THUNDER RUMBLES
The plains of Castile, the bleak heart of central Spain.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
this barren landscape nurtured some of the most dramatic art in history.
From the mystical world of El Greco to the dark visions of Zurbaran
and Ribera,
this was an art inspired by fervent Catholicism and a yearning for contact with God.
Out of such fervour would come darkness and even savagery - religion and violence intertwined.
And as the Inquisition struggled to maintain control, Spain would descend into crisis and paranoia.
I'm travelling through the heart of Spain,
through some of the country's most extraordinary landscapes,
to discover how a history so harsh, so violent,
could have produced some of the greatest art ever seen.
FLAMENCO STYLE MUSIC
My journey begins in a place where, in the 16th century, a great project was born -
one that would shape Spain's art, history, and religion for more than 100 years -
the Escorial Palace.
Wow!
Look at it!
I've never seen El Escorial before.
I've seen pictures, but nothing to prepare me for the size of it.
It's enormous!
They say it took 21 years to build.
When I first read that,
I thought, "That's not going very quickly".
But in fact, 21 years is lightning fast to build something that size.
I don't know any builders who could do it!
The Escorial was built for Philip II,
the King of Spain and the most powerful man in the world.
His empire stretched from Holland to Italy, and included the vast territories of the New World.
This was a citadel fit for an emperor.
But this is no romantic fairytale palace to delight and enchant.
It's monumental, austere, forbidding.
From this angle, with its high watch towers, it almost looks like a prison.
It's the very emblem of Philip's determination to rule through fear and control.
Despite his power and wealth,
Philip was struggling to govern an empire that was in a state of religious emergency -
attacked both by the Muslims in the East and the Protestants in the North.
This vast building, with its state apartments and magnificent library,
was a defiant statement of Spanish invincibility, and the nerve centre of Philip's reign.
But at its heart is a tiny chamber.
Now, these were Philip II's private apartments.
And you've got to remember the scale of the Escorial and here, this is where he is.
And it's so simple, so austere.
Just four rather Spartan rooms.
This is where he would pore over the affairs of state.
This is his writing room.
This is a little, very small, very modest drawing room.
And this is Philip II's bedroom, his bed!
And you think this is the bed of the most powerful man in the world!
It's really rather small.
It doesn't look very comfortable.
But even more telling -
this is my favourite bit.
This is absolutely amazing!
Here's your bedroom. You're Philip II.
You get out of that very uncomfortable bed, and you come into your oratory to pray...
Look where his bedroom leads to! Come out here.
Straight onto the high altar of one of the most fantastic basilicas every built!
This mighty basilica is a muscular declaration of Philip's faith -
and a direct appeal to God for help in difficult times.
Philip called it "a new Jerusalem", and founded a monastery here to pray for his soul for all time.
That monastery is the key to the Spain of Philip II - with religion at the centre of everything.
It seems to me that he was a man who felt that his power very much depended on his relationship to God.
That he ruled by the grace of God and that he had to do his best
to keep in God's good books, if you like.
Yes, I would say that because he was really a person living with faith.
Trying to do his best.
That's evident.
According to some opinions,
this monastery was a kind of sign for the strength of the church.
For example, you enter the main entrance and you are walking towards the East,
where is Jerusalem, where the sun rises.
And because the sun is a symbol of Christ,
when you are entering the church, you are walking in the direction of Christ.
So, even in the architecture,
there is the expression of theological doctrine? Yes, of course.
Philip wanted to unite his people through piety -
but that piety had to conform to the strictest laws of the Catholic Church.
He wanted to spread the one true faith, but also to control it -
and what better tool for that, than art?
New rules were laid down for artists.
Religious images were to tell clear, direct, unambiguous stories.
There were to be no distracting or irrelevant details.
The images of the saints were to be humble, direct calls to prayer.
These were the new criteria by which ALL art would be judged,
and Philip II rigorously enforced them.
One artist who passed the test was Juan de Navarrete, whose paintings fill the Basilica.
In works like this vivid, colour-saturated portrait of Saints Peter and Paul,
he created straightforward aids to devotion -
exactly what Philip wanted.
But one artist failed to comply with Philip's rules.
Domenikos Theotocopoulos came to the Escorial from Greece,
and the picture he painted for the king would become one of the masterpieces of 16th-century Spain.
Its subject is the death of Saint Maurice -
an early saint martyred by the Romans.
