ARABIC SINGING
Heavenly vaults but made by the earthly hand of man.
The imagined form of the universe.
A circle. No beginning, no end,
just wheeling eternity.
Domes had appeared in antiquity and the medieval centuries
but never with such compulsive grandeur.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, domes appeared everywhere,
constellations of them.
They were all the work of mortal men,
but by the lights of philosophers, the infinite capacity
of man's mind, made him a mortal God, king of the lower beings.
Artists and architects, East and West,
now began to be spoken of as touched by a divine gift.
From domes they built from Rome to Lahore,
were the crowning achievement of this moment of supreme,
almost sacrilegious, creative confidence.
So, why do we treat those blossomings
as though they were happening on different cultural planets?
Well, I think you will know the answer to that one.
It's that word "Renaissance", isn't it?
Invariably attached to the word Italian by those who coined it.
Oh, I know, every so often it's extended north
and west to France and Germany, and even, as far as literature was
concerned, to the very shores of Albion.
But if we want to feel the pulse of one of those great moments,
the surge of inventiveness, when civilisation bounded forward,
we need to look much further than that.
We need to look East.
The great flowering we call the Renaissance owed much to Arab
scholars who recovered the lost classics of antiquity,
of science, mathematics, and philosophy.
Through the centuries that followed, the outpouring of creativity
would flow both ways between Islamic East and Christian West.
But for the imaginative freedom of the artists themselves, the future
awaiting them, East or West, could hardly have been more different.
Whenever something profound happens,
which propels civilisation forward, it usually happens,
not through isolated sparks of invention in one city or state
but through the spur of competition.
Competition across time, going one better than the ancients,
but competition across borders, too,
even when those borders divided warring cultures.
So it was with the Renaissances in the Muslim and Christian worlds.
1,000 miles apart, in Rome and Istanbul,
two old men - Michelangelo and the Turk Mimar Sinan
both veteran builders were competing for the same prize.
To outdo what, for almost a millennium,
had been regarded as the greatest house of God in the world.
The Hagia Sophia.
Commissioned by the Emperor Justinian
in the early sixth century,
the Byzantine basilica was the greatest architectural
achievement of the early Christian church.
"Its dome," wrote one scholar,
"seemed not to be founded on masonry at all,
"but suspended from heaven itself."
When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453,
instead of demolishing the Hagia Sophia, they converted it into a mosque.
But there was no escaping the fact
that this conversion was superficial.
Islamic elements had merely been bolted onto a church.
Somehow, Christianity was always showing through.
There came a time when this partial makeover wasn't good enough.
Not, at any rate,
for the greatest of the Ottoman rulers Suleiman the Magnificent.
His armies had cut a swathe through Christian Europe.
So when he decided to build a new mosque,
unencumbered by Christian leftovers, he was making a point for Allah.
And he was making it directly at his rivals,
the holy Roman Emperor and the Pope.
Ironically, the master builder ordered to create the great
Friday service mosque had been born a Christian.
Mimar Sinan was a Janissary, converted to Islam as a child
and conscripted into the crack household troops of the Sultan.
Sinan rose through the ranks to become the greatest military
engineer of his day.
But he always felt himself destined for something greater
than bridges and fortresses.
"I wish to become an architect", he told his biographer,
"so my perfect skills should leave art to the world."
Suleiman's order was thrilling but daunting.
A great dome surrounded by half domes, four minarets,
a structure as immense as the two-continent empire.
A mosque that would eclipse Hagia Sophia.
The visible proclamation of Islam's victory.
Sinan's great idea is the indivisibility of space.
The architectural proclamation of the union of all believers.
Here, the space isn't chopped up by forests of columns
and barriers of choir and altar.
Here, we are all in it together.
Islam is a religion of law and simple faith.
Everything revealed to all.
Islam means submission.
And what we submit to here is the light of true faith
and of the Koran.
Its record, the light of God's law streaming through 249 windows,
drowning the space with radiance.
How weightless this all feels, even the gigantic dome.
That's all the more extraordinary
because it could only be supported by absolutely titanic architecture.
These huge four masonry piers.
Everything is, kind of, airy, and light, and graceful,
but, you feel, behind it is this hard mathematical engineering mind of Sinan.
