Simon Schama TV - Secrets of the Bayeaux Tapestry: Inside the Museum
Caravaggio is on the run again ... This time it’s different; this time he’s wanted for murder. Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e1: Caravaggio, BBC 2006
This was Caravaggio’s Rome: cheap rooms and drunken nights ... Make something sacred out of the lives of the sordid. ibid.
Even his closest friends couldn’t work out how the painter of religious marvels and the psycho could inhabit the same person. ibid.
Sick and sober by what he’s done Caravaggio makes paintings. ibid.
Caravaggio gives us death twice over: The Death of John the Baptist, and the death of our most cherished illusion about art: that it can make us finer, more humane. Dream on, says Caravaggio. ibid.
David and Goliath: It’s a self-portrait unlike any painted before ... Decapitated head is Goliath, a bloody grotesque, a monster ... Here is Caravaggio who is the embodiment of wickedness ... The two sides of the painter painted here. ibid.
She is in ecstasy all right. Her head is thrown back, her mouth is open ... You have to look. You don’t know where to look. Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e2: Bernini
A nun in the throes of ecstasy ... Bernini knew all about passion: that’s what his art was about. It was this physical intensity that would transform sculpture. ibid.
He could like an alchemist change one material into another: marble into trees, leaves, hair, and of course flesh. ibid.
Bernini arrived in Rome in 1605 just at the time Caravaggio’s punchy street dramas were electrifying the Church. Giving it a new vision of how to move the flock. ibid.
This is Apollo and Daphne. A story of sexual huntings: Apollo wants the nymph Daphne. She definitely doesn’t want him. He runs after her and just as he is about to grab her the gods answer her prayers by turning her into a laurel tree. It’s all action sculpture – Apollo breaking his breathless run, his cape and his hair still flying in the wind. ibid.
Bernini is in his early twenties. A Superstar. Someone on whom the almighty and the powerful almost fawn. ibid.
Top that: no-one ever could ... We are looking at the most intense, convulsive drama of the body that any of us experience ... The visualisation of complete bliss. ibid.
Rembrandt: You’re a painter. What’s the worst thing that can happen to you? Disgrace? Derision? No, the worse thing – you have to cut up your masterpiece. What had brought Holland’s greatest painter to this moment of artistic suicide? Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e3: Rembrandt
He does Us. Flesh and Blood. You and Me. Art that exists to tell the truth of the human condition. ibid.
And portraits. Spectacular portraits ... Pictures. Especially pictures of themselves ... Look at this: Rembrandt’s portrait of an eighty-three year old woman. ibid.
Rembrandt looks behind the face: and this is why his portraits touch us like nobody else’s. ibid.
All his life Rembrandt seemed to love the filmy muck of his paint. ibid.
It was David who would give people the vision of what a true citizen was. Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e4: David
All his [David] life he was only really looking for virtue. ibid.
David’s Rome rebuilt as the New France. ibid.
His depiction of the Tennis Court Oath: it’s a picture filled with noise, the roar of the oath, the crash of a great electrical storm. The Revolution as an unstoppable force of Nature. And at the centre of it all an enormous space ... filled with light, the rushing wind, the furious energy of energy. It’s an idea. An idea so big it dwarfs the humans who enact it. ibid.
There was no going back. From now on David and his art belonged to the Revolution. ibid.
It’s an apparition ... Look upon him, David is saying, and you will see the highest type of humanity ... The white sheets seem shroud-like ... It’s a cult image. And it tells you to believe ... A story for the people. ibid.
So why do I like David? Well I don’t. He is a monster. But he makes ideas blaze in dry ice. ibid.
This is Art designed to make those who saw it virtuous citizens. And it’s all so perfect, so tragic, so poetic, you almost believe it. ibid.
When his wife disapproved of his zeal he divorced her. ibid.
The terror had begun. And David had become part of the great engine of killing. ibid.
David’s downfall was inextricably linked to the fate of Robespierre. ibid.
Turner wanted to paint that England too. For this was the early 1800s – the rockiest years in all modern British history. The time when the distance between the fantasy Britain and the reality was at its widest. The kingdom was supposed to be a model of political and social stability, but there was massive unemployment, hunger and anger ... There are hard times. Radical times. Simon Sharma’s Power of Art s1e5: Turner
There is another painting in the 1840 show about which the critics are also absolutely unanimous: in dismay and scorn. J M W Turner’s Slave Ship ... The greatest British painting of the nineteenth century. ibid.
He is after all the National Gallery’s all-time favourite. ibid.
The cockney poet. ibid.
With a dab of his brush he could wave fairy dust on the genteel British countryside. ibid.
He buys a West End house for his pictures, himself and his old dad. ibid.
Frosty Morning, 1813: Two men digging a ditch, or is it a grave? You can feel the tough work of it. That hard frozen soil. Everything impassive, unsentimental, dour. How things really are. When did Constable ever do winter in the north? ibid.
It’s not just what he paints that gets him into trouble with high-class critics, it’s the way that he paints it. ibid.
Venice: for twenty years off and on Turner made the floating city his soul mate. Turner was spellbound, and conjured from a wisp here or a daub there the gauzy radiance of the place. ibid.
He [Turner] looked at Venice and saw death. ibid.
Death on a Pale Horse, 1825-1830: But Turner paints his way out of the nightmare. Look closely: the skeleton is limp; Death is dead. Turner lives to paint on. ibid.
The Fighting Temeraire, 1838: The painting he calls his Old Darling ... A nation in upheaval as the industrial revolution gathers momentum. And Turner has perfect pitch for a British public torn between affection for the past and anticipation for the future. It’s so emotionally versatile this picture ... This could be the sunset of Nelson’s England ... This is the sun rise of your new industrial revolution. ibid.
Turner’s approach to this appalling tragedy was ... to summon an apocalypse, a typhoon. The Slave Ship pitches us into the midst of a fevering dream of catastrophe, terror, sin and retribution. ibid.
This is a day of martyrdom, retribution and judgment ... Slavery would be defeated. There is after all a patch of clearing blue at the right hand top of the painting. The critics went to town. Turner became the butt of jokes. ibid.
He thought of himself as a prophet then. And also a thinker ... Letters: hundreds of them. Mostly to his brother Theo: you’ll see that intelligence bubbling away. Simon Schama’s Power of Art s1e6: Van Gogh
He appointed himself as a missionary to the destitute ... What he wanted to be was a preacher. ibid.
Art would succeed where the Church had failed. ibid.
The Potato Eaters is his first knockout masterpiece. It’s a resume of everything he has felt and thought up to now. ibid.
Van Gogh’s version of nature would always be earthier, clumsier, smellier, truer. ibid.
A great ejaculation of emotional energy ... of paint. ibid.
At the heart of all the greatest pictures from this prolific summer is the opposition between barren and fruitful worlds. Between comradeship and loneliness: welcome to The Night Cafe. ibid.
It’s nearly midnight in the French port of Calais. And the most valuable cargo ever to pass through here is about to arrive. The contents of this truck have been insured for more than £800 million. But in reality it’s priceless. It’s taken eight years of intense international negotiations. But now one of the greatest artworks of the medieval world is coming to the UK. And more important than that, it’s coming home. The Bayeaux Tapestry: one of the wonders of the medieval world. Across 70 meters of exquisite embroidery it tells the story of the Norman Conquest in 1066, an event that would shape our country for ever. Secrets of the Bayeaux Tapestry: Inside the Museum, BBC 2026