Movies: Art history

Raphael: The Young Prodigy tells the story of the artist from Urbino, beginning with his extraordinary early portraits of women - the Mother, the Friend, the Secret Lover and the Client. Delve into Raphael’s uncanny ability to capture celestial beau...

Claude Monet was an avid horticulturist and arguably the most important painter of gardens in the history of art, but he was not alone. Great artists like Van Gogh, Bonnard, Sorolla, Sargent, Pissarro and Matisse all saw the garden as a powerful subj...

The Mona Lisa by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci is the most famous painting in the world. What is the secret behind the "real" Mona Lisa? It draws legions of visitors to the Louvre in Paris to contemplate her enigmatic expression. I...

The Renaissance master Botticelli spent over a decade painting and drawing hell as the poet Dante described it. The film takes us on a journey through hell with fascinating and exciting insights into Botticelli's art and its hidden story....

Throughout the 19th century, imaginative and visionary artists and inventors brought about the advent of a new look, absolutely modern and truly cinematographic, long before the revolutionary invention of the Lumière brothers and the arrival of Decem...

A portrait of the visionary Dutch artist M. C. Escher (1898-1972), according to his own words, taken from his diary, his correspondence and the texts of his lectures....

Kingdom of Granada, al-Andalus, 14th century. After recognizing that his land, always under siege, is hopelessly doomed to be conquered, Sultan Yusuf I undertakes the construction of a magnificent fortress with the purpose of turning it into the land...

What started as a simple tomb became over a 2,000 years history the universal seat of Christendom and is today one of the most visited museum in the world with invaluable collections of Arts, Manuscripts, Maps. Using spectacular 3D modelisation and C...

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt is one of the most recognised and reproduced paintings in the world. It is perhaps the most popular poster on student dorm walls from Beijing to Boston. Painted in Vienna around 1908, the evocative image of an unknown embrac...

The Victorian era is often cited for its lack of sexuality, but as this documentary reveals, the period's artists created a strong tradition surrounding the classical nude figure, which spread from the fine arts to more common forms of expression. Th...

A film that looks at the genius of JMW Turner in a new light. There is more to Turner than his sublime landscapes - he also painted machines, science, technology and industry. Turner's life spans the Industrial Revolution, he witnessed it as it unfol...

Palazzo Vecchio: a history of art and power. Directed by Piero Messina, through a clever movement of the narration between past and present, makes a real journey into the beauty of an ancient place that still retains its undisputed charm....

For three and a half centuries, from the same day that Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) applied his last brushstroke to the canvas, the enigma of “Las meninas, o La familia de Felipe IV” (1656) has not been deciphered. The secret story of a painting unvei...

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Exhibition on Screen's latest release celebrates the life and masterpieces of Hieronymus Bosch brought together from around the world to his hometown in the Netherlands as a one-off exhibition. With exclusive access to the gallery and the show, this ...

Every fall, The Center for Cartoon Studies invites 20 aspiring cartoonists to White River Junction, Vermont for a no-holds-barred education in comics. Those who complete the two-year program earn a Master of Fine Arts degree and are ready to face the...

There is an interlinking history of violent European colonialism and the cultural legacy of ethnographic collections in institutions. This documentary traces the progression of colonial history from the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 to the systematic ...

Art historian Alastair Sooke traces the humanization of the Devil figure in medieval art from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries....

Year 1763, the Seven Years' War is about to end. August III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, has died, leaving empty the royal treasury and an extraordinary collection of paintings, sculptures, jewelry and goldsmith masterpieces, which he consi...

We go behind the scenes and into the minds of artists as they capture, commemorate, and, at times, condemn our presidents....