Let me see. We've been watching the Baroque spreading like a wildfire across Europe
Italy, Spain Holland. So what it needs to finish its journey is to get across here to England
Getting to England was no easy journey for the Baroque crossing. The channel was difficult enough but an even sterner barrier
was the innate English resistance to emotional and flamboyant art. Yes, sir
By the time the baroque reached here in the 16 twenties or so
England was artistically speaking, the most backward of the Great European powers
Never mind the Baroque taking its time. Even the Renaissance hadn't got here yet
17th century England was still stuck in the middle ages, a half timbered medieval hotch potch of Higgledy
Piggledy, Tudor Diy. And
as always in these turbulent years, the forces holding back progress were fiercely religious
The events of the reformation had filled the English with rabid suspicion
not just of popish plots, but of popish art as well as William Prynne
the puritan agitator would later put it. There was no welcome on these shores for the sinful
the idolatrous, the abominable by which he meant art. So
although the Baroque got here. All right, indeed, it did great things here
Look at that one of the most magnificent baroque sites anywhere in the world
but it wasn't an uncomplicated arrival and it had tragic and momentous consequences
Yes, this stupendous riverside vista
at Greenwich consists of three baroque firsts up on the hill. That charming brick
building was the royal observatory begun in 1675. The first purpose built scientific establishment
in the world. The exciting baroque palace across the front isn't a palace at all
But the first old people's home built to look like a palace
Christopher Wren's Greenwich Hospital, a retirement home for wounded sailors so successfully posh that
the old sea dogs were soon kicked out and their officers moved in
But the key building here is the one in the middle, the dinky little white one
Inigo Jones's Queen's House. It was designed for Anne of Denmark in 1617
Take a good look at it because that is possibly the most important little building in the whole of British architecture
Although technically, it belongs to the baroque era, what the Queen's House actually constitutes is the first sophisticated bit of European
building to be attempted in England. It's the whole of the renaissance as well as the baroque rolled into one and arriving
in England at last. It's white, it's
angelic and it's not half timbered. Hallelujah. But let's be honest, it's not an exciting
building. Inigo Jones was not an exciting architect. What made him special was the fact that he'd been to Italy
He'd seen what architecture could do come back to England and he'd opened the floodgates
The Queen's house is the tiny crack through which the baroque poured into England
But the man who enlarged that crack and turned it into a giant opening wasn't an artist or an architect but
a king, the British monarchy has
a patchy record in matters of art. Aesthetic concerns have hardly ever been a priority
With one superb exception. The only king with taste and the only king whose head we
cut off. Charles
The first was an unlikely candidate to become an artistic savior. A tiny man just 5 ft three
He was born with a cluster of disadvantages. He couldn't walk properly or talk till he was three and he always
had a slight stutter. When he was young, his tutors would make him wear iron boots to strengthen his legs
But he became an expert horseman who would have suspected though that he would also turn into a man of art in
1623. When he was 23 Charles was packed off to Spain to fulfill the so called Spanish mission
The hope was that he would marry the daughter of the Spanish king
Philip, the second bring peace to Europe and a huge Spanish dowry back to London
The Spanish marriage plans eventually fell through. Thank God. If you remember from the last film
the one set in Spain, the Spanish Habsburgs had bred themselves into a genetic mess
Cousins had married cousins, nieces had become wives and heaven knows what genetic misfortunes would have been visited upon
the British monarchy if Charles had married a Habsburg, the other problem was the hugely discombobulating
fact that the Spanish princess was a Catholic. After all the religious
turmoil that England had just been through the dissolution of the monasteries
Henry, the eight's battles with Rome. The idea of Charles marrying a Spanish Catholic was dismaying to say the least
But one splendid thing did come out of the failed Spanish mission in Madrid Charles was shown around the royal residences
where he discovered Titian Tintoretto Raphael and his eyes were opened to the delights of art we
with also in Spain, Charles came into contact with the finest
