Baroque Art's Impact on England

We've been watching the Baroque spreading like a wildfire across Europe, Italy, Spain, Holland. So all it needs to finish its journey is to get across here to England. Getting to England was no easy journey for the Baroque. Crossing the Channel was difficult enough, but an even sterner barrier was the innate English resistance to emotional and flamboyant art. By the time the Baroque reached here in the 1620s or so, England was, artistically speaking, the most backward of the great European powers. Never mind the Baroque taking its time, even though... The Renaissance hadn't got here yet. Seventeenth century England was still stuck in the Middle Ages. A half-timbered medieval hotchpotch of higgledy-piggledy Tudor DIY. And as always in these turbulent years, the forces holding back progress were fiercely religious. The events of the Reformation had filled the English with rabid suspicion. not just of popish plots, but of popish art as well. As William Prynne, the Puritan agitator, would later put it, there was no welcome on these shores for the sinful, the idolatrous, the abominable. By which he meant art. So although the Baroque got here all right, indeed it did great things here. Look at that, one of the most magnificent Baroque sites anywhere in the world. But it wasn't an uncomplicated arrival, and it had tragic and momentous consequences. Here comes the chopper to chop off your head! This stupendous riverside vista at Greenwich consists of three baroque firsts. Up on the hill, that charming brick building, was the Royal Observatory, begun in 1675. The first purpose-built scientific establishment in the world. The exciting Baroque Palace across the front isn't a palace at all, but the first old people's home built to look like a palace. Christopher Wren's Greenwich Hospital. A retirement home for wounded sailors, so successfully posh that the old sea dogs were soon kicked out and their officers moved in. But the key building here is the one in the middle, the dinky little white one. Inigo Jones's Queen's House. It was designed for Anne of Denmark in 1617. Take a good look at it, because that is possibly the most important little building in the whole of British architecture. Although technically it belongs to the Baroque era, what the Queen's House actually constitutes is the first sophisticated bit of European building to be attempted in England. It's the whole of the Renaissance as well as the Baroque rolled into one and arriving in England at last. It's white, it's angelic, and it's not half-timbered. Hallelujah! But let's be honest, it's not an exciting building. Inigo Jones was not an exciting architect. What made him special was the fact that he'd been to Italy, he'd seen what architecture could do, come back to England, and he'd opened the floodgates. The Queen's House is the tiny crack through which the Baroque poured into England. But the man who enlarged that crack and turned it into a giant opening wasn't an artist or an architect, but a king. The British monarchy has a patchy record in matters of art. Aesthetic concerns have hardly ever been a priority. With one superb exception. The only king with taste and the only king whose head we cut off. Charles I was an unlikely candidate to become an artistic saviour. A tiny man, just 5 feet 3, he was born with a cluster of disadvantages. He couldn't walk properly. or talk till he was three, and he always had a slight stutter. When he was young, his tutors would make him wear iron boots to strengthen his legs, but he became an expert horseman. Who would have suspected, though, that he would also turn into a man of art? In 1623, when he was 23, Charles was packed off to Spain to fulfill the so-called Spanish mission. The hope was that he would marry the daughter of the Spanish king Philip II, bring peace to Europe. and a huge Spanish dowry back to London. The Spanish marriage plans eventually fell through, thank God. If you remember from the last film, the one set in Spain, the Spanish Habsburgs had bred themselves into a genetic mess. Cousins had married cousins, nieces had become wives, and heaven knows what genetic misfortunes would have been visited upon the British monarchy if Charles had married a Habsburg. The other problem was the hugely discombobulating fact that the Spanish princess was a Catholic. After all the religious turmoil that England had just been through, the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII's battles with Rome, the idea of Charles marrying a Spanish Catholic was dismaying, to say the least. But one splendid thing did come out of the failed Spanish mission. In Madrid, Charles was shown around the royal residences, where he discovered Titian, Tintoretto, Raphael, and his eyes were opened to the delights of art. Also in Spain, Charles came into contact with the finest and most successful Baroque painter of these dramatic times. Rubens, the King of Flesh. So although the Spanish marriage didn't work out, Charles came back to England a changed man. A man who was mad about art. And it was to prove his downfall. That's the Banqueting House in Whitehall, just up from Big Ben, designed again by Inigo Jones. Originally, it was the venue for a huge party that was supposed to follow the Spanish wedding, the one that never happened. Banqueting House was part of the Spanish wedding, but it was cancelled. It's part of a rambling palace that Charles built on the side of the Thames in imitation of the Spanish royals. Most of it was destroyed in 1698, but the banqueting house survives. And inside it is the only painted ceiling by Rubens that's still in place. It's been called the greatest painted ceiling north of the Alps and it's right under our noses in London. Rubens came here originally on a diplomatic mission sent by the King of Spain but Charles dug his exquisite royal fingers into him and he commissioned this. It tells of the union of the crowns of Scotland and England under Charles's father James the first and of the good things that resulted. In the central scene, James is going up to heaven. See him there, as peace crowns him with laurel. Over here, bounty sits on avarice and brings goodness to England, while greed shivers nakedly. Over there, good government tramples on rebellion. It was actually painted in Antwerp in Rubens's studio and then shipped over in bits. Charles liked it so much he knighted Rubens and even gave him a hat worth 500 pounds as a thank you and also the ring from his own finger. Charles himself appears on the ceiling as a little boy, brought before the king to observe the union of the crowns. When Charles became king in 1625, he would hold court down here. So the union of the crowns would be facing him the right way up. But for the general audience, who entered through that door, the first thing they would see would be James I ascending to heaven and being crowned by the gods. thereby affirming the divine right of kings who are answerable only to God. Although it tells the Protestant tale of the making of Great Britain and the union of the crowns, there's a popish air to the banqueting house ceiling. Rubens has turned King James into Saint James, and many would have noticed that. Rubens's great ceiling would have been the last art that Charles saw when, a few short years after it was finished, Parliament decided to punish the King for his extravagances by beheading him. But a lot needed to happen before we reach that tragic conclusion. What matters here is the key role played by art in these events. Charles I was an addict. And his addiction wasn't women or wine. Or even power. His addiction was art. He would send his agents out into Europe looking for the best pictures. Their instruction was to buy, There were masterpieces here by Mantegna, Raphael, Leonardo. Charles even bought some Caravaggios. That's how... how progressive he was. Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, that magnificent display of Catholic mourning that now hangs in the Louvre with its fatally slumped Mary, once hung here in England. It wasn't just as a collector that Charles distinguished himself, it was also as a patron. Having convinced Rubens, the greatest ceiling painter north of the Alps, to work for him, Charles then turned his attention to Rubens'greatest pupil. The arrival in Britain of Anthony van Dyck changed everything here. It ushered in the most dramatic years there have been in English painting. Van Dyck opened the door and the Baroque flooded in. He was a handsome devil. Graceful, charming, eloquent, masterfully diplomatic. The perfect courtier. Ladies loved him and so did kings. Charles pursued Van Dyck furiously for nearly a decade before he finally persuaded this dashing Belgian to come to England in 1632 and become the King's painter. It was like the arrival of a Ferrari at a bicycle race. Van Dyck, with his fast hands and exhilarating courtier's touch, seemed to come not just from another country, but from another planet. Suddenly, poise, elegance, excitement, arrogance entered British art. And he made something so heroic out of Charles I. Those who mistrust his work complain of chronic flattery. And I don't think you can deny it. In that stupendous equestrian portrait, that still hangs in Buckingham Palace. The little king with the gammy legs has been turned into a heroic knight in armour, riding out on his white steed. Sir Lancelot of Whitehall. Van Dyck worked an even greater transformation on the French princess whom Charles successfully married after his Spanish adventure fell through. Queen Henrietta Maria, a tiny bird-like woman, had teeth which, according to a passing Venetian envoy, stuck out of her face like ships'cannons. Though you'd never know it from any of Van Dyck's gorgeous reimaginings of her. No wonder the king showered him with favours, gave him a house by the river in Blackfriars, knighted him and adored him. Although the King was Van Dyck's main employer, the lesser members of the court were soon fighting over his services as well. If you were a man, who wouldn't wish to be remembered as dashingly as this? If you were a woman, who wouldn't envy this kind of beauty? But he was more than a flatterer. Yes, those dashing cavaliers of his with their nonchalant poses, and those perfectly delightful Carolingian temptresses flashing their silk satchels. They're easy on the eye, but look into their faces and there's something else there. A note of sadness, a touch of worry, a fragility. Van Dyck was as great a painter as he was. because he couldn't keep the times he was living through out of his art. And I don't think he wanted to. And it's this psychological magnetism of his that makes him so Baroque. Van Dyck's dashing and ringleted cavaliers with their superb nonchalance are the perfect pictorial inhabitants of these thoroughly exciting times. Everything about Van Dyck was poised, measured, successful, except the manner of his dying. He was killed by a miserable fever in 1641 and died in that house that Charles gave him in Blackfriars, aged just 42, tragically young. But he'd changed British portraiture forever and he'd put an unforgettable face to his era. Thank you. To be a truly important artist, you see, it's not enough to be talented. You need also to live through truly important times. And your work needs somehow to embody that. those times. Now the fates up there, they know this. Indeed, they plan for it. How else to explain the extraordinary fact that as soon as Van Dyck was dead, the English Civil War broke out. Everything changed. And out of nowhere, it seems, he appeared on the scene. If you read conventional books about British art, they'll tell you that the first native genius born on these shores was William Hogarth. But that's not true. The first British-born genius, the first true native genius, truly dazzling English painter, was born a hundred years before Hogarth. He's that handsome fellow in the middle, whose name you probably won't know, even though it's a fine English name. William Dobson. Fate dropped Dobson slap in the middle of one of the most tumultuous, dramatic and tragic epochs in Britain's recorded history. the English Civil War. And if Dobson hadn't been there and put a face to his era, the truth about these dramatic times would have gone unrecorded. Fate gave Dobson this magnificent moment all to himself, and God made sure he was talented enough to record it, unforgettably and brilliantly. When the Civil War broke out in 1642, just a few short weeks after Van Dyck's death, the King and his court decamped from London to Oxford. And for the next four years, this was to be their home. The King and his court decamped from London to Oxford. Souls became the royalist arsenal. Magdalen College was where the artillery was parked. The music school was taken over by tailors, making new uniforms for the king's men. The queen lived here in Merton College. The king himself moved into Christchurch College on the... The quad was used as a cattle pen for the soldiers. Later on, Christopher Wren designed the famous tower. Poor little Oxford didn't know what had hit it. The town was overrun with courtiers, soldiers, freeloaders. Drunken cavaliers wandered the streets, getting into fights. And their bravado in their eyes, their... Courageous excitement was vividly captured by William Dobson. The King who always prized his own aesthetic comforts set up a travelling court for himself here in Oxford and this man Nicholas Lanier was master of the King's music. Now study his face well because he also appears in that exciting self-portrait we've just been looking at by Dobson. Dobson was made the King's official painter and he kept himself very busy painting the various notables who popped up in Oxford. This is Dobson's rather shaky portrait of Inigo Jones. And here's his magnificent Charles II, the boy who would be king, subduing the Furies, with a commanding royal gesture as the Battle of Edge Hill rages in the distance. It's a magnificent piece of royal portraiture and it's so thoroughly English. Dobson must have worked about the court before the Civil War started, but there's no record of it. It's as if he emerged from nowhere. He obviously knew Van Dyck's work well, and he was just as obviously his own man, who brought a stubborn, four-square beefiness to British portraiture. Those who sat for him seemed often to put on a stone and a half in his presence. He made them bulkier, earthier. Here's Endymion Porter, painted by Van Dyck. And here he is by Dobson. Here's Nicholas Lannier as Van Dyck saw him. Here's how he saw himself. And here is what Dobson made of him. Inside every Englishman, it seems, there's a Henry VIII waiting to be discovered. It's such lively portraiture. I can't believe Dobson is so obscure. We should applaud him from every historical rafter in England. He was there in the Civil War. He gave it a face. And history thanked him by forgetting him completely, and by making sure he suffered the grubbiest of deaths. He died in London in 1646, an alcoholic they say, penniless, in debt, dumped into an almshouse, aged just 36. The only paintings we know by him were all done in those few short years in Oxford before the war was lost. That was his moment, and how vigorously he seized it. After Dobson's death, the King plotted on for a few more years. But the fates were determined to punish him for his aesthetic extravagances, and arranged an outrageously dramatic finale for him. It all came to a terrible end on January 30th, 1649. The king was executed outside the very banqueting house that had ushered in his baroque age. They put up a special scaffold up there. It was an unusually cold day, so the king wore an extra shirt so that no one would mistake his shivering for fear. By all accounts he went to his scaffold with great dignity. A king ruined in part at least by his baroque obsession with art. Cromwell and the Puritans quickly set about selling off the Royal Collection. The royal plumber was given a painting of Noah's flood by Bassano, some sort of weak Cromwellian joke I suppose. And the hated French and Spanish courts bought up all the Titians and the Caravaggios and they're now found in the Louvre and the Prado. So the story of painting in England more or less ground to a halt. And it was time for another of the great Baroque arts to step up and be counted. It was time for architecture, with a little unexpected help from the hand of God. The Great Fire of London in the Devil's Year of 1666 is one of the mythic turning points in the story of the Baroque. The fire started in a baker's shop here in Pudding Lane, run by the King's personal baker. And this baker's shop was situated here, far away from the King's palaces, as a deliberate safety measure to make sure that no fires were started in Whitehall. So instead, the Royal Bakery ended up setting fire to the whole of London. For three whole days it raged. Two thirds of the metropolis was destroyed. For Londoners, it was a colossal tragedy. For the Baroque, it was a godsend. What the Great Fire accidentally achieved was the purging of Tudor London. Street after street of highly inflammable, half-timbered housing was torched, creating a golden building opportunity for the English Baroque. And, as sometimes happens in Britain in times of deep national need, a great hero stepped forward to save the day. Christopher Wren didn't look like an architectural warrior. But then, in these ornate baroque times, everyone's seriousness was compromised by absurd restoration wigs and powdery facial get-ups. The fascinating thing about Wren is that he already had a big career behind him as a scientist before he turned to architecture. He was professor of astronomy at Oxford, where he made important discoveries in telescope techniques. motion studies. And Wren was the first man successfully to introduce a foreign substance into the bloodstream of a dog, thereby inventing the injection. Inside that huge baroque brain of his, Wren was constantly making amazing scientific connections. But how these led him to architecture, God only knows. The fire had destroyed 87 London churches. 