Simon Schama explores one of our deepest artistic urges - the depiction of nature. Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed nature - rather it is a projection of dreams and idylls, as well as of escapes and refuges from human turmoil, the elusive paradise on earth.\n\nSimon begins in the 10th century, in Song dynasty China. The Song's scrolls are never innocent of the values of that world - the landscapes depict immense mountains projecting imperial authority. But as that authority was threatened and overwhelmed, majestic mountains are represented in geological turmoil, writhing and heaving. Imagined paradises in Islamic and Western art are often responses to loss and absence. But paradise could be recovered in the country villas of the Renaissance.\n\nSimon goes to the miraculously beautiful Palladian house of Daniele Barbaro in the Veneto, with murals painted by Paolo Veronese to contemplate the world of the cultivated country gentleman. It was in the cooler climate of northern Europe that landscape came into its own as a distinctive type of art. Simon explores the works of the northern Renaissance in Germany and the Netherlands, where emerging states sought expression of identity through depiction of their natural worlds. Simon ends in America where the landscapes of America are as expansive as the landscapes of Holland were confined, but there too, in the numinous photography of Ansel Adams, a kind of earthly paradise is revealed and a sense of nationhood is expressed in the natural world.
Source: BBC 2
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Series 1: 6. First Contact
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Series 1: 4. The Eye Of Faith
Professor Mary Beard broaches the controversial, sometimes dangerous, topic of religion and art. For millennia, art has inspired religion as much as religion has inspired art. Y ...
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Series 1: 2. How Do We Look?
In this episode of Civilisations, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China. Mary seeks answers to fundame ...
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Series 1: 1. Second Moment Of Creation
The first film by Simon Schama looks at the formative role art and the creative imagination have played in the forging of humanity itself.\n\nThe film opens with Simon's passion ...
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Series 1: 5. The Triumph Of Art
Think Renaissance and you think of Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering. The two phenomena ...
13-04-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 9. The Vital Spark
Simon Schama begins Civilisations with this premise: that it is in art - the play of the creative imagination - that humanity expresses its most essential self: the power to bre ...
11-05-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 8. The Cult Of Progress
If David Olusoga's first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reactio ...
04-05-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 4. The Eye Of Faith
Professor Mary Beard broaches the controversial, sometimes dangerous, topic of religion and art. For millennia, art has inspired religion as much as religion has inspired art. Y ...
06-04-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 1. Second Moment Of Creation
The first film by Simon Schama looks at the formative role art and the creative imagination have played in the forging of humanity itself.\n\nThe film opens with Simon's passion ...
16-03-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 7. Radiance
Simon Schama starts his meditation on colour and civilisation with the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres. He then moves to 16th-century Venice, where masterpieces s ...
27-04-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 3. Picturing Paradise
Simon Schama explores one of our deepest artistic urges - the depiction of nature. Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed na ...
30-03-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 6. First Contact
In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. And, as historian of emp ...
20-04-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 2. How Do We Look?
In this episode of Civilisations, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China. Mary seeks answers to fundame ...
23-03-2018
BBC 2