Alain Jaubert

Using a funerary portrait from the Fayum preserved at the Louvre Museum, this documentary explores the art of portrait painting in Roman Egypt during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. These strikingly realistic faces, painted on wooden panels and placed on mummies, reveal a multicultural society shaped by Egyptian, Greek, and Roman traditions. Through this single portrait, the film reflects on identity, memory, and the human relationship to death.

A harbor illuminated by the setting sun in a city of Italian style. On the left, a small temple topped with a clock. In the background, a large Renaissance villa with its four corner towers. On the right, sheltered by a small fort, a large basin reveals a row of tartanes. In the foreground, a shore where two ships are anchored. All around the port, figures stroll, gather, and converse. Positioned high, the viewpoint suggests a spectator looking down over the scene. A perspective effect is created by the convergence of lines toward an area near the center. Colors, the spacing of objects, grazing light, and the perspective of the architecture all combine to produce a powerful illusion of depth. The low sun generates numerous color combinations and transforms the relationships between the usual tones of objects.

By painting his monumental work The Raft of the Medusa, completed in 1819, Théodore Géricault elevated a news event to the level of modern history painting. A denunciation of cowardice, an admission of human brutality, a fascination with disaster—this ambiguous and unclassifiable work that obsessed the painter echoes one of the greatest scandals of the Restoration and, at the time, creates a new aesthetic.

Documentary of a network of caves discovered in 1940 in France. Inside are hundreds of depictions of animals painted approximately 17,000 years ago. The site is no longer open to the public, but can be seen here.

Around 1515, Master Mathis added painted panels arranged as double wings to a sculpted altarpiece created twenty years earlier for the convent-hospital of Isenheim in Alsace. Dedicated to Saint Anthony the Abbot, the work was intended for patients afflicted by ergotism—the “St. Anthony’s fire”—a scourge of poorly nourished Europe that the Order of the Antonines sought to combat under the spiritual protection of their healing patron saint.

Three cards in hand, gold on the table—we are in the middle of a game of prime, a precursor to poker. Eight gold coins lie before the female player, about a dozen before the young man: the stakes are very high. This painting depicts three card players and a servant; their mouths are closed, their gestures and gazes suspended. The cheat looks directly at the viewer, an ace of diamonds hidden in his belt—his face alone is fully illuminated. His diamond cards suggest money and sexual commerce, while those of his opponent, spades, evoke misfortune and a struggle against fate. In La Tour’s time, several edicts were issued against dice cheats and swindlers. This painting, like The Fortune Teller, illustrates a saying common at the time: “Love, wine, and gambling have ruined more than one man.”

Alain Jaubert uncovers the details, interprets the symbols, and analyzes the composition. Why did the painting spark such controversy when it was presented in 1831? Was it the nudity of this armed woman? Or the triumphant people depicted in a realistic staging?

This is certainly the most mysterious painting of all the history of painting. Thirty different attempts of finding out the hidden meaning of it have been made without success. The Flagellation is not only the masterpiece of a great artist telling an enigmatic story, it is also the expression of Renaissance's new ideas and art. Piero had a great reputation as a painter and as a mathematician. A few of his paintings show his vast knowledge of perspective. The architecture, the paving, the ceiling, the whole setting of The Flagellation - up to its smallest details - is governed by the laws of perspective. By computing all these datas, it was possible to recreate in three dimensions the exact space that Piero had imagined.

From the Bagdad School (14th century) to the Qadjar School (19th century), Persian painting has always preserved an extraordinary vitality. Court art essentially involving book illustrations, it had its schools, its royal ateliers, its secret techniques, its great masters. The focus of this film is one of the finest work from the department of oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a collection of Five Poems (Khamse) by the great 12th century Persian poet Nezâmi. The examination of papermaking techniques, make-up, calligraphy, drawing and painting affords an opportunity to discover a fascinating civilization

Ten similar faces are printed in black, in two rows, on a big canvas measuring 5,65 meters long by 2 high. Similar, these faces ? Not quite : the viewer can distinguish many little differences, like the variations that might come from a same mould. He can also recognise the face of a famous actress, Elizabeth Taylor, "Liz". Andy Warhol composed this picture in 1963 from a photo of the star and by repeating it ten times thanks to a screen-printing screen. Why this face ? Why this repetition ? Warhol does not reveal the keys to his work easily. He became a painter by chance and seems to choose his motifs arbitrarily. Working in New York in the 1960s, at the heart of the "pop art" movement, could he be a sort of negative reflection of consumer society ? A picture like this, which seems to break with traditional portrait art, can however be deciphered just as well as a more ancient painting...

At the time Wassily Kandinsky painted Yellow-Red-Blue (1925), he was a professor at the Bauhaus. In this work, the painter applies the principles of color and analytical drawing that he also taught to his students and developed in several theoretical writings. The paintings of this period are highly colorful and highly geometric. The three primary colors and the artist’s favored shapes—triangle, square, circle—become true epic characters. “Form is the outward expression of inner content,” Kandinsky said.

A plunge into the strange and fascinating world of Francis Bacon, whose painting struggles to exorcise violence and death. The anguished and very intimate universe of one of the greatest 20th century painters reveals multiple allusions to classical painting.

