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[Music] when most people think of the Renaissance they think of Italy a sun-kissed realm of popes patas and Patos a place filled with hugely talented artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo a generation who in the 15th century left the Middle Ages behind and created a glorious new kind of art more inventive and more exuberant than anything seen [Music] before when most people think of the Renaissance they don't think of Britain
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while the Italians were busy building a modern world the British were still stuck in the medieval mud the Renaissance is supposed to have passed us by
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but that isn't true the British did have a Renaissance and it was bold it was beautiful and it was utterly brilliant yet for some reason we've all but forgotten it in this series I want to ReDiscover our forgotten Renaissance a dazzling movement that flourished from around 1500 to the Civil War 150 years later [Music] that gave us our first great paintings our first stately homes our earliest scientific breakthroughs and perhaps the finest writer of
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them all a movement that catapulted us out of the Middle Ages and laid the foundations of a modern British culture that still shapes us today this series isn't about kings and queens or chudah and Stuarts it's about the painters sculptors poets playwrights composers inventors explorers and craftsmen who together revolutionized the way we saw the world and this episode is about how it all got started how a handful of brilliant European artists brought the new
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ideas of the Renaissance to Britain how we learned from their techniques experimented with their ideas and through them began to develop a voice of our [Music] own okay so the story of the the British Renaissance doesn't actually start in Britain it begins in Florence when an Italian sculptor accidentally kickstarts our own artistic Revolution Petro torano was proud arrogant and extremely competitive he was childhood friends with Michelangelo but rather
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than admiring the great man like everyone else he was pathologically jealous of him
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things came to a head one day when both men were in a chapel studying some frescos so they were next to each other sketching when Michelangelo apparently made some sned remark and that's when it happened that's when years of jealousy bubbled over that's when torana snapped clenching my fist I gave him such a punch that I felt the bone and cartilage in his nose crumble like a biscuit he will remain marked by me as long as he
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lives torano permanently disfigured Florence's favorite son he was left with only one option to flee the city and take his talent [Music] elsewhere sometime in about 1507 torano fetched up in what was reported to be Europe's Most Philistine Backwater a grubby dirty uninspiring little place at the end of the Known World England when torano first arrived in England the must have felt like it stepped back into the past the Renaissance had been raging in
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Italy for almost 200 years but here there was absolutely no sign of it whatsoever after 150 years of bloody wars and infighting the British hadn't had time for a Renaissance they hadn't even had time for art in Britain artists weren't celebrities like they were in Italy they were anonymous workmen paid the same as plasterers and iron mongers and as for art well the British didn't really know what art was they didn't even have a word for painting
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if a painting was on canvas it was called a cloth and if it was on panel it was called a table but torano wasn't without work for long in 1512 the young King Henry VII who fancied himself as a patron of new ideas gave this exotic Italian artist a very special commission torano was offered a staggering 1500 that's more than a million pound in today's money to make and work well cleanly surely Workman curiously and substantially those are the words in the contract a very
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special artwork it would be his Masterpiece and it would be unlike anything the British had ever seen Tano's piece was commissioned for Westminster Abbey a place that pretty much summed up where England was artistically still stuck in the Middle Ages with its stylized Saints and pointed Gothic arches it was thoroughly medieval but what torano came up with was emphatically different in a quiet Chapel at the back of the Abbey inside an ornate
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chamber is the tomb of King Henry iith and his wife Elizabeth of yorg [Music]
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their life-size Effigies rest on an imposing tomb chest that's decorated with Biblical figures and [Music] Saints it's a revolutionary piece of work and I think it's revolutionary for two reasons first torano did it all he conceived it he designed it he modeled the figures he cast the bronze he carved the stone he gilded the surfaces he did absolutely everything and if that doesn't seem particularly unusual today
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in his time it was unheard of in Britain most tombs indeed most artworks were made by Anonymous Artisans but torano was no medieval Craftsman he was a Renaissance artist the second revolutionary thing about this tomb is its style it is Renaissance through and through it's made from White marble and guilt bronze the materials that Donatello and Michelangelo would have used it's adorned with columns and a canthus leaves that hark
