KEY POINTS:
Simon Schama is an unlikely telly star. He looks like an ageing professor, for one thing. The other count against him is that he opens his mouth and words pour out like great torrents of paint.
He splatters words, spits them, throws them about with the seeming abandon
of that joker, Jackson Pollock, who used to stand on his canvases and throw paint at them.
It would be fascinating to see (hear?) Schama's The Power of Art (Sundays, TV One, at the ludicrous hour of 10.30pm) tackle modern art. He would say he already has. Last night it was Caravaggio; next week, Rembrandt.
Tackle? That's an inadequate word for Schama's ambitious approach, which is to bring great works of art, and the great painters who made them, alive on the telly.
In Caravaggio he has a compelling subject with an irresistible life story. He was a strutting braggart; a mad man; a genius; a profane painter of the sacred; and in the end, a tortured murderer. Probably, he said things like "up your arse".
He was thrown in jail under suspicion of writing rude verses about a rival painter. He denied it, but whoever wrote them was obviously an art critic. He painted Mary, mother of Christ, dead, bloated. This was a scandal: there was a rumour that he used a dead whore from the morgue as his model.
But how to tell all this without resorting to talking heads? Schama resolutely resists such an approach. He's the only talking head, and he couldn't be further removed from what is implied by such a description.
Here he is on Caravaggio's The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. "It's all flicker, flicker, strobe lit, hand held, stuttering and shrieking."
And on Caravaggio's Rome, a place just a palazzo or two from the pious grandeur of Holy Rome but a thousand miles away in terms of what a young painter might find to look at. Caravaggio's Rome was "sour wine, old garlic, street urchins, beggars, tumblers, quacks and whores".
The traditional route to becoming a great painter in the Italy of the 1600s was to learn to draw, then copy, copy, copy. "Caravaggio never drew a thing in his life. He just looked, eyeballed - then he'd paint."
But this being telly, you can't just tell it. You have to use the dreaded, usually dreary, reconstructions. Schama uses reconstructions of the paintings (and of Caravaggio looking mad, strutting, fighting, etc) and in doing so really does bring the paintings to life. Boy with fruit bowl sighs with the boredom of being painted. The gamblers gamble. And then there are the paintings.
The irony about Schama's brilliant show is that he is the last person with whom you'd want to look at a painting. He'd never shut up. Yet here, you get to see the paintings as you'll never see them in a gallery with thousands of others, all trying for the best gawk, the one that will give you a clear view of genius.
Here they are: beautifully lit, showing every lick of paint, corner of darkness. In Caravaggio's self-portrait, David with the Head of Goliath, the painter is Goliath. It is, says Schama, "a bloody grotesque ... the embodiment of wickedness ... a desolate vision offered to us in utter darkness".
That's great telly: to offer up a great painting and make it come to life so compellingly that it makes us flinch. God forbid anyone should see it.