and most successful baroque painter of these dramatic times. Rubens the king of flesh
So although the Spanish marriage didn't work out, Charles came back to England
a changed man, a man who was mad about art and it was to prove his downfall
That's the banqueting house in Whitehall just up from Big Ben designed again by Inigo Jones
originally as the venue for a huge party that was supposed to follow the Spanish wedding
The one that never happened. Banqueting house was part of a rambling palace that Charles built on the side of the Thames
in imitation of the Spanish Royals. Most of it was destroyed in 1698 but the banqueting house survives
But inside it is the only painted ceiling by Rubens that's still in place
It's been called the greatest painted ceiling north of the Alps and it's right under our noses in London
Rubens came here originally on a diplomatic mission sent by the king of Spain
But Charles dug his exquisite royal fingers into him and he commissioned this
It tells of the union of the Crowns of Scotland and England under Charles's father James the first and of the good things that
resulted in
the central scene, James is going up to heaven, see him there as peace crowns him with Laurel
Over here, bounty sits on avarice and brings goodness to England while greed shivers nakedly over
there. Good government tramples on rebellion. It was actually painted in Antwerp in Rubens's studio
and then shipped over in bits. Charles liked it so much. He knighted Rubens and even gave him a hat worth £500
as a thank you and also the ring from his own finger
Charles himself appears on the ceiling as a little boy brought before the king to observe the union of the crowns
When Charles became king in 1625 he would hold court down here
So the union of the crowns would be facing him the right way up
But for the general audience who entered through that door, the first thing they would see would
be James the first ascending to heaven. And being crowned by the gods
thereby affirming the divine right of kings who are answerable only to God
Although it tells the Protestant tale of the making of Great Britain and the union of the crowns
There's a popish heir to the banqueting house ceiling. Rubens has turned King James into Saint James
And many would have noticed that Rubens's great ceiling
would have been the last art that Charles saw when a few short years after it was finished
parliament decided to punish the king for his extravagances by beheading him
But a lot needed to happen before we reach that tragic conclusion
What matters here is the key role played by art in these events
Charles, the first was an addict and his addiction wasn't women or wine or even power
His addiction was art. He would send his agents out into Europe looking
for the best pictures. Their instruction was to buy, buy, buy. There
were masterpieces here by Mantena Raphael Leonardo Charles. He even
bought some Caravaggio's. That's how progressive he was. Caravaggio's death
of the virgin, that magnificent display of Catholic mourning that now hangs in the louver with its fatally slumped Mary once
hung here in England. It wasn't just
as a collector that Charles distinguished himself. It was also as a patron having convinced Rubens the greatest ceiling
painter North of the Alps to work for him. Charles then turned his attention to Rubens's greatest pupil
The arrival in Britain of Antony Van Dyk changed everything here. It ushered in the most dramatic years there have been in English painting
Van Dyk opened the door and the baroque flooded in. He
was a handsome devil, graceful, charming, eloquent, masterfully diplomatic, the perfect courtier
ladies loved him. And so did Kings Charles pursued Van furiously for nearly a decade
before he finally persuaded this dashing Belgian to come to England in 1632 and become the king's painter
It was like the arrival of a Ferrari at a bicycle race
Van Dyk with his fast hands and exhilarating courtiers touch seemed to come not just from another country but from another planet
Suddenly poise, elegance, excitement, arrogance entered British art and
he made something so heroic out of Charles. The first, those who mistrust his work
complain of chronic flattery and I don't think you can deny it in that stupendous equestrian portrait that still
hangs in Buckingham Palace. The little king with the gammy legs has been turned into a heroic knight in armor riding
out on his white steed sir, Lancelot of Whitehall. Van
worked an even greater transformation on the French princess whom Charles successfully married after his Spanish adventure fell through
Queen Henrietta Maria, a tiny birdlike woman had teeth which according to a passing Venetian envoy stuck
out of her face like ships, cannons though you'd never know it from any of Van 's gorgeous reimagining of