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back to the classical ruins of Italy the figures of The King and his wife are lifelike their hands bulging with veins and dimples but for me the most Renaissance thing of all about this tomb are these cheeky little chappies they're called putty and they're Italian cherubs and they were to a penny in Italian Renaissance paintings but they were completely new in this [Music] country [Music]
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all in all it's like a little piece of the Renaissance has been beamed down into the Middle Ages isn't it Tano's tomb marked a turning point in British art it brought a modern style to a medieval country it proved that artists were much more more than mere Craftsmen and it showed that art itself could finally take center stage in British life our Renaissance had [Music] begun in the few years since torano had come and gone England had begun to change dramatically
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under Henry VII it was peaceful for the first time in decades and its economy was booming it was now a land of opportunity and it wasn't long before the finest minds of the Renaissance came knocking artists poured into Britain from all over Europe but none of them would have a greater impact than the brilliant Swiss German painter H Hine Hans haline arrived in England in the Autumn of 1526 he was just 29 years old he
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came with no friends and family he didn't speak a word of the language and he had virtually no money but Hine had big Ambitions Hine had made his reputation as a Portrait Painter in the Swiss city of barel a place that was now being torn apart by the struggles of the Protestant Reformation
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he would be the first artist to bring the new techniques and ideas of the Renaissance portrait to Britain a place where portrait painting was almost nonexistent Hine would look closer and harder at British faces than anyone had done before him he would capture their idiosyncrasies and their imperfections and in doing so he would make us think differently about each other and ourselves hine's genius is best seen not in his finished works but in Intimate pictures
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that he hoped few would ever [Music] see today they're housed at Windsor in the Royal collection these are some of hine's Preparatory drawings for his portraits and these really are some of the most breathtaking artworks I've ever seen they were made 500 years ago and yet these people look like the people you see on the streets today in fact these are portraits of a new class of people merchants and Scholars and cours the
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people who had taken over from the church as the new patrons of art this is Henry Howard Earl of s when he was about 15 years old and it is alarming how present he feels he stares right out at us right through us and it almost feels that if you look at him long enough you'll see him blink and if you lean in close enough you'll smell his breath Howard was executed beheaded a few years after this portrait was made yet on this piece of paper he'll always be
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alive this is the courtier Sir Richard southwell he was a famously unpleasant man and I don't think Hine liked him either he looks pompous and humorous his nose is flared with self-regard and Hine has made sure to include some scar under his throat that he got from an infection of the lymph nodes but the best bit is this little line in German a note from Hine to himself that translates as the eyes rather
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yellow and hine's women are just as fascinating beautiful ethereal and so elegantly anxious you know one of the most impressive things about these drawings is the technique it is so economical a simple outline of pen and ink a tiny Touch of blue chalk for the eyes a tiny stroke of pink chalk for the lips and Hine lets the paper do the rest and it's that delicacy that enables him to capture the Fragile the fleeting the transient quality of life itself
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hine's drawings are the first really lifelike faces in the whole all of British history and they Mark the beginning of a major British tradition a w and all preference for reality over beauty that has persisted ever since but I think they're even more important than that hine's portraits contain the seeds of a new idea they Mark I think a moment when people stopped thinking about themselves simply as types as kings as Knights as Court and
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started thinking about themselves as individuals with their own unique characteristics their own unique hopes and fears and that that birth of the individual is a defining feature of the [Music] Renaissance but the Renaissance wasn't only about looking differently at each other it was also about looking differently at the world itself and Hine captured this radical worldview in his most famous painting one of the great paintings of the [Music] Renaissance the
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ambassadors and here are the ambassadors themselves Jean de dville and George delf looking proud of their achievements and even prouder of their clothes but the first thing you notice about this painting the most mysterious thing the most famous thing are not the ambassadors but this splodge if you look at it from this angle you'll see it's actually a distorted but anatomically accurate skull and it's a reminder that even rich and powerful men like these two will die