That achievement,
something built on the ground that is full of this kind of
planetary uplift towards which our gaze is sent
over and over again
is what makes this place one of the most beautiful buildings on earth.
Sinan was not working in isolation.
He knew very well, that in Christian Europe architects had been
working to remake Christian architecture on an imperial scale.
Turkish visitors to Rome, just like their Italian counterparts
visiting Istanbul, would have seen first hand
this east-west competition of cultural one-upmanship.
Sinan had thought obsessively about the long
history of Constantinople and in Rome, too, artists
and architects found themselves in a dialogue with the past.
The Western Renaissance had been founded on the idea
of rebuilding the ruins of the classical pagan past
and re-consecrating them for a new Christian age.
The supreme test would be St Peter's.
The original basilica built by Constantine
in the fourth century was, by 1500, in danger of collapse.
In 1505, Pope Julius II shocked Rome
by deciding to demolish the old basilica.
The visionary architect Donato Bromante won the competition to
build its successor.
He got the job because
a small, perfect building caught the Pope's eye.
This little gem is really a glimpse inside the Renaissance mind,
in particular, into Donato Bromante's mind.
It's a freestanding shrine to St Peter in the cloister
of the church of San Pietro in Montorio, the place where
St Peter himself was said to have been crucified upside down.
Let's think about what the word Renaissance means.
It means a rebirth.
And what was being reborn was classical antiquity.
Bromante walked around Rome making very careful
scholarly notes of what he saw.
What he saw were pagan temples.
So, what we have here is the perfect classical form
of one of those ruined Roman temples.
A dome, sitting on a drum,
with a colonnaded encirclement outside.
And, as such, what it does is take those perfect forms,
the hemisphere and wheeling circle, the revolution of the planets,
like a great cosmic timepiece, and says,
this, harmoniously, is how the new sacred art is going to be.
There's something else on Bromante's mind, as well.
This is really a miniature size, doll's house prototype
for what he will want to happen to St Peter's itself.
Only one problem. This is so perfect because it is so teeny-weeny.
But his job was to put Hagia Sophia in the shade.
So, St Peter's had to be very big indeed.
And that was going to be a mighty challenge.
Bromante began work in 1506 but he didn't live to see his miniature
St Peter's translated into the big one.
But the greatest of his successors, Michelangelo,
was determined to honour the essence of Bromante's design.
A central dome pierced by windows.
Michelangelo was in his 70s when, as the Pope's third choice,
he got the job, grumbling that he was doing it
only for the glory of God.
Many of his greatest late works like The Last Judgment in the
Sistine Chapel were in their own way titanic architectural constructions,
vast masses of figures, pulled and pushed through space.
Most of his drawings for the project have been lost
but a wooden model survives to show us that his vision, like Bromante's,
was of an enormous Christian temple, a Greek cross.
No nave or fussy side chapels distracting from the focal point of
the great crowning dome, its windows flooding the interior with light.
The whole immense structure supported on four giant piers.
It's astonishing to realise that the two greatest monumental
buildings in the world, one for Islam
and one for Christianity, were going up at the same time in the 1550s.
And, on the same basic building principles.
Many wonder did Mimar Sinan and Michelangelo know what each other was doing?
For Michelangelo, as for Sinan, the challenge was how to make
the mighty engineering beautiful, apparently seamless.
He took his cue from Bromante, a perfect elegant hemispherical dome,
an echo of ancient Rome.
But it was also somehow pure,
Michelangelo's colossal strength translated into flowing line.
Michelangelo toiled away into his 80s on this.
Living in a cell-like room in St Peter's, racked with pain,
refusing pay, eating very little.
February 24th, 1552, was a great day.
Both in the career of the 76-year-old Michelangelo
and in the long extraordinary history of the biggest dome
in the world, the cupola on top of St Peter's
because it was the day when the cornice of the drum was finished.
The cornice is just below the area of the windows.
Essentially, it's the base which made it impossible for anyone,
no matter what happened after Michelangelo's death,
12 years later, to change its size, but, more importantly,
it made it impossible to change Michelangelo's beautiful vision.
To mark this great occasion, what did Michelangelo do?
He threw a party.
And it wasn't for the patricians and the princes,
and the Cardinal and the Pope,
it was for the workmen who made this possible.
