Arts Wildest Movement - Mannerism_3of3
Transcript
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01:20Ah, buongiorno signore.
01:21Prego.
01:225 ml?
01:23Si.
01:24Io ho queste belle croccanti.
01:25Ah, si?
01:26Sono rosso, eh?
01:27Si.
01:28Ah.
01:29Grazie.
01:30Due ciale?
01:31Due ciale, si, si.
01:32As you can see, I'm buying artist's materials.
01:36But they're not any old artist's materials.
01:39These are Mannerist art materials.
01:43Perfetto, si.
01:45In particular, they're the kind of art materials
01:49favoured by this strange and exciting Mannerist genius,
01:54Giuseppe Archimboldo.
01:57Making people's faces out of fruit and veg
02:10is not something we expect of the old masters.
02:14The Renaissance would never have done it.
02:17But Mannerism, rebellious art movement that it was,
02:22took pleasure in breaking the rules.
02:25And making faces out of apples and pears,
02:29that was just the beginning.
02:35Mannerism started in Italy.
02:38But when it began spreading to the rest of Europe,
02:42the brakes came off and the accelerator was pumped.
02:47The more international Mannerism became,
02:51the more rules it broke.
02:54And the art grew wilder and wilder.
03:10Welcome to Prague.
03:12An important stop on the Mannerist trail.
03:16Strange things happened in Prague in Mannerist times.
03:21Very strange things.
03:24And it was all the fault of this man.
03:28Rudolf II.
03:30Holy Roman Emperor.
03:32Unsteady ruler of his people.
03:35And an out-and-out crackpot.
03:52Rudolf was obsessed with all forms of magic.
03:57Especially alchemy.
03:59He believed that alchemy could turn base metals into gold.
04:04And that if he could persuade enough world-class alchemists
04:08to come to Prague to work for him,
04:11then eventually they would discover the secret of eternal life.
04:17And so, under Rudolf II,
04:21Prague became an international hotspot
04:25of occult studies and hocus-pocus.
04:29Alchemy, astrology, wizardry,
04:34and the wildest of all forms of magic, art.
04:40In the Mannerist Prague of Rudolf II,
04:44Mannerist art went completely off the rails.
04:49MANNERIST SPEECH
05:15I have to be careful with this.
05:18It's powerful stuff.
05:20You know what it is, don't you?
05:22It's a bezoar.
05:24If you've read any Harry Potter, you know all about bezoars.
05:28In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone,
05:31Professor Snape shows Harry one just like this,
05:35and explains that it's a bezoar.
05:38In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone,
05:41Professor Snape shows Harry one just like this,
05:45and explains to him how powerful its magic is.
05:51Bezoars changed things.
05:54They were an antidote to any poison, however lethal.
05:59They cured leprosy as well, and cholera, and the plague.
06:05They're actually balls of stuff
06:07that form inside the intestines of a deer or a goat.
06:12Something gets trapped in there, and these hard bezoars form around it.
06:17So they're like pearls in an oyster.
06:20Something rare, precious, difficult to find.
06:27In the Mannerist age,
06:29bezoars were worth ten times the weight of gold.
06:34Everybody wanted one and its magic properties.
06:39So the precious bezoars were turned into beautiful Mannerist knick-knacks.
06:46Despots and absolute rulers like Rudolf II
06:50were particularly keen on bezoars
06:53because they could save you from poisoning,
06:56which is handy if you're an unpopular despot.
07:00In England, Elizabeth I had a bezoar ring made of silver,
07:06which she never took off, just in case.
07:12In the court of Rudolf II,
07:15the finest craftsmen of the age were brought to Prague
07:20to shape bezoars into fantastical bits of Mannerist gold work.
07:27Rudolf, with his interest in alchemy and astrology,
07:32was a keen collector of bezoars.
07:35But then he was a keen collector of so many things,
07:39when he ran out of space in Prague Castle to put stuff,
07:43he built himself a whole new wing
07:46and turned it into a giant cabinet of curiosities.
