National Gallery of Art

Split into five parts and filmed on location in Israel and elsewhere, Yeshua features interviews with scholars, reenactments of events, and recreations of ancient culture and ritual.

This exploration of visual illusions, explained by James Burke in the context of its discovery by the Renaissance masters, and now used by Hollywood special effects wizards is certainly of the most valuable and entertaining educational videos ever produced. If you teach art or film, or if you are a student of any age, your education is incomplete unless you have seen this film. Works of Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Botticelli, Rapheal and others are used to illustrate the technical and artistic achievements of the Renaissance, but within a very contemporary context of how we see the world in reality or artificial illusion. This is about the discovery of how to make a two dimensional image appear in three dimensions through an understanding of light, shadow, color, and vanishing point perspective.

When restoration experts at Washington's National Gallery of Art began cleaning up their Renaissance masterpiece The Feast of the Gods, they discovered their "Bellini" is not what it appears to be -- that significant portions were altered and repainted sometime shortly after the master's death. Who would have dared tamper with the great man's work? And why? Experts set about solving the Bellini whodunit through use of X-rays, paint analysis, computer simulations, and other forms of latter-day techno-snoopery.