Hermitage: The Power of Art

The film treats The Hermitage as a living being. It tells the story of the daily life of the museum today continuously leaving the ‘here and now’ to retrace two and a half centuries. A wonderful complex of buildings with the largest collection of paintings in the world. St. Petersburg and the Hermitage were a meeting point for foreign artists, architects and intellectuals creating connections through art and culture. The history of the museum is marked by the acquisitions of the enlightened Empress Catherine II, whose personality has continued to fascinate art historians and critics over the centuries. Toni Servillo leads us on this journey through cultural bridges between places and distant civilizations. Bridges form a symbolic visual element, that will be repeated in the narrative.

The film treats The Hermitage as a living being. It tells the story of the daily life of the museum today continuously leaving the ‘here and now’ to retrace two and a half centuries.
A wonderful complex of buildings with the largest collection of paintings in the world. St. Petersburg and the Hermitage were a meeting point for foreign artists, architects and intellectuals creating connections through art and culture.
The history of the museum is marked by the acquisitions of the enlightened Empress Catherine II, whose personality has continued to fascinate art historians and critics over the centuries.
Toni Servillo leads us on this journey through cultural bridges between places and distant civilizations. Bridges form a symbolic visual element, that will be repeated in the narrative.

Risking being denounced as an 'enemy of the people,' Igor Savitsky rescues 40,000 forbidden fellow artists' works and creates in a far desert of Soviet Uzbekistan a museum now worth millions.

Painter and critic Matthew Collings charts the rise of abstract art over the last 100 years, whilst trying to answer a set of basic questions that many people have about this often-baffling art form. How do we respond to abstract art when we see it? Is it supposed to be hard or easy? When abstract artists chuck paint about with abandon, what does it mean? Does abstract art stand for something or is it supposed to be understood as just itself?

With sumptuous palaces, exquisite artworks and stunning architecture, every great city offers a dizzying multitude of artistic highlights. In this series, art historians Dr Janina Ramirez and Alastair Sooke take us on three cultural citybreaks, hunting for off-the-beaten-track artistic treats - and finding new ways of enjoying some very famous sights.

This award-winning series, Private Life of a Masterpiece, reveals the full and fascinating stories behind famous works of art, not just how they came to be created, but also how they influenced others and came to have a life of their own in the modern world. The works of art featured here are both instantly familiar and profoundly mysterious.

Matthew Collings explores how Turner makes light the vehicle of feeling in his work, and how he found inspiration for that feeling in the waters of the River Thames. Throughout a lifetime of travel, he returned time and again to paint and draw scenes of the Thames, the lifeblood of London. The film reveals the Thames in all its diverse glory, from its beauty in west London, to its heartland in the City of London and its former docks, out to the vast emptiness and drama of its estuary near Margate.

Lucy Worsley travels to Russia to tell the extraordinary story of the dynasty that ruled the country for more than three centuries - the Romanovs.