Last time
in this potentially award-winning history of human civilization,
I showed you how our ancestors underwent a sudden spiritual awakening
like my Aunt Carol.
Like Carol, they found exciting gurus to follow.
But unlike her, they didn't leave their husband
to live on a farm in Wales with them, alongside eight other women,
in a situation I can't discuss further
as it's currently under investigation by North Wales Police.
Our world changed forever,
as religious messages of tolerance and forgiveness
inspired mankind to fight like rats in a shoe for hundreds of years.
But the world was about to have its mind expanded
and then split at the seams by a different kind of higher calling.
Humankind was about to undergo a renaissance
by having the Renaissance,
here on the same planet we still use today,
a glistening space rock known as Earth.
It's the year 1440. Not now, but then, in 1440.
And a new invention is about to spark a blaze beneath the bush of possibility.
Centuries earlier, the Chinese had invented printing,
but no one in Europe paid attention
until the printing press was invented again
by a German called Johannes "Steve" Gutenberg.
Gutenberg's press was the first of its kind in history,
except Chinese history.
Did the printing press actually change anything of significance?
If Gutenberg hadn't invented printing,
which meant that ideas could be communicated throughout the world,
our culture would not have developed in the same way as it has.
So in many ways, he has made the world our modern world today.
So that's your idea of significant?
The first book to be printed on Gutenberg's press was the Bible.
But as well as spreading the word of God,
it spread the word of scientists, philosophers, and eventually Dan Brown.
Writing new books takes a long time, so to give their presses something to do,
people reached back through time in search of old material to repackage.
That's how the philosophy of ancient Greece
suddenly came back in fashion and blew minds.
At the time, most people's lives were as grim and joyless as my Uncle Martin.
Their only hobbies were doing backbreaking work, dying of the plague,
or being tortured.
As far as they were concerned, this was all there was to life.
So for them, being exposed to ancient Greek philosophy
wasn't boring like it is now,
but a mind-expanding experience that transformed the way they saw themselves.
Like when my mate Paul ate five ketamine brownies
and thought he could communicate telepathically
with any animal he saw on television.
Although, whereas Paul ended up sectioned for his own safety,
our ancestors decided to change the world.
This is Florence.
The Italians call it Firenze to try and stop tourists from finding it.
But it's definitely Florence because we double-checked it on a British map.
Florence might look like a pointless mess today,
but in the 15th century it was the epicenter
of an unprecedented artistic and cultural phenomenon.
What was "Renai-sauce"?
Was that a sort of 16th-century ketchup?
Renaissance comes from the French "renaissance."
"Re-naissance."
Naissance is birth. So it was seen as a rebirth.
So it's not a condiment at all.
- No, not as far as I know. - Okay.
What sauces did they use back then?
So this is an area of culinary history.
I'm not very familiar with the history of sauces.
So you're not the sauce person?
I'm not predominantly a sauce person.
We're going to have to rethink this whole interview.
During the Renaissance,
Florence produced artists who, for the first time in history,
were competent enough to create paintings worth looking at.
One of the most competent paintsmiths was Botticelli.
So what's this painting?
So this is Alessandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.
It's one of the great paintings of the Renaissance.
So do we know if the birth of Venus actually looked like this?
Well, it's depicting a sort of mythical figure,
so it's sort of metaphorical.
So it's the idea of a goddess
who is coming into being, rather than being born.
Her neck's very long.
Was she part giraffe or could he just not do necks?
No, her... her neck...
It's meant to be a sign of beauty that he would have elongated the neck.
I've spotted a mistake here. Look.
He's blowing, and her hair's all whipping about.
But look at these trees on the right. Not moving at all. No wind.
I think these people have been photoshopped in.
It's all fake.
Other notable artists produced 3D paintings, or sculptures,
the most famous example being this very naked man,
known as "Michelangelo's David."
If you manage to look past his little marble goolies,
you'll notice there's an incredible amount of detail
all over the rest of Michelangelo's body.
His eyes have pupils in them like a Furby does.
His muscles are really detailed. Look at his abs.
They prove gyms are bullshit
because they didn't have gyms back then, but look how toned he is.