87! No wonder it must have seemed like an act of God. And when Wren stepped forward to rebuild 51 of them, yes, 51, he was driven by something more than mere dutifulness. Because beneath that powdery restoration disguise of his, Sir Christopher Wren saw himself himself so Baroque-ly as an instrument of God. This square mile of the City of London contains the finest concentration of Baroque architecture outside Rome. 51 Baroque gems nestling among the money-making skyscrapers. Now obviously I can't show all of those to you at once but let's see how many a fat lump like me can get round to see in 15 minutes. His finest creative energy went into the steeples. The English liked their steeples, Wren knew that. But rather than giving them pointy bits of gothic that they were used to, Wren came up with things like that. Saint Brides. You know, the modern wedding cake with all the different layers? That was inspired by this steeple. Get it? Saint Brides. Saint Mary Lebeau. To be a proper cockney, you need to have been born within earshot of that fantastical steeple. I like this one, St Veddust. The way it curves and bulges barochally in and out. Wren had to invent a new kind of church, an Anglican church. Before, the Church of England had been happy to convert Catholic churches, but he had to come up with something new from scratch. The interiors also needed complete reinvention. This is St Margaret's Lothbury, the best surviving Wren interior. A bold rectangle with these big wide windows and an air of elegant simplicity. The Protestant interior. Five churches, 15 minutes. A fitter man than me would probably have got round 10. And of course, all the time that Wren was building the London churches, his greatest achievement, St Paul's Cathedral, was rising up out of the ashes of the Great Fire. St Paul's took 35 years to finish. And while we're waiting for that to happen, we should get out of London and expand our horizons. Because the Baroque was much too powerful an epidemic to confine itself to the city. The English stately home was one of the most distinctive and delightful inventions of the Baroque Age. Of course, other nations dotted their countryside with big houses too. But no one else was quite as keen as the British to position excellent architecture in an excellent stretch of landscape. When you look at somewhere magnificently English like Blenheim Palace, you're looking at an outdoor composition in which everything has been placed just so. It's a duet, if you like, between the house... and its landscape. And that sense you get here of the whole thing being one entity, no one else did that. That is a fine invention of the English Baroque. But the closer you get to Blenheim Palace, the less rural and relaxed it begins to seem. Because Blenheim is the greatest and grandest creation of the full-blown English Baroque. The house itself is the handiwork of that fascinating and busy baroque bee, Sir John Vanborough. When you look at portraits of Vanborough, it's difficult to take the man seriously. He had the biggest of big hairdos, and a puffy, pouty look to him, with his velvets and his lace. But underneath this powdered and billowing baroque exterior lurked one of the most interesting creative minds that these times produced. Vanbrugh looked like a toff and he built like a toff, but he actually had fierce democratic leanings. So much so that in 1688 he was imprisoned in the Bastille for sedition. malicious and revolutionary behaviour and espionage. He spent four and a half years in that French jail. And when he came out, he became a playwright. And he wrote that marvellous restoration comedy, The Provoked Wife, which is probably playing at an Amdram somewhere near you right now. He wrote poems, pamphlets, plays and managed somehow to become an architect too, and a very quirky one. Blenheim is the largest and most bombastic of Britain's country houses, the only one allowed to call itself a palace. It was built to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough's famous victory over the French at the Battle of Blenheim. So pleased was the British monarchy with the Duke's great victory that they gave him this land and told him to build something suitable on it. So it was always meant to be more of a war memorial than a home and that's why there is this heavyweight grandeur and seriousness to it. Other English country houses settle gently on the landscape like a butterfly. But Blenheim needed to land heavily like a great big ceremonial cake. And you have to admit, it does that impeccably. Vanborough's ambition here is to find a baroque architecture that resounds with power and might. Go round the back and it all gets a little more relaxed and playful. A nice backdrop for the occasional game of cricket. But that's the back. At the front this is a building that demands your obedience and respect. The back is a little more relaxed. The era's finest sculptor, Grinling Gibbons, was employed to carve these giant English lions, chewing up the pathetic French cog. And at the top of the house, where no one could miss him, Vanborough placed a giant captured bust of the defeated Sun King, Louis XIV, so that visitors could mock him as they entered the house. While the outside of Blenheim puffs out its chest and demands your obedience, the inside puffs out its chest and demands that you dress properly for dinner. That great English warrior Sir Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim of course, and some of its military mood was his inheritance. Visitors entered into here where they'd be overwhelmed by all this mighty Baroque architecture with its militaristic air. Then they'd be led through here, underneath the minstrel gallery, into Blenheim's great saloon, its most surprising sight. An illusionistic courtyard that turns the inside of Blenheim into an outside. It was painted by the aptly named Louis Laguerre, a French painter whose name means in translation, Louis the War. There he is up there, too prim and powdered you would have thought, to be much of a painter. Laguerre came up with an illusionistic ring of balconies on which was gathered a pretend audience of international visitors to Blenheim from the four corners of the earth. From France, from Spain, from China and from wherever that is. They're here to watch the room's central scene, in which the mighty Duke of Marlborough rushes across the sky in his chariot like a Marvel comic hero, while the embodiment of peace stays his militaristic arm and persuades him to stop fighting. It's a decent bit of Baroque hack work and it does its job well enough, faking up some grandeur and illusionism for these stately rooms and throwing in some handy propaganda for peace. But at this point in the Baroque's story, and we're very near the tail end, these illusionistic ambitions are outweighing the meaningful content. And the Baroque has grown slightly. Silly. That's inside the fake interior of Blenheim, and it's not something you could ever say of the palace's exterior. Blenheim on the outside is a masterclass of baroque invention. These weird towers for instance, how strange and unexpected are they? Or this peculiar cluster of bold architectural sculpture? Who on earth came up with this? Vanbrugh came late to architecture. He was basically an amateur, so he needed some professional help. to achieve all this. And while the grandeur and the bombast that you see here is definitely Vanbrugh's handiwork, much of the architectural brilliance is due to someone else. Vanbrugh's number two at Blenheim, the designer of many of the best bits, was this lopsided Borromini of Blenheim. Nicholas Hawksmoor Hawksmoor was the most inventive and madcap architect these shores have produced. If things look excitingly strange in British Baroque architecture, the chances are Hawksmoor did it. And according to some, scattering bits of eccentric Baroque around London wasn't all that Hawksmoor did. Hawksmoor, a time-travelling murder mystery by Peter Ackroyd. Lud Heat, a collection of weird existential poems about Hawksmoor by Ian Sinclair. and From Hell, an extra-large gothic horror comic set in Hawksmoor's London and all about the Ripper murders by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. All of these excessively fruity tomes accuse Britain's most mysterious Baroque builder of being the architect not just of buildings, but also of evil. Mind you, wandering around the churchyard of a Hawksmoor building at twilight in the autumn is a distinctly spooky experience. His buildings definitely have a psychological presence. It's the baroque getting inside your head again. In 1711, the British Parliament passed some new legislation providing tax money to build 50 new London churches. In the end, only a dozen of them were finished, six of them by Hawksmoor. He also designed the towers of two of the other ones. And these London churches are Hawksmoor's most important Baroque achievements. Now I've marked out their positions on this London map. So over here is St George Bloomsbury. That's the one with the strange ziggurat for a steeple. And the statue of George I on the top. Very peculiar build. And over here is Christchurch Spitalfields. Now it's around this church that all the Ripper murders were supposed to have taken place. It's the one with the pointy Gothic steeple. Now out here... is St Anne's Limehouse. This one here with the strange obelisk in front of it. In the centre of the city, right in the centre, St Mary Woolneth. A very peculiar looking building. And over here, St George in the East. The one with a Spanish look to