The painting shows his arrest and execution.
CHURCH BELLS TOLL
Theotocopoulos hadn't reckoned on his patron's extreme religious sensitivities.
And while the King praised the picture for its flair and originality,
he took issue with one cardinal error -
the placement of the beheaded martyr's body
in the obscure middle distance.
As far as Philip was concerned, it should have been centre stage for everyone to see.
Theotocopoulos had failed on the one essential criterion - religious clarity.
The king dismissed him.
He would never work for him again.
What Philip didn't realise was that he had just sent away
the greatest artist of the age - El Greco - "The Greek".
El Greco's work was too original for Philip II.
There was only one other place for an ambitious painter to try his luck - the city of Toledo.
I'm not the only one.
We'll fight our way through.
See if we can get a view of the city that inspired El Greco.
It is a great view.
When El Greco arrived, Toledo was a beacon for Catholics across Spain.
And it still is today.
Madrid might be the political capital of Spain, but Toledo is definitely its religious centre.
And in a deeply Catholic country, this is the closest you can get to being in Rome.
Everyone's in on the business.
You sell a lot of images of saints.
Is there a kind of top ten of saints?
Is there a particular saint that you sell the most of?
The most popular one would be St Pancrathio,
who's supposed to bring health, money and work.
St Pancrathio?
And he gives you health. What would be your number two?
St Teresa is also very popular.
She used to be a writer. She has the pen to write.
And the pigeon, the pigeon of peace.
St Anthony is very popular,
because it tradition that all the girls that are single, single girls,
they go to church and they go to the convent where St Anthony is.
They kneel down in front of St Anthony. They say a prayer to St Anthony,
and St Anthony will provide them with a good-looking and rich boyfriend.
It actually works out.
Sometimes they get married within the year!
This kind of deep, popular devotion to the saints goes back a long time in Toledo.
And El Greco encountered much the same thing, although in a different form,
at the very heart of the city's cathedral.
This is the great altarpiece.
It's a multi-coloured wall of sculpture,
with much the same doll's house feel
as the displays of statuettes in Toledo's modern gift-shops.
Made by an army of anonymous craftsmen, it's like a 3-D billboard of Christian messages.
Art for the masses - just what Philip II would have liked.
And it was in this world where the church was all important,
and the individual artist was subordinate to its majesty, might and splendour.
It was this world that El Greco was going to have to try and find a way through.
In 1577, he got his chance to prove there could be more to Spanish art than pious folksiness.
The cathedral authorities gave him a commission.
The subject?
The Disrobing of Christ - Jesus about to be stripped before his Crucifixion.
It's an absolutely wonderful picture.
I'd never seen it before.
It's just a tour de force of everything that makes El Greco the greatest painter of his age.
And he's pulled out all the stops.
This wonderfully original vertical composition, crowded with figures,
in which you get an extraordinary combination of
virtuoso realism.
Look at the armour of Herod.
Look at that old man at the back of the painting with his hand pointing out at us -
which is a classic painter's way of showing off
that he can paint that foreshortening of perspective.
And yet on the other hand, you've got this tremendous departure from realism.
Look at the scale of the body of Christ.
Look at the way in which the whole composition seems in contradiction of the fact
that he's about to be crucified.
It seems to be whooshing him up to heaven.
Hard to believe, but the cathedral authorities disapproved.
They complained that there shouldn't be any figures above Christ in the picture -
nothing should separate the Lord from heaven.
Once more, El Greco had broken the rules to express his own artistic vision.
He'd never work in the cathedral again.
The irony is that it was precisely because El Greco was rejected by these two great patrons,
the Spanish king and the cathedral authorities,
that he was able to find the freedom to develop his own imaginative vision.
If at first you don't succeed, try again. And El Greco had good reason not to give up.
Away from the cathedral, a circle of priests and scholars were practising an intense form of spirituality -
mysticism, a devotion to God so extreme it became a physical experience.
They embraced El Greco's experiments -
the way he brought his own roots in the shimmering art of the Greek east, and planted them in Spain.
In his pictures, the figures yearn towards heaven and writhe with energy.
It's as if they're bursting out of the frame.
And when he came to paint Toledo itself, he filled the landscape with that same mystical spirit.
He turned Toledo into a brooding cauldron of spiritual energy.
The clouds overhead signal the apocalypse -
the impending religious showdown for which all of Spain and all of Christendom was preparing.