her. No wonder the king showered him with favors gave him a house by the river in Blackfriars
knighted him and adored him. Although
the king was Van 's main employer, the lesser members of the court were soon fighting over his services as well
If you are a man who wouldn't wish to be remembered as dashingly as this
if you were a woman who wouldn't envy this kind of beauty
but he was more than a Flatterer. Yes, those dashing cavaliers of his were their nonchalant poses and those perfectly delightful
caroling and temptresses flashing their silks at you. They're easy on the eye but look into their faces and there's something else there
a note of sadness, a touch of worry, a fragility. Van was as great a painter as he was because he couldn't
keep the times he was living through, out of his art. And I don't think he wanted to
And it's this psychological magnetism of his that makes him so baroque
Van 's dashing and ringlet Cavaliers with their superb nonchalance are the perfect pictorial inhabitants of these thoroughly
exciting times. Everything
about Van was poised, measured successful except the manner of his dying
He was killed by a miserable fever in 1641 and died in that house that Charles gave him in Black Friars aged just 42
tragically young, but he changed British portraiture forever and he'd put an unforgettable face to
his era to be a truly important artist. You see, it's not enough to be talented
You need also to live through truly important times and your work needs somehow to embody those times
Now the fates up there, they know this indeed. They plan for it
How else to explain the extraordinary fact that as soon as Van was dead
the English civil War broke out, everything changed and out of nowhere
it seems he appeared on the scene. If
you read conventional books about British art, they'll tell you that the first native genius born on these shores was William Hogarth
But that's not true. The first British born genius, the first truly dazzling
English painter was born 100 years before Hogarth. He's that handsome fellow in the middle
whose name you probably won't know even though it's a fine English name
William Dobson. Fate dropped Dobson slap in the middle of one of the most tumultuous
dramatic and tragic epochs in Britain's recorded history, the English Civil War
And if Dobson hadn't been there and put a face to his era, the truth about these dramatic times would have gone unrecorded
Fate gave Dobson this magnificent moment all to himself. And God made sure he was talented enough to record it
unforgettably and brilliantly when
the Civil war broke out in 1642 just a few short weeks after Van 's death
the king and his court decamped from London to Oxford. And for the next four years
this was to be their home, all
souls became the Royalist arsenal College was where the artillery was parked
The music school was taken over by tailors making new uniforms for the king's men
The queen lived here in Merton College. The king himself moved into Christchurch College and
the quad was used as a cattle pen for the soldiers. Later on Christopher Wren designed
the famous tower. Poor little Oxford didn't know what had hit it
The town was overrun with courtiers, soldiers freeloaders, drunken cavaliers wandered the streets getting into fights
and their bravado in their eyes, their courageous excitement was vividly captured by William Dobson courts
The what's the king who always prized
his own aesthetic comforts. Set up a traveling court for himself here in Oxford
And this man Nicholas Lanier was master of the king's music. Now study his face well
because he also appears in that exciting self portrait we've just been looking at by Dobson
See you. Dobson was made the king's official painter and he kept himself very busy painting the various notables who
popped up in Oxford. This is Dobson's rather shaky portrait of Inigo Jones and
here's his magnificent Charles the second, the boy who would be king subduing the furies with a commanding royal gesture as the Battle
of Edge Hill rages in the distance. It's a magnificent piece of royal portraiture and it's so thoroughly English
Dobson must have worked about the court before the civil war started
but there's no record of it. It's as if he emerged from nowhere
He obviously knew Van 's work well and he was just as obviously his own man who brought a stubborn four square beefiness
to British portraiture. Those who sat for him seemed often to put on a stone
and a half in his presence. He made them bulkier earthier. Here's Endymion porter
painted by Van and here he is by Dobson. Here's Nicholas Lanier as Van saw him
Here's how he saw himself and here is what Dobson made of him inside every Englishman
It seems there's a Henry the eighth waiting to be discovered. It's such lively
