Video Documentaries

Vincent van Gogh life has long captured the imagination, shrouded in myth and misunderstanding, but who was he really? Delving deep into his fascinating and sometimes deeply troubled world comes this definitive, award-winning documentary directed by David Bickerstaff. Vincent van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing seeks the truth about Van Gogh. What better way to discover the real Van Gogh than through his art? Showcasing his iconic works and featuring extensive access to Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum – along with illuminating letters that capture his most revealing and moving moments – this remarkable documentary brings to life arguably the world’s favourite artist and reminds us, in Van Gogh’s own words, that ‘Art is long and life is short’. Just who really was Vincent van Gogh? David Bickerstaff’s award-winning documentary delves deep into his fascinating and troubled world. Featuring exclusive access to the Van Gogh Museum, the film brings to life the world’s favourite artist.

Caravaggio Michelangelo Merisi left his birth town of Caravaggio in the north of Italy to study as an apprentice in nearby Milan. In 1593 he moved to Rome, impatient to use his talents on the biggest stage possible. Caravaggio's approach to painting was unconventional. He avoided the standard method of making copies of old sculptures and instead took the more direct approach of painting directly onto canvas without drawing first. He also used people from the street as his models. His dramatic painting was enhanced with intense and theatrical lighting. Caravaggio's fate was sealed when in 1606 he killed a man in a duel. He fled to Naples where he attempted to paint his way out of trouble, he became a Knight, but was then imprisoned in Malta and then finally he moved to Sicily. He was pardoned for murder in 1610, but he died of a fever attempting to return to Rome. Power of Art episode 1 The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our de

Documentary in which Andrew Graham-Dixon reveals how the Medici family transformed Florence through sculpture, painting and architecture and created a world where masterpieces fetch millions today.  Without the money and patronage of the Medici we might never have heard of artists such as Donatello, Michelangelo or Botticelli, and Graham-Dixon examines how a family of shadowy, corrupt businessmen, driven by greed and ambition, became the financial engine behind the Italian Renaissance . The Medici The House of Medici was an Italian banking family and political dynasty that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the first half of the 15th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of Tuscany and prospered gradually until it was able to fund the Medici Bank. This bank was the largest in Europe during the 15th century, and it facilitated the Medicis' rise to political power in Florence, although they officially rema

In The Victorians, Jeremy Paxman takes his love of Victorian paintings as the starting point for a journey into Victorian Britain. Such pictures may not be fashionable today, but they are a goldmine of information about the most dynamic age in British history. The Victorians Part 1: Painting The Town He investigates the most dramatic event of Victorian Britain: the explosion of great cities. At first the Victorians feared these new monsters in their midst, but then grew to love and transform them. Jeremy explores the canals and sewers, suburbs and back streets, workhouses and magnificent buildings of the great Victorian city, while also experiencing the fun-filled chaos of Derby Day. The Victorians Part 2: Home Sweet Home Jeremy Paxman enters the typical Victorian home, a haven of order, respectability and morality. But not everything was always as it should be, with sexual double standards and the perils of drink, disease and poverty all threatening to destroy the cherished dream of H

Titian - Tim Marlow reveals how the Renaissance movement found a new centre in Venice and examines the life and work of Tiziano Vecellio, known to English-speakers as Titian, who pioneered the use of oils with a radical approach to light, colour and brush strokes. His talent was recognised across Europe and he painted portraits of some of the 16th century's most powerful figures, including Pope Paul III and Charles V of Spain. Great Artists This major 26-part series takes a fresh look at the most important artworks of some of the greatest artists in history. Shot on location in over fifty museums, churches and palaces throughout Europe and the United States, this series is a comprehensive survey of the history of Western art. Both intelligent and informative, it's the perfect introduction to the art of the Old Masters. This set contains all 26 episodes of the Great Artists series: Giotto , Leonardo , Durer , Michelangelo , Raphael , Titian, Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer,

The Renaissance Unchained is a four-part series in which Waldemar Januszczak challenges the traditional view of art's most important epoch - the Renaissance. According to Januszczak, that ‘Michelangelo groupie’ was responsible for inventing the Renaissance in his use of the term rinascita to describe what was happening around him artistically.   The Renaissance Unchained - Gods, Myths and Oil Paints part 1 [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://video-clump.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/The-Renaissance-Unchained-ep-1.mp4"][/video]   Waldemar Januszczak challenges the traditional notion of the Renaissance having fixed origins in Italy and showcases the ingenuity in both technique and ideas behind great artists such as Van Eyck, Memling, Van der Weyden, Cranach, Riemenschneider and Durer. The Renaissance Unchained - Whips, Deaths and Madonnas part 2 [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://video-clump.com/wp-content/u

