CLAUDIA SWAN
There have been times when I have been taken by surprise by what I've found myself researching - a range of topics I never really expected to get into, taking me by surprise, you know moments when I've thought, what am I doing now I'm an art historian

NARRATOR
Our understanding of the past comes from relics that time leaves behind. When new discoveries are made, our history changes. Revealing a secret often leads to a better understanding of the past, but sometimes it leads to a greater mystery.

CLAUDIA SWAN
It's very drab, very grey, cold, raining, predictably sort of awful setting. The stairways are huge, classically fascistic architectural gestures, and at the same time that it has this grandness it's also incredibly drab.

NARRATOR
Claudia Swan had travelled to Krakow to examine a collection of books that had ended up in Poland by an accident of war. They had been hidden in secret for half a century.

But the books were about to lead Claudia on a journey of discovery which would change her ideas of Renaissance science. She was an art historian entering unknown territory and nothing had quite prepared her for what she was about to see.

Nearly two thousand botanical watercolours, five hundred years old, and painted with stunning accuracy. There was nothing else quite like them in the world.

But where did they come from? Why were they painted? And what could they tell us about the past?


CLAUDIA SWAN
What I found in Krakow are botanical water colours that are exquisitely rendered and extremely well preserved beyond my expectations. The depth of the colouring, the use of multiple shades of a given colour to render the various flowers, fruits, leaves in certain light conditions…

And the whites were intact! And white in itself, I think it takes a certain level of an artist to apply it quite boldly, to apply whites to render things like certain silky weeds and grasses and grains, completely intact.


CLAUDIA SWAN
In the honeysuckle we have a great example of this range of colours from the reds, the red berries, to the greens in the various leaves, and then particularly the whites of the flower - this succulent flower and its pinky-whites, yellow-whites and the whites of the petals.

NARRATOR
Who could have owned the watercolours? Who made them? Claudia studied the paintings for clues, but the paintings gave little away. Only one thing seemed certain. These were products of the renaissance. Their vivid detail revealed a fascination with nature that was an obsession of the age.

MARTIN KEMP
Artists like Durer and Leonardo, to take the two great examples from Germany and Italy, were obsessed with getting things right. Now this wasn't a question of simply sitting down and photographing things with their eyes as it were, it's a lot more complicated than that. They want to understand how nature works in order to portray nature.

Durer's Great Piece of Turf is perhaps the supreme example, at least in Botany, of his depiction of natural form, and it's spine tingling! So we've got this extraordinary frisson - not just of a piece of turf sitting there, but of this active eye looking at it and saying what's that, how does that work look at that.

CLAUDIA SWAN
Durer represented plants, flowers, animals with an exacting attention that is the hallmark of the Renaissance.

MARTIN KEMP
There are a lot of artists who can draw animals well and they can sit the animal down if the animal will stay still and get a decent picture. What Durer can do and you in a sense can't say why he can do this because it's so extraordinary, is he can get this sort of twitching vitality where every bit of the hair of the hare seems to vibrate with nervous energy, and this creature sits there as alive as the day when Durer drew it.

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