文明

第一集：远古的城市们

1、米诺斯文明——迈锡尼文明

当看见那个战斗玛瑙印石以后，突然觉得之前文明和社会发展远胜过我们今天的21世纪是很有可能！！

2、中国三星堆：面具 与华夏文明的断裂

3、佩特拉：由纳巴泰人建造。地理位置隐蔽，在山壁的岩石表面雕凿出来。游牧民族公园前4世纪建造。依靠熏香贸易。

我想住在佩特拉！！感觉是充满着芬芳的花园城市。

4、墨西哥——玛雅文明：阶梯金字塔

“所有的文明都有种无法实现的渴求——对时间的征服。它们用越来越高大庄严的建筑来逃避死亡，这从无作用，总会有终点。有些市场、庙宇、宫殿和坟墓的城市，就这样被人遗弃，于是大自然接管并荡平一切，或用植被将其扼杀，或用沙漠将其覆盖。这样看来，一切都似乎徒劳无功，其实绝非如此。这些遗迹都是丰碑，纪念着人类的创造力、人类的野心、人类的希望。这些是人类双手的丰碑、思维的丰碑，人类本身的丰碑。”

第二集：雕塑们

1、古埃及——曼农石像

2、古希腊——对于肉体的关注。展现了雅典人理解自己文明的方式和视角。

3、中国兵马俑：看自己国家的东西的时候，会发现bbc独特的拍摄手法。在一个场景中遮蔽3分之二，展示3分之一的画面。喜欢运用虚焦转实。慢放

4、埃及——底比斯神庙 拉美西斯二世

5、希腊——纳克索斯岛

这里的海美的像油画。

镜头语言方面：喜欢用横向移动的镜头作为镜头与镜头的连接，快慢之间的速度切换。

6、英国——塞恩宅邸

垂死的高卢人——象征着古人战败时的高贵美德

贝尔维德罗的阿波罗

7、墨西哥——奥尔梅克

奥尔梅克摔跤手雕像

“在某一方面来说，摔跤手尖锐地提醒着我们，人体艺术方面一个根本性的真理，那就是这不仅关乎过去的人们选择如何表现自己或他们的容貌，这也关乎我们审视的方式”

第三集：画卷

1、中国传统山水画

宋代，用墨和毛笔绘就山水画。

第一批真正意义上的山水画画家——李成画作

乔仲常——《后赤壁赋图》

王蒙——《青卞隐居图》表现了王蒙深切的焦虑心境。

2、伊斯兰

花园地毯

瓦格纳地毯

BBC的纪录片向来有口皆碑，题材广泛、制作精良是它的特色。

从横跨几千年的历史文化，到神秘广阔的宇宙星辰，BBC的纪录片总是一次次地打动我们。

正如《地球脉动》和《人类星球》这样的佳作，几乎每一帧都美到窒息。

最近，BBC又推出了一部高逼格神作。

全片涵盖6个大陆，31个国家，介绍超过500件艺术品。

将人类各个时期，不同大陆的历史文化艺术通通串联起来，看过的人都大呼过瘾。

无论你是文物爱好者还是历史达人，这部纪录片都能让你在养眼之余还非常涨知识。

今天就来聊聊，这部讲述人类艺术创造力的新作——

文明

导演:阿什利·格辛/马修·希尔/蒂姆·尼尔

编剧:西蒙·沙玛/玛丽·比尔德/戴维·奥卢索加

主演:西蒙·沙玛/玛丽·比尔德/戴维·奥卢索加

首播:2018-03-01(英国)

