The Art of Spain

Something to look forward to this evening.

Look beyond Italy to the glories of Spanish art, broadcasters urged.

From Kenneth Clark's Civilisation to Alan Yentob on Leonardo da Vinci, when it comes to great art, television keeps on returning to the Italian Renaissance.

Now, the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has accused broadcasters of ignoring the artistic masterpieces of Spain in their focus on its Mediterranean rival.

In a new series, The Art of Spain, which starts on BBC4 next week, Graham-Dixon redresses the balance by introducing viewers to a rich cultural heritage ranging from the Moorish architecture of the south to baroque paintings inspired by a fanatical Catholicism and some of the most important modern art of the twentieth century.

"There has been very little about Spanish art on television. TV has rather been subject to an innate conservatism in its commissioning patterns," he argued.

"There's an element of, 'let's commission another series on the Italian Renaissance because we know that people like that'," he added.

The presenter revealed that he once heard a head of commissioning for arts programmes at the BBC say: "We do the 10 artists everybody has heard of and then when we've finished we do them again."

That may be an exaggeration, but there is little doubt Italian art has seized the imagination of programme makers for decades.

In his classic 1969 series on Western civilisation, Kenneth Clark devoted whole programmes to the flowering of the renaissance in Urbino and Mantua, and to the work of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.

More recently, Alan Yentob explored the life and work of Da Vinci for the BBC in the 2003 series Leonardo, followed in 2004 by a series on Michelangelo.

Part of the problem, according to Graham-Dixon, is the lack of books on the subject compared to the Italian Renaissance.

"One of the ambitions of this series is to say to people you can go to Spain in the same way as you go to Italy, not just in search of topless bars, beer and Benidorm," said Graham-Dixon. "If you're looking up general histories of Spain in the Golden Age a lot of the books are written by the same few people."

In The Art of Spain, Graham-Dixon divides Spain geographically and historically. The first programme looks at the impact of Moorish culture in southern Spain.

The second looks at Spain's Golden Age of arts and literature in the 16th and 17th centuries – when its empire was at its height, following a path through the mysticism of El Greco, and Ribera's paintings of suffering martyrs, to the apparent lack of religious belief of Velázquez.

Northern Spain, home to Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Salvador Dali, is the focus of the third programme, which looks at the artists' reaction to the fascist regime of General Franco, and explores the work of post-Franco architects such as Santiago Calatrava.