Simon Schama's Power of Art

Caravaggio didn’t just confine drama to his remarkable, shadowy masterpieces. His whole life was drama. He spent years on the run after killing someone during a duel, trying to paint his way out of trouble. And this passion for life spills out on to the canvas in his spellbinding, breathtaking works. Art expert Simon Schama explains how the great man changed the way the divine was witnessed.

Episode two of Simon Schama’s Power of Art asks what drove Italian master sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini to combine sex with the sacred to create a masterpiece. In the 1630s in Rome, young Bernini was a prodigious artist on the ascendant and a personal friend of Pope Urban VIII. There, Schama shows us how his work epitomized the Baroque style and could be seen everywhere. Bernini also painted, ...

In this Power of Art episode, author and historian Simon Schama reveals with wit and insight why the great Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt cut up his own masterpiece, ''The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis.'' Traveling to Amsterdam, Schama details Rembrandt van Rijn's early success as a portrait painter. His historical and religious paintings also gave him wide acclaim. He began to push bounda...

Power of Art episode four sees acclaimed scholar and author Simon Schama tell the tale of an artist, an artwork, and a bloody revolution. Jacques Louis David's ''Death of Marat'' is the defining image of the French Revolution. But for decades it was hidden away, ignored and almost feared. Schama travels to France to discover what made this brutal painting so dangerous.

Simon Schama recounts moments of drama in the making of great works of art. How Britain's greatest painter, JMW Turner, created one his most powerful paintings: "The Slave Ship."

In the Power of Art episode six, Sir Simon Schama analyses the hopelessness and victory found in Van Gogh's most famous work, ''Wheat Field with Crows.'' Young Vincent’s story begins in Groot-Zundert, where Schama sketches out his career as a teacher, preacher, and art dealer in Holland, England, and Belgium. Studying art in Brussels, his early work was dominated by somber, earthy colors depict...

In this Power of Art episode, historian Simon Schama discovers what motivated Pablo Picasso to depict the full-on horror of war at Guernica. In 1937, the defenseless Basque town was bombed by Nazi air forces during the Spanish Civil War. There Schama reveals why Málaga-born Picasso, whose bohemian paintings had been void of contemporary political context to that point, came to create this visio...

In Episode Eight of Power of Art, join esteemed historian Simon Schama as he delves into the extraordinary work of abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. Starting in Latvia, Schama explores the artist’s upbringing and inspirations before journeying to New York, where Rothko studied under Cubist painter Max Weber.