集数:9

单集片长:60分钟

BBC、Nutopia 影视制作公司、美国公共电视网（PBS）共同出品，豆瓣9.2分。

全片共 9 集，每集时长为 1 小时左右。

宗旨就是透过艺术之眼，探索“人类创造的起源”、“观看艺术的方式”以及“全球文明的进程”。

纪录片主讲人，是三位致力于普及艺术知识的公共学者——

哥伦比亚大学艺术史教授Simon Schama，剑桥大学的古典学教授Mary Beard，以及尼日利亚裔英国历史学家David Olusoga 。

虽然今天，人类的艺术成就浩如星海，但这一切都始于数万年前的一个掌印——

我们的一位远古祖先，不知出于什么原因，在洞穴的岩壁上勾勒出掌印。

这是历史上最早的壁画，可以说是人类艺术的第一笔。

这就是人类文明觉醒的起点，超越衣食住行的生存需求，人们有了创造的冲动。

艺术的存在，让我们摆脱日常琐事，感受体会作为人的意义。

文化与社会也因此诞生，创造了伟大的文明。

画画是人本能的表达形式，而壁画则是人类最早期的艺术。

即便间隔数万年，艺术家的手法也不会改变。

像是毕加索，就深受远古洞穴壁画的影响。

而远古人类第一次对美的追求，体现在下面这个小小的人脸雕像上 。

现在看起来虽然工艺粗糙，五官模糊，但要知道它可是2万多年前的产物。

制作者显然被一位美人打动，试图努力雕刻出她的样子。

在墨西哥出土的玛雅文明，也让人看到了其天真淳朴，充满创意的一面。

这些小人塑像，实在是太可爱了。

但还有很多出土文物，在现代人看来相当神秘。

像中国古老文明的代表三星堆青铜人头像、青铜面具。

那巨大的眼睛和耳朵，令人印象深刻。

1986年，三星堆遗址在一处建筑工地被发现。

发掘出的考古坑中包含数百枚象牙、祭祀牲畜的遗骸，以及数目惊人的面具。

三星堆距今已有5000至3000年历史，被称为20世纪人类最伟大的考古发现之一。

甚至还有人推测，三星堆和外星文明有关。

而秦始皇陵兵马俑，更是20世纪最伟大的考古发现。

这些真人大小，气势磅礴的军队，是世界上最大的雕像群。

其工艺和规模即便在今天，也是难以想象的。

中国在公元前200多年，由秦始皇实现了大一统。

而这项工程在秦始皇十几岁的时候，就开始动工了。

我们今天看到的，只是7000具陶俑中的一小部分。

中国古代贵族原本是用活人陪葬，但秦始皇却使用了真人大小的兵马俑。

据说他的陵墓内部也模仿现实世界，其间有日月星辰和山川河流。

秦始皇陵兵马俑，无疑是权力的象征。

而3000年前古埃及的雕像艺术，也同样是权力的象征。

古埃及的雕像往往都十分巨大，就为了使人产生望而生畏的臣服感。

然而尴尬的是，考古学家发现，拉美西斯二世的雕像比其他法老王都多。

原因竟然是他会篡改其他人的雕塑，在上面刻上自己的名字。

而人像雕塑的的技艺，在古希腊时期已经接近完美。

此时的人像越来越栩栩如生，每块肌肉，每个动作都完全复制真实的人。

而这种写实风格，通过丝绸之路影响了佛教的造像艺术。

传入阿富汗之后，又影响了早期的伊斯兰艺术。

世界文化互相影响，融会贯通。

而在绘画领域，纪录片中首先介绍的就是中国古代的山水画卷。

在古代战乱纷争不断的中国，文人创作出追求平静的山水风景画。

中国的水墨山水画，自成一体。

在此之前，绘画是没有以风景为主题的，风景只是一种陪衬。

直到宋朝，才开始出现了专门描绘风景的山水画。

风景画并不是对自然世界的描写，而是一种意境的表达。

让人对自然产生思考，以追求人和自然的和谐境界。

中国水墨山水画具有很深的哲学意味，已经打破了对于自然的模仿。

而日本绘画最具代表性的，当属浮世绘。

最初，是描绘市井生活和娱乐风月场所的木版画。

主题多是歌舞伎或妓女，还有春宫图。

色彩艳丽，具有装饰性。

而梵高深受日本版画影响，他本人就临摹过不少浮世绘作品。