These three very big panels scattered in three different museums (London, Paris and Florence) are considered to be a sort of manifesto of the new art of the 15th century. The rediscovery of the principles of perspective of the ancient Greek treatises, the innovations of an architect like Brunelleschi or a goldsmith like Ghiberti were put to good use by painters to render space and depth. But, in Uccello’s work, in addition there is, besides the passionate quest for perspective, an intense curiosity for geometric shapes, for colour and above all for movement. The subject of The Battles of San Romano : an obscure battle in the Tuscan hills, in 1432, between the mercenaries of Florence and those of Sienna. Paolo made it into a feast for the eyes and the mind and invented paradoxical images which had consequences right up to the cubist and surrealist painters.

From his very first paintings, Rembrandt stages himself. Thereafter, at least a hundred times, he would take his own face as the sole subject of an engraving, drawing, or painting. Such persistence, unique in the history of art, has been interpreted in many different ways. Some of Rembrandt’s self-portraits might appear to express an extravagant man. Yet the objects depicted in them can often be deciphered in quite another way. Through canvases and panels, one can indeed follow the entire history of Rembrandt’s face, but also read the full symbolism of a humanist Europe undergoing profound transformation.

A century later, Alain Jaubert rediscovered the exact location where Seurat prepared his painting, as well as the studio where he completed it. In March 1886, the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition took place. A 26-year-old unknown artist, Georges Seurat, exhibited a very large canvas there, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. A striking light—born of a long reflection on the origins of color perception—a multitude of tiny dots, a landscape treated in a classical manner yet populated with caricature-like figures: the painting caused a scandal. It would give rise to the Neo-Impressionists, or more commonly, “pointillists.” Above all, it would leave a lasting mark on later generations—Fauves, Cubists, and Futurists. Van Gogh himself was deeply influenced by the discovery of Seurat.

It is with regard to the painting "Nude descending the staircase" that Alain Jaubert has chosen to evoke the work of Marcel Duchamp. It is 1913, in New York, and the work of this 25-year-old young man, which depicts different moments of the action of the same character, is causing a stir. Cubists do not recognize it as one of their own, and traditionalists see it as a dangerous iconoclast.

On the right, a very dark tree clings to the slope of a hill. At the center stands Saint Anne. She wears her hair in braids, her eyes lowered, smiling. Seated on her knees is the Virgin Mary, dressed in a low-cut, billowing pink gown. She leans toward the Child Jesus, a two- or three-year-old baby. Naked and very curly-haired, he is stepping over a rearing lamb. Behind them, the landscape reveals mountain peaks and glaciers from which roaring waters emerge. Anne seems to envelop Mary; Mary wraps her arms around Jesus, yet he escapes from his mother’s embrace, as if symbolizing a new birth. Painted between 1500 and 1515, The Virgin, the Child Jesus, and Saint Anne accompanied Leonardo da Vinci when he settled in Amboise in 1517 at the invitation of Francis I. The painting never returned to Italy and entered the Louvre in 1801.

The silhouette of a giant wave about to engulf fragile boats: this image of suspended fate has traveled the world in the form of postcards, posters, and advertisements. Why such success? How did an image so deeply rooted in a specific culture—that of Japanese prints—come to achieve such universality?

A study of Veronese’s painting The Feast in the House of Levi (1573), originally conceived as a representation of the Last Supper. By transforming the traditional space and spirit of the subject into a grand Venetian banquet, the painter was accused of heresy by the Inquisition (reconstructed here through a voice-over of his dialogue with the judges). Ordered to correct the work, Veronese changed only its title.

Blue period, blue traces, blue sponges... Yves Klein deserved his nickname of "Yves the monochrome". Even though he used many other colours, it is the colour of the sky that he chose above all, used over and over again and that he made into not just a mode of expression but a sort of spiritual energy. Klein had the idea of using directly the naked bodies of his models as "living paintbrushes", inventing by his strange sessions, between ritual and striptease, a whole catalogue of new forms. At the same time, intuitively, almost naively, he went through both the history of legendary pictures, the history of the peculiarities of nature and the noble history of nudes in painting. The Anthropométries are both a meditation on imprint, trace, disappearance and coloured variations on the theme of incarnation.

Shitao, one of the most skilled painters of his time, was deeply imbued with Buddhist spirituality, as he was forced to take refuge in monasteries from a very young age. His painting relies on the simplicity of line and the pure white of the paper. Here, a mountain landscape is rendered in ink on rice paper mounted on a silk scroll. Beneath the apparent simplicity of the subject unfolds a whole universe of hidden correspondences that one must learn to decipher.

Raphael strives to capture the open and sympathetic face of his friend and deliberately simplifies his composition. Yet the image is filled with clues and can be interpreted today using both traditional laboratory analysis and historical archives. The technical details of the pictorial surface, the choice of colors, and the hidden symmetries of the image already reveal how the painting was created. But the clothing, the hairstyle, the materials used, and even the model’s gaze—or the way the reflections are placed in his eyes—each carry a precise meaning within this composition.

An educational French TV documentary series which goes into depth during each episode into the analysis of a single painting.