El Greco didn't paint the real Toledo.
He painted a Toledo of the imagination, and that imagination was intensely spiritual.
In his vision, the end of the world is nigh.
The city's buildings are quivering with a kind of spiritual electricity.
It's as if the whole place is about to be whirled up to heaven.
He painted Toledo as the holiest of holy places.
And he could have given it no greater gift.
People in those days really believed in visions, spirits, angels.
But this could become a contagion, breeding morbid obsession.
And El Greco captured that too in his greatest work of all -
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.
It depicts the moment when two saints descended from heaven
to take the soul of the devout Count up to God.
It's stunning, with these radiant colours, these forms that flicker and ascend like flames.
It's as if the whole wall is on fire.
Below, we have flesh and blood human beings
witnessing solemnly the miracle.
But as the miracle takes place, as the soul is transported into heaven,
all of the forms dissolve.
The Count of Orgaz becomes pure spirit and
as that happens, El Greco's style turns into pure spirit.
So that the forms become more fluid.
Look at the figure of John the Baptist, for example.
It's not a body, it's like an emanation of spirit. It's like a flame.
There's a wonderful tenderness about the way in which the two saints
are lowering the Count's body into the tomb.
It's as if they're placing a new born infant in the cradle.
And I think THAT ultimately is what this picture is all about.
It's a picture that says that death IS a form of rebirth.
It expresses the belief that death is what you live for, death is the fulfilment,
death is the beginning of the great adventure that will take your soul into the world of the spirit.
El Greco could never have thrived without the mystics of Toledo.
But all over Spain, a uniquely strong sense of piety
was flourishing - an obsession with saints, their lives, their relics.
I'm on my way to the home of the most extraordinary female mystic of 16th century Spain -
St Teresa of Avila.
She was born in Avila in 1515 and was so fascinated by the lives of the saints,
that at the age of seven she ran away to the South,
hoping to become a Christian martyr at the hands of the Moors.
Her family rescued her, but Teresa went on to become a nun, founding convents all over Spain.
Five hundred years on, pilgrims come to Avila from all corners of the world.
She was a saint who understood the everyday problems of ordinary people.
And in her writings she spoke openly about her struggles with her own faith.
She preached a simple message to people whose lives were short and often very hard.
"Life on earth," she said, "well, it's no more than a night in a cheap hotel."
Here in this convent,
Teresa stripped Christianity back to its basics -
love, charity, poverty.
She even went so far as to turn the expression of her faith into an uncanny form of performance art.
When Santa Teresa first entered the convent, she was appalled by the other sisters' lack of piety.
So to make her point, she staged her own personal re-enactment of Christ being dragged to his crucifixion.
She got on all fours, she had herself saddled up with a mule pack full of stones,
and she got one of the other sisters to lead her around the convent on a halter.
These are the rooms where Teresa experienced her visions.
She claimed that Christ appeared to her, right here, tied to the pillar on which he was scourged.
Later, the power of the Holy Spirit took hold of her so strongly
that her body shook and she began to levitate.
And then there was the most baffling phenomenon of all.
A transverberation of the heart, in which she felt she had been speared
through the heart by an angel and infused with the Holy Spirit.
Teresa had such an intense relationship with God
that she actually felt it within her own body.
She died in 1582 and was canonised 40 years later.
But after her death, the question was, how to tell her story?
The answer was art.
Teresa had become a folk hero, an inspiration to thousands.
And her image appeared in countless paintings, by artists including Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens
and the Spaniard Claudio Coello.
But paintings weren't enough for St Teresa's followers.
They would demand something far more graphic.
This is the convent of Alba de Tormes, where Teresa died,
and her final resting place.
Above the altar is a gold-trimmed casket designed to receive her body.
But the casket is incomplete.
Nine months after she died in 1582, her body was exhumed,
and conclusive evidence of her purity was found.
Her body was said to have been perfectly preserved.
In fact, witnesses said it even smelt of perfume.
But devotion to Teresa soon became a cult.
Over the following centuries, her body was exhumed countless times.
On each occasion, parts of it were removed for relics.
This is her arm, encased in crystal.
The 400-year-old flesh still clinging to the bone.
But the greatest treasure is this object -
St Teresa's heart, displayed in a gold and silver reliquary.
When we talk about Spanish art of the Golden Age,
we tend to think very much of painting and sculpture, the sort of art that you see in museums.