It was all the sausage you could possibly eat,
four enormous pork livers, and what does this tell us
about Michelangelo beyond the lovely anecdote that
he felt a kind of fraternal solidarity with the workmen?
It tells us this.
That Michelangelo, through all his life, valued what his contemporaries
called "Ars". Ars, means art, in the old sense of hands-on skill.
In his case, of an almost sublime gift for technical engineering,
for structural power.
Knowing exactly what should go where.
But you weren't going to be a great artist
unless you could also marry that technical ability with what
Michelangelo's contemporaries called "ingenio" -
the ability to conceive a sublime idea.
And that heroic idea survived even his successors
making the curve of the dome much steeper.
Michelangelo died 89 years old,
but before he could see the dome completed.
The Greek cross temple idea struck later popes as altogether too pagan.
A big long nave was added, the opposite of what Bromante
and Michelangelo had wanted.
But you still feel the essence of his "ingenio" beneath that dome.
Rising 120 metres above the ground, over 40 metres diameter,
the tallest dome in the world, taller than
the dome of the Suleiman mosque, taller than the Hagia Sophia,
The work of the man his biographers called Il Divino.
The divine one.
No-one would have quite dared to say that about Mimar Sinan.
But in Europe,
the cult of the superhero artist listening to his own voice,
which is to say the echo of God, rather than his patron,
had taken off.
Their lives were now for the first time
since antiquity the subject of page-turning biographies.
As fascinating, if not more so, than those of saints and kings.
For, often, they describe the work of sinners.
And among the gallery of self-described geniuses,
no-one sinned quite like the Florentine goldsmith
Benvenuto Cellini.
It was from house arrest for living in sin with a boyfriend
who shopped him to the authorities that Cellini wrote
his blood-soaked, chest beating thriller of an autobiography
which, aside from a catalogue of murders, prison escapes,
and gunfights, was one long document of yearning
to be treated as a true artist genius,
alongside his hero, Michelangelo.
Michelangelo knew Cellini and, in fact,
on at least one occasion, gave him a hearty endorsement,
but as the world's best goldsmith,
and, for Benvenuto, that was not going to be enough.
Only a bona fide genius, after all,
could have managed to turn a golden salt cellar
into a witty erotic sculpture.
But the godly form of Poseidon showed that Cellini
could make heroic figures with the best of them.
In Florence,
the bronze to beat was Donatello's heroine from scripture, Judith,
holding up the head of the enemy general, Holofernes,
she'd just beheaded.
But Judith had been set up on the Piazza Della Signoria,
in front of the seat of Florence's government
to celebrate chasing the Medici despots out of Florence.
So when, almost a century later, Cosimo de' Medici became duke,
he wanted a statue which would reverse all that,
a manly hero beheading a female monster.
And Cellini, an alpha-male who knew all about bloody killings,
seized his chance.
Donatello had cast Judith in pieces,
Cellini promised to do the Perseus in one casting.
"Impossible," scoffed the duke.
"The liquid bronze won't reach all those extremities."
"Watch me," said Cellini, who liked talking back to his patrons.
Cellini was playing for the highest stakes imaginable,
the casting of the Perseus was the moment that was going to
transform him from a goldsmith, a craftsman, a mere artisan,
to whom everybody condescended, into an artist superhero -
the real thing.
Having set up everything just right, suddenly as the melted bronze
was going to be poured, Cellini falls deathly ill
of a terrible fever.
So sick, so ill, he's sure he's going to die.
There's an incredible storm.
Wind, rain, the roof is partly removed,
the cover of the furnace explodes.
And most fatally, the temperature of the molten bronze starts to lower.
That word that nobody wants to hear in a foundry - caking.
The premature coagulation of the alloy starts to be set.
The assistants come running, "maestro, maestro!"
Everything is going pear-shaped.
The bronze alloy will cool, it won't run to all the extremities
of the mould, and you end up with this little, kind of,
dwarfish homunculus.
So Cellini jumps off his deathbed and gets every conceivable
kitchen utensil, plates, platters all made of pewter -
they're thrown on the fire.
He's got his heat back.
The alloy flows through the mould everywhere it should.
He has won the transformation he so badly wanted.