07:51A giant Kunstkammer.
07:57Kunstkammers were all the rage in Mannerist times.
08:02Remarkable collections of extraordinary things.
08:07Not just paintings and sculptures,
08:10but precious stones, weird objects, natural wonders.
08:17Things you didn't expect to see.
08:27Why were there so many cabinets of curiosity in Mannerist times?
08:32Why this sudden interest in the fantastical, the unexpected?
08:37Well, one reason was geography.
08:41Columbus' famous journey to America,
08:45the great European voyages to new continents,
08:50opened up a world that no-one was expecting.
08:54A world full of new sights and new creatures.
08:59New plants, new nature.
09:02Things people hadn't seen before.
09:13It was an optical revolution,
09:16a tidal wave of new sights arriving in Europe.
09:19Everything people thought they knew was being challenged.
09:23And all these new sights, well, they triggered a new curiosity.
09:29What else was out there?
09:33Alongside the new nature came huge new helpings of gold and silver.
09:41Tons and tons of it flooding in from the Americas.
09:46It triggered a Mannerist rethink of the decorative arts.
09:51The goldsmiths of Europe were used to dealing with gold and precious stones.
09:58But not with ostrich eggs and exotic seashells,
10:03bright pink coral and magical bezoars.
10:08In Mannerist Europe, the decorative arts exploded into fabulous invention.
10:16But it wasn't all magic and craziness.
10:20All these exotic discoveries in the new world
10:24also triggered a new fascination with nature and science.
10:29Half of what Rudolf II commissioned was Mannerist craziness,
10:34but the other half wasn't.
10:37This is a facsimile of a little book produced for Rudolf in Prague.
10:42It's tiny, but in here is a goldmine of Mannerist creativity.
10:50As I said, Rudolf invited all manner of experts to come to Prague to work for him.
10:58And in his collection was a wondrous book of calligraphy by Georg Bočkaj,
11:06the greatest calligrapher in Europe.
11:11The book was beautiful, but it was also half empty,
11:16with all these white spaces left over.
11:20So Rudolf decided it needed filling.
11:26So he commissioned his court miniaturist, Joris Hoefnagel,
11:31to complete it with exquisite scenes from the natural world.
11:37Hoefnagel worked on it for several years,
11:41filling the empty spaces in Bočkaj's calligraphy
11:45with precise recordings of the animal kingdom.
11:49Today, this great Mannerist manuscript, where calligraphy meets nature,
11:56is one of the treasures of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
12:04Rudolf loved the natural world so fiercely
12:08he let a tiger and a lion prowl freely around the grounds of the castle.
12:14We know this because there are legal records from the victims' families
12:18claiming compensation from the emperor for the loss of their loved ones,
12:23eaten by the big cats that roamed the castle.
12:32There's a lot more to tell about Rudolf.
12:35We haven't touched yet on his art collection,
12:38which was just as spectacular as his alchemy.
12:43When Mannerism went international and spread across Europe,
12:50it reached a lot of places.
12:54So we have some important travelling to do.
12:58But don't worry, we'll be back.
13:13The Chateau at Fontainebleau,
13:17one of the finest in France,
13:20and definitely the most Mannerist.
13:24Two people made this great palace what it is.
13:28One of them was Napoleon, but we're not interested in him.
13:32He's not Mannerist enough.
13:34The other one was the French king Francis I.
13:38And we're definitely interested in him
13:40because he's the one who brought Mannerism to France.
13:47Francis I, also known as the King with the Big Nose,
13:52loved Italy.
13:54He knew it well from his wars there.
13:58And his dream was to build a palace in France
14:02that was the equal of France.
14:05He built a palace in France
14:07that was the equal of the great palaces he'd seen
14:11in Milan and Florence.
14:14Do you know why the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre in Paris
14:18and not the Uffizi in Florence?
