Simon Schama's Power of Art

Prepare to be transformed! Explore the dramatic moments behind the creation of eight masterpieces of painting, sculpture and design. Acclaimed author, teacher and historian Simon Schama leads you on a journey through the birthplaces of visual imagination, from Rome to the Renaissance, from Paris to Provence, from civil war Spain to the edgy glitz of Cold War Manhattan. Wonder at the genius of Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko. And discover Schama's "trademark blend of authoritative overview and intimate, insightful detail...His enthusiasm for the works and their artists is downright contagious" (Financial Times). Like the best art, it will penetrate your very psyche.

This series is not a stroll through the world's art galleries in search of the Beauty of the Ages. Great art is seldom polite. It is created by the embrace of risk and is driven by courage. It takes us where we had never dreamed of going and demands that we look afresh at what we had taken for granted. It lives or dies by the force and the freedom of its visual imagination. But the bravery of its exertions has often taken a terrible toll, the artist sometimes consumed by the art.

Focusing on eight iconic works of art, this series reveals the history of visual imagination through the ages. A combination of dramatic reconstruction, spectacular photography and Simon Schama's unique, personal style of storytelling transport the viewer back to the intense moments that great works were conceived and born - from the murderous world of baroque Rome; paranoid, revolutionary Paris and the carnage of civil-war Spain to the paradox of 1950s New York, caught between Cold War jitters and Manhattan glitter.

This is the epic story of an unfolding force, and a chance to witness the power of the individuals who changed the way we view the world.

Caravaggio

David with the Head of Goliath (1601)

Rome 1603. Images of the Saviour, the virgin and the saints are beautiful and pure, created to win the hearts of the faithful. But then Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio starts to paint. He says the glory of the gospel is that the saviour was made of flesh and blood. And he paints him, and those who were with him, earthier and more physical than anything that has been seen before. His models are taken from the streets, the taverns, markets and brothels. Caravaggio changes forever the sense of what painting could do, how real it could feel. But to some, this was precisely the problem - he was the man who came to destroy painting, to rob it of its spiritual lift-off power.

Caravaggio is played by Paul Popplewell (24 Hour Party People, The Somme)

Rembrandt

The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilus (c.1666)

In The Night Watch and his portraits of the richest merchants of Amsterdam, Rembrandt has done the impossible: made something heroic, dramatic and grand out of a world of merchants and money. Yet, 10 years later, he is bankrupt, out of fashion, dismissed as an obstinately rough painter in a smooth age. Then the chance of a comeback - to decorate the halls of Amsterdam Town Hall. But instead of the classical restraint and grandeur required, Rembrandt creates the roughest, toughest history painting ever, and one of the greatest masterpieces of his age.

Bernini

The Ecstasy of St Theresa (1652)

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, boy wonder, then adult prodigy - sculptor, architect, composer, as well as a dashing Cavalier, and the personal friend of Pope Urban VIII. His sculptures have the breath of life flowing through them; in his hands stone seems to move and ripple. Then, in the late 1640s, Bernini's star falls; cracks appear in the bell-tower he has built for St Peter's. Bernini needs a miracle to restore his fortune. So he makes one: The Ecstasy of St Theresa. His marble saint levitates and quivers, hovering on the border between mystery and indecency. Devotees flock to see this holy peepshow, flesh dissolving into spirit, a mystery exuding pain and pleasure, carnal consummation and disembodied bliss. No wonder people watch.

Turner

Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon Coming On ("The Slave Ship") (1840)

May, 1840. Turner brings seven paintings to exhibit at the Royal Academy Annual Exhibition, and faces the biggest critical onslaught of his life. The target of the most poisonous attacks is The Slave Ship: at once allegory, history and seascape, an explosion of scarlet and gold, lost in the ocean between history and fantasy. For contemporaries, it is "a kitchen accident", "a detestable absurdity"; Turner's art has abandoned what it is supposed to do - to look like things. Freed from the job of describing the mere look of the world, Turner shows that art can now go to the heart of the matter, to take the viewer right into the eye of the storm.

David

The Death of Marat (1793)

When the arch-denouncer and violent journalist Jean-Paul Marat, the 'friend of the people', is stabbed in his bath in July 1793, Jacques-Louis David - painter for the Revolution - promises to make an image of the martyr, for France and for the world. And so he does, creating an altarpiece for the new church of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. It is the work of a fantastic propagandist. Marat the fanatic is transformed into Marat the pure and selfless. Art has become, irreversibly, the accomplice of power.

Van Gogh

Wheatfield with Crows (1890)

"Painting," wrote Van Gogh, "is the raft that can take us safely to shore after the shipwreck." Painting sometimes calms him. Slashing now comes with the brush; convulsive energy becomes translated into the surging of his loaded brush; merciless insecurity and anguish throb in intensive, ecstatic colour. He is looking in a mirror, but it is as though he is painting from inside his head. However, painting can as easily sweep him up to the edge and over it. By the summer of 1890, there are no more self-portraits; instead of levelling a brush at the reflection of his face, he levels a gun.

Van Gogh is played by Andy Serkis (King Kong, Lord of the Rings)

Picasso

Guernica (1937)

Picasso - self-indulgent genius, the artist for whom the condition of modern art was to separate itself from politics and history. But the brutality of the Luftwaffe when it bombs the ancient Basque town of Guernica makes Cubism's own little wrecking action seem trivial. What is the breaking of figurative art beside the breaking of bodies and the burning of homes? Picasso, anguished about the fate of his country, wants to do what was assumed could never be done - make a modern history painting.

Rothko

Black On Maroon (1958)

New York, 1958. Rothko is commissioned to paint a series of large abstractions for what will be the Seagram Building restaurant - the Four Seasons, mid-town Manhattan. It is, says Rothko, "a place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off... I hope to ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who eats in that room." For Rothko, this will be the iron test of art's power in the relentless drone of the modern world. Can it interrupt and startle, or will it just be waved away like an annoying waiter? Is it just another consumer durable, or the saving of our souls?

Mark Rothko is played by Allan Corduner (Vera Drake, Topsy-Turvy)