And Cellini has a wonderful, vainglorious sentence
for what happens.
He said, "I revived a corpse."
This is the mine-blowing masterpiece the tourists don't notice,
as they're too busy doing selfies
with the copy of Michelangelo's David nearby.
But if they did give it a minute or two, they'd see Cellini's outrageous
miracle in bronze, hard metal that somehow gushes hot blood
and writhes with snaky horror.
Perseus, head down, armed raised in triumph
like some sports champion with the ultimate trophy.
All the ancient Perseuses and Medusas
contrasts between beauteous hero and grotesque gorgon -
not here.
Cellini has the genius crazy idea of making them interchangeably,
androgynously beautiful.
Boy-girl, girl-boy, both looking down.
Even the hairdos aren't actually that different -
tousled curls or writhing snakes.
Cellini is a sorcerer, an alchemist.
He's made hard metal sweat with the exertion of killing.
He's turned that hot alloy back into liquid,
the blood coursing through the hero's body,
the blood pouring from Medusa's sliced away neck.
And, remember, even dead, her look could kill you.
So Cellini has one bit of mischief to play out,
at the expense of his hero, Michelangelo, no less -
positioning the sculpture where it would seem it had caught
David's attention.
The petrifying gaze of Medusa turns David into cold, lifeless stone.
Cellini got away with his stupendous work only
because it flattered his Medici patron's sense of self-importance.
The great days of Florence are gone, but a show of grandstanding art
would postpone insignificance indefinitely.
And for rising empires,
art and artists were indispensable to the projection of their power.
And this was as true in Muslim Asia as in Christian Europe.
The Mughal Empire in India was a sponge for all the cultures
it inherited and admired.
And that tolerant, curious openness to many influences,
east and west under the Emperor Akbar
became a principal of government.
When he and his descendants rebuilt the old ruined Hindu city of Lahore,
they borrowed from Indian temple style
and from Persian architecture.
But most crucially, Akbar, who had learned painting himself,
made art the mirror of his civilisation.
"There are many that hate painting," Akbar said,
"but such men I dislike."
Akbar established workshops of hundreds of artists,
great factories of royal culture that dwarfed the modest studios
of western painters.
Mughal art drew on Indian epics, Persian poetry, calligraphy
and profuse decoration,
but it quickly developed its own style,
crowded with dashing incident,
courtly elegance and sometimes
under the influence of Western art
seen by Akbar, a flair for naturalism.
Akbar himself, always at the centre of the subject matter,
paid personal attention to the work,
regularly descending on workshops and, to the terror of the artists,
promoting or demoting painters,
depending on how he liked or disliked their latest work.
And though like all the generations of Mughal emperors
and their successors, he was embattled,
sometimes literally with his son, Jahangir,
he bequeathed to him the sense that the authority
of the Mughal Empire would be built on art
as much as government and military power.
It would be seen to contemporaries and posterity
above all as a civilisation.
Jahangir didn't really need to be told by his father
how important art was.
In his own right, he was the most intellectually
and aesthetically driven of the whole dynasty.
Well, this is one of the great masterpieces of Mughal painting.
But it's also an extraordinary masterpiece
of imperial self-congratulation,
even by the standards of the World's Seizer,
that's what Jahangir's name means, the title he gave to itself.
He's encircled with a golden halo that's the size of a small planet,
and it's giving off these extraordinarily intense
golden glimmer,
so fierce that one of the little putti, one of the cupids,
who's been flown in directly from European art,
has to cover his eyes with his hands
lest his eyeballs be scalded by the radiation
of Jahangir's magnificence.
The slightly implausible conceit of the painting is that Jahangir
prefers the company of a saintly Muslim holy man to worldly rulers.
The Sufi sheikh himself has been painted
with wonderful fustian simplicity -
a brown coat, perfect candyfloss whiskers there.
He's receiving a present from the hands of Jahangir himself,
but of course the hands don't actually touch.
And there is something else going on in in this extraordinary painting.
It's also a picture about the competition between Mughal art
and European art,
between East and West.
There's an Ottoman sultan who's shown with the Turkish turban
and he's looking respectfully in the direction of Jahangir,
but most significant is that the gesture he's making with his hands,
like that, are the gesture of Indian deferential respect.