it. Now Hawksmoor also designed these two towers, not the whole church, but the two towers for other people's churches. There's St Luke's Old Street, which is over here, and St John's Horsley Down, that was down here, south of the river. Now, according to this book here, Ludheat, Ian Sinclair, if you join up these Hawksmoor churches, With their positions here. What you get... is a diagram that bears an uncanny resemblance to an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph. Down here, the last of the Hawksmoor churches, St. Alphage, Greenwich, the one with the huge keystones. And that's the final bit of the jigsaw which makes... This mysterious symbol, the Eye of Horus, protector of all deities, safeguarder of the deepest secrets. This mad idea that Hawksmoor deliberately planned the position of his churches so that they formed this mysterious ancient diagram reaches its crescendo in this great big comic book where Jack the Ripper's murders and the secrets of the Freemasons and the position of Hawksmoor's churches and all manner of weird hocus-pocus that I can't begin to understand is mixed together in a mysterious baroque soup. Of course it's all nonsense, really silly. But what isn't nonsense is the atmosphere of Hawksmoor's work, which is, take it from me, doomy and unsettling. Someone once wrote that you can imagine funerals taking place in a Hawksmoor church, but not weddings. How true that is. These looming, oversized and madly inventive slabs of architectural sampling are some of the strangest concoctions the Baroque ever came up with. What is that on top of St George's Bloomsbury? And whoever saw a zigguratic pyramid atop an Anglican church? In Hawksmoor, the English Baroque grows very eccentric. His architecture mixes things that have never been mixed before. Mexican, Gothic, Greek, Egyptian. And it's the very unexpectedness of this mix that makes it unmistakably Baroque. Do I like it? Hmm, not always. Do I recognise genius in here? Of course. Is it the greatest achievement of the English Baroque? No, but that's only because this is... Do you know how many great cathedrals there are in the world that were actually built in the lifetimes of their architect? One, this one, St Paul's. Wren designed it. He watched the first stone going down. He watched the last stone going down. From 1675 to 1710. 35 years. What an achievement. There was a biblical heir to the great fire that destroyed the old St Paul's. The sense that God had played a deliberate part in the purging of London must have seemed inescapable. From the start Wren wanted to build an imposing domed cathedral here. A great church roundel to rank alongside St Peter's in Rome. And he achieved that, of course. But it took a momentous piece of deception. This is the giant model Wren made of St Paul's as he dreamt of building it. This is what he really wanted to do here. But the English clergy found Wren's domed basilica too Catholic and popish and rejected his splendid design. He was forced to come up with something else, something more English, more traditional. So he proposed instead this grim compromise. A bit of a steeple, a bit of a nave, a bit of a mess. And when the scaffolds went up in 1675 for the new St Paul's, this is what people were expecting to be built. 35 years later, however, when the scaffolds finally came down, look what the English Baroque had actually come up with. Wren had lied through his teeth about what he was going to build. He promised us this, and all the time he was building this. St Paul's was never what it seems to be. These high palatial walls, for instance, rising grandly above the city, are actually false and unnecessary. They're just there for effect. See, the actual building from the front.....that took off the facade, would be shaped. Like this, with a nave, two aisles down either side. But what Ren's done is he's put up these false walls. They're just there for show, to make the building look much higher from the side. So in between here, there are empty spaces. And the dome, that too, is illusionistic. It's actually not one dome, but three. Out here, you have the big dome that everybody sees. Inside, there's another dome that you only see on the inside. And then there's one that you don't see at all. Which is a kind of conical dome that goes up the middle and that supports the lantern. So what you see on the outside is completely different from what you see on the inside. So Wren got his popish cathedral in the end. He promised us an ugly English compromise. Instead, he connived to bring us a soaring ecclesiastical masterpiece that wouldn't look too out of place in Rome itself. And that's the thing about the English Baroque. On paper it's thoroughly Protestant. In the flesh it's not so sure. We began this series in Rome in front of St Peter's and I told you that we'd follow the Baroque from Rome to London, from St Peter's to St Paul's. Now here we are at the end of the journey and we've watched the Baroque squiggling its way through the entire 17th century, always pushing, expanding, changing. We've seen the Baroque grow thunderous and huge as it soars sought to batter us into submission. And we've watched it go plaintive and sad as it tried to get inside our minds and our hearts. We've watched it rope in all the other arts for support, sculpture, architecture. This way and that it billowed through enormous spaces and tiny ones. If you remember, I told you that the actual words The word Baroque comes from this, a misshapen pearl. Barroco in Portuguese. And if you were expecting this series to follow a straight line, you'll be disappointed because the Baroque didn't do straight lines. But there is something that unites all these magnificent sights and spectacles and makes them typically Baroque. Something powerful that brings everything together. It's the need to be... noticed. The Baroque built big because big things have a big impact. It dazzled you with its illusions and caught you up in its psychology because it wanted your time and your attention. It was the It was the first art movement to realise that being good wasn't enough. You needed also to make an impact. It's a lesson the arts have never forgotten. If you want an audience, get out there and grab it. Getting to England was no easy journey for the Baroque. Crossing the Channel was difficult enough, but an even sterner barrier was the innate English resistance to emotional and flamboyant art. By the time the Baroque reached here in the 1620s or so, England was, artistically speaking, the most backward of the great European powers. Never mind the Baroque taking its time, even though... The Renaissance hadn't got here yet. 17th century England was still stuck in the Middle Ages. A half-timbered medieval hotchpotch of higgledy-piggledy Tudor DIY. And as always in these turbulent years, the forces holding back progress were fiercely religious. The events of the Reformation had filled the English with rabid suspicion, not just of Pope... It's the whole of the Renaissance, as well as the Baroque, rolled into one and arriving in England at last. It's white, it's angelic, and it's not half-timbered. Hallelujah! But let's be honest, it's not an exciting building. Inigo Jones was not an exciting architect. What made him special was the fact that he'd been to Italy, he'd seen what architecture could do, come back to England, and he'd opened the floodgates. The Queen's House is the tiny crack through which the Baroque poured into England. But the man who enlarged that crack and turned it into a giant opening wasn't an artist or an architect, but a king. ...plots but of popish art as well. As William Prynne, the Puritan agitator, would later put it, there was no welcome on these shores for the sinful, the idolatrous, the abominable. By which he meant art. So although the Baroque got here all right, indeed it did great things here. Look at that, one of the most magnificent Baroque sites anywhere in the world. But it wasn't an uncomplicated arrival, and it had tragic and momentous consequences. Here comes the chopper to chop off your head! This stupendous riverside vista at Greenwich consists of three baroque firsts. Up on the hill, that charming brick building, was the Royal Observatory, begun in 1675. The first purpose-built scientific establishment in the world. The exciting Baroque Palace across the front isn't a palace at all, but the first old people's home built to look like a palace. Christopher Wren's Greenwich Hospital, a retirement home for wounded sailors, so successfully posh that the old sea dogs were soon kicked out and their officers moved in. But the key building here is the one in the middle, the dinky little white one. Inigo Jones's Queen's House. It was designed for Anne of Denmark in 1617. Take a good look at it, because that is possibly the most important little building in the whole of British architecture. Although technically it belongs to the Baroque era, what the Queen's House actually constitutes is the first sophisticated bit of European building to be attempted in England. We've been watching the Baroque spreading like a wildfire across Europe, Italy, Spain, Holland. So all it needs to finish its journey is to get across here to England.