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like everyone else but I don't think this picture is really about the ambassadors I think it's about what's right at the very center this cryptic array of objects on the top shelf these objects relate to the heavens a Celestial Globe two quadrants a su dial on the Shelf below these objects relate to the Earthly realm a terrestrial Globe a book of arithmetic some musical instruments and a book of hymns that's painted in so much detail I can actually sing them these two shelves
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depict no less than the entire Cosmos Heaven and Earth together Hine has created an image of a world in which everything can be charted measured Quantified understood a world that mankind finally has has Mastery over this is hine's most ambitious portrait it is a portrait of the Renaissance itself as Hine assembled his Renaissance stage set he would have looked to his best friend for the props a German mathematician and astronomer called Nicholas katzer katzer
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represented the other crucial aspect ECT of the Renaissance the spirit of scientific [Music] inquiry katzer arrived in England in about 1518 but his reasons for coming remain a mystery when one friend heard of his visit he advised katzer to keep his thing secret and tell no one who summoned him he's to inv vent an excuse as far from the truth as possible we may never know Katz's true motives he may have been on a secret mission he may have
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been a spy but we do know that he was immediately employed by the king himself as the Royal clock maker spy or not when katzer came to London he certainly brought secrets with him this is his private notebook and it contains diagrams equations and instructions for the instruments he made it's so exciting to be looking through this book because looking through it is like peering into Nicholas kratzer's mind and it was clearly a formidable mind it was
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also a genuinely Renaissance mind a mind that believed in observation and and calculation a mind that believed the secrets of the universe could be unlocked with Precision Engineering and for katzer and his peers nothing was quite as precise as a sunal an instrument that harnessed the sun itself transforming its Rays into the hands of a mathematically designed [Music] clock Joanna MD is one of the few people to continue the great art of
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dialing as an instrument Mak yourself how do you rate katzer well what was extraordinary about katzer was he brought the knowledge from Europe to this country the 50 years that were after katzer the dials became amazing and so whatever he did he just sort of changed the consciousness of um of understanding of of sundal so he really kickstarted things in this country yes I think he really did I mean I don't think Henry the8 was have bought him over
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um unless he had something special about him so do we know much Joanna about katzer as a person one of the sandals there's a quotation on it I think in Oxford where he proudly says that he and his stonemason could drink in the German style which basically meant that they could drink anyone under the table um so he was obviously a funloving um Man Too katzer evidently could handle his drink because he specialized in miniature sunds
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and these required a clear head and a steady hand to make miraculously one of them still survives this is a delightful little Sund dial handmade out of guilt brass but it doesn't just have one dial it has nine of them seven along the edge and one on each side each one of them is perfectly calibrated all are set to a latitude of 51.5 De north of the equator and that means it was designed to work in London so to use it the first thing you need to do is to orient these
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noons towards the North and right at the top of it there's a little hole and inside that hole there would have been a compass and that Compass would have helped you position it exactly right and when the positioning is right the Sun and I'm going to use a torch because we're indoors the sun would pass over the surface of the sunds and would help you tell the time and the Really clever thing is that actually not just one of these sunds will tell the time
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but all of them and this was completely new in Britain there had been sunds before there had been pockets sundal before but nothing as showy as complex as sophisticated as this and most remarkable of all we know for whom this object was made right here on the stand is a little picture of a dinky Cardinal's hat and that tells us that this sundal was made for Cardinal Woolsey King Henry's chief minister and you know I can just imagine the chubby
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figure of woie pulling this out after dinner passing it around the table and showing off his fishlyn technology was becoming fashionable reflecting an appetite for scientific knowledge an excitement that was not confined to England thanks to Scotland long-running alliance with France the Scottish Stewart kings had embraced the Renaissance with enthusiasm their base was Sterling Castle part of which they restyled according to the latest fashion they filled it with modish sculptures of
