WHEN I told a friend that I was about to write about visual arts coverage on television and that, in order to give some perspective, I would watch a few videos from the past, he replied that it ‘would probably reveal how much the BBC has changed’. That’s a pretty safe assumption, but one that ignores the fact that the BBC’s monopoly of arts programmes ended years ago. Nowadays, ITV, Channels 4 and 5, not to mention the digital and satellite stations, all offer programmes about art and artists as well as miscellanies such as ITV’s South Bank Show or BBC2’s Culture Show.

Not having satellite TV, I thought I would restrict my (wholly unscientific) survey to programmes from terrestrial television, beginning with the much-trumpeted Power of Art series by Simon Schama. First came my Henry Reed moment though. To explain, in 1940, the poet Henry Reed wrote a sardonic poem called Naming of Parts (a metaphor for Britain’s unpreparedness for war) in which a bullying instructor drills new recruits in assembling a rifle, several bits of which are missing. The repeated trope is ‘Which, in your case, you have not got’. Well, the first of Schama’s programmes was on Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and I missed it so I don’t propose to judge it’s content or presentation, but having been a Caravaggio pilgrim for years and having seen most of the great paintings in situ, I can’t resist an entirely gratuitous comment (my Caravaggio addiction, incidentally, is so chronic that there’s an embarrassing photo of me standing in front of the Merisi garage in the town of Caravaggio, clearly hoping to accost a mechanic to ask him if he’s a descendant of the great master). Schama, as the trailer promised, focused upon Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, the decapitated head bearing the artist’s anguished self-portrait. Shortly before his death, Caravaggio sent that painting to Cardinal Borghese as an act of contrition for past misdemeanours and that neatly conforms to an account of his life and work as a kind of Shakespearian tragedy. But (and here comes the gratuitous bit) there is a painting in Rome’s Doria Pamphili Gallery that reveals another kind of Caravaggio, one that doesn’t fit the template of ‘transgressive’ artist. The Rest on the Flight to Egypt is an early (1595) masterpiece of sublime beauty in which Joseph holds up a sheet of music from which an angel plays a lullaby on a violin. Resonant with theological symbolism, it precedes those dramas where the action takes place at the base of the canvas. I wonder if Schama mentioned it?

My suspicion that he didn’t, was compounded by seeing the second programme, on Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa, in the Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria (just across the road from Rome’s Termini station). This was the programme that I took to calling ‘Full-on Bernini’, so determinedly populist was Schama’s language and content. It had all the patronising elements that I’d feared, actors dramatising the rivalry between Bernini and Borromini for instance. ‘Patronising’ may be a bit harsh, but what makes producers think that the audience for a 17th century sculptor needs spoon-feeding? (Sorry about the contagious jargon, but that’s just a ‘no brainer’: they have an ingrained certainty that the average attention span is about two minutes). Still, for those who prefer their art history as a branch of celebrity culture, Bernini is ideal. Painter, theatre designer, architect, sculptor, relentless self-promoter, power broker, lionised across Europe, Bernini was the ‘divinely gifted’ artist that Pope Urban VIII ‘would have liked to embalm (to) make him eternal’. Schama provided plenty of this, from the architectural illusionism of the Vatican’s Scala Regia and dynamic sculpture such as the Apollo & Daphne, as well as much about his life, his disreputable brother Luigi and his affair with Costanza Bonarelli, which yielded the famous intimate portrait. Much of this provided a historical rather than art historical context: Bernini seems to have appeared on earth as a fully fledged genius unaffected by influences from other artists (Michelangelo, Maderno and Giambologna for example) save for his father. And then of course there is the main feature, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, originally known as The Vision of St. Teresa. It’s difficult, I suppose, for contemporary secularists to see this piece as other than psycho–sexual, the ecstasy, of course, being that of the female orgasm, but it was her own description of the event which was decisive in her canonization. Admittedly, her words such as ‘in his (the angel in human form’s) hands I saw a long gold lance with an iron tip, from which I thought a tongue of flame issued. With this he appeared to pierce my heart several times and this penetrated my most innermost parts… the pain was so intense that I groaned a number of times…’ will seem comical to post-Freudians but perhaps that really was the language of mysticism in the 17th century. Besides, if there’s sex, then it’s probably Bernini’s, not Teresa’s (the merest glance at her autobiography reveals what a forthright and intelligent woman she was). As for Bernini, the eroticism of the Rape of Proserpina and the torrid relationship with Constanza simply confirms what we already know, that he was a man of lavish sensuality. The climax, so to speak, of the programme was the discussion of Bernini’s overall conception of the monument. Frequently, reproductions simply concentrate on the swooning St. Teresa but here we were given an unedited version, a ‘tableau vivant’ as Wittkower described it (we would call it an installation) with members of the Cornaro family watching the event from the boxes on either side of it. This theatrical set is said to be Bernini’s version of the choir of The Convent of the Incarnation at Avila, the site of St. Teresa’s vision. It’s an intensely dramatic construction and lends itself to differing interpretations; of pious wonder or prurient curiosity.

