Browse all episodes of The Private Life of a Masterpiece

Botticelli's painting is extraordinarily beautiful; his portrayal of Flora, the central character, reveals a face you might find in London or Bologna or Boston today. But what the painting is about is a mystery which scholars devote their lives to solving. It is rich is sex, even rape, but it also about love and the highest aspirations of man.

Sandro Botticelli: La Primavera

Among the greatest of all depictions of battle, these three panels were break throughs in painting technique, so that contemporaries must have viewed them in awe. Also they were the victims of an audacious art crime.

Paolo Uccello: The Battle of San Romano

The story of probably the most renowned painting in the world. The Last Supper revolutionized Western art and its power reverberates to this day in the courts and the bookshops and cinemas.

Just how Leonardo Da Vinci broke with traditions in creating his supremely dynamic masterpiece is recounted, together with the tale of his disastrous attempt to use a new technique in wall-painting.

Leonardo da Vinci: The Last Supper

The first moment in the Christmas story is the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel to tell Mary that she has been chosen to give birth to the son of God. Many painters have depicted this event, none better than the great Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck.

As befits a man who seems to mixed espionage in with painting for his patron, Eyck’s picture is full of symbols and half-concealed messages. It has an extraordinary after-life - sold by the Soviets against the wishes of the Hermitage and bought by a secretive American millionaire who hid it away in a cellar.

Piero della Francesca: The Resurrection

Why should a painting of a group of part-time Amsterdam militiamen, dressed up for an occasion that wasn't serious anyway, have become the most revered painting in Holland? The full story of Rembrandt's masterpiece.

Rembrandt van Rijn: The Night Watch

Of all Vermeer's paintings, it was probably this picture that he held in greatest esteem. It was the painting he used to show off his skills to customers. A customer three centuries after he died was none other than Adolf Hitler

Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting

She's been called 'the most smackable bum in art'. Velazquez's portrait of a young woman lying naked on a couch gazing at her reflection in a mirror held by Cupid has an extraordinary story

Diego Velázquez: The Rokeby Venus

Eugene Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People

Arguably the most powerful painting about war ever achieved. It portrays the slaughter of civilians after Napoleonic troops entered Madrid in 1808. The programme reveals the historical truths behind the painting and shows exactly how Goya achieved this masterpiece of protest.

Francisco Goya: The Third of May 1808

The great revolutionary masterpiece, painted by a man who soon complained that revolutions got in the way of dinner parties. Shunned by the government of the day, it has endured to become the symbol of the French republic and an icon of later revolutions.

Eugène Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People

Perhaps the most celebrated of all Japanese pictures, the Great Wave's portrayal of a huge wave about to overwhelm three boats was only produced by Hokusai when he was old and broke and needed money badly. A print that cost little more than bowl of noodles to those who first bought it, the image has been hugely influential on later art.

Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave

Two men sitting on the grass, with a picnic nearby. They are not looking at a naked woman seated nearby, who stares brazenly out of the canvas at the viewer. In the background a second woman is doing something hard to quite see. Just what is going on? The full story of the painting that many believe is the beginning of modern art.

Édouard Manet: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe

The stark portrait, mainly in greys and black, that James McNeill Whistler painted of his mother is now a picture that is widely lampooned as a portrait of a prim Victorian lady. She is shown smoking reefers, wearing trainers, having a tatoo. But Whistler's approach was revolutionary in its time, wholly departing from the Victorian tradition of sentimental narrative painting. His relationship with his mother was also an intriguing study in contrasts.

James McNeill Whistler: Portrait Of The Artist's Mother

The Scream tells the life-story of the painting more widely reproduced than any other, even the Mona Lisa. It shows exactly how and why the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch arrived at his extraordinary image and how that image of the screaming person has reverberated down the decades to become an icon in modern culture.

Edvard Munch: The Scream

This painting was once described as the most beautiful of all the artworks of the 19th century. Certainly it seems the happiest. But beneath renoir's joyful portrayal of working class Parisians at leisure is another, darker story.

Auguste Renoir: Dance at the Moulin de la Galette

Perhaps the most reproduced of all 19th century paintings, The Sunflowers has a story that lies at the crux of the complex relationship between Van Gogh and Paul Gaugin. The programme reveals how Van Gogh started to paint sunflowers soon after he moved from Holland to Paris and how they became the emblem of his embrace of Southern France, warmth and the sun. It looks especially at the 8th of the Sunflower paintings, the one in the National Gallery in London which is arguably the best in the series. It was most admired and desired by Gaugin but denied to him by Van Gogh as their relationship deteriorated.

Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers

A popular masterpiece and yet an enduring enigma. It seems to show a quiet scene in a Paris park but there are hints at the demi-monde, if you know where to look. The most remarkable aspect of this vast canvas however remains Seurat's technique his revolutionary pointillism.

Georges Seurat: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

'My Brothel' is the title that Picasso gave to his masterwork Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting of five towering prostitutes that began the art of the twentieth century. It was a work that shocked even his friends when they first saw it, with one saying that Picasso would be found hanged behind it one day. The programme relates how the painting grew out of a fierce rivalry between Matisse and Picasso and just why it was and remains so revolutionary.

Pablo Picasso: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

One of the most sensual of paintings, achieved in the extraordinary intellectual climate of turn of the century Vienna by a male artist of prodigious sexual appetite. Yet it may portray the shift of sexual power towards the female.

Gustav Klimt: The Kiss

Salvador Dalí: Christ of Saint John of the Cross

Michelangelo: David

The statue of the young girl in a real ballet dress is often seen today just as a pretty image of dancer making one of the classic moves of ballet. But to the people who first saw the statue when it was unveiled it was a dangerous, even disgraceful, portrayal of a degenerate girl little more than a whore. The programme reveals the story of the real woman who Degas used as a model and includes revelations about how the statue as actually made.