Crossing the Channel was difficult enough, but an even sterner barrier was the innate English resistance to emotional and flamboyant art. By the time the Baroque reached here in the 1620s or so, England was, artistically speaking, the most backward of the great European powers. Never mind the Baroque taking its time, even though... The Renaissance hadn't got here yet. Seventeenth century England was still stuck in the Middle Ages.

A half-timbered medieval hotchpotch of higgledy-piggledy Tudor DIY. And as always in these turbulent years, the forces holding back progress were fiercely religious. The events of the Reformation had filled the English with rabid suspicion.

not just of popish plots, but of popish art as well. As William Prynne, the Puritan agitator, would later put it, there was no welcome on these shores for the sinful, the idolatrous, the abominable. By which he meant art.

So although the Baroque got here all right, indeed it did great things here. Look at that, one of the most magnificent Baroque sites anywhere in the world. But it wasn't an uncomplicated arrival, and it had tragic and momentous consequences. Here comes the chopper to chop off your head! This stupendous riverside vista at Greenwich consists of three baroque firsts.

Up on the hill, that charming brick building, was the Royal Observatory, begun in 1675. The first purpose-built scientific establishment in the world. The exciting Baroque Palace across the front isn't a palace at all, but the first old people's home built to look like a palace. Christopher Wren's Greenwich Hospital.

A retirement home for wounded sailors, so successfully posh that the old sea dogs were soon kicked out and their officers moved in. But the key building here is the one in the middle, the dinky little white one. Inigo Jones's Queen's House. It was designed for Anne of Denmark in 1617. Take a good look at it, because that is possibly the most important little building in the whole of British architecture.

Although technically it belongs to the Baroque era, what the Queen's House actually constitutes is the first sophisticated bit of European building to be attempted in England. It's the whole of the Renaissance as well as the Baroque rolled into one and arriving in England at last. It's white, it's angelic, and it's not half-timbered. Hallelujah! But let's be honest, it's not an exciting building.

Inigo Jones was not an exciting architect. What made him special was the fact that he'd been to Italy, he'd seen what architecture could do, come back to England, and he'd opened the floodgates. The Queen's House is the tiny crack through which the Baroque poured into England. But the man who enlarged that crack and turned it into a giant opening wasn't an artist or an architect, but a king. The British monarchy has a patchy record in matters of art.

Aesthetic concerns have hardly ever been a priority. With one superb exception. The only king with taste and the only king whose head we cut off. Charles I was an unlikely candidate to become an artistic saviour. A tiny man, just 5 feet 3, he was born with a cluster of disadvantages.

He couldn't walk properly. or talk till he was three, and he always had a slight stutter. When he was young, his tutors would make him wear iron boots to strengthen his legs, but he became an expert horseman. Who would have suspected, though, that he would also turn into a man of art? In 1623, when he was 23, Charles was packed off to Spain to fulfill the so-called Spanish mission.

The hope was that he would marry the daughter of the Spanish king Philip II, bring peace to Europe. and a huge Spanish dowry back to London. The Spanish marriage plans eventually fell through, thank God. If you remember from the last film, the one set in Spain, the Spanish Habsburgs had bred themselves into a genetic mess. Cousins had married cousins, nieces had become wives, and heaven knows what genetic misfortunes would have been visited upon the British monarchy if Charles had married a Habsburg.

The other problem was the hugely discombobulating fact that the Spanish princess was a Catholic. After all the religious turmoil that England had just been through, the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII's battles with Rome, the idea of Charles marrying a Spanish Catholic was dismaying, to say the least. But one splendid thing did come out of the failed Spanish mission.

In Madrid, Charles was shown around the royal residences, where he discovered Titian, Tintoretto, Raphael, and his eyes were opened to the delights of art. Also in Spain, Charles came into contact with the finest and most successful Baroque painter of these dramatic times. Rubens, the King of Flesh.

So although the Spanish marriage didn't work out, Charles came back to England a changed man. A man who was mad about art. And it was to prove his downfall.

That's the Banqueting House in Whitehall, just up from Big Ben, designed again by Inigo Jones. Originally, it was the venue for a huge party that was supposed to follow the Spanish wedding, the one that never happened. Banqueting House was part of the Spanish wedding, but it was cancelled. It's part of a rambling palace that Charles built on the side of the Thames in imitation of the Spanish royals. Most of it was destroyed in 1698, but the banqueting house survives.

And inside it is the only painted ceiling by Rubens that's still in place. It's been called the greatest painted ceiling north of the Alps and it's right under our noses in London. Rubens came here originally on a diplomatic mission sent by the King of Spain but Charles dug his exquisite royal fingers into him and he commissioned this. It tells of the union of the crowns of Scotland and England under Charles's father James the first and of the good things that resulted. In the central scene, James is going up to heaven.

See him there, as peace crowns him with laurel. Over here, bounty sits on avarice and brings goodness to England, while greed shivers nakedly. Over there, good government tramples on rebellion.

It was actually painted in Antwerp in Rubens's studio and then shipped over in bits. Charles liked it so much he knighted Rubens and even gave him a hat worth 500 pounds as a thank you and also the ring from his own finger. Charles himself appears on the ceiling as a little boy, brought before the king to observe the union of the crowns. When Charles became king in 1625, he would hold court down here.

So the union of the crowns would be facing him the right way up. But for the general audience, who entered through that door, the first thing they would see would be James I ascending to heaven and being crowned by the gods. thereby affirming the divine right of kings who are answerable only to God. Although it tells the Protestant tale of the making of Great Britain and the union of the crowns, there's a popish air to the banqueting house ceiling. Rubens has turned King James into Saint James, and many would have noticed that.

Rubens's great ceiling would have been the last art that Charles saw when, a few short years after it was finished, Parliament decided to punish the King for his extravagances by beheading him. But a lot needed to happen before we reach that tragic conclusion. What matters here is the key role played by art in these events. Charles I was an addict.

And his addiction wasn't women or wine. Or even power. His addiction was art. He would send his agents out into Europe looking for the best pictures.

Their instruction was to buy, There were masterpieces here by Mantegna, Raphael, Leonardo. Charles even bought some Caravaggios. That's how...

how progressive he was. Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, that magnificent display of Catholic mourning that now hangs in the Louvre with its fatally slumped Mary, once hung here in England. It wasn't just as a collector that Charles distinguished himself, it was also as a patron. Having convinced Rubens, the greatest ceiling painter north of the Alps, to work for him, Charles then turned his attention to Rubens'greatest pupil. The arrival in Britain of Anthony van Dyck changed everything here.

It ushered in the most dramatic years there have been in English painting. Van Dyck opened the door and the Baroque flooded in. He was a handsome devil.

Graceful, charming, eloquent, masterfully diplomatic. The perfect courtier. Ladies loved him and so did kings.

Charles pursued Van Dyck furiously for nearly a decade before he finally persuaded this dashing Belgian to come to England in 1632 and become the King's painter. It was like the arrival of a Ferrari at a bicycle race. Van Dyck, with his fast hands and exhilarating courtier's touch, seemed to come not just from another country, but from another planet. Suddenly, poise, elegance, excitement, arrogance entered British art.

