'A geometric painter' is usually a figure of speech. With Piero it is not.

On days he did not paint, he wrote mathematics. The manuscripts survive. In front of his pictures I find myself lowering my voice.

https://youtu.be/RUa7x7aTkFc
#MeetTheOldMasters

A painting in London that quiets the room if you stand before it for five minutes. Nothing moves: not the figures, not the wind, not the dove.

The stillness is geometry. Piero della Francesca really was a mathematician; his treatise survives.

https://youtu.be/RUa7x7aTkFc
#MeetTheOldMasters

My favourite Fra Angelico in National Gallery ✨

Uccello's real name was Paolo di Dono. 'Uccello' means bird: a nickname.

Vasari says he loved birds. That is legend. But he did paint a duck and a woodcock into a fresco corner where the story needed neither.

https://youtu.be/NWj0d2DANBc
#MeetTheOldMasters

A shepherd boy draws a sheep on a rock. A passing master, Cimabue, takes him on. The boy is Giotto.

The source is Vasari; whether it happened, nobody knows. A shepherd who becomes a painter: the story people wanted. That it survived is a record too.

youtu.be/g4SMkeIc9ZY
#MeetTheOldMasters #Giotto

And Enrico himself? He inherited the family business and remained a moneylender until his death.

Was the chapel filial expiation, a hedge against damnation, or a high-stakes bid for civic prestige?

Whatever the motive, Enrico still kneels in the Last Judgment, offering his chapel to heaven.

Crucially, Dante never names the man; it was later commentators who identified the blue sow as the Scrovegni arms and the sinner as Reginaldo.

Moreover, modern scholarship suggests Dante wrote this after the chapel was built. Enrico wasn't reacting to Dante’s verses; Dante was reacting to them.

This notoriety echoes in Dante’s Inferno (Canto XVII). Among the usurers weeping on burning sands, the poet notes none are recognizable by face—only by the heraldic moneybags hung around their necks.
One carried a pouch marked with an azure, pregnant sow on a white field.

The Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, renowned for Giotto’s vivid blue frescoes, was commissioned by the banker Enrico Scrovegni.

Behind its beauty lies a dark family shadow: his father, Reginaldo, was an infamous usurer in an era when charging interest was seen as the grave sin of "selling God’s time."

Catalogue number one at the National Gallery: Sebastiano del Piombo's Raising of Lazarus.

Its first owner was not a museum but one man, an immigrant marine insurer. The nation's number one came out of a private drawing room.

https://youtu.be/00DDZ_-YpSM
#MeetTheOldMasters #arthistory

Mind the museum shop on the way out—proper dangerous.
Beyond standard socks and mugs, they’ve gone all out: fine bone china plates, watches, chess sets, jewellery.
You’ll easily spend way more than your ticket. Keep your wits about you!

Bagging tickets was mental (80k queue on day one). Inside, you queue for ~20 mins before viewing the 70m piece single file (~3.5m/min). Photos got banned after just 2 days thanks to flash use.
You’re constantly hustled along, so watching a 40-min lecture beforehand was a proper lifesaver.

A battlefield where nobody bleeds, lances in rows so tidy it borders on the absurd. Uccello wasn't painting war; he was showing off perspective.

The record of this episode: his daughter Antonia, one word in a 1491 death register, "pittoressa".

https://youtu.be/NWj0d2DANBc
#MeetTheOldMasters

Seven hundred years ago, on a day nobody recorded, European painting suddenly got heavier.

The Virgin used to float in gold. Then she came down and held the weight of a child. Episode 2 meets the two men credited with that: Giotto and Duccio.

https://youtu.be/g4SMkeIc9ZY
#MeetTheOldMasters

The nation's first art museum wasn't founded in a palace. It began in one man's drawing room.

In 1824 Parliament bought 38 paintings from a marine insurer for £57,000. Episode 1 walks that story, and the Sainsbury Wing itself.

https://youtu.be/00DDZ_-YpSM
#MeetTheOldMasters #arthistory