But I think that these reliquaries are in themselves tremendously eloquent works of art.
They take us straight to the centre of that combination
of mysticism and morbidity which is right at the heart of Santa Teresa's legend.
There's the angel with the spear said to have pierced her heart.
And then, right at the centre of it, is her heart itself.
A piece of her actual body.
It's that interplay between the sense of the flesh itself,
the body - the fact that we're all going to die -
and the hope that we'll all go to heaven -
it's absolutely enshrined in that object.
In a final twist to the legend of the angel,
when the heart was removed from St Teresa's body, it was said to be perforated.
Today, her fingers are in Avila, her jaw is in Rome.
Such was the power and persistence of Santa Teresa's legend,
that throughout his dictatorship, General Franco kept her hand beside his bed.
The fate of St Teresa's body is a symbol of the deep fascination with saints and martyrs
that gripped 17th century Spain.
Pain had become the mark of piety - God's sign -
written into your very flesh, that you had become one of his Chosen.
And the most visceral artist of this pain was Jusepe de Ribera.
Ribera specialised in martyrdoms, which he painted with extraordinary realism.
This is this is the Martyrdom of St Philip, captured in the moments before his crucifixion.
Ribera doesn't paint him ON the cross,
but as he's being agonisingly winched into place.
At his crucifixion, St Andrew submits stoically as the executioner binds him to the cross.
And then there's the martyrdom of St Bartholomew, one of Ribera's favourite subjects.
Bartholomew was executed by being skinned alive.
There's a tremendously strong emphasis in all of these works
on the sheer visceral pain that goes with being a saint.
These are religious paintings, but they have the immediacy of portraits, and what they show us
is real flesh-and-blood human bodies being subjected to appalling torments.
You see the sweat, the blood, the straining sinews.
There'd been violence of this kind in religious art before.
But in Spanish art, everything is more intense.
It's as if the volume's been turned up.
But the dark in this world of light and shade, could be very black indeed.
Spain's preoccupation with martyrdom would be used to justify atrocities.
I'm travelling through the province of Extremadura, one of the remotest parts of the country.
The literal meaning of Extremadura is "extremely hard".
And you can feel that about this place.
It's bleak, it's isolated.
The landscape is parched.
In the summer, it's unbearably hot.
And the people from here have a reputation for being extremely hard too.
They certainly bore that out in the 16th century.
In the middle of this impoverished landscape is an unlikely treasure -
the birthplace of one of the darkest figures in Spanish history.
It's an architectural jewel of 16th-century Spain - Trujillo.
The first thing you notice when you walk into the town square is the architecture.
How grand, how unexpectedly imposing it is.
In fact, the whole place is like a 16th-century film set.
So how did a little provincial backwater like this come to be so rich?
In the early 16th century,
an illegitimate swineherd, named Francisco Pizarro,
set off from Trujillo to make his fortune in the New World.
He and his band of conquistadors
discovered an extraordinary civilisation - the Incas -
and wealth beyond their wildest dreams.
It started out as a trickle of gold, and soon became a torrent of silver.
And the king got 20 percent of the spoils.
The wealth brought back by the conquistadors would fuel the Spanish Empire.
When the conquistadors returned home from Peru,
they were determined to show off that money.
Here in Trujillo, they built a Renaissance ideal city in miniature.
Streets of elaborate palaces,
completely disproportionate to the size of the town
and the economy of the region.
At first sight, these buildings look like traditional displays of wealth.
But look a little closer, and something else is going on.
The owner of this palace built his chimneys to resemble Inca temples,
like the ones the Spanish plundered.
On the Pizarro family palace,
the parapet is decorated with Inca-style statues.
And at the centre of the coat of arms,
groups of Inca prisoners are bound together with chains.
The architectural equivalent of a head on a stick,
this is the triumphant architecture of conquest.
During the course of the conquest of Peru, thousands of Incas died,
some from European diseases,
but many as the result of Spanish butchery.
Francisco Pizarro was one of the most brutal of all the conquistadors.
He raped and pillaged, and he duped the king of the Incas,
persuading him to give him all his gold in exchange for his life,
and then just garrotting him anyway.
The blood of the Incas is the cement that holds all of these magnificent palaces together.
But the conquistadors were more than mercenaries.
They saw themselves as missionaries,
and their conquest of the New World was just another front
in the great religious war that was consuming 16th-century Spain.