And he made something so heroic out of Charles I. Those who mistrust his work complain of chronic flattery. And I don't think you can deny it. In that stupendous equestrian portrait, that still hangs in Buckingham Palace. The little king with the gammy legs has been turned into a heroic knight in armour, riding out on his white steed.

Sir Lancelot of Whitehall. Van Dyck worked an even greater transformation on the French princess whom Charles successfully married after his Spanish adventure fell through. Queen Henrietta Maria, a tiny bird-like woman, had teeth which, according to a passing Venetian envoy, stuck out of her face like ships'cannons. Though you'd never know it from any of Van Dyck's gorgeous reimaginings of her.

No wonder the king showered him with favours, gave him a house by the river in Blackfriars, knighted him and adored him. Although the King was Van Dyck's main employer, the lesser members of the court were soon fighting over his services as well. If you were a man, who wouldn't wish to be remembered as dashingly as this?

If you were a woman, who wouldn't envy this kind of beauty? But he was more than a flatterer. Yes, those dashing cavaliers of his with their nonchalant poses, and those perfectly delightful Carolingian temptresses flashing their silk satchels. They're easy on the eye, but look into their faces and there's something else there. A note of sadness, a touch of worry, a fragility.

Van Dyck was as great a painter as he was. because he couldn't keep the times he was living through out of his art. And I don't think he wanted to. And it's this psychological magnetism of his that makes him so Baroque.

Van Dyck's dashing and ringleted cavaliers with their superb nonchalance are the perfect pictorial inhabitants of these thoroughly exciting times. Everything about Van Dyck was poised, measured, successful, except the manner of his dying. He was killed by a miserable fever in 1641 and died in that house that Charles gave him in Blackfriars, aged just 42, tragically young.

But he'd changed British portraiture forever and he'd put an unforgettable face to his era. Thank you. To be a truly important artist, you see, it's not enough to be talented.

You need also to live through truly important times. And your work needs somehow to embody that. those times. Now the fates up there, they know this.

Indeed, they plan for it. How else to explain the extraordinary fact that as soon as Van Dyck was dead, the English Civil War broke out. Everything changed.

And out of nowhere, it seems, he appeared on the scene. If you read conventional books about British art, they'll tell you that the first native genius born on these shores was William Hogarth. But that's not true.

The first British-born genius, the first true native genius, truly dazzling English painter, was born a hundred years before Hogarth. He's that handsome fellow in the middle, whose name you probably won't know, even though it's a fine English name. William Dobson.

Fate dropped Dobson slap in the middle of one of the most tumultuous, dramatic and tragic epochs in Britain's recorded history. the English Civil War. And if Dobson hadn't been there and put a face to his era, the truth about these dramatic times would have gone unrecorded. Fate gave Dobson this magnificent moment all to himself, and God made sure he was talented enough to record it, unforgettably and brilliantly. When the Civil War broke out in 1642, just a few short weeks after Van Dyck's death, the King and his court decamped from London to Oxford.

And for the next four years, this was to be their home. The King and his court decamped from London to Oxford. Souls became the royalist arsenal.

Magdalen College was where the artillery was parked. The music school was taken over by tailors, making new uniforms for the king's men. The queen lived here in Merton College. The king himself moved into Christchurch College on the... The quad was used as a cattle pen for the soldiers.

Later on, Christopher Wren designed the famous tower. Poor little Oxford didn't know what had hit it. The town was overrun with courtiers, soldiers, freeloaders. Drunken cavaliers wandered the streets, getting into fights.

And their bravado in their eyes, their... Courageous excitement was vividly captured by William Dobson. The King who always prized his own aesthetic comforts set up a travelling court for himself here in Oxford and this man Nicholas Lanier was master of the King's music. Now study his face well because he also appears in that exciting self-portrait we've just been looking at by Dobson. Dobson was made the King's official painter and he kept himself very busy painting the various notables who popped up in Oxford.

This is Dobson's rather shaky portrait of Inigo Jones. And here's his magnificent Charles II, the boy who would be king, subduing the Furies, with a commanding royal gesture as the Battle of Edge Hill rages in the distance. It's a magnificent piece of royal portraiture and it's so thoroughly English. Dobson must have worked about the court before the Civil War started, but there's no record of it. It's as if he emerged from nowhere.

He obviously knew Van Dyck's work well, and he was just as obviously his own man, who brought a stubborn, four-square beefiness to British portraiture. Those who sat for him seemed often to put on a stone and a half in his presence. He made them bulkier, earthier.

Here's Endymion Porter, painted by Van Dyck. And here he is by Dobson. Here's Nicholas Lannier as Van Dyck saw him. Here's how he saw himself. And here is what Dobson made of him.

Inside every Englishman, it seems, there's a Henry VIII waiting to be discovered. It's such lively portraiture. I can't believe Dobson is so obscure.

We should applaud him from every historical rafter in England. He was there in the Civil War. He gave it a face.

And history thanked him by forgetting him completely, and by making sure he suffered the grubbiest of deaths. He died in London in 1646, an alcoholic they say, penniless, in debt, dumped into an almshouse, aged just 36. The only paintings we know by him were all done in those few short years in Oxford before the war was lost. That was his moment, and how vigorously he seized it. After Dobson's death, the King plotted on for a few more years.

But the fates were determined to punish him for his aesthetic extravagances, and arranged an outrageously dramatic finale for him. It all came to a terrible end on January 30th, 1649. The king was executed outside the very banqueting house that had ushered in his baroque age. They put up a special scaffold up there.

It was an unusually cold day, so the king wore an extra shirt so that no one would mistake his shivering for fear. By all accounts he went to his scaffold with great dignity. A king ruined in part at least by his baroque obsession with art.

Cromwell and the Puritans quickly set about selling off the Royal Collection. The royal plumber was given a painting of Noah's flood by Bassano, some sort of weak Cromwellian joke I suppose. And the hated French and Spanish courts bought up all the Titians and the Caravaggios and they're now found in the Louvre and the Prado.

So the story of painting in England more or less ground to a halt. And it was time for another of the great Baroque arts to step up and be counted. It was time for architecture, with a little unexpected help from the hand of God. The Great Fire of London in the Devil's Year of 1666 is one of the mythic turning points in the story of the Baroque.

The fire started in a baker's shop here in Pudding Lane, run by the King's personal baker. And this baker's shop was situated here, far away from the King's palaces, as a deliberate safety measure to make sure that no fires were started in Whitehall. So instead, the Royal Bakery ended up setting fire to the whole of London.

For three whole days it raged. Two thirds of the metropolis was destroyed. For Londoners, it was a colossal tragedy.

For the Baroque, it was a godsend. What the Great Fire accidentally achieved was the purging of Tudor London. Street after street of highly inflammable, half-timbered housing was torched, creating a golden building opportunity for the English Baroque. And, as sometimes happens in Britain in times of deep national need, a great hero stepped forward to save the day. Christopher Wren didn't look like an architectural warrior.

But then, in these ornate baroque times, everyone's seriousness was compromised by absurd restoration wigs and powdery facial get-ups. The fascinating thing about Wren is that he already had a big career behind him as a scientist before he turned to architecture. He was professor of astronomy at Oxford, where he made important discoveries in telescope techniques. motion studies. And Wren was the first man successfully to introduce a foreign substance into the bloodstream of a dog, thereby inventing the injection.