No Turk would ever have done that.
But if the Ottoman sultan is belittled
by Jahangir's court painter,
it says nothing compared to what happens to King James I of England,
who is placed below the emperor's feet,
wearing a look of what can only be described as sour resentment
at his low place in the pecking order.
And the artist who's doing this and who was enjoying it all,
has an exquisite self-portrait at the bottom of the painting.
His name is Bichitra. He's a Hindu, we know that by the saffron robe.
And it's a beautiful, beautiful profile self-portrait.
Exquisite details of the beard, of the turban,
of his painterly hand,
almost as refined as the technique he's used for the emperor himself.
In fact, this is a doubly reflective self-portrait -
a miniature of a miniature,
the one Bichitra is holding and which tells us everything
about the ambiguous status of the Mughal artist.
There are the signs of favour -
an elephant and two horses which the emperor has given his painter
but on an understood condition.
Ultimately for all that he's slipstreaming behind the power
and the glory of Jahangir, he knows his place
and that's defined by the last detail in that tiny
frame of him kneeling, prostrating himself
at the feet of the Seizure of the World.
And look where he is.
He has literally backed himself into a corner.
For when all is said and done,
these intricate beautiful paintings are miniatures,
book illustrations contained within the framing page,
and their enjoyment confined to the emperor,
his court and anyone he sought to impress.
Only once, albeit spectacularly,
did Jahangir make art visible to all of his subjects.
On the outer wall of Lahore Fort, Jahangir set a vast display
of mosaic tiles, creating the biggest mural in the world.
70 metres high and 450 metres long.
Kashi Kari - the name for this mosaic technique came from Persia,
but as with all Mughal art, it's a glorious hybrid.
There are angels from Europe,
Chinese dragons,
royal hunts and epic battles.
History, mythology, birds and beasts,
the whole world Jahangir revelled in is on display.
In effect, it's a huge vertical book,
the one truly open book in all of Mughal art.
Readable by all Jahangir's subjects passing through the gates
of Lahore Fort.
Or, is it?
Despite the sheer boldness of the gesture,
the link forged between ruler and subjects
is undermined by vertical remoteness.
As your eye travels up, the brilliant pages
swim in and out of vision
until they disappear into the great city.
Ultimately, even the experimentally-minded Jahangir
couldn't conceive of public art that was truly accessible
to his subjects.
The Mughals with their fastidious connoisseurship
could barely have imagined the revolution
in looking that was unfolding in Western art.
By the 17th century,
European images were busy exploding
through any kind of containing frame.
The body slammed the beholder with great, meaty,
muscular life-size or larger figures, all deployed by artists who
re-wrote the rules about decorum or threw them away altogether.
And this liberation of the senses began in the place you'd
least expect, the Rome that had been remade by Michelangelo
and the Counter-Reformation popes.
There came a point when the Roman Church
would be a victim of its own success.
All that wealth, all that power, the biggest basilica
with the biggest dome in the world,
and you know that sooner or later, someone's going to come along
and say, "Remember the simplicity of Christ."
"Remember Christ's mission to teach and preach to the poor."
And then there'd be a second great point that the whole
idea of the Christian message is that the compassion of God
lay in giving his own son the form of human flesh and blood.
Now, you put those two things together,
poverty and a physical presence of flesh and blood,
and you know there has to be a new kind of art.
Only problem is, nobody could do that
since the death of Michelangelo,
and then along comes a second Michelangelo.
We shouldn't get carried away, but isn't it striking that the
rule breakers in art were often law breakers?
Like Cellini, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
was a bisexual murderer with major anger management issues,
foul-mouthed, short fused, in and out of jail.
But if he acted like a devil, he painted like an angel.
And patrons who suddenly wanted startlingly raw
realistic images of ordinary people, many of them poor,
to persuade themselves they were reviving Christ's gospel to the
humble, couldn't get enough of him.
This is the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome
and this just may be my favourite Caravaggio,
the Madonna of Loreto.
Even by the standards of Christian legends,
this one is a bit of a stretch.
To escape destruction in the 13th century,
the House of the Virgin was supposed to have been
airlifted out of the Holy Land, touching down in the Italian
town of Loreto, where it became a place of pilgrimage.
