Simon Schama's Power of Art

The violent life and tumultuous times of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), revolutionary artist of the Counter Reformation and Baroque era, whose paintings forever changed religious art.

Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) becomes the hottest artist in Rome.

The rise and fall of Holland's great painter Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 - 1669) is detailed.

This time Simon rather uses the works of the iron-monger's son, orphaned at 7 by a duel and trained by a famous relative, Boulanger, in the art of 'bonbonniere' paintings to the taste of the aristocracy, as illustration of a fairly elaborate sketch of the road to and trough the French Revolution rather then the other way around. David incurred a permanent jaw-mark which marked his face, speech and social skills, rather estranging him from his patrons and the Royal Academy, despite his ultimate success. After expensive French support to the American Revolution contributed to rising poverty and outcry for change, David soon espoused the cause of the revolution, even becoming a member of the legislative Convention, in the ranks of the fanatical publicist Marat, whose slaying by a moderate revolutionary he portrayed masterly, and tyrant Robespierre, the incarnation of political terror by guillotine whose head ended up like 'last' king Louis XVI's, David even rises to chief of its visual propaganda. After the collapse of the republic, David turned coat to become Napoleon Bonaparte's court-painter, only after the royal Restoration he was banished and forgotten, 'exiled' in Brussels (Belgium).

Simon argues The Slave ship, one of 7 of his works causing a scandal at the 1840 Royal Academy exhibition, is typical of Turner's feeling from experience, as low-born Covent garden boy affected by family tragedy, for the common man, even prominent in his epic works, deliberately unpolished for grim effect. Despite his membership of the Royal Academy his appearance remained deliberately rough, his later life darkened by disease, loss of close one and a pain-killer which enhanced his morbid imagination. The sea, with uncut fluent lines typical for him, hence his glorious Venice period, is a common element of drama and emotions. His rendering of the Temeraire reflects the mixed public mood as industrialization takes the lead. He sided with the anti-slavery movement gaining momentum to fight slave-trade by others after the British Empire abandoned it, referring to the case of the Sun sixty years earlier, when the captain of the Sun, off Jamaica, decided to swindle the ship's insurance -for losses at sea, nor death at arrival- by dumping 132 live cargo hand-picked. Turner dramatized maximally, even replaced the Caribean sharks by piranhas he knew from Jeroen Bosch's hell scenes and setting a red-gold stormy sky above water cut by a huge dark spot for the scene, supposedly a rising typhoon. The critics were merciless for his denial of artistic conventions, Simon considers it a triumph of expression, plastic expression and even matching a social rebellion in the name of liberty with his artistic one. His more idyllic works seem serial, almost soulless by comparison.

Simon sketches how Vincent Van Gogh was foremost a world-improver, who cared for the common man, working as a 'lay priest' among but got fired by the Dutch Protestant establishment at age 30, and only then turned to painting as a means of continuing his social strife for the poor, while depending on his brother, who became an art gallery-keeper in Paris, for his meager livelihood, as his works' dark themes and colors didn't sell in the colorful, light-focused age of impressionism, yet made his mark on it after a visit to Paris, without becoming fashionable till long after his death in a mental asylum.

Simon sketches how Pablo Picasso, the Andalusian (south Spanish) hedonistic king of Paris' bohemian painting scene, who for decades deliberately created pioneering modern works, far from the classical traditions of realistic resemblance (in favor of cubism) and themes serving grandeur or devotion, nor aiming at beauty, while remarkably oblivious of contemporary political context, came to paint Guernica, his giant 1937 evocation of the horror of war in the German Luftwafe (airforce) total destruction of the Basque village of that name. Since Picasso was thematically inspired by his compatriot Goya's nightmarish war images, he visited Spain again in 1934, picking up the motives bull, horse and light-bearer, all to stay with him, and since general Franco started in 1936 a civil war, in which the right-wing Catholic country-based reactionaries, massively aided by Hitler's Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy which sent 40,000 troops, bitterly fought modernist urban Marxists' elected republican government, at all cost, the personal height of horror being the bombing of Spain's main museum, the Prado palace in Madrid, after which Picasso accepted its largely honorary directorship, while his turbulent love-life intensified his anxiety.

Mark Rothko, the Anglicized name of a Russian Jewish family which immigrated while he was a child to escape the abusive Cossacks, shortly before father's dead, initially followed the European painting tradition, but felt it failed to express the most meaningful emotions. After decades he developed an abstract style and got the reputation of the US's foremost painter by the 1950s, enough to be commissioned without contest a gigantic work for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram company's New York skyscraper, worth millions, which he ultimately turned down delivering, preferring patrons further from capitalism, which he distanced himself from. Simon highly esteems his work, often sets of abstract paintings each framing an empty space, supposedly the morbid window to a deep meaning. Ruthko's brooding finally lead him to suicide, after a life of chain-smoking already wrecking his health.