14:21Because of Francis I.
14:23He was so in love with Italian art
14:26that he persuaded Leonardo da Vinci to come here and work for him.
14:35Leonardo brought the Mona Lisa with him
14:38and Francis I hung her above his bathtub.
14:43She's now in the Louvre, the envy of the world.
14:49WHISTLING
15:05Francis was obsessed with Italian art.
15:08The wars he was waging in Italy weren't very successful.
15:12But, he said, if I can't beat them at war,
15:16I can beat them at art.
15:22It wasn't just Leonardo da Vinci he brought to France.
15:26It was also some of the finest Mannerist artists in Italy.
15:31Especially the man who did all this.
15:36The strange Mannerist genius from Florence,
15:40Rosso Fiorentino.
15:44Rosso wasn't renowned for decorating beautiful palaces.
15:48He was renowned for painting some of the most tortured Christs
15:53that art had ever seen.
15:57Jesus, in his final days, slumped in agony, bent with pain.
16:04It's a common subject in art.
16:07But no-one captured these final agonies
16:11as weightily as Rosso Fiorentino.
16:16But that was in Italy.
16:18When Rosso came to France in 1530 and brought Mannerism with him,
16:23he turned into a completely different artist.
16:27And he did all this.
16:33The great gallery of Francis I at Fontainebleau.
16:39The finest Mannerist gallery in France.
16:43The most inventive and ambitious creation of Rosso Fiorentino.
16:51Of course, he didn't actually do everything in here himself.
16:54Look how much of it there is.
16:56That would have been impossible.
16:58But he did design and imagine the whole thing.
17:03Rosso brought with him skilled Italian stucco artists
17:08who filled every niche with symbolic gods and cupids.
17:14The frescoes he painted himself,
17:17especially this strange one with the big elephant in the middle.
17:23No-one had ever seen anything like this before.
17:27It's some kind of twisty Mannerist symbolism
17:30that's trying to equate the power of Francis I
17:34with the power of the mighty elephant.
17:39The whopping great elephant is a stand-in for the king himself.
17:44He's covered with fleur-de-lis, the sign of France.
17:50And on his forehead there's a salamander.
17:54A salamander.
17:56Francis I's personal symbol.
18:01Now, in real life, salamanders are just quiet little amphibians.
18:06Nothing like the roaring dragons you see everywhere in here.
18:10But in Mannerist times,
18:12it was believed that salamanders could walk through fire.
18:17You could burn one, but you couldn't kill it.
18:21And that's why Francis I filled his great hall with them.
18:27Now, when you look at all this, the enigmatic frescoes,
18:31the stucco with the cupids, the sculptures in every niche,
18:35the roaring salamanders, the woodwork, the plasterwork,
18:40what you have to remember is that no-one had ever done this before.
18:47No-one had previously filled a space with such a cornucopia of art.
18:54The paintings, the sculpture, the stucco,
18:59all working together to create one overwhelming experience.
19:05Later ages would copy this,
19:09and the great royal room, stuffed with all the arts at once,
19:14would soon become a cliché.
19:17But this is where it happened first.
19:21This is one of the big inventions of Mannerism.
19:37Mannerism was besotted with the female nude.
19:42The Renaissance loved nudes too,
19:45but Renaissance nudes were graceful, delicate and charming.
19:52But Mannerist nudes were sly, snaky, downright weird,
19:59and the stories they told were so complicated.
20:06To understand the Mannerist nude, you need to think like a snake.
20:12Sometimes, though, that's not enough.
20:21Oh, again.
20:25No-one has ever been able to understand fully
20:29what's going on in Rosso Fiorentino's puzzling threesome,
20:34of Bacchus, Venus and Cupid.
20:39And what, in Satan's name, is Hans Baldung-Green recording
20:45in his creepy allegories,
20:48where the women are the prey and the skeletons are the predators?