梵高比同时代的印象派画家更奔放，喜欢表现出浓重的色彩。

甚至直接把颜料挤在画布上，用画笔粗犷地涂抹。

人类文明在建筑领域，也留下了很多宏伟的作品。

约旦的佩特拉古墓，就是在山岳表面雕凿而成。

地理位置空前绝后，与山体合二为一。

鲜为人知的是，不仅埃及有金字塔，玛雅文明也有金字塔。

玛雅文明的统治者向人民保证会祈求雨神每年降雨，而金字塔是给雨神祭祀的祭台。

不过，当旱灾来临后，玛雅文明就衰落消亡了。

建筑奇迹一直在被人类刷新。

由米开朗基罗设计的圣彼得大教堂，作为世界上最大的教堂，占地23,000平方米，可容纳超过六万人，是当时世界上最高的建筑。

米开朗基罗也因为设计出世界上最伟大的圆顶建筑，被同代人尊称为“圣者“。

宗教，往往催生伟大的艺术作品。

西班牙塞维利亚的玛格丽娜圣母像，就是一件十分动人的作品。

雕像为大理石制作，眼泪由玻璃制作。

但手却是木制的，也因此人们认为木头比大理石更有温度。

这部纪录片包含的信息量实在太大，由于文章篇幅有限，只能介绍一小部分。

在此，我十分推荐各位亲自去感受下这趟“全球文化之旅”。

这些保存至今的文物让我们现代人看到了古人的智慧和艺术造诣，不得不说是一种幸运。

然而，还有有大量的文物在战火中被破坏损毁。

巴米扬大佛，就曾被塔利班份子的炮火损毁殆尽。

短短几个小时之间，伊斯兰国就将人类文明的杰作毁于一旦。

2005年当他们夺下巴尔米拉这座古老的贸易之城之后，巴尔米拉数世纪以来那些关于希腊人、罗马人、波斯人、阿拉伯人以及犹太人的遗产，在短短几小时之内化为断壁残垣。

讽刺的是，一些艺术品恰恰因为早期被劫掠，而逃脱了被毁的厄运。

在日内瓦艺术与历史博物馆，有几件巴尔米拉的工艺品被保存了下来。

我们可以花许多时间争论，文明是什么亦或不是什么。

但当它的对立面出现时，在种种暴虐、残忍、偏执和毁灭欲中，我们立刻就会明白何为文明。

从人类残破的肢体，文明的顷刻陨落，我们会真切知晓文明到底为何物。

所有文明最终都对无法实现的目标汲汲以求，那就是征服时间。

为此，它们致力于更大、更高、更壮观，以为这样就能通往不朽。

然而事与愿违，即便是人口最稠密的城市，其市集、寺庙、宫殿和坟墓也终归会被废弃。

然后，不眠不休铁面无私的大自然母亲开始接管此地，用沙尘掩埋，以植被覆盖。

自此，文明便会淡出公众视线、彻底消亡。

每一个失落或繁荣的文明，都是文化的里程碑。

它们时而颠覆着现代人的认知，又不时吸引我们向前看。

文化所传达出的跨越时空的相似性，让我们理解过去，也指引未来。

文明是一个很宏大的词汇，但文明真正的力量，却来自那些简单的小东西。

像是壶，印刷品，挂毯以及雕刻品，或者源自那些恢宏的建筑和精美的画作。

它不是出自国家意志，或者某个富裕阶层的要求。

它更多的来自于那些天赋异禀的艺术家们，为全人类创造艺术的内心渴求。

这些经由自由心灵、敏锐洞察力、无与伦比的创造力所创作出来的最美好的东西，注定将被永久地保存下去。

用来对抗这个，同样被我们创造出来的充满暴力、战争、迁徙、破坏、死亡的，满目疮痍的世界。

在这部纪录片里，我们会看到这些人类创造的奇迹如何开拓我们的眼界，激发我们的思考，以及带给我们感动。

有句话说：艺术即历史，它记录了帝国的兴衰、世界的演变、以及全球范围的新思想、新世界的贸易路线。

虽然人生苦短，但艺术却让我们得以目睹那些相对不朽的事物。

艺术是文明的基石，是对人性的一种表达方式。

*本文作者：RAMA

人体是我们认知世界的基本工具，也是表达我们对这个世界的感受和想法的最佳载体。我认为我们一直试图客观地描述我们是谁。人是什么？艺术是什么？但这两个认知过程是相互平行的，也是相互补充的。通过制造生命以外的事物，但反映的又是生命本身，我们表现出了生命中某种隐藏的或是隐晦的东西。雕像艺术只有两个主题，那就是人体与空间