portraiture. I can't believe Dobson is so obscure. We should applaud him from every historical rafter in England
He was there in the Civil War. He gave it a face and history thanked him by forgetting him completely and by making sure
he suffered the grubbiest of deaths. He died in London in 1646
an alcoholic. They say penniless in debt dumped into an arms house aged just 36
The only paintings we know by him were all done in those few short years in Oxford before the war was lost
That was his moment and how vigorously he seized it after Dobson's death
the king plotted on for a few more years, but the fates were determined to punish him for his aesthetic extravagances and
arranged an outrageously dramatic finale for him. It all came to a terrible end
on January, the 30th 1649 the king was executed outside
the very banqueting house that had ushered in his baroque age. They put up a special scaffold up there
It was an unusually cold day. So the king wore an extra shirt so that no one would mistake his shivering for fear
By all accounts, he went to his scaffold with great dignity. A king ruined in part
at least by his baroque obsession with art Cromwell. And the puritans quickly
set about selling off the royal collection. The royal plumber was given a painting of Noah's Flood by Bassano
some sort of weak Cromwellian joke, I suppose. And the hated French and Spanish courts bought up all the Titian
and the Caravaggio's and they're now found in the Louver and the Prado
So the story of painting in England more or less ground to a halt
And it was time for another of the great baroque arts to step up and be counted
It was time for architecture with a little unexpected help from the hand of God
The great fire of London in the devil's year of 1666 is one of the mythic turning points in the story of the baroque
No, the fire started in a baker's shop here in Pudding Lane
run by the king's personal baker. And this baker shop was situated here far away from the king's palaces as a deliberate safety measure
to make sure that no fires were started in Whitehall. So instead
the Royal bakery ended up setting fire to the whole of London
So for three whole days, it raged, two thirds of the metropolis was destroyed for Londoners
It was a colossal tragedy for the baroque. It was a godsend
What the great fire accidentally achieved was the purging of Tudor London Street after street of highly inflammable half
timbered housing was torched, creating a golden building opportunity for the English Baroque and as sometimes happens
in Britain in times of deep national need, a great hero stepped forward to save the day
Yes, Christopher Wren didn't look like an architectural warrior. But then in these ornate baroque times
everyone's seriousness was compromised by absurd restoration, wigs and powdery facial get ups
The fascinating thing about Ren is that he already had a big career behind him as a scientist before he turned to architecture
he was professor of astronomy at Oxford where he made important discoveries in telescope techniques and motion studies
And Wren was the first man successfully to introduce a foreign substance into the bloodstream of a dog
thereby inventing the injection inside
that huge baroque brain of his ren was constantly making amazing scientific connections
But how these led him to architecture. God only knows the
fire had destroyed 87 London churches, 87 no wonder it
must have seemed like an act of God. And when Ren stepped forward to rebuild 51 of them
yes, 51 he was driven by something more than mere dutifulness because beneath that powdery restoration
disguise of his Sir Christopher Wren saw himself so baroque as an instrument of God
This square mile of the city of London contains the finest concentration of baroque architecture outside Rome
51 baroque gems nestling among the money making skyscrapers. Now, obviously, I can't show all of those to you at once
but let's see how many a fat lump like me can get round to see in 15 minutes
His finest creative energy went into the steeples. The English liked their steeples
Wren knew that, but rather than giving them pointy bits of gothic that they were used to
Wren came up with things like that. Saint Brides, you know, the modern
wedding cake with all the different layers that was inspired by this steeple
get it Saint Brides, Saint Mary Le Beau to be a proper cocky
You need to have been born within earshot of that fantastical steeple
I like this one, Saint Vedas the way it curves and bulges broccoli in and out
Wren had to invent a new kind of church. An anglican church before the church of England had been happy
to convert Catholic churches, but he had to come up with something new from scratch