Inside that huge baroque brain of his, Wren was constantly making amazing scientific connections. But how these led him to architecture, God only knows. The fire had destroyed 87 London churches.

87! No wonder it must have seemed like an act of God. And when Wren stepped forward to rebuild 51 of them, yes, 51, he was driven by something more than mere dutifulness.

Because beneath that powdery restoration disguise of his, Sir Christopher Wren saw himself himself so Baroque-ly as an instrument of God. This square mile of the City of London contains the finest concentration of Baroque architecture outside Rome. 51 Baroque gems nestling among the money-making skyscrapers. Now obviously I can't show all of those to you at once but let's see how many a fat lump like me can get round to see in 15 minutes. His finest creative energy went into the steeples.

The English liked their steeples, Wren knew that. But rather than giving them pointy bits of gothic that they were used to, Wren came up with things like that. Saint Brides.

You know, the modern wedding cake with all the different layers? That was inspired by this steeple. Get it? Saint Brides. Saint Mary Lebeau.

To be a proper cockney, you need to have been born within earshot of that fantastical steeple. I like this one, St Veddust. The way it curves and bulges barochally in and out. Wren had to invent a new kind of church, an Anglican church.

Before, the Church of England had been happy to convert Catholic churches, but he had to come up with something new from scratch. The interiors also needed complete reinvention. This is St Margaret's Lothbury, the best surviving Wren interior.

A bold rectangle with these big wide windows and an air of elegant simplicity. The Protestant interior. Five churches, 15 minutes.

A fitter man than me would probably have got round 10. And of course, all the time that Wren was building the London churches, his greatest achievement, St Paul's Cathedral, was rising up out of the ashes of the Great Fire. St Paul's took 35 years to finish. And while we're waiting for that to happen, we should get out of London and expand our horizons.

Because the Baroque was much too powerful an epidemic to confine itself to the city. The English stately home was one of the most distinctive and delightful inventions of the Baroque Age. Of course, other nations dotted their countryside with big houses too. But no one else was quite as keen as the British to position excellent architecture in an excellent stretch of landscape. When you look at somewhere magnificently English like Blenheim Palace, you're looking at an outdoor composition in which everything has been placed just so.

It's a duet, if you like, between the house... and its landscape. And that sense you get here of the whole thing being one entity, no one else did that. That is a fine invention of the English Baroque.

But the closer you get to Blenheim Palace, the less rural and relaxed it begins to seem. Because Blenheim is the greatest and grandest creation of the full-blown English Baroque. The house itself is the handiwork of that fascinating and busy baroque bee, Sir John Vanborough. When you look at portraits of Vanborough, it's difficult to take the man seriously. He had the biggest of big hairdos, and a puffy, pouty look to him, with his velvets and his lace.

But underneath this powdered and billowing baroque exterior lurked one of the most interesting creative minds that these times produced. Vanbrugh looked like a toff and he built like a toff, but he actually had fierce democratic leanings. So much so that in 1688 he was imprisoned in the Bastille for sedition.

malicious and revolutionary behaviour and espionage. He spent four and a half years in that French jail. And when he came out, he became a playwright. And he wrote that marvellous restoration comedy, The Provoked Wife, which is probably playing at an Amdram somewhere near you right now.

He wrote poems, pamphlets, plays and managed somehow to become an architect too, and a very quirky one. Blenheim is the largest and most bombastic of Britain's country houses, the only one allowed to call itself a palace. It was built to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough's famous victory over the French at the Battle of Blenheim.

So pleased was the British monarchy with the Duke's great victory that they gave him this land and told him to build something suitable on it. So it was always meant to be more of a war memorial than a home and that's why there is this heavyweight grandeur and seriousness to it. Other English country houses settle gently on the landscape like a butterfly. But Blenheim needed to land heavily like a great big ceremonial cake. And you have to admit, it does that impeccably.

Vanborough's ambition here is to find a baroque architecture that resounds with power and might. Go round the back and it all gets a little more relaxed and playful. A nice backdrop for the occasional game of cricket.

But that's the back. At the front this is a building that demands your obedience and respect. The back is a little more relaxed.

The era's finest sculptor, Grinling Gibbons, was employed to carve these giant English lions, chewing up the pathetic French cog. And at the top of the house, where no one could miss him, Vanborough placed a giant captured bust of the defeated Sun King, Louis XIV, so that visitors could mock him as they entered the house. While the outside of Blenheim puffs out its chest and demands your obedience, the inside puffs out its chest and demands that you dress properly for dinner. That great English warrior Sir Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim of course, and some of its military mood was his inheritance.

Visitors entered into here where they'd be overwhelmed by all this mighty Baroque architecture with its militaristic air. Then they'd be led through here, underneath the minstrel gallery, into Blenheim's great saloon, its most surprising sight. An illusionistic courtyard that turns the inside of Blenheim into an outside. It was painted by the aptly named Louis Laguerre, a French painter whose name means in translation, Louis the War. There he is up there, too prim and powdered you would have thought, to be much of a painter.

Laguerre came up with an illusionistic ring of balconies on which was gathered a pretend audience of international visitors to Blenheim from the four corners of the earth. From France, from Spain, from China and from wherever that is. They're here to watch the room's central scene, in which the mighty Duke of Marlborough rushes across the sky in his chariot like a Marvel comic hero, while the embodiment of peace stays his militaristic arm and persuades him to stop fighting.

It's a decent bit of Baroque hack work and it does its job well enough, faking up some grandeur and illusionism for these stately rooms and throwing in some handy propaganda for peace. But at this point in the Baroque's story, and we're very near the tail end, these illusionistic ambitions are outweighing the meaningful content. And the Baroque has grown slightly. Silly. That's inside the fake interior of Blenheim, and it's not something you could ever say of the palace's exterior.

Blenheim on the outside is a masterclass of baroque invention. These weird towers for instance, how strange and unexpected are they? Or this peculiar cluster of bold architectural sculpture? Who on earth came up with this?

Vanbrugh came late to architecture. He was basically an amateur, so he needed some professional help. to achieve all this. And while the grandeur and the bombast that you see here is definitely Vanbrugh's handiwork, much of the architectural brilliance is due to someone else. Vanbrugh's number two at Blenheim, the designer of many of the best bits, was this lopsided Borromini of Blenheim.

Nicholas Hawksmoor Hawksmoor was the most inventive and madcap architect these shores have produced. If things look excitingly strange in British Baroque architecture, the chances are Hawksmoor did it. And according to some, scattering bits of eccentric Baroque around London wasn't all that Hawksmoor did.

Hawksmoor, a time-travelling murder mystery by Peter Ackroyd. Lud Heat, a collection of weird existential poems about Hawksmoor by Ian Sinclair. and From Hell, an extra-large gothic horror comic set in Hawksmoor's London and all about the Ripper murders by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. All of these excessively fruity tomes accuse Britain's most mysterious Baroque builder of being the architect not just of buildings, but also of evil. Mind you, wandering around the churchyard of a Hawksmoor building at twilight in the autumn is a distinctly spooky experience.

His buildings definitely have a psychological presence. It's the baroque getting inside your head again. In 1711, the British Parliament passed some new legislation providing tax money to build 50 new London churches. In the end, only a dozen of them were finished, six of them by Hawksmoor. He also designed the towers of two of the other ones.

And these London churches are Hawksmoor's most important Baroque achievements. Now I've marked out their positions on this London map. So over here is St George Bloomsbury.

