Simon Schama's Power of Art

Simon Schama recounts the story of eight moments of high drama in the making of eight masterpieces. How Caravaggio changed the way artists portrayed religious icons.

Documentary series in which historian Simon Schama recounts the story of eight moments of high drama in the making of eight masterpieces. He looks at how Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy of St Thereza shows a nun in the state of orgasmic bliss and wonders how it was ever allowed.

Why did one of the world's greatest artists cut up his own masterpiece, The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis? Simon Schama tells the story of the rise and fall of Rembrandt van Rijn in glittering 17th-century Amsterdam.

Simon Schama recounts the story of eight moments of drama in the making of eight great works of art. He looks at Jacques Louis David's revolutionary painting Death of Marat .

In this revealing blend of history and art, Simon Schama tells the extraordinary story of how Britain's greatest painter, JMW Turner, created one of his most powerful paintings, The Slave Ship .

In 1890, Vincent van Gogh painted his great masterpiece Wheatfield with Crows , but a few weeks later, he killed himself. Was the painting a cry of anguish that he would never realise his dream of creating an art revolution, or was it a shout of triumph that this kind of painting would be the new art for the people?

Simon Schama tells the story of Picasso's epic Guernica , looking at both the Nazi bombing massacre that inspired the painting and Picasso's extraordinary artistic response. The film combines Schama's trademark sassy storytelling with dramatisation to ask what art can do in the face of atrocity.

Mark Rothko believed that tradition was all used up, and that figurative art no longer had what it took to connect us, viscerally, to the human tragedy. Only a completely new visual language of strong feeling could wake us from moral stupor. So he set himself - and New York - a test.