解说写的实在太漂亮，决定挑一些喜欢的誊下来。

时隔一年半，我终于把剩下的三集看完了。一集一集写。

E06 Radiance

26’20’’ Goya

The Black Paintings seem to me to be an endgame for Goya, not just in his own life and career in his 70s, but also his feeling about an endgame for art, the art that aspired through beauty to ennoble the spirit of civilization.

Shock at his own monstrousness, Francisco de Goya,1820-1823

//www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/saturn/18110a75-b0e7-430c-bc73-2a4d55893bd6

One of the most terrifying of all these paintings, perhaps the most famous one, shows Saturn devouring one of his children. That’s what it’s come to. The huge tradition of classical mythology reduced to a mad, antic, capering monster, chewing on the stump of a small body, but look at that body. Not a child at all. It’s the body miniaturized of a female nude. Two millennia of looking at the nude, of seeing it as a symbol of art’s perfection is reduced to this horrifying image of sadistic cruelty.

Fight with Cudgels, or Fight to Death with Clubs, Francisco de Goya, 1820-1823

//www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/duel-with-cudgels-or-fight-to-the-death-with-clubs/2f2f2e12-ed09-45dd-805d-f38162c5beaf

In one of the paintings, he puts the lights back on. We’re able to see something, but what is it we’re seeing? The light is given to us to reveal another kind of horror. These two huge peasant-like figures beating the living daylights out of each other. Blood is streaming down the head of one of them, even as they sink deeper and deeper into a kind of sandy quagmire. This is what Spain has become. Endless, relentless, mutual slaughter.

Now, all these monsters and horrors and demons and dragons of course had appeared all over European art before, but where had they appeared? They’d appeared in images of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse, and they were always balanced by a sense of the optimism of salvation. But Goya has come to the conclusion that God is absent without leave and there is one painting, which in a sense is least likely to have the horrifying pessimistic eloquence, but it does.

The Drowning Dog, Francisco de Goya, 1820-1823

//www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-drowning-dog/4ea6a3d1-00ee-49ee-b423-ab1c6969bca6

There are no figures, there’s just a dog, a mutt. But for this dog, the master is gone, dead, slaughtered, missing. He’s no longer going to be fed. He’s simply faced with drowning inside this formless brown vacuum. It’s all come down to this, then. A dog without a master. Spain without its god. Humanity absolutely without civilization.

E01 Second Moment of Creation

4’53’’

We can spend a lot of time debating what civilization is or isn’t, but when it’s opposite shows up, in all its brutality and cruelty and intolerance and lust for destruction, we know what civilization is; we know it from the shock of its imminent loss as a mutilation on the body of our humanity.

16’58’’

With this exquisite, intensively carved female head, we have for the first time, something immensely and movingly momentous. We have the revelation of the human face. It’s a tiny thing, it can just go in the palm of your hand and it could have only been made by an extraordinary array of dexterous skills.

39’36’’

Ultimately, all civilizations want exactly what they can’t have: the conquest of time. So they build bigger, higher and grander as if they could build their way out of mortality, and it never works.

There always comes a moment where the most populous of cities with their markets and temples and palaces and funeral tombs are simply abandoned. And that most indefatigable leveller of all, mother nature, closes in, covering the place with desert sand, or strangling it with vegetation. And then, civilization dies the death of deaths, invisibility.

E02 How do we look?

25'41"

The one thing you really get here is that size matters. These vast monumental figures, perhaps four or five times life size and with that nice hint that they’d been even bigger if they bothered to stand up for you, simply dominate. They take over your field of vision. It’s an assertion of the power of the pharaoh through his huge, superhuman, enthroned body.