20:55As for Bartolomeus Spranger,
20:58titillator-in-chief to the Mannerist age,
21:02he seemed to paint nothing but nudes.
21:06Elongated, artificial, pale as porcelain.
21:14None of these stretched-out Mannerist nudes is meant to be real.
21:19They're symbolic, fantasy goddesses with complex meanings.
21:25Better men than me have tried and failed
21:29to understand the Mannerist nude.
21:35On the right here is Gabrielle d'Estrée,
21:39the royal mistress of Henry IV,
21:42who reigned in France a few kings after Francis I.
21:48On the left is apparently one of Gabrielle's sisters.
21:52She had several of them, and they were all notoriously beautiful.
21:58One of her sisters became the abbess at a convent,
22:02where she advised all the nuns to take energetic lovers,
22:07just as she had done.
22:10As for Gabrielle, her reputation was so racy,
22:15they called her the Duchess of Filth.
22:20Gabrielle wasn't just the most beautiful of these decadent d'Estrées.
22:26She was also the smartest that she needed to be,
22:31because when it came to women,
22:33Henry IV broke all the royal records.
22:42He didn't look like much, did he?
22:45He didn't look like much, did he?
22:48But apparently Henry IV had 56 royal mistresses.
22:55But the one who grabbed his heart,
22:58who captivated him and controlled him,
23:01was the Duchess of Filth.
23:05Henry was king in deeply troubled times in France.
23:09The nation was being torn apart by a vicious civil war
23:13between the Protestants and the Catholics.
23:17Henry had been raised a Protestant,
23:20but to become king of France,
23:23he needed to convert to Catholicism,
23:26which he didn't want to do.
23:29No-one could persuade him except Gabrielle d'Estrées,
23:34she it was who finally made him see sense.
23:37And prompted by Gabrielle, Henry converted.
23:41And when he became king,
23:43he famously quipped that he had got Paris with a mass.
23:50Gabrielle's role in this momentous conversion
23:55is the reason there are so many paintings of her in the Bath.
24:00They're all slightly different, but they all make the same point.
24:05That the beautiful Gabrielle d'Estrées
24:10interfered wickedly in French history.
24:15This is the one everybody knows,
24:17the nipple-tweaking version in the Louvre.
24:22It's very, very mannerist.
24:25Pale, strange, unrealistic.
24:29Gabrielle is in the Bath with her decadent sister,
24:34and the sister is tweaking her nipple.
24:37Why?
24:39What's not happening is that this is some sort of lesbian love affair.
24:44That's just modern thinking being projected backwards.
24:48The nipple-touching is actually a reference
24:51not to Gabrielle's sexual tastes, but to her fertility.
24:57It was Gabrielle who finally supplied Henry IV
25:02with the son he was so desperate to have.
25:06That's why the maid at the back is sewing baby clothes for the new heir.
25:13This one here is even more explicit.
25:16This time, the wet nurse at the back is actually nursing the newborn son
25:22with that wicked grid on her face.
25:26So that's why the babies and the nipples are there.
25:30They're giggly, mocking references
25:33to Gabrielle giving the king his heir.
25:37But why is she always in the bath?
25:43Because she's being compared to Venus, the goddess of love,
25:48who intoxicated men and made them do crazy things.
25:56Venus taking a bath?
25:58Naked, gorgeous, irresistible
26:02was a popular subject in French Mannerist art.
26:07No man could resist her, least of all a foolish king.
26:14Henry was piggy in the middle in a vicious religious war.
26:19The Catholics hated him because he was once a Protestant.
26:23The Protestants hated him because he became a Catholic.
26:29It triggered so much anger, there were 12 attempts to assassinate him.
26:36And in 1610, they finally succeeded
26:40when a Catholic fanatic stabbed him to death in Paris.
26:47Both sides had reason as well to hate the Duchess of Filth
26:51and her wicked influence on the king.