If you want to understand the conquistador mentality,
you have to realise that it was widely believed throughout Spain
that God had given to these Catholic people
the New World and all its treasures,
precisely so that they could combat the enemies of Catholicism -
the Protestants, the Muslims.
They genuinely believed that God was on their side.
Francisco Pizarro's descendents were awarded an aristocratic title,
and still live in Trujillo today.
Ramon Perez de Herraste is the current Marquis of the Conquest.
How do you think Francisco Pizarro has gone down in history?
Is he a hero, is he a villain?
When you think of, particularly Francisco Pizarro,
do you think he was a very religious man?
That's religious!
In the twisted logic of Catholic Spain,
the brutality of the conquistadors became the expression of their piety.
By advancing his faith at the expense of a whole civilization,
Francisco Pizarro would become a Spanish hero.
Before the conquistadors set off for the New World,
they made a public display of their piety.
To pray for safe passage,
they visited one of the holiest shrines in Europe,
and a wellspring of extreme Catholic fervour -
the monastery of Guadalupe.
Around the year 1290,
the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared to a shepherd,
and guided him to a statue buried in the ground on this site.
What the shepherd found became one of the most sacred treasures
of the Catholic world - the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Perched high above the altar and blackened with age,
she's so small, you can barely see her.
But there is a way to get closer.
To change her elaborate robes,
the monks use a special chamber at the back of the altar.
For centuries, the Spanish had prayed to the Madonna of Guadalupe.
Christopher Columbus in 1492 came here to pray to her before setting sail for the New World,
and the reason was that they believed that this was no ordinary Madonna.
This was a portrait of Mary, Mother of God herself,
carved by none other than St Luke.
And you can still feel that intensity of veneration
in the splendour with which she's housed today.
But the Virgin of Guadalupe is just the centrepiece of a vast complex of piety and prayer.
In the 17th century,
it was a group of Jeronymite monks who had the task of looking after the Virgin.
Inspired by the 4th-century scholar and monk, St Jerome,
the Jeronymite Order was one of the most powerful and influential forces in Spain.
And to assert the authority of their order, they turned to art.
In 1637, the friars of the order
commissioned the greatest Spanish religious artist of the day,
Francisco de Zurbaran,
to paint eight pictures commemorating the ways
in which they strove to keep the spirit of St Jerome alive,
and this was the result.
It's one of the most extraordinary rooms.
In fact, it's the only space in all of the monasteries of all of Spain
where you can still see a great cycle of religious paintings in the place for which it was designed.
Now, you might have expected to find here a set of paintings
illustrating the life of St Jerome, but that's not what you see.
What you see are a series of portraits
of members of the Spanish Jeronymite order
experiencing, themselves, apparitions and visions.
He shows us Brother Pedro of Salamanca having a vision
of a great fire in the sky that portends a great battle to come.
But how simply Zurbaran has painted it.
He just shows us two men in the dark,
one of them gesturing towards the vision.
There's almost nothing to look at except for their awestruck faces.
But over here, this is my favourite picture in the room.
I think it's a real masterpiece.
For me, it's perhaps Zurbaran's greatest painting,
and what it shows us is a young 25-year-old brother of the order.
He's received a vision from God,
in which he's learned that he's going to die on this day,
and he's gone to get the other brothers in the order.
He's told them the news, and they're all praying together.
He is about to die. That's the moment that Zurbaran's painted.
What's extraordinary about this as a work of art,
and why I think Zurbaran is the greatest artistic interpreter
of this monastic, austere ideal of life,
is because he has found an equivalent in painting
to the extremism of the piety that it represents.
This is a form of painting that has rejected, as the monk rejects,
all the things of this world.
It's almost like a kind of spiritual minimalism.
There's only the black and the white of the monk's robes,
and I think it absolutely expresses the sense that for these people,
black and white is all there is.
Either you're in God's light, or you're cast out into darkness.
Zurbaran's paintings for Guadalupe would represent the last great flowering of religious art in Spain.
Increasingly, this was a society in crisis.
While the monks of Guadalupe were models of piety,
elsewhere, people were asking awkward questions.
The black and white doctrines of the church
were being tested by some of the sharpest minds in Spain.
A storm was brewing.
This is Salamanca, one of Europe's most beautiful towns.
and, in the 16th century, one of the great European seats of learning.
