This superb exhibition of Italian Renaissance drawings, featuring 100 works and chosen from the outstanding graphic collections of the Uffizi and the British Museum, explores the evolution of the preparatory sketch in the 15th century. We learn how artists began to experiment with the medium in order to create finished paintings that were far more compositionally and stylistically ambitious, far more dramatic and full of movement, than anything that had come before. And though the drawings themselves were never meant to be seen outside the artist’s studio, we learn that by the early part of the 16th century, drawing had gained great importance as a medium in its own right.

Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking artists in their own right, in fact. As such, the school is considered to be something of a star in itself. So what’s its secret? This BBC Four two-parter aimed to find out - and, you’ve guessed it, in keeping with a certain jaunty documentary-making tradition, it gave the participants just enough rope to hang themselves.

Anthony Caro makes works with the human figure in mind. The venerated sculptor, who, at 86, remains seemingly unstoppable, came to prominence in the early Sixties with his brightly coloured abstract steel sculptures. These, such as his seminal 1962 work, Early One Morning – an open-form sculpture of welded steel plates and delicately balancing rods painted in bright red – chimed with an era of optimism and confidence. Any figurative references were entirely incidental.

How might a portraitist, working in oils, describe Martin Freeman's face? If one were a novelist, heavy with description, perhaps the following: fleshy, boneless features; pasty Northern European pallor; flesh the texture of sweaty suet pudding. Not, then, conventionally handsome, but still, we have those plaintive, expressive eyes and that rumpled yet quietly dignified presence. All perfect, actually, for put-upon Tim, the frustrated paper-clip-arranger in The Office who dreamt of better things and was played with touchingly eloquent bemusement by Freeman.

Richard Hamilton, the true father of Pop art and spiritual descendant of Duchamp, is not a particularly prolific artist. Rather, he sticks to an idea and works on it over several editions and in different media, so that we get a large body of work repeating the same image in paint, in collage, in photography and in mixed media. For Hamilton, now 87, in so much of what he has done over the decades the key idea cannot be conveyed by a single unique work of art, because the key idea is often to do with the multiplicity of images: in other words, the medium is the message.