The interiors also needed complete reinvention. This is Saint Margaret's Lothbury, the best surviving Rennes interior
a bold rectangle with these big wide windows and an air of elegant simplicity
The protestant interior, five
churches, 15 minutes fitter man than me. We probably have got around 10
And of course, all the time that Wren was building the London churches
his greatest achievement, Saint Paul's Cathedral was rising up out of the ashes of the great fire
Saint Paul's took 35 years to finish. And while we're waiting for that to happen
we should get out of London and expand our horizons because the baroque was much too powerful
an epidemic to confine itself to the city. The
English stately home was one of the most distinctive and delightful inventions of the baroque age
Of course, other nations dotted their countryside with big houses too, but no one else was quite as keen as the British to position
excellent architecture in an excellent stretch of landscape. When you look at somewhere magnificently
English like Blenheim Palace, you're looking at an outdoor composition in which everything has been placed just so
it's a duet. If you like between the house and its landscape and that sense you get here of the whole thing being one
entity, no one else did that. That is a fine invention of the English baroque
But the closer you get to Blenheim Palace, the less rural and relaxed it begins to seem because Blenheim is the greatest
and grandest creation of the full blown English baroque. The
house itself is the handiwork of that fascinating and busy Baroque Bee
Sir John Van Borough. When you look at portraits of Van Borough
it's difficult to take the man seriously. He had the biggest of big hairdos and a puffy pouty look to him
with his velvets and his lace. But underneath this powdered and billowing baroque exterior lurked one of the most
interesting creative minds that these times produced Vanbrugh looked like
a toth and he built like a toth, but he actually had fierce democratic leanings so much so that in 1688
he was imprisoned in the Bastille for seditious and revolutionary behavior and espionage
He spent 4.5 years in that French jail. And when he came out
he became a playwright and he wrote that marvelous restoration comedy, The Provoked Wife
which is probably playing at an Amram somewhere near you right now
He wrote poems, pamphlets, plays and managed somehow to become an architect too and a very quirky one
Blenheim is the largest and most bombastic of Britain's country houses. The only one allowed to call itself
a palace. It was built to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough's famous victory over the French
at the battle of Blenheim. So pleased was the British monarchy with the duke's great victory that they gave him this land and told
him to build something suitable on it. Come
on. So it was always meant to be more of a war memorial than a home
And that's why there is this heavyweight grandeur and seriousness to it
Other English country houses settle gently on the landscape like a butterfly
But Blenheim needed to land heavily like a great big ceremonial cake and you have to admit it does that impeccably
Van Borough's ambition here is to find a baroque architecture that resounds with power and might go round the back and
it all gets a little more relaxed and playful, a nice backdrop for the occasional game of cricket
But that's the back at the front. This is a building that demands your obedience and respect the
era's finest sculptor Greyling Gibbons was employed to carve these giant English lions chewing up the pathetic
French cog. And at the top of the house where no one could miss him
Van Borough placed the giant captured bust of the defeated sun King Louis the 14th so that visitors could mock
him as they entered the house. While the outside of Blenheim puffs out its chest and demands
your obedience. The inside puffs out its chest and demands that you dress properly for dinner
That great English warrior, Sir Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim, of course
and some of its military mood was his inheritance. Visitors entered
into here where they'd be overwhelmed by all this mighty baroque architecture with its militaristic air
Then they'd be led through here underneath the minstrel gallery into Blenheim's Great Saloon
Its most surprising sight, an illusion courtyard that turns
the inside of Blenheim into an outside. It
was painted by the Aptly named Louis Laguerre, a French painter whose name means in translation
Louis the war there. He is up there too. Prim and powdered
You would have thought to be much of a painter la came up with an illusion stick ring
of balconies on which has gathered a pretend audience of international visitors to Blenheim from the four corners of the earth
