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"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the culture of the Baroque. What do the music of Bach, the Colonnades of St Peter's, the paintings of Caravaggio and the rebuilding of Prague have in common? The answer is the Baroque - a term used to describe a vast array of painting, music, architecture and sculpture from the 17th and 18th centuries. Baroque derives from the word for a misshapen pearl and denotes an art of effusion, drama, grandeur and powerful emotion. Strongly religious it became the aesthetic of choice of absolute monarchs. But the more we examine the Baroque, the more subtle and mysterious it becomes. It is impossible to discuss 17th century Europe without it, yet it is increasingly hard to say what it is. It was coined as a term of abuse, denounced by thinkers of the rational Enlightenment and by Protestant cultures which read into Baroque the excess, decadence and corruption they saw in the Catholic Church. With Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge; Nigel Aston, Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Leicester and Helen Hills, Professor of Art History at the University of York."

"Engravings are objects of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy whose visual language is composed entirely of lines. From 1480 to 1650 Renaissance and Baroque (Early Modern) engravers made dramatic and rapid visual changes to the technique of engraving as they responded to the demands of reproducing artworks. ‚The Brilliant Line' follows these visual transformations and offers new insight intothe special inventiveness and technical virtuosity of Early Modern engravers."

„In August 1617 a small group of Saxon nobles gathered in Castle Hornstein near Weimar to establish a type of institution previously unknown on German soil ‚the learned society'. It was based on the Italian model of the previous century and specifically on the Academia della Crusca of Florence, to whose ranks one of its founding members, Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen, had been elected in 1600. Ludwig was the chief benefactor and the head of this new German society until his death in 1650, and he and its other founding members sought inspiration in their pursuit of learning from the many Italian literary societies which had contributed so much to the purification and normalization of Italian letters in the sixteenth century. The new German society was called the ‚Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft', the Fruitbearing Society, and its motto was „Alles zum Nutzen" - ‚Everything for a purpose'".