Constable There have been few more powerful painters of landscape than John Constable. He brought a scale, ambition and impact to a subject long considered amongst the lowest forms of art. Constable is often celebrated as a nostalgic painter of a lost England but look a little harder, though, and you discover an intense and radical vision at work which changed the course of British art. As well as looking Constable’s most famous works, such as The Haywain and Flatford Mill, Tim Marlow explores lesser known works such as the expressive sketch for The Leaping Horse Great Artists This major 26-part series takes a fresh look at the most important artworks of some of the greatest artists in history. Shot on location in over fifty museums, churches and palaces throughout Europe and the United States, this series is a comprehensive survey of the history of Western art. Both intelligent and informative, it's the perfect introduction to the art of the Old Masters. This set contains all 26 e

Treasures of the Louvre - Paris-based writer Andrew Hussey travels through the glorious art and surprising history of an extraordinary French institution to show that the story of the Louvre is the story of France. [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://video-clump.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Louvre-part-1.mp4"][/video] Treasures of the Louvre - Part 1 As well as exploring the masterpieces of painters such as Veronese, Rubens, David, Chardin, Gericault and Delacroix, he examines the changing face of the Louvre itself through its architecture and design. Medieval fortress, Renaissance palace, luxurious home to kings, emperors and more recently civil servants, today it attracts eight million visitors a year. [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://video-clump.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Louvre-part-2.mp4"][/video] Treasures of the Louvre - Part 2 The documentary also reflects the latest transformation of the L

John McCarthy examines the art of faith - the art of religions, journeying across the globe in search of great temples, churches and sacred sites. The three hour-long films, presented and narrated by the broadcaster John McCarthy, visit many of the greatest and most significant religious buildings of the world. Each hour-long episode is a high-definition visual experience. Divine in form, sacred buildings are amongst the most beautiful and enduring achievements of mankind. Art of Faith travels the world to visit the great buildings, exploring how the passions and complexities of religious beliefs have been expressed in architecture. Looking back over the last 3000 years the series provides an insight into how we have celebrated faith through art. With contributions from architects, scholars and worshippers the series explains the buildings' genesis, laying down the brush strokes of the sites' design, whilst looking at the shared elements and contrasts between the religions and

The Art That Made Mexico: Paradise, Power and Prayers , artist Alinka Echeverria explores the three major forces - nature, power and faith - that have shaped Mexican art, and Mexico itself. Alinka Echeverria reveals the way in which Mexican artists shook off European artistic influence to find a distinctive voice, expressed through landscape painting, and reconnected with pre-Hispanic subject matter. The Art that Made Mexico Part 1 - Paradise The murals of Teotihuacan and illustrated Aztec codices show how nature was the reference point for their worldview, their power structures and their calendars. But following the conquest in the 16th century, the Spanish 're-educated' indigenous artists to aspire to European aesthetics, and for nearly 300 years after conquest, the art of what was called New Spain looked a lot the art of old Spain. A century after independence in 1810, artists began to depict Mexico's ancient foundation myths, including the symbolic volcanoes that domin

The Art of Russia is a series in which art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon tells the incredible story of Russian art - its mystery and magnificence - and until now a story untold on British television. The Art of Russia Part 1: Out of the Forest [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://video-clump.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/The.Art_.of_.Russia.1.mp4"][/video] He explores the origins of the Russian icon from its roots in Byzantium and the first great Russian icon, Our Lady of Vladimir to the masterpieces of the country's most famous icon painter, Andrei Rublev. Both epic and awe-inspiring, and producing brilliant art, nevertheless medieval Russia could be a terrifying place. Criss-crossing the epic landscape, Andrew visits the monastery founded by Ivan the Terrible, where his favourite forms of torture found inspiration in religious art. One man would shine a light into Russia's 'dark' ages - Peter the Great who, surprisingly, took as hi

Documentary in which Ros Savill, former director and curator at the Wallace Collection, tells the story of some incredible and misunderstood objects - the opulent, intricate, gold-crested and often much-maligned Sevres porcelain of the 18th century. Ros brings us up close to a personal choice of Sevres masterpieces in the Wallace Collection, viewing them in intricate and intimate detail. She engages us with the beauty and brilliance in the designs, revelling in what is now often viewed as unfashionably pretty or ostentatious. These objects represent the unbelievable skills of 18th-century France, as well as the desires and demands of an autocratic regime that was heading for revolution. Sevres porcelain As valuable now as they were when first produced, Sevres' intricacies and opulence speak of wealth, sophistication and prestige and have always been sought after by collectors eager to associate themselves with Sevres' power. Often the whims and capricious demands of monumentall

In Civilisations episode 9, Simon Schama begins Civilisations with this premise: that it is in art - the play of the creative imagination - that humanity expresses its most essential self: the power to break the tyranny of the humdrum, the grind of everyday. Art, then, makes life worth living; it is the great window into human potential. And societies become civilised to the extent that they take culture as seriously as the prosecution of power, or the accumulation of wealth. But in the century of total war and industrial slaughter was (and is) that enough? The cause of humanity went up in the smoke of the Nazi crematoria. Horror and terror brushed beauty aside and stamped on its pretensions. And in the modern world art has become increasingly commodified. Simon’s last programme explores the fate of art in the machine and profit-driven world. It looks at the rise of art as a tradeable commodity and turns on one central question: should art create a realm separate from the modern world,

