Television - Andrew Billen admires Andrew Graham-Dixon's Renaissance

Some have detected a nervousness within the BBC about Andrew Graham-Dixon's "landmark" series, Renaissance. With Omnibus pursuing The South Bank Show into pop culture, The Late Show unreplaced and the always enjoyable Late Review threatened with being turned into a celebrity panel game, it is not just the BBC's governors who want the BBC to try harder with its arts coverage. Now, by blowing £1.8 million on six hours of television and entrusting the greatest cultural movement in western history to one talking head, the BBC has put huge pressure on Graham-Dixon to be the Kenneth Clark de nos jours. Graham-Dixon, meanwhile, nervously assuring the licence-fee paying readers of Arts Quarterly that he never spent more than £7 on lunch while filming and carefully wearing the same suit throughout episode one, creates additional difficulties for himself by telling the Independent on Sunday that he never thought Clark much cop anyway.

Anyhow, originally due in March, Renaissance finally hit BBC2 on Sunday night at the unhelpfully early hour of 7pm. The BBC was right to be worried. The first episode was such a tour de force it made the rest of the corporation's arts output look spineless and unintelligent. Graham-Dixon threw out ideas at such a rate in his first 60 minutes that even a civilian could hear critical icons being smashed. "I think Bellini is almost too good," he told us in Venice. "He wears his influences so effortlessly that it is easy to underestimate how much effort has gone into his pictures." But Graham-Dixon is not so good that we do not notice the hard sell of his arguments. Within minutes, it was clear his Renaissance would not be a "celebration", "a visual treat" or a travelogue (it rains; the camera focuses on lumpen Italians), but a demanding television essay.

Its central thesis was that the 15th century was not a time of spontaneous change in the west but the climax of two centuries of movement in the west, the north and the Byzantine east. His first programme was largely set in the 13th and 14th centuries as it set out to prove that there was nothing dark about the Dark Ages. An English graduate turned newspaper art critic, Graham-Dixon did not mind whom he mixed it with, starting with the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari, who pronounced Giotto the father of western painting. "I don't think it makes sense to speak of any artist in those terms," he scolded. "There are no absolute beginnings." (Julien Temple's movie must have been loitering somewhere in the back of his head.)

His dreamy voice notwithstanding, Graham-Dixon remained unerringly contrary. Some call Bellini's San Zaccaria altarpiece a "sacred conversation"; he'd call it "a sacred meditation". The devils of a Pisano pulpit in Pisa were not satanic but Bacchic. Call Bruges the Venice of the north, if you like; it is also "another Florence". But alongside the iconoclasm, there was simply plenty of good, detailed art criticism. Of a Duccio altarpiece in Sienna, Graham-Dixon noted that Pilot and Jesus were dressed in clothes of the same cloth, mirroring the sympathy the New Testament tells us they had for each other. A Giotto fresco paints St Francis's deathbed as a version of Christ's crucifixion, with a monk playing Doubting Thomas by poking his fingers into his stigmata. A lamentation he discovers in a mountain church in Macedonia is one of the most moving depictions of Mary mourning Christ he has seen: "She cradles him between her legs as if he is being born, a fusion of life and death in a single image."

What was wrong about Lord Clark's approach was not so much that he patronised us as that he wanted art to intimidate us. Graham-Dixon, whose premise is that the Renaissance is about the individual, turned the artists back into people we might understand. Giotto, we learnt, was a property speculator who rented out looms. The self-torturing St Francis of Assisi was a "kind of visual artist", whose emphasis on the Passion of Christ encouraged artists to make the body so real it bled. Duccio's altarpiece was an advertisement for the local textile trade, his heaven a mansion of a thousand patterns, comparable to the oriental and African fabrics loved by Matisse. Graham-Dixon saw in Pisano's stone bull Picasso's, in Turner's sunsets and Van Gogh's corn fields the gold of Byzantine church ceilings.

He mooched around the Renaissance, insisting that he had as much right to be inspired by religious art as St Francis, and when the camera revealed young Andrew sitting in silence where St Francis heard a painted Christ speak to him, this did not seem particularly absurd. After all, in his History of British Art a few years ago, he climbed on to a rood screen in a parish church in Devon and posed as Christ himself. Renaissance is every bit as egotistical and presenter-driven as Civilisation. But while Clark was a high priest, translating art's mysteries to his Sunday-night congregation, Graham-Dixon is the Renaissance's candid, revisionist biographer. It is not what audiences will expect, and it may take them a while to appreciate its quality.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"

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