33’31”

If early Athenian pottery reflects how man and women were expected to live within the social context of the city, its statues attempt to embody the interior life within.

The beginning of the fifth century BCE saw an amazing transformation in Greek sculpture. Rigid figures with the fixed gaze of phrasikleia give way to daring new experiments in the human form. One of the first of these is known as the Kritios boy, and he would transform how we see the sculpted human body.

The Kritios boy show us that you can signal anteriority through the person’s movement, through their stance. But particularly, if you lose the archaic smile, and you have an expression which isn’t necessarily blank, that immediately invites you, the spectator, to psychologise it. So with that one step, the statue acquires not just a body that is an organism rather than a mechanism, but also what we would probably call, a soul.

41’57’’

“This was quite simply the most sublime statue of antiquity to have escaped destruction. An eternal springtide, clothes the alluring virility of his mature years with a pleasing youth and plays with soft tenderness upon the lofty structure of his limbs."

49’46’’

We still have a lot of really unexamined assumptions about what constitutes a beautiful or desirable body. We have a lot of unexamined assumptions about what constitutes an attractive, or aesthetically appealing way to look. And you have only to open up the pages of a women’s magazine, as people are commonly pointing out, to see how incredibly narrow the space is in a certain kind of western aesthetic consciousness, for what a woman can look like. Similar kinds of things can be applied to men as well.

Reinforced by commercial interests, the cult of youth and beauty begun by the ancient Greeks, is perhaps more powerful than ever today.

E03 Picturing Paradise

6’34’’

李成《晴峦萧寺图》

http://collection.sina.com.cn/zgsh/20121116/152092655.shtml

What makes Li Cheng’s painting a masterpiece, is that it literally rises above royal propaganda.

As our eye ascends through the painting, so our whole approach to it also ascends to a higher order of question. And Li Cheng has changed the wash of the ink. It’s lighter, finer, more ethereal. It suggests deep distance. But depths of our own response as well as physical depths. What is nature? What lies beyond surface appearance? What truly moves the universe? And how above all, does the dialogue between flowing water and the adamant face of that eroded rock, bring us harmony?

18’56’’

But renaissance humanism took a different attitude to the serpent of temptation.

This is Villa Barbaro. … A place where renaissance ideals of culture and sophistication could meet the earthy pleasures of the country. A building of harmony, grace and pleasure, where it would be forever summer.

Leonardo Da Vinci wrote something fascinating. He says, “one of the values of painting is it can show you the beauty of nature and perhaps your lover in nature, in the middle of winter.” When you’re stuck inside, you’re stuck indoors, but you can remember what the meadows and what lovely picnics were like last summer by looking at a painting of it.

If you extend that into a kind of a theory of landscape art, you might say that the first way that people express the desire to escape into landscape is by actually creating escapist worlds.

30’41”

Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel 1565

//www.wikiart.org/en/pieter-bruegel-the-elder/hunters-in-the-snow-1565

Bruegel painted these compendious, visually inexhaustible masterpieces after the longest, bleakest, coldest Flemish winter anyone could remember. Let’s just think for a minute the way in which Bruegel makes us look at these pictures. On the one hand, they are an invitation into a wealth of detail, wherever our eye travels, it picks out these lovely minutiae of work and play. The skaters gliding across the ice. Our eye travels from one kind of landscape, a village huddled on the hill, to a completely different one. A frozen mountain or a storm tossed estuary out to the broad open sea. But there are moments as well when the pure compositional muscle that Bruegel can command makes everything come together in one great universal vision. It makes us stop. It makes us have a moment of contemplation. And then If we’re very, very lucky, like these wonderful paintings, it all seems to add up. A whole of the human condition and our special little place within it.