Bernini appears again in Sir Kenneth Clark’s The Light of Experience, the eighth in his Civilisation series. In 1665, Bernini met Sir Christopher Wren in Paris, who remarked that he would have ‘given his skin’ for one of Bernini’s drawings for the Louvre (typically, Bernini treated the French with such condescension that, exasperated, they rejected his scheme). Clark’s mandarin style has often been mocked by brave class warriors and it’s true that his attempts at humour have all the grimness of a feared headmaster. Furthermore, his cultural references are absolutely uncompromising; poor people in Rembrandt’s etchings, for example, are likened to the prisoners in Fidelio, but as an uomo universale he is hugely impressive. The Light of Experience covers, for example, Dutch 17th century affluence, the collapse of the tulip market, Hals, Vermeer, Rembrandt (‘reinventing the bible in terms of emotional truth’) Sanredam, ‘the vulgar De Hooch’ and Paulus Potter. Among philosophers and scientists are Descartes (who lived in Holland) Boyle, Newton, Halley as well as Wren, all contributing to the study of light and the stars as well as the development of scientific instruments.

In fairness to Schama, his Rembrandt programme seemed to be a genuine labour of love, as one might have expected from the author of Rembrandt’s Eyes. This time there seemed to be fewer dramatisations (give or take the occasional life model) and a greater emphasis on vivid biography, with Rembrandt as inspired ‘psychologist of the human condition’. The political and economic background to his career was deftly sketched in and the emotional consequences of his relationships with Saskia, Geertje Dircx, and Hendrickje Stoffels anatomised in detail. As well as familiar masterpieces such as the Nightwatch and the Slaughtered Ox there were splendid drawings and etchings, among them treats such as the vicious Satire on Art Criticism. After this, it seems churlish to have been so disappointed with the Turner programme. Gone were the Turner of ‘colour-beginnings’ vaporous atmospheres and the abstract sublime, the Turner that Ruskin admired. Instead was a politicised Turner, The Slave Ship – one of the most shameful episodes of British history. No matter that Turner specialised in shipwrecks, snowstorms and epic tragedies, or that apocalyptic events were the common currency of Romanticism – witness John Martin; Turner had to be seen to be using his art in the cause of racial justice.

However, if the Turner program was contentious, the Holbein was simply crass. Seeing the Dead Christ in Basle, which was painted from a corpse, is an experience which will stay with me forever and the programme duly started with it. After that though, things went downhill fast. The programme would be ‘an art historical detective trail’, so we were treated to the Bond and Pink Panther themes as accompaniment and, lest we hadn’t realised that this was an enlightened post-modern production, a stunt was arranged whereby The Ambassadors was recreated in contemporary form featuring Chris Patten and David Frost. The upshot of this was that all mystery and gravitas was stripped from the painting in favour of relevance. If anyone was helped to understand the political subtext of The Ambassadors, I’d be amazed. It was the worst cultural experience I’d had since I went to a Happy Clappy christening earlier this year.

To repeat my earlier question, farragoes such as the Holbein feature really make me wonder who they are presumed to be for. Are they for people who know a bit about art and want to learn more, or are they tasters intended to whet the appetite of the uninformed? The best of the programmes from my random survey, a 1982 Omnibus feature on Piero Della Francesca, was exemplary in making no concessions, but making the full use of television’s resources to engage its audience. TV producers can choose to have a familiar presenter fronting the programme or an acknowledged expert, but the Piero had an international line up of scholars; Professor Marilyn Lavin, Martin Kemp, Nicholas Penny and Sir John Pope-Hennessy (whose accent makes Brian Sewell sound like a guttersnipe). There were notables too, such as John Mortimer and Harrison Birtwhistle and even an artist, Tom Phillips. The Piero trail was undertaken in winter and Tuscany looked magical in the snow.

Early in the programme, the scholars asked the ‘Shakespeare’ question: ‘if Piero could be considered the most important mathematician of the 15th century, where did he get his education?’ That remained a mystery, but the analysis of The Flagellation was superb, there were Philip Steadman’s three-dimensional model of its spaces, digital projections and Professor Carter’s (Professor of the Perspective at the RA) discussion of its symbolic geometry. There was also discussion of its role as a metaphor of the tribulations of the church (Constantinople had just come under attack from the Moors) as well as meditations on its Neo-Platonism and poetry. It required concentration but that was an effort hugely repaid.

In recent years, a group of experts including Tim Marlow, Neil McGregor, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Waldemar Januszczak and Brian Sewell, have come to be associated with highly professional and accessible programmes. With this group, one suspects that they, rather than TV ‘creative’ types, call the shots in terms of programme style. Each of them is characterised by a level of seriousness and independence that, given the intimidatory nature of television hard won. Brian Sewell? Yes, of course. I know that he’s loathed by the Dave Sparts of the art world, but his recreation of the Grand Tour was one of the most honest things appearing in a not particularly honest medium during the last year. Of course it wasn’t really the Grand Tour, but a recreation of his journey throughout Italy with three other art history students fifty years ago and their adventures in an unreliable car, getting stuck at Todi for instance, and rattling down steps into the piazza, made the business of experiencing great art in Italy (‘museo chiuso’) come vividly alive. And his selection of the art worth seeing was utterly, stubbornly personal. What’s more, he got it right. Anyone who can introduce a vast audience to the surreally Baroque Park of Monsters at Bomarzo has to be applauded.

William Varley is a writer and former regional critic for The Guardian in the North of England