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European monarchs classical Heroes and lots of Italian putty and they invited musicians Scholars and scientists from all over Europe to come and work there one of the most eccentric was a young Italian called joavan Damiano or as the Scots called him John Damian John Damian was an alchemist and he divided opinion dramatically some people thought he was a charlatan and they accused him of murdering a priest in Italy and impersonating a doctor in France but the king thought
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he was a genius Daman was a contemporary of Leonardo and both were obsessed with the ultimate Renaissance ambition human flight in fact Leonardo's famous drawings of flying machines May well have inspired Damen to embark on his most audacious experiment it was the morning of the 27th of September 1 157 the king had just dispatched two ambassadors to France but as they exited Damian entered John Damian assembled the
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court and made a staggering announcement he would beat the ambassadors to Paris he then strapped on two large Wings which had' fashioned from hen feathers he stepped up onto those ramparts over there and when he had everyone's attention he leapt [Music] off in the end Damian didn't quite make it to France instead he landed in a dungill near the foot of the castle and broke his leg
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John Damian's flight could be seen as a miserable failure but I disagree these ramp parts are really really high and for him to jump off them and only break his leg well I think he must have flown at least for a bit which would make this one of the first human flights in British history John daman's Grand Ambitions pleased the king but many others at Court mocked and insulted him relentlessly and in doing so they revealed a broader tension at the heart of the British
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Renaissance the British Renaissance had started brilliantly but as I'm sure you've noticed it had not been very British its greatest sculptor had been Italian its greatest painter had come from Switzerland and its greatest inventor had been German and this was not lost on the natives for some time londoners had been concerned that foreigners were stealing their jobs in 1517 this resentment had bubbled over into outright [Music] violence it was about 9:00 in the evening when
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a thousand angry English apprentices gathered in the city of London they broke into Newgate Prison liberated several prisoners who' already been arrested for race crimes and then marched through the streets looting foreign Craftsman's workshops and assaulting anyone who got in their way
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by 3:00 a.m. the riots had been quelled but the problem would not go away British artists and Craftsmen soon realized that they would have to move with the [Music] times from the 1520s a new generation began to discover Renaissance ideas for themselves but they wouldn't simply copy Europe they would do things differently on the continent the Renaissance had typically been elegant and refined the British however
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were not a particularly elegant and refined Bunch so when we did the Renaissance it was earthy visceral and at first a bit rough around the edges the first of these native Pioneers was a young English courtier called Thomas Wyatt captured here by none other than H Hine Thomas Wyatt was a Playboy assassin spy Diplomat he's famous for having had a secret affair with Anne berin but the real reason we should remember him is this he was in my
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opinion the man who brought the Renaissance to England English [Music] literature before Wyatt English poetry was stuck in a rut in the 120 years since cha there hadn't been one original voice and Poets seemed content to translate French romances into bad English verse but Wyatt would turn his back on archaic fairy tales and make poetry one of Britain's most d dnamic art forms and it all started with a Chance
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encounter it was New Year 1527 Thomas Wyatt was 24 years old he was on the banks of the temps when he saw a man preparing a boat for travel Wyatt asked the man where he was going and the man said to Italy for the king Wyatt absorbed this information and then asked if he could join him the trip would Inspire Wyatt but it would also nearly cost him his life the two men arrived in Italy in February on a diplomatic mission to meet the
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pope but Italy was a lot more dangerous than Wyatt had bargained for [Music]
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while traveling alone to deliver a letter Wyatt was kidnapped by mercenaries held for ransom and finally released now at this point most people would have run home with their tails between their legs but not Thomas Wyatt because Wyatt was in love while traveling around Wyatt had seen the Italian Renaissance with his own eyes for the first time and he loved everything about it but nothing appealed to him quite like its poetry and most of all the Love lyrics of
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Petra Petra was a towering figure of the Italian Renaissance in fact many people think he actually invented the idea of the Renaissance but he was also a hopeless romantic petrarch was a pioneer of the sonnet a short poem made up of one verse and 14 lines Petra pretty much reinvented the sonnet as the perfect love poem one that could express the true complexity of emotion in an extremely condensed form his first eight lines they would set up the problem