40’30”

There were a few kind of particular characteristics that marked out the American approach to the landscape. One of those was a sense of inferiority and competition with Europe that Americans in the 18thcentury and the early 19thcentury, were the poor country cousins. And they were on the outermost fringe of an European world in which they had been taught that Rome is the centre of all art, that the best landscapes, the tallest mountains are to be found in Switzerland. And here are Americans, on the threshold really of their own great continent, which they are beginning increasingly to move west across, trying to say, “wait, you know what, we have really high mountains also. And we have really big animals that we can celebrate in the same terms you guys are using but with our characters instead.” And I think that was out of inferiority in a funny sense, that a kind of American pride in the American landscape was born.

43’21”

More and more (Ansel) Adam’s photographs became preachy. But those vision sermons were radiant, mystical, ecstatic. They were passionate statements about how humanity could be redeemed through the encounter with nature.

But throughout, he remains steadfast that his job in life is to give visual form to that silken cord, tying together the fate of man with the fate of the earth.

E04 The Eye of Faith

43’49’’

What all of these movements within religions have in common is that they come along saying we have a purer form of faith than the one that is currently being practiced, and if your fundamental goal is purity, then one of the central things you might try to do would be to eliminate opulent aesthetic or potentially sinful representations of things to act as intermediaries, because then maybe you’re just worshipping the object, you’re not actually worshipping the divine. So it makes sense that protestants in the Reformation went into the monasteries and stripped everything out saying “it’s time to get rid of these images.”

51’35’’

We passionately want to rediscover the spiritual in art, we passionately want to discover that kind of power and purpose that religious art has. Whether it’s reinventing Christian art in cathedrals or whether it’s reinventing Islamic art, it’s about wanting to resacralise art, wanting to rediscover that wonderful, almost magical, charismatic purpose that religious art has.

For much of history, art has been religious art. For some, the creative impulse has been the very expression of divinity. For others, a challenge to God’s authority. For those that believe, religious art has always been transformative; yet for everyone, art retains a primal, spiritual feeling, a way to express the mysterious and it speaks to our earliest human drive to touch and define a world beyond our own.

E05 The Triumph of Art

50’49’’

Out there the western hurly burly is getting ready to make terrible mischief to smash its way into the domed heavenly vault, to stick its bloody great brutal boots right into the paradise garden. It’ll make an empire based on machines, money and muskets. Then slowly but surely, the Moghul Empire will disappear entirely inside its courtly refinement, becoming inextricably just a cultural ornament.

After centuries of extraordinary flowering, the eastern Renaissance was transformed by the twin forces of empire and colonialism. The delicate blooms and glowing jewels survived in what Europeans wore on their bodies and how they decorate their homes. While painters were mislabeled as miniaturists, as they were forced at least for a time, to rely on the patronage of their new British rulers. Western art critics increasingly called the artistic beauty of the east decorative, to distinguish it from pictures they put in frames where Europeans consider real art. But it was in the east, that the ancient meaning of ars, craft was preserved in all its splendor and still is. Because here, unlike in the west, the Renaissance wasn’t about the rebirth of classical knowledge. Unlike Europe, the east had never lost touch with its ancient heritage. A rich heritage which it continues to celebrate and share with the world to this day.

E06 First Contact

28’07’’

《冰山屏风》圆山应举Cracked Ice, Maruyama Okyo

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What’s regarded as his greatest work, cracked ice, combined everything Okyo knew from both eastern and western traditions.

It’s so subtle, so minimal, a work of art that almost feels like it isn’t there. And everything about it feels ephemeral and frail. It’s painted on paper not canvas as in the west, and great expanses of it are just white blank areas that seem almost untouched by the artist. And yet all of that belies the fact that this is one of the most sophisticated works of cultural synthesis that I know. It shows a sheet of ice, presumably on a lake, and these broken jagged cracks in the ice disappeared into the mist. The effect is three-dimensional space. Now, that is European vanishing point perspective. And yet, this is one of Okyo’s masterworks, just could not be more Japanese, because it’s a philosophical contemplation of two concepts, fundamental to Buddism, imperfection and impermanence. Imperfection because these lines are uncontrolled and irregular; Impermanence because of course the ice will melt. And those two are just as fundamental to Japanese art, as the classical Greek roman ideas of beauty and perfection are to European art.

