Pbs Masterpiece

Walt Whitman rises from a hardscrabble boyhood in Long Island and Brooklyn to write the masterpiece Leaves of Grass in 1855 that revolutionizes literature. Many of his most famous poems are profiled.

The dome that crowns Florence's great cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore – the Duomo – is a masterpiece of Renaissance ingenuity and an enduring source of mystery. Still the largest masonry dome on earth, it is taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighs as much as an average cruise ship. Historians and engineers have long debated how its architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, kept the dome perfectly aligned and symmetrical as the sides rose and converged toward the center. More than four million bricks could collapse at any moment – and we still don't understand how Brunelleschi prevented it.

In October 2007, a striking portrait of a young woman in Renaissance dress made world news headlines. Originally sold nine years before for around $20,000, the portrait is now thought to be an undiscovered masterwork by Leonardo da Vinci worth more than $100 million.

In October 2007, a striking portrait of a young woman in Renaissance dress made world news headlines. Originally sold nine years before for around $20,000, the portrait is now thought to be an undiscovered masterwork by Leonardo da Vinci worth more than $100 million.

DANTE: Inferno to Paradise, a groundbreaking two-part, 4-hour film, presents and explores the extraordinary power, beauty and drama of Dante's great masterwork, The Divine Comedy, set within the riveting circumstances of the poet’s own life, and of the turbulent times he lived in.

This extraordinary crucifiction scene - inspired by a weird mix of Spanish mysticism and nuclear physics - is often called the 20th century's greatest religious painting. Yet the artist was a notorious blasphemer whose work had provoked outrage in the Catholic Church.

High on a granite cliff in South Dakota's Black Hills tower the huge carved faces of four American presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Together they constitute the world's largest piece of sculpture. The story of Mount Rushmore's creation is as bizarre and wonderful as the monument itself. It is the tale of a hyperactive, temperamental artist whose talent and determination propelled the project, even as his ego and obsession threatened to tear it apart. It is the story of hucksterism and hyperbole, of a massive public works project in the midst of an economic depression.