from France, from Spain, from China and from wherever that is, they're
here to watch the room's central scene in which the mighty Duke of Marlborough rushes across the sky in his chariot like a marvel comic
hero. While the embodiment of peace stays his militaristic arm and persuades him to stop fighting
It's a decent bit of baroque hack work and it does its job well enough faking up some grandeur and illusionism for these stately
rooms and throwing in some handy propaganda for peace. But at this point in the baroque story
and we're very near the tail end, these illusion ambitions are outweighing the meaningful content and
the bar has grown slightly silly that's inside the fake
interior of Blenheim. And it's not something you could ever say of the palace's exterior
Blenheim on the outside is a master class of baroque invention. These weird towers
for instance, how strange and unexpected are they or this peculiar cluster of bold architectural sculpture
who on Earth came up with this manor came late to architecture
He was basically an amateur. So he needed some professional help to achieve all this
And while the grandeur and the bomb bass that you see here is definitely Van Borough's handiwork
Much of the architectural brilliance is due to someone else. Borough's
number two at Blenheim. The designer of many of the best bits was this lopsided bro mini of Blenheim
Nicholas Hawks more. Hawkes Moor was the most inventive
and madcap architect these shores have produced. If things look excitingly strange in British baroque architecture
the chances are Hawkes Moor did it. And according to some scattering bits of eccentric baroque around London wasn't
all that Hawkes Moor did Hawkes Moor a time traveling murder mystery by
Peter Aykroyd Lud Heat. A collection of weird existential poems about Hawkes Moor by Ian Sinclair
and from Hell, an extra large gothic horror comic set in Hawkes Moors London and all about the Ripper
murders by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. All
of these excessively fruity Tomes accuse Britain's most mysterious baroque builder of being the architect
not just of buildings but also of evil mind. You
wandering around the churchyard of a Hawkes Moor building at twilight in the autumn is a distinctly spooky experience
His buildings definitely have a psychological presence. It's the baroque getting inside
your head. Again. In 1711, the British Parliament passed some new legislation providing
tax money to build 50 New London churches. In the end, only a dozen of them were finished
Six of them by Hawkes Moor. He also designed the towers of two of the other ones and these London churches are
Hawkes Moor's most important baroque achievements. Now, I've marked out their positions on this London map
So over here is Saint George Bloomsbury. That's the one with the strange zig at for a steeple and the statue of George the first
on the top. Very peculiar building. And over here is Christchurch Spittle Fields
Now, it's around this church that all the ripper murders were supposed to have taken place
It's the one with the pointy gothic steeple. Now, out here is Saint Anne's Limehouse
This one here with the strange obelisk in front of it in the center of the city
right in the center, Saint Mary Wout very peculiar looking building. And over here
Saint George in the east, the one with a Spanish look to it
Now, Hawkes more also designed these two towers, not the whole church
but the two towers for other people's churches. There's Saint Luke's Old Street which is over here and Saint John's Horsley down that was down
here south of the river. Now, according to this book here, Lud Heat
Ian Sinclair, if you join up these Hawkes more
churches with their positions. Yeah. What
you get is a diagram that bears an uncanny resemblance
to an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph down here. The last of the Hawke's Moor Church is Saint
Aage Greenwich, the one with the huge keystones. And that's the final bit of the jigsaw which makes this
mysterious symbol, the eye of Horus, protector of all deities safeguard her of the deepest
secrets. And this mad idea that Hawkes Moor
deliberately planned the position of his churches so that they formed this mysterious ancient diagram reaches its
crescendo in this great big comic book where Jack The Ripper's murders and the secrets of the Freemasons and the position
of Hawkes Moor's churches and all manner of weird hocus pocus that I can't begin to understand is mixed together in a mysterious
baroque soup. Of course, it's all nonsense, really silly. But what isn't nonsense
is the atmosphere of Hawke's Moor's work which is take it from me
do me and unsettling someone once wrote that you can imagine funerals taking place in a Hawkes Moor church but not
