The Private Life of a Masterpiece - Season 4
Season 4
Episodes
Eugène Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People
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.
Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting
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.
Georges Seurat: Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884
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.
Gustav Klimt: The Kiss
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.
Paolo Uccello: The Battle of San Romano
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.
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