Every so often, the Virgin herself would show up for the pilgrims.
But this is no provincial scene, is it?
Its appealing doorway in the backstreets of Rome,
the doorstep drama is lit by a great wash of light.
But the reason why one of the Caravaggio's critics
said the painting caused a great "schiamazzo", a cackle,
was because so much flesh was on display.
This is a barefoot Madonna, not the spun sugar version
of conventional painting, but of real-life body,
probably Caravaggio's girlfriend.
And the adoration dwells on that sumptuous form -
the heavy lids, the glossy ropes of hair.
And the naked Christ Child is a squirmy bambino, fat with pasta.
And the poor pilgrim couple who kneel before them
are made bodily present too -
that big rump of the man,
those calloused feet from the long walk.
As in all the greatest Caravaggio's, these big fleshy figures
are uncomfortably, almost disturbingly, close to us.
Caravaggio has broken right through the fourth wall
and he's done it in the name of making the Christian message true.
By which he means physically true.
We don't get a kind of remote heavenly apparition that's granted
to us by the intercession of some priest.
No, we are physically in the company of the Madonna and Child,
just as much as if we are walking down the street and look round
and there they are, standing in a doorway.
And this, of course, is a breach in every kind of decorum,
social as well as aesthetic.
But breaking rules was what this generation of Western artists
was all about.
And the closer they got both to God and to kings,
paradoxically, the more freedoms they claimed.
And one of the most spectacular of those rule breakers was a woman
in her 40s when she painted this in England -
Artemisia Gentileschi.
Well, I love the fact that this extraordinary picture is in the
Royal Collection because in its way it too is a royal proclamation.
If artists of this generation made the claim that they were sovereigns
of the realm of art, this picture does something much more ambitious.
It says that claim was not only for men,
women, too, can be sovereigns of painting.
Only a woman could have done this particular painting
as a combination of a self-portrait and the allegory of painting.
And the allegory comes from a book written by a man
called Cesare Ripa.
He says the image of painting should have black hair, should be
slightly dishevelled with a passion and engagement of painting.
Painting should wear a gold chain round her neck...
There you see the gold chain.
..with a mask at the end of it indicating imitation or mimicry.
She should hold a brush in one hand and a palate in the other.
And Artemisia does all that,
but there's one detail that is missing.
It's there in what Ripa says the allegory of painting should be
and it's a bandage or a gag which is going to go around the mouth,
because painting doesn't speak.
Now, men, of course, thought women shouldn't speak,
certainly until they were spoken to.
But Artemisia Gentileschi, who had been raped
by one of her father's assistants the age of 18,
was determined that nobody was going to shut her up,
either in life or in her work.
And what she does here is of course liberate the figure
from painting to a kind of conventional stereotype,
the stereotype in Ripa's book,
and turn it into something like a living physical force.
Look at the twist of her body.
The twist of her body is so that she can paint.
And what she's painting is the painting we're looking at.
The whole thing is unapologetic.
"Look at me, I'm a professional.
"I'm in the business, I'm in the throes of creativity
"and what is wrong with that?"
Artemisia's breakthrough self-portrait was bought
by none other than King Charles I, that great stickler for protocol
but also a great lover of art.
And there was no court in Europe more obsessed with protocol
than that of Philip IV in Spain.
But right at the heart of that court was the greatest of artistic
freethinkers, Diego Velazquez.
As official painter to the king, Velazquez produced
images of the royals on demand,
though always with unprecedented sparkling naturalism -
the human showing through the fancy dress.
And on one occasion at least, despite,
or maybe because of the strength of his position,
he committed an extraordinary act of painterly lese-majeste.
Towards the end of his career in 1656,
Velazquez he produced a picture, this one, Las Meninas,
The Maids Of Honour, which more than any other before or since
stakes the most ambitious claim for the power of art and the artist.
It's a painting which reverses all the usual
expectations of the relationship between patron and artist.
In this picture, it is the painter thoughtfully looking at us
who is truly sovereign.
Anyone who comes into the presence of this masterpiece,
or as it really feels, steps across the threshold
of that huge work, feels him or herself
uncannily in presence of all the characters who populate it.
That thoughtful painter, the little princess,
her maids of honour,
the dwarfs,
even that slumbering dog.