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which was usually a bur burning desire for an unattainable woman and the last six lines well they would resolve that desire it was short it was sweet and it was passionate and Thomas Wyatt was smitten in May 1527 Wyatt returned to London wanting to Breathe new life into English [Music] poetry Wyatt took the Italian sonnet and put it to bold new use he wrote tortured love poems for his friends in the chuda court they were very private often
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intimate W's poems were written by hand onto small precious pieces of paper they were folded rolled up wrapped in ribbon and then furtively passed from person to person tucked into to a pocket or left under a pillow for a lucky lady to find unlike petar spiritual love poems Wyatts were more passionate more pained and more human this is a copy of one of his finest they flee from me that sometime did me seek with
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naked foot stalking in my chamber I have seen them gentle tame and meek that now are wild and do not remember what an explosive start to a poem they flee from me that sometime did me seek it's so simple yet so powerful it's about loss it's about rejection it's about heartbreak and who ultimately hasn't felt those things in their life and that ultimately is the most amazing thing about this poem Thomas Wyatt wrote it 500 years ago and you can still feel his pain
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today Wyatt repeatedly explored the pain of rejection I find no peace and all my war is done I fear and hope I burn and freeze like ice i Fly Above the wind yet can I not arise and not I have and all the world I seize on I desire to perish and yet I ask health I love another and thus I hate myself I love another and thus I hate myself that is a great lie that's a great lie how good a poet was he I think he was I think he was a genius I think that you if you
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spend some time with Wyatt's poetry the more you look at it the more impressive it is he produced a poetry which is much more human than pet poetry he produced a poem which actually addresses our own human feelings of frustration entitlement reject bewilderment rejection abandonment you know there isn't anybody who could read a Wyatt's poem and not feel yes I have been there I have been there Wyatt also didn't shy away from writing about sex when her loose gwn
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from her shoulders did fall and Shey Caught In Her Arms long and small there with all sweetly did me kiss and softly said Dear Heart how like you this it was no dream I lay broad waking but nobody in medieval poetry went to bed with anybody only in dreams that's why this is such a radical poem there is a real englishness to his poetry isn't there I think he is above all an English person unlike most of the other architects of the Renaissance he was English um you you know
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torano was Italian Hine was German so he had a conscious desire to write in English and make English a language which was as flexible and as beautiful and a vehicle for the expression of complex ideas as Latin or as Greek or as Italian had been Thomas Wyatt died when he was only 39 but his influence on English literature was profound he' taken a refined foreign art form and made it unmistakably English less concerned with Elegance than with capturing
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the messy quality of life as lived setting the tone for English poets from Shakespeare to Philip [Music] Lin if Thomas Wyatt introduced an unglamorous realism to poetry another Englishman would was to do the same with painting his name was John Betts like so many British artists of this period virtually nothing is known about John Betts but it seems he was trained by none other than Hans Hine
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now if that's true it makes him a crucial figure the first Renaissance trained British Artist in history only a handful of his portraits survive one of them of an unknown man is the earliest British picture in the Tate collection and this is it it was painted in 1545 just 2 years after Hine died now I'll be honest it's not as good as Hine but it's pretty darn good and it's got that defining Renaissance feature the desire to be realistic John Betts has individually
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painted every single curling hair in this man's Ginger beard he's used wet paint to capture the ruffle of the fur collar and the face well for maybe the first time in British art it's lifelike this picture is the beginning of a homegrown Renaissance in painting but it's a suggests that our Renaissance would not be about beauty Grace and endless cherubs it would instead have a solid and earthy reality but just as British painting was finally about to flourish the country descended Into
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Darkness after the death of Henry VII the long standing tensions between the old Catholic church and the new Protestant Faith erupted into violence in the 1550s over 300 innocent men and women were cruy and publicly burnt alive their crime being protest during the reign of a Catholic Monarch the new medium used to document these atrocities was the printed book and the man who made it happen was an Evangelical London printer called John Day a man who would arguably have
