BBC - A Very British Renaissance (2014) Part 2 The Elizabethan Code

Art historian Dr James Fox makes the case for a singularly British renaissance, telling the stories of the artists and artisans who changed Britain forever. Italians do it better when Venice and Florence, Leonardo and Raphael led the Renaissance, shouldn't our murky backwater of an island at the far edge of Europe just accept its place in the cultural shadows? Not if art historian Dr James Fox has anything to do with it. In this edifying journey into Britain's cultural flowering, James is telling anecdotes and tales of the strange and wonderful immigrants who seeded the Renaissance. And so we learn that it was a punch-up with Michelangelo, which eventually graced England with the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano as court artist to Henry VII. The Italian was soon joined by Holbein from Switzerland, who taught us about lifelike portraiture, and his friend Nicholas Kratzer, who ushered in a new era of scientific thinking. And the Scottish Icarus, a man who called himself Giovanni Damiano de Falcucci, better known as John Damian the Birdman of Stirling Castle, an Italian at the court of James IV of Scotland. In a series for BBC Two, Dr James Fox looks back at a forgotten British Renaissance, celebrating an age that saw Britain shed its medieval shackles and embrace a world of cutting-edge art, literature, architecture and science. Across three episodes, James reveals the painters, sculptors, poets, thinkers and figures who, he argues, brought a bold and beautiful artistic movement to our shores between the 1500s to the start of the English civil war.

Part 2 The Elizabethan Code

Art historian Dr James Fox continues his exploration of a Renaissance that he believes was as rich and as significant in Britain as it was in Italy and Europe. He tells the story of the painters, sculptors, poets, playwrights, composers, inventors, craftsmen and scientists who revolutionised the way we saw the world. In this episode, he explores the Elizabethans' love of secrecy, codes and complexity, and the cultural revolution sparked by an age of discovery and exploration. Especially two extraordinary paintings from the Elizabethan Age are highlighted, a portrait of Sir Henry Unton, and Sir Christopher Hatton by an unknown artist, both filled with symbolism to decode, showing that English Renaissance painting was experimental, rich and sophisticated.

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