It is an absolute triumph of illusionistic painting.
Something else as well...
..Velazquez is the most cerebral artist of his generation
and this is a huge brainteaser.
There's a giant in the room and it's that epic sized canvas
but what's on it?
A painting of the little princess,
or of Philip VI and his queen?
Is that mirror showing a reflection of the royal couple
painted on Velazquez's canvas?
Or the real king and queen who are actually present in the room?
Is the sudden attentiveness the beginnings of a curtsy on the
part of the maid because the royal couple have come into the studio...
..or are just departing?
It's full of games that play with the mind,
it's full of complicated layers of meaning,
all of which build into a meditation on which it is to paint.
And they are so fiendishly ingenious that they have challenged
generation after generation of writers and commentators
and artists to nail its ultimate meaning. And do you know?
I don't think anyone has yet quite got to the bottom of it.
But if presumptuously I were to tell you in a sentence
what I think it's about,
I think it's about who or what, in every sense,
controls the way we look.
The look we put on when we know we're being watched,
our body language when we suddenly have to defer to authority,
the concentrated look of the artist glancing from subject
to picture and back again.
There's really only one sovereign of staring here
and it's not the king.
He only exists in the picture courtesy of the painter.
The royal ego is shrunk and contained inside that small frame
at the back of the room.
A reversal of roles that was provocative in he West
and inconceivable in he East,
where anything so cheeky would get you in the deepest trouble.
And taking liberties with conventions didn't stop
when monarchs went missing from the picture.
The Dutch Republic fought Spain to a standstill to secure its freedom.
But independence often goes along with civic myths
and in Holland, the rich burgers of Amsterdam like to portray
themselves as vigilant militia companies,
ready at the drop of a hat to go off to war.
Though, when they commissioned group portraits, what they actually
wanted for their money was just a bunch of likenesses.
And if there were a lot of them, the artist elasticated the format
accordingly to get everyone in.
But then there was Rembrandt.
And what he thought his militia patrons might like more than
a collection of the overdressed was an action portrait of an ethos.
The actual title of the picture is
The March Out Of The Company Of Frans Banning Cocq
and, boy, are they marching.
They're on the point of beginning that march
and the idea of this painting is, above all, energy.
Dynamism, vitality, that's what Rembrandt wanted to celebrate
in Amsterdam.
It is propulsive. It moves through that frame into our own space.
Rembrandt has used his entire box of tricks to make this
feel like a moving image, like a movie, in fact.
If you look at the kind of foreshortened hand,
the order that's being given is happening in his body language.
Look at the foreshortened spear.
You can see his rather glamorously dressed lieutenant
in that gorgeous yellow coat
is just on the point of moving as well.
Everything is coming at us.
And it also has a soundtrack.
Everything is exploding.
SHOUTING
A gun is being fired. GUNSHOTS
A drum is being beaten. DRUM ROLLS
A dog is barking. DOG BARKS
Take a look at Frans Banning Cocq's perfect little mouth
and it's open. He is giving that order.
A little girl, maybe the mascot of the company,
is running into the brilliant light.
Some people have trouble with this painting and have thought
of it for centuries as a kind of garish chaos,
too much, too much going on.
But Rembrandt being Rembrandt, he stops just this side of chaos.
That amidst this extraordinary kind of melee
is an incredibly strong compositional armature
and it's an armature of two parallel lines.
One angle of the parallelogram is made by that rhythm of the lines,
of the spear, the gun, the partisan.
On the other hand, it's made by the baton of the captain,
the musket, the gorgeous flag of the Kloveniers.
And if you think about it, those two lines converge at an arrowhead
and the arrowhead appropriately is the commander.
The Night Watch is a perfect miracle of dynamism
and discipline together.
And that's the living ethos that Rembrandt is trying to communicate.
In his boiling brain,
he reckons he's doing the overstuffed patricians a favour.
They no longer pose and preen, they act.
And the fact that it's a painting about freedom with order
makes it an extraordinary moment, not just in the history
of painting, but it's a moment in the history of civilisation, too.
Amsterdam is beating not only the drum,
but its own chest, saying,
"We can be free, but we are also strong and disciplined."
This is the visual declaration of republican liberty.
