscoreale cubiculum: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access, CC0.
All other works and reproductions are in the public domain.
Music composed for this video.
Pentimento. Masterpieces, decoded.