weddings. How true that is. These looming
oversized and madly inventive slabs of architectural sampling are some of the strangest concoctions the baroque ever
came up with. What is that on top of Saint George's Bloomsbury and whoever saw a Zygotic pyramid
atop an Anglican church in Hawkes Moor? The English baroque grows very eccentric
His architecture mixes things that have never been mixed before. Mexican Gothic Greek
Egyptian and it's the very unexpectedness of this mix that makes it unmistakably baroque
Do I like it? Hm, not always do I recognize genius in here
Of course, is it the greatest achievement of the English Baroque? No
but that's only because this is, do
you know how many great cathedrals there are in the world that were actually built in the lifetimes of their architect
One, this one Saint Paul's Ren designed it. He watched the first stone going down
he watched the last stone going down from 1675 to 1710, 35 years
What an achievement. There
was a biblical heir to the great fire that destroyed the old Saint Paul's
The sense that God had played a deliberate part in the purging of London must have seemed inescapable from
the start. Wryn wanted to build an imposing domed cathedral here. A great church round all to rank alongside
Saint Peter's in Rome. And he achieved that of course, but it took a momentous piece of
deception. This is the giant model Wren made of Saint Paul's as he dreamt of building it
This is what he really wanted to do here. But the English clergy found Wren's domed basilica too
Catholic and Popish and rejected his splendid design. He was forced to come up with something else
something more English more traditional. So he proposed instead this grim compromise
a bit of a steeple, a bit of a knave, a bit of a mess
And when the scaffolds went up in 1675 for the new Saint Paul's
this is what people were expecting to be built 35 years later
However, when the Scaffolds finally came down, look what the English Baroque had actually come up with
Wren had lied through his teeth about what he was going to build
He promised us this and all the time he was building this Saint
Paul's was never what it seems to be. These high palatial walls
for instance, rising grandly above the city are actually false and unnecessary
They're just there for effect. See the actual building from the front took off
the facade would be shaped like this for the nave, two aisles down either
side. But what Ren's done is he's put up these false walls
They're just there for show to make the building look much higher from the side
So in between here, there are empty spaces and the dome that too is
illusion. It's actually not one dome but three out here, you
have the big dome that everybody sees inside. There's another dome that you only see on the inside and
then there's one that you don't see at all, which is a kind of conical dome
but those at the middle and that supports the lantern. So what you see on the outside is completely different from what you see on
the inside. So Ren got his Popish cathedral
in the end, he promised us an ugly English compromise. Instead, he connived to bring us a soaring ecclesiastical
masterpiece that wouldn't look too out of place in Rome itself. And
that's the thing about the English baroque on paper. It's thoroughly protestant in the flesh
It's not so sure. We
began this series in Rome in front of Saint Peter's. And I told you that we'd follow the baroque from Rome to London
from Saint Peter's to Saint Paul's. Now, here we are at the end of the journey and we've watched the baroque squiggling its way through
the entire 17th century. Always pushing, expanding, changing. We've
seen the baroque grow thunderous and huge as it sought to batter us into submission
And we've watched it go, Plaintiff and sad as it tried to get inside our minds and our hearts
we've watched it rope in all the other arts for support, sculpture
architecture this way and that it billowed through enormous spaces and tiny ones
If you remember, I told you that the actual word baroque comes from this a Misshapen Pearl Barocco in
Portuguese. And if you are expecting this series to follow a straight line
you'll be disappointed because the baroque didn't do straight lines. But there is something that unites
all these magnificent sights and spectacles and makes them typically baroque, something powerful that brings everything
together. It's the need to be noticed. The baroque built big because big things have a big impact
It dazzled you with its illusions and caught you up in its psychology because it wanted your time and your attention
It was the first art movement to realize that being good wasn't enough
You needed also to make an impact. It's a lesson, the arts have never forgotten
If you want an audience get out there and grab it