But its open spirit of inquiry would attract the attention of the most draconian organisation in Europe,
the Spanish Inquisition -
a tribunal set up to enforce Catholic orthodoxy.
The results would be devastating.
This is Fray Luis de Leon,
one of the great intellectuals in the university's history.
He was a revered theologian
whose progressive scholarship and religious poetry
were part of the mystical tradition of El Greco and St Teresa.
And this is his lecture theatre,
just as it was when he taught here in the mid 1500s.
This was where he expounded his own unique vision of faith - intense,
questioning, a deep personal engagement with the Bible.
It while he was lecturing in this very room
that Fray Luis came to the attention of the Spanish Inquisition.
His crime had been to produce his own translation
of one of the most erotic passages in the whole Bible,
the Song of Songs.
Now this dangerous text was being sold and circulated in the street just outside this building.
That had to be stopped, and it had to be stopped immediately.
And so on 27th March 1572,
the officers of the Inquisition stormed into this room.
Fray Luis was lecturing up there.
They arrested him, they dragged him away,
and they imprisoned him for five years.
The Inquisition had succeeded in stifling
one of the most humane voices in a climate of increasing paranoia.
But it wasn't just religious scholarship
that the Inquisition repressed.
Professor Jose Luis Marcello is the guardian of a unique text,
one that shows how the Inquisition invented the dark art of thought control.
So cover the pages up!
What other methods did they...?
These are dangerous ideas.
Wow! Incredible.
In the case of this book, what are the dangerous ideas?
But censorship was the mildest of the Inquisition's techniques.
All over the country,
ordinary people were being forced to provide proof of their Christian bloodlines.
This is the Plaza Mayor, the great central square of Salamanca.
Such squares are a feature of nearly every Spanish town,
the place for bullfights, carnivals and civic events.
But during the Inquisition, they also served another purpose.
All over Spain, squares like this
were used to stage elaborate public rituals known as trials of faith.
Those accused of heresy were brought here by the Inquisition
to face questions from priests and officials,
and it all took place in front of a bloodthirsty crowd.
On their inevitable conviction,
those accused of heresy were sentenced to death,
and they were executed by being burned at the stake,
a lengthy process that gave them plenty of time
to plead for forgiveness in their dying moments.
This was religious enforcement as a kind of grisly public theatre.
In one of the few paintings of a trial of faith,
Francisco Rizzi shows a public square crammed with officials and onlookers.
The condemned heretics, wearing tall hats, are paraded around the square,
and urged to repent by priests and monks.
This is religious persecution,
painted as if it were a spectator sport.
Pedro Berruguete paints the moment of execution itself.
Flames lick around the feet of the condemned,
but for the executioner, it's just another tedious day's work.
Burning at the stake had become part of everyday life.
Much of Spain was descending into a kind of madness.
The nation's devotion to God was increasingly darkened by obsession,
and the relentless focus on Church doctrine
had climaxed in a bloodbath.
This was a country starting to devour itself.
And while religious conflict was consuming the nation,
the Empire was starting to unravel.
Philip had spent millions leading a campaign against the Protestants
in northern Europe, a campaign that failed disastrously.
His famous Armada against England had also ended in failure.
Throughout this period,
it was the Castilians who funded their kings' foreign wars,
and provided most of the soldiers.
Even today, this has the feeling of a war-scarred landscape.
The people were exhausted,
a fact subtly expressed in one of the unsung art forms of the day.
Still life paintings traditionally reflect on mortality,
but in Spain, they become a cry of despair.
In Zurbaran's Agnus Dei,
the lamb of God is a dead sheep on a slab, its feet trussed up,
ready for the butcher's block.
In Antonio de Pereda's Still Life with Walnuts,
the cracked nuts spill out of their shells onto a table,
like brains from smashed skulls.
And in even the simplest of subjects,
Juan Sanchez Cotan's beautiful painting of vegetables,
the carrots are rotten and black.
But before imperial Spain vanished into darkness,
there would be one extraordinary final act,
and it would be played out in the capital, Madrid.
The old order was changing.
In 1598, Philip II died.
His son, Philip III, squandered his power,
delegating authority to his courtiers.
His grandson, Philip IV,
would be the king to lead the Empire into its final moments.
Philip IV spared no expense in turning this city
into one of the most glittering capitals of all Europe.
He filled Madrid with lavish palaces and monuments to his own glory.
