We know what civilisation is: we know it from the shock of its imminent loss as a mutilation on the body of our humanity. ibid.
We are the art-making animal. ibid.
When did it begin that second moment of creation, the dawning of human creativity? Where did it begin? ibid.
Europe’s first great civilisation: the culture of the Minoans … This is the first truly social art the world had seen. ibid.
The Nabataeans had what you might call an instinct for cultural ecology; they worked with the rock in their desert home … This is Petra. ibid.
A garden city of fountains, swimming pools, groves and orchards … A city of 30,000 people … A cosmopolitan playground. ibid.
Mayan art and architecture was a prayer – an appeal to the weather … But Mayan art wasn’t all enormous and formal – far from it – it was hugely varied. One of the most spectacular flourishing of creativity in human history. ibid.
All civilisations want what they can’t have – the conquest of time. ibid.
Tabasco State, Mexico: There are many places where you can come face to face with the ancient world. But I have to say this is hard to beat. This colossal stone head is almost 3,000 years old. Mary Beard, Civilisations II: How Do We Look, BBC 2018
When civilisations first made art they made it about us. ibid.
One of the most distinctive things about the Athenian culture was an intense focus on a youthful athletic body. ibid.
Terracotta Army: The biggest tableau of sculpture made anywhere in the planet ever. ibid.
This is the figure of Ramesses II who ruled Egypt around 1200 BC. He was the pharaoh who invested more in his image than any other. His figure is found all over Egypt. ibid.
The Boxer: The body beautiful was not so very far from the body brutalised. ibid.
A barometer of civilisation itself. ibid.
When your world is collapsing, when everything is closing in, what you want is to be somewhere else, somewhere you can breathe in peace, a scrap of beauty far from the noise and the ugliness. But if there is no escape then you get there in your dreams and you paint that landscape into existence. Simon Schama, Civilisations III: Picturing Paradise
Landscape art has always been an antidote to the anarchy brought by the hand of man. ibid.
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, Civilisation 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.