Great Artists with Tim Marlow

The first episode looks at the life and work of the 15th century Italian artist Piero della Francesca. With only 26 surviving works Piero has been seen as one of the mystery men of western art.

Holbein made the human individual seem more real and more exposed than any other artists before him and is the father of a tradition of portraiture which continues to this day.

Caravaggio lived a brief and tumultuous life, mocking authority and even murdering a man; but he always painted, bringing religious art to life in paintings so powerful and naturalistic that some saw them as miracles in themselves.

George Stubbs is the greatest painter of horses who ever lived, but so much more than that - a man who literally dissected his subject before he felt able to paint it.

Goya has often been described as the last of the great old masters and the first of the new. He painted sublime portraits of the Spanish royal court and celebratory pictures of the good life in Spain.

David was a revolutionary artist in every sense. He was also fully committed supporter of the French Revolution and Napoleon using his art as a powerful instrument of political propaganda.

There have been few more powerful painters of landscape than John Constable. He brought a scale, ambition and impact to a subject long considered amongst the lowest forms of art.

Delacroix is France's greatest romantic painter - an artist who challenged to rigid classicism of the previous generation, injecting a degree of fluidity and unpredictability to his art.

Whistler was the first great international American artist, hugely well travelled, a painter and printmaker who bridged the gap between Impressionist Paris and symbolist London.

Auguste Rodin redefined the idea of sculpture in European Art liberating it from the constraints of classicism and created three dimensional forms which pulsated with life and energy.

Mary Cassatt is one of only a handful of women artists up to the beginning of the twentieth century who have managed to forge a reputation in the male dominated story of art history.

Egon Schiele has become one of the most celebrated artists of the last hundred years. He was a controversial figure in his own short lifetime who was jailed on an obscenity charge.