THIS is the seventh episode of the seminal British television documentary series written and presented by the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark in 1969 that the New Yorker at the time described as revelatory. Over the 13 episodes Sir Kenneth traverses and explains the different elements and key developments of Western art, architecture and philosophy since the Dark Ages, communicating their meaning and beauty. You can read my fuller introduction to this extraordinary accomplishment, why it needs to be watched again (or for the first time) and to Part 1 of the series here. Part 2 is here, Part 3 is here, Part 4 is here, Part 5 is here and Part 6 is here.
Although the series was almost universally praised when it came out in 1969, typically and perhaps predictably in the 1970s and 80s it was condemned by left-wing historians as an ‘elitist version of history’. Viewing figures however showed that Clark eclipsed the inverted snobbery it was met with by the left. The series was watched in an estimated 1,363,000 homes, approximating to 2.5million viewers.
The previous episode ended on what perhaps was the most ‘disputed’ (by Clark and his producers) part of the series where Clark discussed Elizabethan England and Shakespeare from the ruins of Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire. Clark was uneasy with the dramatised sequence.
In this seventh episode Clark returns to Rome, to the time of Michelangelo and of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, described by one scholar as being to sculpture what Shakespeare is to drama. Clark tells of the Catholic Church’s fight – the Counter-Reformation – against the Protestant north and of the Church’s new splendour symbolised by the glory of St Peter’s Basilica. The programme encompasses the art of the baroque of the early 17th century.
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