That's the one with the strange ziggurat for a steeple. And the statue of George I on the top. Very peculiar build.

And over here is Christchurch Spitalfields. Now it's around this church that all the Ripper murders were supposed to have taken place. It's the one with the pointy Gothic steeple. Now out here... is St Anne's Limehouse.

This one here with the strange obelisk in front of it. In the centre of the city, right in the centre, St Mary Woolneth. A very peculiar looking building. And over here, St George in the East. The one with a Spanish look to it.

Now Hawksmoor also designed these two towers, not the whole church, but the two towers for other people's churches. There's St Luke's Old Street, which is over here, and St John's Horsley Down, that was down here, south of the river. Now, according to this book here, Ludheat, Ian Sinclair, if you join up these Hawksmoor churches, With their positions here.

What you get... is a diagram that bears an uncanny resemblance to an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph. Down here, the last of the Hawksmoor churches, St. Alphage, Greenwich, the one with the huge keystones. And that's the final bit of the jigsaw which makes... This mysterious symbol, the Eye of Horus, protector of all deities, safeguarder of the deepest secrets.

This mad idea that Hawksmoor deliberately planned the position of his churches so that they formed this mysterious ancient diagram reaches its crescendo in this great big comic book where Jack the Ripper's murders and the secrets of the Freemasons and the position of Hawksmoor's churches and all manner of weird hocus-pocus that I can't begin to understand is mixed together in a mysterious baroque soup. Of course it's all nonsense, really silly. But what isn't nonsense is the atmosphere of Hawksmoor's work, which is, take it from me, doomy and unsettling.

Someone once wrote that you can imagine funerals taking place in a Hawksmoor church, but not weddings. How true that is. These looming, oversized and madly inventive slabs of architectural sampling are some of the strangest concoctions the Baroque ever came up with. What is that on top of St George's Bloomsbury?

And whoever saw a zigguratic pyramid atop an Anglican church? In Hawksmoor, the English Baroque grows very eccentric. His architecture mixes things that have never been mixed before. Mexican, Gothic, Greek, Egyptian. And it's the very unexpectedness of this mix that makes it unmistakably Baroque.

Do I like it? Hmm, not always. Do I recognise genius in here?

Of course. Is it the greatest achievement of the English Baroque? No, but that's only because this is... Do you know how many great cathedrals there are in the world that were actually built in the lifetimes of their architect?

One, this one, St Paul's. Wren designed it. He watched the first stone going down.

He watched the last stone going down. From 1675 to 1710. 35 years. What an achievement. There was a biblical heir to the great fire that destroyed the old St Paul's.

The sense that God had played a deliberate part in the purging of London must have seemed inescapable. From the start Wren wanted to build an imposing domed cathedral here. A great church roundel to rank alongside St Peter's in Rome. And he achieved that, of course.

But it took a momentous piece of deception. This is the giant model Wren made of St Paul's as he dreamt of building it. This is what he really wanted to do here.

But the English clergy found Wren's domed basilica too Catholic and popish and rejected his splendid design. He was forced to come up with something else, something more English, more traditional. So he proposed instead this grim compromise. A bit of a steeple, a bit of a nave, a bit of a mess. And when the scaffolds went up in 1675 for the new St Paul's, this is what people were expecting to be built.

35 years later, however, when the scaffolds finally came down, look what the English Baroque had actually come up with. Wren had lied through his teeth about what he was going to build. He promised us this, and all the time he was building this. St Paul's was never what it seems to be. These high palatial walls, for instance, rising grandly above the city, are actually false and unnecessary.

They're just there for effect. See, the actual building from the front.....that took off the facade, would be shaped. Like this, with a nave, two aisles down either side. But what Ren's done is he's put up these false walls. They're just there for show, to make the building look much higher from the side.

So in between here, there are empty spaces. And the dome, that too, is illusionistic. It's actually not one dome, but three. Out here, you have the big dome that everybody sees. Inside, there's another dome that you only see on the inside.

And then there's one that you don't see at all. Which is a kind of conical dome that goes up the middle and that supports the lantern. So what you see on the outside is completely different from what you see on the inside.

So Wren got his popish cathedral in the end. He promised us an ugly English compromise. Instead, he connived to bring us a soaring ecclesiastical masterpiece that wouldn't look too out of place in Rome itself. And that's the thing about the English Baroque. On paper it's thoroughly Protestant.

In the flesh it's not so sure. We began this series in Rome in front of St Peter's and I told you that we'd follow the Baroque from Rome to London, from St Peter's to St Paul's. Now here we are at the end of the journey and we've watched the Baroque squiggling its way through the entire 17th century, always pushing, expanding, changing. We've seen the Baroque grow thunderous and huge as it soars sought to batter us into submission. And we've watched it go plaintive and sad as it tried to get inside our minds and our hearts.

We've watched it rope in all the other arts for support, sculpture, architecture. This way and that it billowed through enormous spaces and tiny ones. If you remember, I told you that the actual words The word Baroque comes from this, a misshapen pearl. Barroco in Portuguese. And if you were expecting this series to follow a straight line, you'll be disappointed because the Baroque didn't do straight lines.

But there is something that unites all these magnificent sights and spectacles and makes them typically Baroque. Something powerful that brings everything together. It's the need to be...

noticed. The Baroque built big because big things have a big impact. It dazzled you with its illusions and caught you up in its psychology because it wanted your time and your attention. It was the It was the first art movement to realise that being good wasn't enough. You needed also to make an impact.

It's a lesson the arts have never forgotten. If you want an audience, get out there and grab it. Getting to England was no easy journey for the Baroque.

Crossing the Channel was difficult enough, but an even sterner barrier was the innate English resistance to emotional and flamboyant art. By the time the Baroque reached here in the 1620s or so, England was, artistically speaking, the most backward of the great European powers. Never mind the Baroque taking its time, even though... The Renaissance hadn't got here yet. 17th century England was still stuck in the Middle Ages.

It's the whole of the Renaissance, as well as the Baroque, rolled into one and arriving in England at last. It's white, it's angelic, and it's not half-timbered. Hallelujah! But let's be honest, it's not an exciting building.

But the man who enlarged that crack and turned it into a giant opening wasn't an artist or an architect, but a king. ...plots but of popish art as well. As William Prynne, the Puritan agitator, would later put it, there was no welcome on these shores for the sinful, the idolatrous, the abominable. By which he meant art.

This stupendous riverside vista at Greenwich consists of three baroque firsts. Up on the hill, that charming brick building, was the Royal Observatory, begun in 1675. The first purpose-built scientific establishment in the world. The exciting Baroque Palace across the front isn't a palace at all, but the first old people's home built to look like a palace. Christopher Wren's Greenwich Hospital, a retirement home for wounded sailors, so successfully posh that the old sea dogs were soon kicked out and their officers moved in.

But the key building here is the one in the middle, the dinky little white one. Inigo Jones's Queen's House. It was designed for Anne of Denmark in 1617. Take a good look at it, because that is possibly the most important little building in the whole of British architecture.

Although technically it belongs to the Baroque era, what the Queen's House actually constitutes is the first sophisticated bit of European building to be attempted in England. We've been watching the Baroque spreading like a wildfire across Europe, Italy, Spain, Holland. So all it needs to finish its journey is to get across here to England.

Transcript for:Baroque Art's Impact on England

Transcript for:
Baroque Art's Impact on England