26:55We'll never know for sure which of these warring factions
27:00commissioned all these mocking portrayals
27:03of the decadent Gabrielle as the bathing Venus.
27:08Was this the Catholics having a go at her or the Protestants?
27:14There's only one way to find out.
27:18A cave.
27:24I thought so.
27:55FOOTSTEPS
28:04These are prickly, don't you think?
28:06They're by Christian Schade, a brilliant German painter
28:10who's best known for his spooky portraits of the 1930s.
28:15So that's the Nazi era.
28:17And this is complex art.
28:20Very complex.
28:24Schade's portraits of the Nazi era may be complex,
28:29but one thing's certain.
28:32They're not Mannerist.
28:34They're 500 years too late for that.
28:38So what is Waldemar doing here?
28:43I'm preparing the ground, that's what I'm doing,
28:46for something a little more appropriate.
28:49This is something that Schade did with a big Mannerist kick to it.
28:57300 yards from the Christian Schade Museum,
29:01in the pretty German town of Aschaffenburg,
29:05is the medieval church of St Peter and Alexander,
29:10where, unexpectedly, Christian Schade makes a dramatic appearance.
29:20In 1943, he was commissioned to paint something
29:25for the town of Aschaffenburg in Bavaria.
29:29Now, 1943 was slap in the middle of the Second World War.
29:34The Nazis were in power here,
29:37and it was the Nazi mayor of Aschaffenburg
29:40who commissioned this new art from Christian Schade.
29:45This is what he did.
29:48He produced this exquisite copy
29:51of a famous painting by Matthias Grunewald,
29:55the Stupak Madonna.
29:58And when we talk about Matthias Grunewald,
30:02we are talking Mannerism.
30:08Grunewald's original painting used to hang here, in this chapel.
30:14And Schade was commissioned to make this copy
30:17because his technique was famously exact.
30:20You need to be very, very good to copy Grunewald.
30:24And Schade was.
30:28It took him four and a half years to get it right.
30:32Only when the war was over in 1947
30:36was his exquisite copy finally unveiled.
30:41Now, you're probably wondering what happened to the original.
30:45Well, at some point in the past,
30:48it left the church and began wandering around Germany,
30:53eventually ending up in the tiny Bavarian town of Stupak,
30:59where it delights the few intrepid visitors
31:03who manage to discover it.
31:05One look at the Stupak Madonna
31:09and you know you're in the presence of an inspired Mannerist.
31:16We know ridiculously little about Matthias Grunewald.
31:20Grunewald definitely wasn't his real name.
31:23Somebody in the 17th century made it up.
31:26We don't know his real name.
31:28Sometimes he gets called Matthias from Aschaffenburg.
31:32Other people call him Mattis Gotthard.
31:36He was an enigma.
31:40We know about 20 paintings by him, and that's it.
31:44Yet this Matthias from Aschaffenburg,
31:47or Mattis Gotthard,
31:49or Matthias Grunewald,
31:52produced one of the greatest masterpieces of European art,
31:57the Isenheim Altar.
32:06Every time I see it, it takes my breath away.
32:09It's so ambitious, so emotional, so big.
32:16It's pretty much the largest crucifixion in European art.
32:21Ten feet across, nine feet high,
32:26a looming billboard of pain and blood and anguish.
32:33It was painted between 1512 and 1516,
32:38so some people will think that's too early to be called Mannerism,
32:42that we should think of this as a piece of Renaissance art.
32:46But I don't think so.
32:49The tortured Christ, the sweaty nocturnal mood.
32:54There's nothing Renaissance about it.
32:57It's too dark and intense.
33:01This is Mannerism in its earliest form.
33:05Particularly charged, particularly scary.
33:10It was painted for a religious order called the Antonines,
33:14and they named themselves after St Anthony,
33:17who's over there on the right,
33:19a hermit originally who lived in Egypt.
33:24Now, these Antonines were a medical order.
33:27They helped the sick.