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a greater impact on the culture of this country than anyone of his generation John day was nearly murdered himself he was a passionate Protestant and during the reign of Catholic Mary chuda he was arrested for publicizing the Protestant cause but he was one of the lucky ones day watched in horror as hundreds of other Protestants were burnt at the stake and he became determined to avenge their deaths when Mary died day got his chance in the Autumn of 1559 John day was approached
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by a writer called John Fox Fox was a man on a mission for some time he'd been working on a book about the many Protestant Martyrs it would be a witness to what he believed was an English genocide John Day immediately agreed to print the book at whatever cost and crucially he insisted that it be Illustrated with nothing censored it's since become known as Fox's book of Mars and it's a milestone in the history of bookm 1,800 Pages 1.9 million Words the book of Martyrs
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was the longest book in British history and more than twice as long as the Bible however I think its Real Genius was not John Fox's text but John day's illustrations they depict the suffering of Protestants and they are vivid and gruesome burnings torture disembowelment Fox and day used the shock tactics of modern photojournalism but they weren't out merely to shock they wanted to expose the truth as in The Sensational
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case of a supposed suicide Richard hun was imprisoned after a minor disagreement with a priest a few days after his incarceration he was being brought some food in his cell when he was found dead hanging from his own belt the authorities thought it was a straightforward suicide but Fox and day did their homework they even read the coroner's report and they thought otherwise the report said that a fresh candle had been found snuffed out in the Dead Man's
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cell now why would Richard hun have done that why would he have extinguished his candle before he tied that noose and hanged himself for day and fox that candle was a clinching piece of evidence someone else must have done it someone who wanted to cover their tracks Fox and day were convinced that these three men have been sent by the Catholic Church to murder Richard hun and then make it look like suicide [Music]
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The Book Of Martyrs had more impact than day could ever have imagined it was distributed to churches schools and even pubs and it became the most widely read book in England for the next 200 years this book had a profound effect on the English people it helped Forge the identity of England as a Protestant Nation and John day's images were crucial to its success they ensured that all British people literate and illiterate
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alike could understand Fox's message The Book Of Martyrs is a Monumental work of the Renaissance but it is also the beginning of a distinctly British tradition a tradition of graphically exposing Injustice that runs all the way through our culture from William Hogarth to Gerald scarf [Music] by the middle of the century British artists and writers had not just absorbed the newest ideas from abroad they had brilliantly adapted them to their
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own tastes Thomas Wyatt had turned the Italian sonnet into the classic form of English poetry John Betts had combined hine's impeccable technique with an compromising realism and John Day had used a Renaissance invention to teach the English people about their own history in spite of the dark times they had lived through they had proved a match for their Continental counterparts but that wasn't enough now with the new Queen Elizabeth on the throne and the country more at ease
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with itself British artists wanted to produce work that was better than anything in Europe and that competitive Spirit would lead to one of the greatest pieces of music ever written according to one anecdote sometime in the 1500s an Italian song arrived in England for 30 different voices on hearing it one great Juke challenged the the composers of England to do the same eventually one English composer came back with a song not for 30 voices but for 40
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voices his name was Thomas Talis he was an organist and singer for The Royal Court who over the course of a long life composed music for virtually the entire chuda Dynasty Thomas talis's greatest work was the one he produced as a result of that challenge a motet for 40 voices called spem in alia Talis was used to composing for four five or six voices composing 40 different Melodies all to be sung at the same time was a huge leap but the result
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spem in alium is one of the richest and most ambitious pieces of coral music in the English Cannon it's so beautiful I'm not going to ruin it by [Music] talking [Music] [Applause] [Music] h [Applause] [Music] David Hurley has sung spin alium many times so David what is it actually like to perform spem Alum it's quite terrifying actually I mean you you either are the person that comes in first which in itself is terrifying or you're in chire six or seven and you have to wait
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around for ages for the and work out exactly when um it is you're meant to come in when all those voices come in at that point of the music is it really it must be you know euphoric experience it must be wonderful it's an incredible sound I mean both for the people listening and actually for the people involved it's just this all this this wall of sound an ancient Renaissance version of surround sound before its time so was that a broader you know feel of the time that the
