the pantheon of italian renaissance art. creators of mona, madonna of the meadow and the sistine chapel's ceiling. to that pantheon, let's add one more name. mr. robert burns of bring on the, england. >> to paint clouds you must think clouds. >> reporter: burns, a part-time country singer, is turning his petite public housing abode into a renaissance masterpiece. >> so, this is where it all started, nick. >> reporter: he's keeping their vision alive. >> reporter: are you done yet? >> no, this is the renaissance. we're never done. there is no such thing as over the top. >> reporter: this all started eight years ago when burns stumbled u un this book at a yard sale. a glossy vatican guidebook. >> i did look at it and i just thought, goodness me this is absolutely beautiful. so, i thought, well, i'm a decorator, this has got to be, you know, i should be able to do this. >> reporter: self-taught by trial and error -- >> i like to this is my piece -- >> reporter: and self-educated by tireless research -- >> this is aceiling paint

. >> the addition of the museum to the cultural pantheons of san francisco has been phenomenon.ou have fabulous exhibits. there is one i want to talk about, "seeing gertrude stein." >> gertrude stein is a local woman. she was raised in oakland. she was an extraordinary individual who helped create -- many people call for the mother of modernism. years ago, i was introduced to someone doing research on her. i thought it would be an extraordinary exposition to take her and understand her at all for complexity. that is what we have on view during the summer of 2011. >> it is full of wonderful drawings, paintings, and sculpture. >> there is incredible art on view. we have photographs. we have sculpture. we have a lot of different things. we have a little something made for her by picasso. there are five different ways of looking at her life. it is not in chronological installation. it is looking at how she is portrayed in help artists, painters, and photographers presented her and how she thought about her own style and presentation. many people think she always had short hair. it w

robert boyle, one of the titans in the pantheon of science, believed that death sweat was one of the most valuable weapons in the physician's arsenal. boyle and newton and all these other early scientists shared a mental landscape. they all lived precariously between two worlds, the medieval one they'd grown up in, and a modern one that they had just begun to glimpse. these were brilliant, confused, conflicted, ambitious men. they believed in angels and alchemy and the devil, and they believed at the same time in a universe that was governed by precise mathematical law. if we could travel to the 1600s, a huge number of things would startle us; the piles of human waste blocking the streets, the body parts of executed criminals tacked up around town to keep in line -- [inaudible] with what you would see so much as what people believed. and one of the crucial differences between then and now was how our forebearers thought of god. this affected everything. the 1600s was a god-drenched society. god was everywhere. nowadayses when something tragic happens, we try to console ourselves by s