33:29Their monastery was basically a hospital with the monks as doctors,
33:34and they specialised in a terrible disease called St Anthony's fire.
33:42Known these days as ergotism,
33:45St Anthony's fire brought pain to every cell in the body.
33:52Caused by a fungus found in rye bread,
33:56it made your skin burn and your mind go crazy.
34:01And then the gangrene set in.
34:05So, Grunewald's tortured Christ, the most tortured Christ in art,
34:10isn't just suffering his own pain, the pain of the crucifixion.
34:15He's suffering extra doses of it,
34:18for all the poor devils in here infected with St Anthony's fire.
34:26This part of the altar was always open.
34:29When the sufferers came here for Mass,
34:31this was always here, offering them a daily comfort.
34:36But this isn't an ordinary altarpiece with just one message.
34:41This is an altarpiece full of surprises.
34:46An altarpiece with many layers.
34:52On Sundays and feast days,
34:55the front panels would be opened,
34:58and these hidden panels at the back would appear and take over the altarpiece.
35:05So this is another story, the next stage in the drama,
35:09and it features the comforting female presence of the Virgin Mary.
35:18On the left, a choir of divine angels sings to her
35:23to prepare her for her future,
35:26because she's going to be the mother of God.
35:31And there she is again, on the right, having given birth to Jesus,
35:37cradling him in a beautiful enclosed garden that symbolises her purity.
35:46And guess what? There's more.
35:48Not content with giving us two big stages to his altarpiece,
35:52Grunewald also gives us a third.
35:59It was only unveiled once a year, on January 17th,
36:04the feast day of St Anthony.
36:11In the left-hand panel, St Anthony is meeting St Paul in the desert.
36:18Two old hermits in a fantastical landscape,
36:22while a helpful crow brings them a morsel of bread.
36:29On the other side, St Anthony in the desert is being tempted by the devil,
36:35who throws every imaginable evil at him,
36:40while Grunewald shows off his progressive talent for imagining monsters.
36:48The poor blighter in the corner, the one covered in separating sores,
36:54he's been eating the deadly fungus.
37:01What drama, what vision, what power.
37:05Imagine all this closing and opening, one day this, one day that.
37:11And all the time, these people suffering from St Anthony's fire,
37:16are passing by and interacting with it.
37:20Because that's what you get with mannerism.
37:23This isn't a movement that sits back calmly and waits.
37:27Mannerism forces the pace.
37:30It connects with you, gets inside you, where it counts.
37:47A long way up here, even for a natural athlete like me.
37:52At school, they used to call me the human mountain goat.
37:57That was a while ago, a long while ago.
38:05But mannerism isn't a movement that sits back calmly and waits.
38:12The mannerism isn't a movement you can study from the sofa.
38:17You need to climb the hill and see what's at the top.
38:27You recognise it, of course.
38:29The bridge, the river, the cathedral over there.
38:33It's the view of Toledo by El Greco, painted more or less from here.
38:40El Greco's fabulous view of Toledo
38:43is one of the first landscapes in Western art without any figures in it.
38:49Just the view itself, crackling with mannerist energy.
38:57Before El Greco, landscapes were mostly backgrounds,
39:01settings for a story, something religious or mythological.
39:06What no-one had done before is get rid of the figures
39:09and charge the landscape itself with a pulsing energy,
39:14as if it had electricity running through it.
39:19It's something you find in every picture El Greco painted.
39:24A shimmer, a throb, an energy that cracks the sky.
39:30His views of Toledo have it,
39:33and so do his backgrounds,
39:36when he sets his stories
39:38in the shimmering, rocky, cubistic landscape of Toledo.
39:46He was from Crete originally, born in Heraklion in 1541.
39:51That's why they called him El Greco, the Greek.
39:55And he started out as an icon painter,
39:59his earliest works are stylised religious scenes in the Byzantine manner.
40:05In those days, Crete was part of the Venetian Empire,
40:09so to further his career, he moved to Venice and then Rome.