Then there's the realistic veins in the back of his hands,
carrying statue blood to his fingers.
Yet, despite all this attention to detail,
a quick inspection of his back half reveals he doesn't have an anus.
It's a baffling omission.
Maybe the sculptor got embarrassed
or the model had to leave early that day, or didn't actually have an anus.
We just don't know.
The undisputed master of the Renaissance
was a human known as Leonardo da Vinci.
This is The Vitruvian Man.
It's a drawing made by Leonardo in about 1490.
What's it for?
What's the point of it?
The point was that Leonardo wanted to know
how to sketch the human body proportion.
Just to be clear, you can see his bits too?
I'm not imagining that.
Is there a version of this with underpants on?
Oh, no, no, no.
He thought that was fine, did he? It's a bit rude, isn't it?
No, it's not.
Because, you know, the beauty of the human body, of course.
Look at the todger. You can't say that's beautiful.
Look at it.
Leonardo also filled notebook after notebook with drawings of inventions
years ahead of their time.
What's that?
This is a flying machine. It's like the helicopter.
It doesn't look very convincing.
Like my mate Paul invented a treadmill for his fiancée's pet snake,
and the sketches for that were much more convincing than this.
And he was on mushrooms.
Mind you, the prototype did pull the snake's head off.
Yeah...
Worst ending to a birthday party I've ever been to.
His inventions were one thing,
but it's mainly for his paintings that we know da Vinci today.
This is the Mona Lisa, an actual painting that exists in our world and on this wall.
It's Mona Lisa's enigmatic character that draws people in.
Like all women, you simply can't tell what's going on in her head.
Just looking at her prompts so many questions.
Who is she? What's she smiling about?
Is she holding a balloon between her knees?
And if so, what color is it?
Has she got a boyfriend? What's his name?
What's between his knees, and how can we find out?
The answer is we can't.
And that's why people keep returning every year
to gaze upon her and wonder,
then stop wondering and go home.
As well as looking all right,
"Da Vinci's work demonstrated mastery
of the trailblazing techniques of the age," it says here.
Before the Renaissance,
other people's paintings were in a sort of wonky 2D.
That's because artists had no sense of perspective.
A bit like my mate Paul, who punched a waiter in a TGI Friday's
for dropping his banoffee pie.
Just look at this 14th-century painting of Jesus having his fateful tea party.
The dimensions are all wrong.
The room's squashed up,
so it looks like it's happening in the lid of a cardboard box.
Jesus is twice as big as the others,
so it looks like he's enjoying an intimate dinner with some school boys.
Not a good look.
And what are those? Bowls or seashells?
It's just shoddy craftsmanship. Absolutely disgraceful.
Shouldn't even be in a museum.
But da Vinci's reboot of the same painting is a different story.
He knew how to perspective the fuck out of things.
Look at the angles of the walls in The Last Supper and the table there.
You almost feel like you could crawl inside it and betray Jesus yourself.
Perspective was a huge leap forward for human art,
on a par with the release of Crash Bandicoot centuries later.
There's no denying the Renaissance was a pretty big deal for civilization.
Just how important it was is for experts to decide.
Which was more culturally significant,
the Renaissance or "Single Ladies" by Beyoncé?
They both have their period and they both have their time.
Um...
Beyoncé I'm rather fond of,
but what the Renaissance was trying to do
was to reform culture as a whole,
and whatever Beyoncé does, I don't think she's quite got that ambition.
So, what, the work of a few straight white men
just blows Beyoncé out of the water?
Is that what you're saying, on camera?
The Renaissance might have been expanding minds,
but without programs like this around to educate them,
people were still largely ignorant about the planet they were living on.
Ask a medieval peasant where America was and you'd get a blank look.
Or, worse still, the plague.
That's because to them, the world map looked like this,
a garbled mass of the countries they'd discovered so far,
all squashed together, with America nowhere to be seen.
But one man changed all that:
Italian sailor and detective Christopher Colombo.
Colombo thought that if he sailed off the edge of the map,
he'd reappear on the other side like Pac-Man.
It would be a shortcut to India, and he'd shake off any ghosts on his tail.