Watch out, art, but watch out, the world.
Nothing, you'd suppose, could be further from the unleashed energy
that produced the Night Watch than the controlled refinement
of Indian Mughal art.
But Rembrandt, who had a lifelong fascination
with non-European cultures, was in love with them.
In the 1650s he began to draw his version of miniatures,
which had found their way to Amsterdam probably as copies
through he East India Company.
Rembrandt responded to the miniatures with his own graceful
pen and ink variations, all rich with what he loved best -
human interest.
A group of Sufi sheiks.
The bond between father and son,
a favourite Rembrandt theme.
Some of the miniatures he copied still exist
and they make a fascinating contrast
with Rembrandt's versions.
This is a painting of the Emperors Akbar and Jahangir.
Rembrandt keeps the profile,
but ditches the formalism for humane naturalism,
the rulers become characters.
Father and son look each other in the eye
as Jahangir hands Akbar a book.
A Mughal portrait of Jahangir's son, Shah Jahan On Horseback,
is still and poised.
But Rembrandt adds movement and action.
What Rembrandt's sketches show
is that the tide of artistic inspiration also flowed
from East to West.
In the end, Rembrandt was a stay-at-home cultural traveller.
But what might he have made of the real thing?
Of the marbled perfection of Agra?
Each building, a dialogue between curve and straight line.
A civilisation as painterly in its architecture as in its art.
Another extraordinary dome.
A marble monument to love,
20 years in the making.
The tribute of the Emperor Shah Jahan
for his dead wife Mumtaz Mahal.
Grief and yearning translated into architectural poetry.
While European art was fizzing with experiment,
the Mughal's perfected royal elegies crafted in stone.
This building, the I'timad-ud-Daulah,
is the first of their marble mausoleums
build a decade before the Taj Mahal.
Some claim it's the most perfect building in India
and I think they may be right.
It too was a work of devotion,
but this time designed by a cultivated woman,
Jahangir's favourite wife, Nur Jahan.
She was the child of a Persian father, Mirza Beg,
Jahangir's closest adviser.
When he died, Nur Jahan built a tomb for him
as handsome as any emperor's.
And looking at it, you would say her creation
is about as perfect as anything
the hand of man can accomplish.
And then you go inside and see this.
Death in a jewel box.
The chilly funereal marble warmed by an uncountable myriad of gems.
Encrusted in glowing paint, the ceiling burns.
And on the walls, in a technique borrowed from Italy
of planed-down jewels, a paradise garden.
There are images of flowers designed so naturalistically,
so scientifically, that they could have come straight from the pages
of one of that endlessly curious Jahangir's great books.
Here in the presence of the dead, we have an eternal springtime.
And that perhaps is both its glory and its limitation.
The mausoleum is like a page from one of Jahangir's picture books.
And like those books, it's private and contained.
Every hint of the uneven roughness of life is smoothed away.
It couldn't be more different from European art,
with its earthy, subversive humanity,
the force of individual genius coming at you.
How different that is
from the anonymous serenity of this royal tomb,
a serenity that would all too soon be shattered.
Out there, the western hurly-burly is getting ready to make
terrible mischief, to smash its way into the domed heavenly vault,
to stick its bloody, great brutal boots
right into the paradise garden.
It'll make an empire based on machines, money and muskets.
And then, slowly but surely,
the Mughal Empire will disappear entirely
inside its courtly refinement,
becoming inexorably just a cultural ornament.
So, after centuries of extraordinary flowering,
did the Eastern Renaissance just simply wither away?
Not quite.
Because these delicate blooms and glowing jewels did survive.
They reappeared in what Europeans wore on their bodies
and how they decorated their homes.
Mughal domes appeared in Brighton.
Western art critics called that beauty decorative
to distinguish it from pictures they put in frames -
what they considered "real art".
But it was in he East that the ancient meaning of art as craft
was preserved in all its majestic splendour -
and still is - because if the work of art is to intensify
our delight in the beauty of the world,
and to do so with pattern and colour, the music of the eye,
then what you see here was not an ending,
but another vibrant beginning.
The Open University has produced a free poster that explores
the history of different civilisations through artefacts.
To order your free copy, please call...
..or go to the address on screen
and follow the links for the Open University.