40:14Finally, he ended up here in Spain,
40:17where he produced some of the most original and exciting art
40:21anyone has ever painted.
40:23The church of San Gius, in Toulouse,
40:26was built in the mid-19th century,
40:29and was the centre of the medieval church.
40:33It's the oldest and most famous church in the world,
40:37and it was built in the early 17th century.
40:40It was built in the early 17th century,
40:43and it was the oldest and most famous church in the world.
40:47It was the building site of the first church,
40:50This is the Hospital de Tavera, a powerful piece of Mannerist architecture, started in
41:021541.
41:16To go with the new hospital, there was this new church dedicated to John the Baptist.
41:23The architect, Nicolas Vergara, was a good friend of El Greco's, and they say that El
41:29Greco himself played a big role in the architecture here.
41:37He definitely designed this, this beautiful tabernacle that used to sit on the high altar
41:43here, but inside it, suspended miraculously in the air, was this resurrected Jesus, also
41:52by El Greco, stark naked in a brave Mannerist fashion.
42:00If you ever come in here, and I recommend that you do, then try and block out the main
42:09altar with all that flashy gold on it, because that's not part of what El Greco was trying
42:15to do here.
42:18He was after a spiritual whiteness, a sense of architectural purity.
42:26Some of that has been preserved in this marvellous side altar.
42:33He designed the whole thing with its white and fluted columns, and then, in the middle,
42:40he painted this shimmering view of Jesus being baptised by John the Baptist.
42:48What he's doing here, deliberately, is contrasting the plain white setting of this altar he designed
42:56with the thrilling, vibrantly coloured, shimmering painting at the centre.
43:02It's like designing a jewel with a precious stone in the middle.
43:11Here at Toledo Cathedral, there's lots more El Greco.
43:16This painting of the disrobing of Christ in the sacristy was his first big Toledo commission.
43:26They're taking off Christ's clothes before they crucify him, and the drama is being played
43:31out in exciting Mannerist colours.
43:36The explosive splash of red in Jesus' robe.
43:41The pinging yellow of Mary Magdalene's dress.
43:46Jesus' colour turning its back on the old rules and inventing some new ones.
43:56The other thing about El Greco which you can't miss, which everyone goes on about, is the
44:00proportion of his figures.
44:02He liked to stretch them out as if they were made of rubber.
44:07Stretch, stretch, stretch, till they almost snapped.
44:14When I was a kid, I used to cut out famous paintings from art magazines and hang them
44:20on my walls.
44:22And one of the first ones I ever cut out was El Greco's Saint Martin and the Beggar.
44:29It was so different, so gripping.
44:33I loved how it seemed to challenge the usual rules of art.
44:40That's why I became an art historian.
44:45I was in love with El Greco's figures.
44:50The man from Crete brought something to Western art that was risky, exciting, new.
44:58His figures, stretched out, angular, twisty, were unlike anyone else's.
45:06And they seemed to look forward to the future of art.
45:12When we were here before, there was something I forgot to mention.
45:16Another El Greco that used to hang here at the Hospital de Tavara.
45:22It's now in New York at the Metropolitan Museum.
45:26El Greco's momentous opening of the fifth seal.
45:32It shows the moment just before the apocalypse, when the souls of the Christian martyrs return
45:40to seek their vengeance.
45:42What a thrilling painting.
45:47And it wasn't just me who admired the opening of the fifth seal.
45:51Picasso loved it too.
45:53So much so that it inspired this, the most important painting in modern art.
46:00The one that started everything, the Demoiselle d'Avignon.
46:08The first cubist painting, an image that crackles with electricity, is an homage to El Greco.
46:18Not content with being an architect, a sculptor, a painter, El Greco, the great multitasker,
46:28changed the future of art as well.
46:31That's how Mannerist he was.
46:49Prague.
46:50We're back, as promised.