If David Olusoga’s first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century. David shows the growing ambivalence with which artists reacted to the idea of progress – both intellectual and scientific - that underpinned the imperial mission and followed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Advances in knowledge and technology imbued Europeans in the 19th century with a sense of their civilisation’s superiority. It justified their imperial ideology. But it created among artists a deep fascinations with other civilisations which in turn produced a scepticism about their own. By contrast, as European artists questioned their civilisation’s ‘advance’, in America painters sought to capture an idea of their new nation’s ‘manifest destiny’ in landscapes. And in their representation of the Native Americans they sought to record for posterity the wo

In Civilisations episode 7, Simon Schama starts his meditation on colour and civilisation with the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres. He then moves to 16th century Venice where masterpieces such as Giovanni Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece and Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne contested the assumption that drawing would always be superior to colouring. As the Baroque took hold in enlightenment Europe another Venetian, Giambattista Tiepolo, created a ceiling fresco Apollo and the Four Continents at the Bishop’s palace in Würzburg. In a glorious sequence Simon celebrates this grand opera of light, colour, and dancing line: a dizzying lift-off into 18th century elation. But if light could open the gates of ecstasy it could also drop art into the abyss. Francisco Goya began by working in the Venetian tradition but in the last years of his life his Black Paintings drained colour from the world of light. The art of colour discovered a new mission which somehow sustained the old: how

In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. And, as historian of empire David Olusoga shows, art was always on the frontline. Each cultural contact at this time left a mark on both sides: the magnificent Benin bronzes record the meeting of an ancient West African kingdom and Portuguese voyagers in a spirit of mutual respect and exchange. By contrast we think Spain’s conquest of Central America in the 16th century as decimating the Aztecs and eviscerating their culture. But David shows even in Mexico rare surviving Aztec artworks recall a more nuanced story. He travels to Japan to explore how the Tokugawa Shogunate, after an initial embrace, became so wary of outside interference that they sought to cut ties with the outside world. But in their art, as in their trade, they could never truly isolate themselves from foreign influences. By contrast the Protestant Dutch Republic was

Think Renaissance and you think Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering. The two phenomena did not unfold in separate artistic universes; they were acutely conscious of, and in competition with, each other and mutually open to influences flowing both ways.   The fifth film in Civilisations goes east and west with Simon Schama: to Papal Rome but also to Ottoman Istanbul and Mughal Lahore and Agra, exploring those connections and rivalries, and examining how the role of artists from the different traditions of West and East developed in the years that followed the Renaissances. That rivalry unfolds most spectacularly over the creation of domes – in Ottoman Istanbul the great engineer-architect Mimar Sinan builds the light-flooded Süleymaniye mosque, while at the same time in Rome Michelangelo designs the great dome over the St Peter’s Basilica. The fate of the hero-artist, seemingly touched by God, with th

Professor Mary Beard broaches the controversial, sometimes dangerous, topic of religion and art. For millennia, art has inspired religion as much as religion has inspired art. Yet there are fundamental problems, which all religions share, in making god or gods visible in the human world. How, and at what cost, do you make the unseen, seen? Beneath all works of religious art there always lies conflict and risk. And the result is often iconoclasm – the destruction of works of art – which Mary believes can lead on to new forms of creativity. Mary Beard visits sacred sites across the world to examine the contested boundaries between religion and art. She goes to the temple of Angkor Wat and to the Tintoretto Crucifixion in Venice, to Buddhist caves of Ajanta and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, as she seeks to break down the conventions that make some religions of the image, while others are seen as hostile to artistic representation. She shows how all faiths (and their artists) face the same

In Civilisations episode 3, Simon Schama explores one of our deepest artistic urges - the depiction of nature. Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed nature - rather it is a projection of dreams and idylls, as well as of escapes and refuges from human turmoil, the elusive paradise on earth. Simon begins in the 10th century, in Song dynasty China. The Song's scrolls are never innocent of the values of that world - the landscapes depict immense mountains projecting imperial authority. But as that authority was threatened and overwhelmed, majestic mountains are represented in geological turmoil, writhing and heaving. Imagined paradises in Islamic and Western art are often responses to loss and absence. But paradise could be recovered in the country villas of the Renaissance. Simon goes to the miraculously beautiful Palladian house of Daniele Barbaro in the Veneto, with murals painted by Paolo Veronese to contemplate the world of the

In Civilisations episode 2, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China. Mary seeks answers to fundamental questions at the heart of ideas about civilisations. Why have human beings always made art about themselves? What were these images for? And in what ways do some ancient conventions of representing the body still affect us now? In raising these questions, Mary explores how the way we look can influence our ideas of what is civilised. The colossal prehistoric Olmec heads in Mexico set the scene. In a culture with no written record, all we can do is puzzle about what these images were for, whom they represented, and why they were constructed. Mary Beard moves to other ancient cultures where more evidence has survived. She looks at images that are far more than art objects - images from Egyptian statues to the terracotta warriors of ancient China that actively participate in the social world, that teach men and wome