But all was not well.
While Philip was busy rebuilding, his empire was falling apart.
Religious wars had emptied the nation's coffers,
the gold rush of the New World had dried up,
the economy was on its knees.
The great Spanish galleon was running aground,
while the captain twiddled his thumbs.
The beliefs that had sustained Spain for a century
were starting to crumble.
And one artist would reveal the truth beneath - Diego de Velazquez.
And it was on streets like these that he found his inspiration.
For centuries, the art of Spain had been overwhelmingly religious,
but he turned away from that to paint real life.
He painted ordinary working people in simple settings.
In taverns and kitchens, he captured moments of humanity,
with immense wisdom and sympathy.
In this picture, an old woman poaches eggs.
Everyday life has been given a miraculous vividness.
The wrinkles on the woman's face, the simple utensils she uses,
the perfect depiction of half-cooked, milky egg-whites.
In these pictures, Velazquez painted ordinary people living their lives.
With immense respect, he gave them great dignity,
but he didn't sentimentalise them in the slightest bit.
There are no religious mysteries here, no arcane symbolism, no codes.
He simply painted what was in front of his eyes.
But this painter of ordinary people was also destined to become
the greatest court painter of the age.
Some would say the greatest painter ever to have lived.
And in Philip IV, he found the perfect patron.
Philip IV collected art with an astonishing enthusiasm,
and on an incredible scale.
At one point, he had half the studios in Rome working for him.
It's as if he wanted the beautiful illusions of art
to fill the real power vacuum that was developing during his reign.
But his favourite artist was Velazquez,
who painted for every occasion.
He painted his few military victories,
such as The Surrender at Breda.
He painted Philip himself, resplendent on horseback,
he rides through the landscape.
The horse symbolising the unruly populace that he keeps under his firm control.
Far from the truth.
And here, Velazquez paints Philip's son and heir.
Again, astride a horse,
but on this occasion, the painting starts to develop something uneasy.
You sense that Velazquez can feel that this rather sickly boy
may not live long, which, indeed, turned out to be the case.
And this begins to take us to the heart of the painter,
and his strange, remarkable relationship with the king,
because what Velazquez ended up giving Philip IV,
and it's what makes Velazquez such a great, such a profound artist,
was something much deeper than merely official propaganda.
But there's one picture by Velazquez that encapsulates all the delusion,
glory and grandeur of 17th-century Spain,
and finally sounds its death knell.
It's often been described as the world's greatest painting,
and it's called Las Meninas - The Ladies-in-Waiting.
Every time I see this picture,
I just think what an artist Velasquez was.
The painting is often said to be a great mystery,
but I don't think it is a mystery,
I think it's wonderfully clear what's going on,
although what's going on is an incredibly daring thing.
No one had ever painted this before.
What Velazquez has painted is not a portrait of the king.
He's painted a picture of what the king sees as he's having his portrait painted.
And what does the king see?
He sees his daughter, who's come to see him being painted,
lit by this brilliant shaft of light in this rather dark room.
He sees his court entertainers, a dwarf, a midget. He sees his dog.
He sees Velazquez himself, with his paintbrush in his hand.
He sees himself in the mirror, and he sees his queen.
But what do they look like? They look like ghosts.
Everything in this picture is about transience.
Look at the way in which Velazquez paints the fabrics,
the skin, the hair.
Look at the way in which he paints the dwarves.
Everything is hovering on the brink of disappearance.
Some of the forms are almost out of focus.
It's as if these figures will turn and move,
that the scene will disperse, that the moment will pass.
The message seems to be that no matter how powerful you are,
in the end, your experience is transitory.
Spanish power, Spanish might, all its glory and magnificence.
It's all come down to these figures in this dark room.
They will pass, they will die, everything will come to an end.
Velazquez's masterpiece was a full-stop to the extraordinary century that preceded it.
He'd introduced a dangerously powerful idea,
an utterly secular view of the world.
The Golden Age of Spain was over.
It had been an era in which Spain had been consumed by religion,
by a fascination with piety, self-denial, death.
Its artists, from El Greco to Zurbaran,
had looked to God for inspiration,
capturing a spiritual realm, invisible to the eye.
In the end, the greatest Spanish painter of all
dares to turn his back on all of that,
and the most basic and subversive message of his art
is that this life, brief though it is, is all we can be sure of,
and maybe that's enough.