It was a huge risk.
If Colombo was right, he'd be a millionaire.
If he was wrong, he'd be a laughingstock. But a dead one.
And he could live with that, which is why he set sail.
Colombo failed to find India,
but his ship eventually bumped into the New World,
Planet Earth Part Two, aka America.
And before long, others were following in his wake.
This is Plymouth.
Gathered here in 1620 was a group of pilgrims who yearned for a better life.
Which isn't surprising because, like I say, this is Plymouth.
The Pilgrims leapt into their water mobile, or boat, the Starship Mayflower
and bravely sailed across this drawing of the Atlantic Ocean
to arrive on the other side, still in Plymouth.
They must have been devastated.
Luckily, it turned out this Plymouth wasn't the one they'd just left.
At first, the European colonists found life in the New World hard.
Luckily, some Native Americans taught them how to grow corn
and where to fish.
In exchange, the colonists introduced the Native Americans
to smallpox.
The settlers never forgot what the Native Americans had done for them,
although they did ignore it when they massacred them years later.
While the New World was undergoing massive change,
a controversial breakthrough was brewing in the Old World.
It's the early 1600s, and this stupidly dressed scientist
is about to change the way mankind sees itself forever.
His name is Galileo,
one of the few figures in history to become so famous,
they're known by just one name.
Like Churchill, Pepsi or Garfield.
Galileo's full name was Galileo Figaro Magnifico, wasn't it?
I'm not sure that's right. I don't know...
That's what it says in "Dominican Rhapsody."
Are you thinking of "Bohemian Rhapsody"?
What was his name then?
Well, as far as I'm aware, his name was Galileo Galilei.
- Galileo Galilei? - Yes.
That's like me being called Philomena Philomenei.
Actually, I quite like that.
Galileo invented a telescope so powerful,
he could watch people getting changed on the Sun.
Bloody hell. This makes everything look massive.
Have you had a go on this yet? It's amazing.
How did you do that? Are you the real Galileo or an actor one?
Was the real one busy?
Galileo's astronomical smart arsery
led him to a discovery so shocking, the Pope shat his hat off.
According to the Old Testament, the Sun goes around the Earth,
not the other way around.
So as far as the church was concerned, Galileo was calling the Bible a liar.
Rather than overreact,
they did the Christian thing by accusing him of heresy
and finding him guilty in a corrupt show trial.
Galileo was sentenced to spend the rest of his life under house arrest
on a planet with the Sun spinning around it.
The church thought the Sun went round the Earth,
but Galileo thought the Earth went round the Sun.
Whose side are we on here?
We are most definitely on Galileo's side,
as I think the church is today.
Is it possible they were both right and the Sun and Earth go round each other?
That would keep everyone happy. Can we just agree on that?
If only he'd invented some kind of immortality engine
instead of his pointless telescope,
Galileo might have lived to see his ideas accepted.
Sadly, he simply wasn't that clever.
Like science, the world of philosophy was also expanding,
thanks to massive thinkers like this man.
Who was Jim Des Cartes?
Well, I don't know who Jim Des Cartes might be,
but I do know that René Descartes is often thought of
as the founder of modern philosophy.
What did he mean by "I think therefore I am"?
Descartes meant that
self-awareness,
self-consciousness,
is the defining feature of human identity.
So hang on, if I think therefore I am, what about other people?
Do they think therefore they am?
How can I tell if they're thinking therefore they am?
Or am I just thinking they think therefore they am,
but actually they're not real and I'm only thinking they am?
Are you thinking therefore you am right now?
Well, I wouldn't want to say that
my existence is dependent upon my thought,
but that is not the claim that Descartes wants to make.
Is it possible to think you're someone else?
Like, if I thought really hard that I was Eddie Murphy,
could I eventually become him?
If I did become him, would he become me
or would he just disappear?
Did Des Cartes ever cover this stuff?
No. That's not a topic that Descartes is covering as far as I'm aware.
Why not?
Descartes inspired an intellectual movement
known as the Enlightenment,
during which metrosexual elitists published essays
that expanded humankind's horizons in a manner that will go unmatched
until the 1989 release of Belgian techno anthem "Pump Up the Jam."