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English were competing with what was coming from the continent yes I think I think we had a little bit of an inferiority complex and their way of dealing with it was to make England this incredibly important Place artistically English music is very much an important part of showing how wonderful England [Music] was in Rising to the Italian challenge Talis had created a work that was as sophisticated as anything on the continent but at the same time distinctly
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English a breathtaking feat of virtuosity that was a sign of the country's growing confidence [Music] by the 1560s the British Renaissance had serious momentum and yet if you walked through any Town you'd be forgiven for thinking you were still in the Middle Ages because our buildings were still resolutely medieval that finally began to change when a few Builders started to dabble in the new classical
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style of the European Renaissance and they got their ideas from architectural pattern books from France and Italy when it comes to classical architecture there is pretty much everything here you could ever want so what have we got we have Doric columns like those used on the pathon we have ionic columns and you can always tell an ionic column because it has these little curls on the top and we have Corinthian columns Corinthian columns with their acanthus Leaf
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capitals there are also pediments domes Temple fronts and triumphal arches like those built by the Roman emperors but it took one determined even obsessive Englishman to bring all these ideas together and to create something that was both utterly unique and unmistakably British his name was John Finn John Finn was born in 1515 he was the son of a Midlands farmer but he had Grand designs he married the Lord May of London's daughter and with his wife's Fortune bought
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a former prian Wilshire and proceeded to turn it into his family's seat John Finn was frankly pretty unpleasant he was famously impatient and had a ferocious temper but he was also ambitious and single minded and when he set his mind on something he never gave up he wanted a house to suit his ego it had to be new it had to be modern and for John Finn that meant it had to be classical Finn was so determined to
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get his house just right that he wrote letters to his Builders every single day I would you do not forget to mend the lanes with gravel in such places as need or require also let there be haste made with the top of my tower further I would you not forget to get planks swn for my dos every single detail of his house he's writing about must have been a nightmare their employer but John th's obsessive attention to detail eventually paid off in 1568 after 30
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years of building and rebuilding and rebuilding again he finished his house it's still standing today it is called [Music] longle and it's the first of England's Great stately homes
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longle is completely unlike the Fortified Mana houses of its time it's symmetrical and it's smothered in classical [Applause] features but it's also unlike any classical building in Europe it doesn't slavishly follow the architectural pattern books it mixes everything up creating an Eclectic exuberant and Rule breaking English [Music] [Music] style Finn loved to take his guests behind the scenes of his lavish home [Music] for he had a surprise to show
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them after dinner John Finn would lead his guests up this staircase they can't have had a clue where he was taking them but it was worth the [Music] climb this is the roof at longle and when John Finn's guests came up here they must have been completely overwhelmed it must have been like nothing they had ever seen before because it's filled with columns and statues and domes and John Finn's land stretches out for as far as the eye can see
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it's utterly amazing and back then it must have felt like the entire Renaissance had been assembled and then set down on top of one house but John finin had another trick up his sleeve he would present his guests with a very special work of art exquisitly designed sculptures some of them covered in Gold they were phenomenally fashionable and phenomenally expensive these are sugar sculptures and and they would have appeared at
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any self-respecting Renaissance banquet and they are Exquisite little things and the best thing of all is everything here is edible even the plates but that was just the icing on the cake long Le itself is a seminal Masterpiece impossible without foreign inspiration yet like so much in our Renaissance quintessentially British it was 60 years since Petro torano had stepped foot on English soil but Britain
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was no longer a cultural Backwater it was on the verge of becoming a cultural superpower and this was only the beginning next time as the nation's confidence grows its artists turn turn away from Europe completely they fill their paintings with secret signs and their buildings with riddles and finally they set sail taking their Renaissance to the new [Music] [Applause] world [Music] a
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