So this is Okyo incorporating European ideas into his art, but in ways that are in keeping with Japanese philosophy and Japanese tastes.

32’11’’

In this frenzy of trade and wealth, Dutch art also became the object of conspicuous consumption. A modern commercial art market was born, supplying landscapes, still lifes, portraits and scenes from Dutch life to the aspirational new merchant class. What they wanted in their art was not the pomp of monarchy, or the flamboyance of the catholic church, but a new type of realism, one that reflect their protestant desire to portray the world as it truly was, often with warts and all moral lessons.

With art from renaissance, it’s about beauty. Dutch art, it’s not about that, it’s about reality. So you do paint rotten fruits, and you do paint fat ladies that just woke up in their bed. And you do look at dirty dogs in the street. Because it’s about nature in every sense, and not just in the sense that you want it to be, but in the sense it is.

33’22’’

One of the star artists of this golden age of Dutch painting was Vermeer. Jan Vermeer is not an artist known for his epic landscapes. Most of his paintings are famously intimate, set within a neat, ordered, almost claustrophobic world of the Dutch home.

What Jan Vermeer specialized in was the art of everyday life and his world was an interior world. What he captured on canvas were simple fleeting moments. A woman reading a letter is bathed in a delicate light that pours from a side window. But that only serves to emphasize the fact that we are in an enclosed room and the rest of the world is hidden from sight, that it’s somewhere out there. But if you look a little more closely at the details, what you realise is that Vermeer’s seemingly interior domestic space is infused with the globalism of the Dutch golden age.

From the innovative pottery of his hometown of Delft, which mimicked Chinese porcelain, to prized rugs from the orient, and a geographer wearing a fashionable Japanese robe, Vermeer captures a world built on encounters with distant civilizations and peoples.

50’05’’

Hundreds of public buildings built in the British neoclassical tradition would follow. They represented not only a separation of cultures that had before freely intermingled, they also marked the passing of the age of discovery. The world had entered an age of high empire, in which to justify their exploitations and conquests, European powers would willfully overlook the achievements of other civilisations. It was a story that would be repeated around the globe and we are only just emerging from its cultural legacy today.

In a wonderful twist, Richard Wellesley’s government house is used by the government of Bengal. It has been taken back by Indians for their own government. And so we have to unthink some of the inevitability that we tend to ascribe to encounters that ultimately led to European dominance. If you look at the history of European encounters with the non-European world, you find a huge range of ways that they took shape.

And although there is a history that has to be told, a story that is one of imperialism, but a story that is also one of globalization, one of increasing interconnection across different parts of the world that has yielded the world in which we live today.

Our modern world of digital communication has massively broaden the scope of our encounters, both with foreign cultures and civilisations and within the different cultural groupings of our own. And by connecting new audience with traditional artistic practices, the global art market continues to transform new encounters into new kinds of art. From the reemergence of the long overlooked sacred art, like that of North American first nations, the indigenous people of Australia and the carvings of the African Makonde people, to new artists such as Ghanaian born sculptor El Anatsui, who sews together bottle tops into large scale assemblages that comment on consumption, waste and the environment. Today, in our increasingly globalized civilization, the sheer variety of our encounters both foreign and at home continues to be a major source of inspiration, shaping both our art and our world.

Episode 04 - The Eye of Faith

【信仰之眼】

For much of history, art has been religious art. For some, the creative impulse has been the very expression of divinity. For others, a challenge to God’s authority.

以下是观后的粗略笔记整理。列出大部分重要建筑和名画。

有错误的地方请指出。谢谢。

《文明》是一部深度而又富有洞见的纪录片，由历史学家西蒙·沙玛、玛丽·比尔德和戴维·奥卢索加主持。该片全面展示了人类文明的进程，以及各种艺术和文化对社会的深远影响。透过这部纪录片，我们可以看到人类历史的宏大叙事，理解各种文化的价值和影响。这部作品充满洞见，富有启发性，是一部难得的历史纪录片。