46:53Because anyone interested in Mannerist art has no choice in the matter.
46:58If you're interested in Mannerism, you have to come to Prague.
47:06We haven't finished the story of Rudolf II, and we need to.
47:10So I've brought my bezoar along to protect me.
47:14Because in the Prague of Rudolf II, you need all the magic help you can get.
47:24He really was spectacularly mad.
47:28Not only did he spend vast amounts of Habsburg money on alchemy and magic, he also searched
47:36hopelessly for the secret of eternal life.
47:41And the older he got, the moodier and weirder he grew.
47:46Paranoid, secretive.
47:50He never went out, he wouldn't meet people.
47:54He just locked himself away with his alchemy experiments, and he'd sit there, staring at
48:00a powerful new magic he was hoping to channel.
48:04Art.
48:08Rudolf amassed the largest collection of Mannerist art ever assembled.
48:15He was insatiable.
48:18Prague of the 1580s and 1590s was the most active artistic capital in Europe.
48:28He brought over artists from wherever he could find them.
48:32The Netherlands, Italy, Flanders, they all came to Prague.
48:38And because he was such a crackpot, the kind of art he favoured was often unusual.
48:46Especially Giuseppe Archimboldo.
48:54Archimboldo was Italian.
48:57He used to paint quiet Italian altarpieces.
49:01But then he found himself in Rudolf's Prague and began churning out some of the strangest
49:09art of the Mannerist era.
49:14His thing was faces, people.
49:17He'd make portraits of them, but they'd be made out of fruit or vegetables, or sometimes
49:24bits of fish.
49:28Unhappiness was an Archimboldo speciality.
49:33He had a nose for angst and misery.
49:37His faces are full of food, but his souls are full of darkness.
49:45And it could be very tricky.
49:48See this bowl of fruit.
49:50Look what happens when you turn it round.
49:54Mannerism was often strange, but it never got much stranger than the art of Archimboldo.
50:07So yes, Rudolf liked weirdness.
50:11But he had another passion too.
50:13Sex.
50:15He loved it.
50:16Couldn't get enough of it.
50:18Didn't matter if it was men or women.
50:20He pumped away at them like a nodding donkey in an oil field.
50:27So he also encouraged art that catered for his erotic needs.
50:33Above all, he encouraged Bartolomeus Spranger.
50:40Spranger was pretty much incapable of painting an innocent picture.
50:45All his art is erotically charged.
50:49Rudolf would gather up his Sprangers and lock himself away with them in his private rooms
50:55of the castle.
50:58God knows what he got up to in there.
51:01It's probably best we never find out.
51:04Whatever the mythological situation, Spranger would ensure that the women in the picture
51:11lost their clothes.
51:14And it was all aimed at the watching Rudolf.
51:20In the naughty, naughty court of Rudolf II, Mannerism reached its moral nadir and odied
51:28on sex and perversion.
51:31But we can't leave it like that.
51:33It sends the wrong message.
51:35Rudolf wasn't all bad.
51:37Remember my little book?
51:40The one with the superb calligraphy and the exquisite watercolours by Joris Høfnagel?
51:48That's down to Rudolf II as well.
51:53He had a dark side and he had a light side.
51:57He could be smutty, but he could also be sublime.
52:03Rudolf II had many faces and that's also true of Mannerism itself.
52:11Mannerism did many things.
52:14It did fear and love, anger and religion, mythology and sex.
52:24And it did all of them in new ways.
52:28It kept changing size as well, from big to bigger to biggest.
52:34And it jumped so happily from medium to medium.
52:39From jewellery to sculpture to architecture.
52:45Was there ever an art movement that achieved as much on as many fronts as Mannerism?
52:52No.
52:54I don't think there ever was.
53:02The next new heat of Landscape Artist of the Year is back at Hever Castle this week and
53:06it's the turrets and keeps that are the subject this time.
53:09Catch you there Wednesday night at 8 on Sky Arts.