Edgar Degas: La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans

Rodin's The Kiss is arguably the most sensual sculpture in the art of the past 150 years. Its subject matter is more daring that most people understand: A it portrays a girl seducing a man. The sculpture has been controversial right up to the 21st century.

Auguste Rodin: The Kiss

The first moment in the Christmas story is the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel to tell Mary that she has been chosen to give birth to the son of God.  Many painters have depicted this event, none better than the great Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck.  

As befits a man who seems to mixed espionage in with painting for his patron, Eyck’s picture is full of symbols and half-concealed messages.  It has an extraordinary after-life  - sold by the Soviets against the wishes of the Hermitage and bought by a secretive American millionaire who hid it away in a cellar.

Jan van Eyck: The Annunciation

Arguably the painting that invented the snowy Christmas card scene, the Census at Bethlehem is a picture that depicts the arrival of Mary and Joseph at Bethlehem  But it also a portrays Netherlands village under the grip of a cruel winter and under the hammer of a foreign army.   The picture teems with human life as the best Breughels do, but it also speaks to the 21st century in an extraordinary way.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Census At Bethlehem

This is a Nativity, and since it is by Paul Gauguin, it is modern and fresh like few recent nativities.  This painting is intensely personal.  The Madonna is Gauguin’s young Polynesian mistress, who was pregnant with his child.    It is a brilliant departure in other ways from traditional nativities, relevant to the contemporary world.

Paul Gauguin: God's Child

Caravaggio: The Taking Of Christ

Botticelli's Mystic Nativity is a painting that lovers of mystery fiction should love: a Renaissance masterpiece crammed with cryptic symbols disguising a dangerous message. But it is much more besides. Painted in 1500 by one of the most famous artists of all time, it is a supremely beautiful vision of maternal love, earthly harmony, and heavenly ecstasy.

But the painting also has a dark side. It was inspired by the preaching of Savonarola, the puritanical friar who held Florence in his grip in the 1490s. He purged the city of non-Christian art, destroying it on the notorious Bonfire of the Vanities. But he himself met a violent, fiery end, and Botticelli had to carefully hide the Mystic Nativity's dangerous meaning. Only a recent chance discovery by a scholar fully unlocked the painting's message.

The painting was the first Botticelli work to arrive in Britain, brought here in 1799 by a wealthy young owner of slave plantations. It would have cost him just a few pounds at a time when Botticelli's name was all but forgotten. But before long, the painting would be on display to an audience of millions at the world's biggest ever art exhibition held in industrial Manchester.

Sandro Botticelli: The Mystic Nativity

The Private Life of an Easter Masterpiece.

Six hundred years ago, one painting in northern Europe was prized above all others. Queens and kings wanted to own it. Other and lesser painters endlessly copied it. Anyone who saw it was struck with awe. The painting was huge and overwhelming - the Descent from the Cross. The painter was a Flemish master, Rogier Van Der Weyden.

Today it is one of the greatest masterpieces in Spain's National Gallery, the Prado, in Madrid. It was taken there by Philip II of Spain and survived great adventures - almost lost at sea, almost destroyed by German bombers in the Spanish Civil War.

Recently Google Earth went inside a gallery for the first time - they chose the Prado and then the Descent from the Cross. Only today can the highest resolution digital cameras capture the amazing attention to detail of Van Der Weyden's paintbrush.

Rogier van der Weyden: The Descent from the Cross

The Private Life of a Christmas Masterpiece.

Painted over five centuries ago, Filippo Lippi's nativity is like no other: the birth of Christ in a dark, wooded wilderness. Its beauty inspired Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli. But it also conceals a deeply personal story. It was painted for Cosimo de' Medici, a wealthy banker who feared that his money was dragging him straight to hell.

The artist's life was equally surprising. One of the most celebrated painters of his day, Filippo Lippi was also a Carmelite friar, but he was no stranger to the temptations of the flesh, to which he frequently yielded. Shortly before painting his Adoration, he caused uproar by seducing a twenty year-old nun. His paintings rejoice not just in divine beauty, but in that of women.

In later times, the Adoration's history was interwoven with that of rulers and dictators. It became a bargaining chip after Napoleon's allies seized twenty merchant ships. And in the 20th century, it was hidden by the Nazis in a potassium mine, where American troops stumbled upon it. The painting even inspired mutiny amongst US officers when the American authorities tried to appropriate it for the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Filippo Lippi: The Adoration of the Christ Child

Private Life of a Masterpiece is a BBC arts documentary series that tells the stories behind great works of art reaching from the Renaissance to modern art. David by Michelangelo, The Scream by Edvard Munch, The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya, The Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn, Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso, The Annunciation by Jan van Eyck, ... The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer. For behind the beautiful canvases and sculptures are tales of political revolution, wartime escapes, massive ego clashes, social scandal, financial wrangling and shocking violence. The series reveals the full and fascinating stories behind famous works of art, not just how they came to be created, but also how they influenced others and came to have a life of their own in the modern world.

All Episodes of The Private Life of a Masterpiece

All Episodes of The Private Life of a Masterpiece

Season 1

Sandro Botticelli: La Primavera

Season 1 Episode 1 - Aired 2/16/2001

Paolo Uccello: The Battle of San Romano

Season 1 Episode 2 - Aired 2/17/2001

Leonardo da Vinci: The Last Supper

Season 1 Episode 3 - Aired 2/18/2001

Piero della Francesca: The Resurrection

Season 1 Episode 4 - Aired 2/19/2001