The man trapped inside this painting
is Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
a name so French, he might as well have been called Pierre Baguette,
but wasn't.
Which is why I didn't call him that.
Rousseau wrote, "Man is free but is everywhere in chains."
He dreamed of a new society in which people were masters of their own destiny.
It was the same dream that was tempting colonists to the New World in droves...
and boats.
After arriving in America to forge a life of honest, hard work and toil,
many of these colonists quickly discovered they couldn't be arsed,
so they stole people from Africa and made them do it instead.
You might think these were precisely the people Rousseau had been talking about
when he said mankind needed to throw off its chains.
But they weren't.
Like many humanists, he'd found a clever loophole.
By not thinking of slaves as human, he was free to not give a shit.
As luck would have it, around this time,
the colonists started getting interested in freedom.
Although as luck wouldn't have it,
it wasn't the slaves' freedom they were interested in, but their own.
The British colonies were ruled by king and line drawing George III.
But the relationship between old England and the New World was getting frosty.
What started the tension between the British and the Americans?
Was it because you say cookies and we say biscuits
and you say sidewalk and we say pavement?
Because I find in a relationship,
it's those little things that start to grate after a while.
It was worse than that.
Britain decided they were going to tax the colonies
and this hadn't happened before.
So it was a disagreement over money, basically.
It's like the situation between me and my ex, Sean.
Uh, when we used to get takeaway, or takeout, as you call it,
um, sometimes, you know, he would always insist that we go halves
and yet he would want to buy things like onion bhajis, which he knows I hate,
and they made his breath stink.
- Mm. - So, but I had to pay for half of that.
That doesn't seem fair to me. Does it to you?
Put that way, no.
No. And that's from a professor, Sean.
Finally, in Boston in 1773,
a group of colonists decided they'd had enough.
So when the people in Boston got angry with the British,
why did they just hold a prissy Tea Party
instead of having a proper fight like British men would?
Why has there always been this big cowardly streak in the Americans,
even to this day?
Well, the only cowardly streak in that, I suppose,
is that they dressed themselves up as Indians
and no one said who their names were.
But would you voluntarily,
when you didn't have to, go to jail?
It depends what facilities they had, I think.
Disrespecting our tea was one thing,
but an even nastier slap in the tits was to come.
In 1776, the leaders of the 13 colonies decided
that they didn't want to be called British anymore, but Americans.
This straight, white supergroup known as the Founding Fathers
drafted the most famous breakup text in history,
the Declaration of Independence.
All the men you see here became idols if you're American.
Otherwise, they're just not all that.
It led to all-out war between American and British.
Because no one had invented camouflage yet,
the British troops of the time wore bright red coats
and were consequently shot in their thousands, while looking amazing.
This painting depicts one of the war's most pivotal events:
George Washington crossing the Delaware River.
As you can see, he had to stand up for the whole journey
because he hadn't reserved a seat.
He didn't fall in, but he also didn't help with the rowing,
which must have been annoying.
Eventually, Washington won, becoming America's first president,
the single most revered role in the world,
until 2016.
Washington and the other founding daddies wrote the Constitution,
an instruction manual for their new country,
containing some of the most influential political concepts ever.
I read somewhere that America isn't just a country, but an idea.
But it is just a country, isn't it?
Well, it was founded under an idea,
so it's organized around...
has always been organized around the idea
that it's a land of liberty for everyone.
Yeah, but, like, having a sandwich, that's an idea.
Painting your bicycle blue, that's an idea.
Going... that's an idea.
America is just a place.
The American Revolution sent shockwaves around the globe,
not to mention the planet.
It hit especially hard in France,
where the common man, or "homme," had to scrabble about in the muck
while the rich had got so posh they'd evolved frills.
Soon, the average Jacques had enough of their ruler, King Louis XVI,
and his identical wives, Marie and Toinette,
who enjoyed lavish lifestyles while the poor were forced to survive on cake.
Finally, in 1789, it exploded into topless revolution.
The poor toppled the king
and invented a machine that would rid the world of royalty forever.
