The Chinese tradition landscape painting first blossomed as a great subject of art. ibid.
In 1565 the Flemish master Peter Bruegel painted a set of landscapes which reinvented that traditional medieval cycle – the labours of the months. ibid.
A new class of jobbing artists emerged to service this popular demand for landscape art. ibid.
Angkor Wat: It’s religious art at its most spectacular. Mary Beard, Civilisations IV: The Eye of Faith
For millennia, art has been used to bring the human and divine together. And it’s given us some of the most majestic and affecting visual images ever made. ibid.
How can a perfect and indivisible God give up a part of himself to create a son? … Were Jesus and God made of the same substance? ibid.
Islam is absolutely not an artless religion. ibid.
Heavenly vaults but made by the earthly hand of man. The imagined form of the universe: a circle, no beginning, no end, just wheeling eternity. Domes had appeared in antiquity and the medieval centuries but never with such compulsive grandeur. Simon Schama, Civilisations V: The Triumph of Art
The great flowering we call the Renaissance owed much to Arab scholars … the outpouring of creativity would flow both ways between Islamic East and Christian West. ibid.
St Peter’s: Michelangelo toiled away into his ’80s on this. ibid.
Cellini’s outrageous miracle in bronze … Perseus, head down … with the ultimate trophy … Cellini is a sorcerer, an alchemist. ibid.
On the outer wall of Lahore Fort, Jahangir set a vast display of mosaic tiles. ibid.
Caravaggio was a bisexual murderer with major anger management issues … but if he acted like a devil he painted like an angel. ibid.
Velazquez produced images of the royals on demand … with sparkling naturalism. ibid.
When civilisations meet each other for the first time there is always the danger of conflict … but time and again these momentous meetings sparked great artistic energy. David Olusoga, Civilisations s1e6: First Contact
The Benin bronzes: they are now regarded as one of Africa’s greatest treasures. ibid.
An encounter that would prove to be one of the most cataclysmic events in all human history. On the eve of Spain’s arrival, Central America was dominated by the Aztecs. ibid.
The very first Europeans to reach Japan arrived by accident. ibid.
Amsterdam was the testing ground for modern capitalism. Through its stock exchange, the Dutch East India Company became the world’s first publicly traded company … The modern art market was born. ibid.
Europe’s imperial ambitions came to dominate the globe. ibid.
Think of the Gothic cathedral and you think of the austerity of stone. Rows of saints and angels, and angels ushering the righteous into heaven and thrusting the damned into the halls of hell … The whole of the architectural design was meant to optimize that flood of heavenly coloured light. Shining down on you in Chartres cathedral were the stories of the Bible. Simon Schama, Civilisations 1e7: Radiance
The first great colourist to set Venetian art on this path and to do it with the dazzling luminousness of oils on wood was Giovanni Bellini. ibid.
The largest ceiling fresco ever painted: painted in the 1750s by Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo it’s a vision of Apollo the sun-god. ibid.
Another culture’s rapturous embrace of colour … the ancient Hindu festival of Holi. ibid.
The black paintings seem to me to be an endgame for Goya. ibid.
Eventually, a new generation of Western artists would put colour back into European art. But their inspiration would come from another culture on the other side of the world – Japan. ibid.
It was Vincent van Gogh who’d reach most feverishly towards an even more radiant redemptive in paint. ibid.
In the 19th century the world was transformed by a powerful idea: a belief among Europeans that their civilisation represented the pinnacle of human progress. It was idea driven by the modernising forces of science and industry. David Olusoga, Civilisations s1e8: The Cult of Progress
The Industrial Revolution first emerged in the English Midlands. Its most potent symbol was a new kind of architecture: the factory ... Industry forced nature to bow before the ambitions of mankind. But from now on industry would also demand human beings submit to the needs of the machine, working in shifts around the shop. ibid.
Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres: The Turkish Bath 1863: These were European fantasies. ibid.
J M W Turner: Dudley Worcestershire 1832: The great thinker and art critic John Ruskin saw in the picture an indictment of how the old way of life was being destroyed by the factory and the machine. ibid.
What can art do when horror comes calling? What can art do when civilisation itself is lost? Simon Schama, Civilisations s1e9: The Vital Spark
Is the art of our own time just so much buzz and fashion? A hot investment for the rich? Or is it an absolutely necessity? A light from humanity’s vital spark? ibid.
It wasn’t until autumn 1914 that Mondrian had the epiphany which would bring true abstraction into the world. ibid.
Abstraction pumped up with the vitality of expressionism: Jackson Pollock’s pictures were monumental in scale and ferociously physical in execution. ibid.
Yet it’s this visual greediness which has made contemporary art such a hit: the sense that the quality of the art and its subtlety isn’t necessarily compromised by its playfulness. ibid.
The strongest contemporary art has this magical power of transformation. ibid.
Ai Weiwei: Law of the Journey, 2017 … Cast adrift on an infinite ocean of terror and despair. ibid.
I’m just a man who keeps a strip of civilisation open in the wilderness. In Order of Disappearance 2014 starring Stellan Skarsgaard & Pal Sverre Valheim Hagen & Bruno Ganz & Birgitte Hjort Sorensen & Peter Andersson & Kristofer Hivju & Jan Gunnar Roise & Jakob Oftebro et al, director Hans Petter Moland, hero
The powers of financial capitalism have a far-reaching aim: nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, cover & p324
Can our way of life survive? Is our civilisation doomed to vanish? ibid. ch1
a) A period of declining rate of expansion; b) It is a period of growing tensions and class conflicts; c) It is a period of increasingly frequent and increasingly violent imperialist wars, and d) It is a period of growing irrationality, pessimism, superstitions and other worldliness. ibid.
The 19th century was marked by i) belief in the innate goodness of man; ii) secularism; iii) belief in progress; iv) liberalism; v) capitalism; vi) faith in science; vii) democracy; viii) nationalism. ibid. ch2
We can divide a society into six aspects: military, political, economic, social, religious, intellectual. ibid.
Goods are an asset; money is a debt. ibid.
The organizational structure for creating means of payment out of nothing, which we call credit, was not invented by England but was developed by her to become one of her chief weapons in the victory over Napoleon in 1815. ibid.
The industrial revolution existed in Britain for almost two generations before it spread elsewhere. ibid.
The Russian Empire to 1917: Against the Russians themselves unbelievable extremes of espionage, counter-espionage, censorship, provocation, imprisonment without trial and outright brutality were employed; the revolutionaries responded with similar measures crowned by assassination. ibid. ch3
Turkey: The Sultan made feeble efforts to reform in the period 1838-1875 but by the later date he was completely disillusioned with these efforts and shifted over to a policy of ruthless censorship and repression. This repression led at last to the so-called Young Turk rebellion of 1908. ibid. ch4
The old statement that England acquired its empire in a fit of absentmindedness is amusing but does not explain very much. It does, however, contain an element of truth: much of the empire was acquired by private individuals and commercial firms, and was taken over by the British government much later. ibid. The British Imperial Crisis: Africa, Ireland and India to 1926