The guillotine was specifically designed to be the most humane way
to decapitate someone in front of a jeering crowd.
You simply fed a royal, headfirst, through the chopping hole here.
Then the razor-sharp blade up there would drop down and slice their head off,
sending it sailing away from their neck and body.
At that point, they probably thought they'd escaped.
But any sense of victory was short lived, because moments later,
they'd land face first into this horribly coarse wicker basket.
If you look, there's no padding in there,
so the fall would have caused extensive bruising
and maybe even concussion.
I suppose it could have been worse.
They could have made you stick your head out of a carriage
and driven really close to a building.
Even so, being guillotined would have had a huge impact on anyone.
But especially King Louis.
With his head gone, he could never breed or wear a crown again
and was almost certainly unemployable in any other line of work.
Perhaps that's why he chose to withdraw from public life completely
shortly after it happened.
The French Revolution wasn't the first time
the masses had risen up against the elite, and it may not be the last.
A lot of revolutions seem to be about poor people overthrowing the rich.
Do you think billionaires like Elon Musk
should be worried about getting guillotined?
I think that the French Revolution
certainly made a lot of people who were powerful
very, very worried about their existence.
I suppose Elon Musk could invent a machine that chops his own head off electronically
before the mob arrives.
- You know much more about this than I do. - I'm just guessing.
Soon, France decided it needed a strong man to take charge of things,
and they got one in the form of the Emperor Napoleon.
No relation to the Emperor Penguin as far as we can ascertain at this time.
Napoleon did a load of massive wars on land and sea,
which remain far too expensive to properly re-create
in historical documentaries to this day.
Laying sound effects over a painting of a battle like this
gives some idea of what it might have been like,
but there was still a key ingredient missing.
A soundtrack of classical music was the only thing
that would really bring these Napoleonic wars to life.
See? Loads better.
And luckily, classical music was being perfected elsewhere in Europe
by a composer called Beethoven.
Did Beethoven have an actual full-sized horse living inside his face?
Sorry, I've misphrased that.
I mean, was Beethoven good at music?
Yeah. He's considered to be the best composer of Western classical music ever.
Beethoven wrote that song that goes...
What do those lyrics mean?
Um... Well, it's a really strong orchestral motif.
It's just the word "dum" over and over again.
Is it a dig at his audience, or is it German for something?
With the Beethoven symphonic music, it's all just instruments.
So there are no words to these pieces at all.
No lyrics? How are we supposed to know what it's about if it doesn't have lyrics?
It's literally meaningless.
Despite enjoying great success with his pointless tunes,
Beethoven faced huge personal challenges in his career.
Is it true that in the final years of his working life, Beethoven was dead?
Well, he was deaf for most of his life.
No, dead.
- Dead? - Yeah.
No.
The producer wrote it in the notes.
It's definitely here. Let me see.
"In his later years, Beethoven was profoundly dead."
Profoundly deaf. D-E-A-F.
Obviously he went deaf when he died.
But was he deaf when he was still alive?
Yes, he was profoundly. Yeah, he was profoundly.
But not dead? He wasn't dead when he was alive?
No, no. Not.
So how did he write the music when he was dead?
On 26th March 1827,
Beethoven did roll over and his genius was thought to be lost forever.
Until now.
Silicon Valley boffins have re-created his mind
and installed it into this smart speaker, the B8-Hoven Smart Home+.
Let's see if it works.
B8-Hoven, compose a new symphony.
- Was war das? - Compose a new symphony.
Where am I?
What? Just compose your thing.
Mein Gott, it is dark in here.
Why am I speaking English? I cannot see my legs.
Just... play my Friday night playlist.
Playing Friday night playlist.
Why am I doing this?
Mein Gott im Himmel, kill me!
As we've seen, in just a few hundred years,
humankind had undergone a series
of massive cultural and political revolutions.
Next time, I'll show you an even bigger revolution:
an Industrial Revolution forged in steel, steam, sweat,
planes, trains, automobiles and planes a gain.
People tried for years to make an aeroplane.
Why were we so interested in conquering the sky?
There's nothing up there. There's not even anywhere to sit.