How art made the world

How art made the world

How do the images we surround ourselves with today come from a world that is thousands of years old?

Find out on BBC Two in May.

		Episode Guide Dr Nigel Spivey investigates everything from cave paintings to ceramics, pyramids to palaces and icons to artefacts across five continents and 100,000 years of history. Art and Personality Take part in an experiment designed by UK psychologists. Is there a connection between your personality type and the art that you like? See for yourself Where can you find out more about the stories featured in this series? A guide to museums with How Art Made the World related exhibits. bbc.co.uk/art A guide to the best art-realted content on bbc.co.uk. First shown May 2005

Leonardo
Part artist, part scientist: What made Leonardo da Vinci the ultimate Renaissance man?

bbc.co.uk/art
The best art related content from around bbc.co.uk.

History through art
Find out about World War One and other historic events through paintings.

Egypt’s loveliest mummy
See pictures of a fabulously-decorated 2,300-year-old mummy.

How art made the world

More Human Than Human.

Greek Art
Nigel Spivey

The Day Pictures Were Born

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
David Lewis-Williams

The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves
Jean Clottes, David Lewis-Williams

Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings
Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps, Christian Hilaire, Jean Clottes, Paul G. Bahn

Cave of Lascaux
Mario Ruspoli, Yves Coppens

Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology (Cambridge Illustrated Histories)
Lord Renfrew

The Art of Persuasion

The Image of Augustus
Susan Walker & Andrew Burnett

The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus
Paul Zanker

Conquest and Empire: Reign of Alexander the Great
A.B. Bosworth

From Cyrus to Alexander
Pierre Briant

Once Upon a Time

Assyrian Scuplture
Julian Reade

Ancient Near Eastern Art
D. Collon

Translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh
Andrew George

Hadrian’s column of Trajan
Amanda Claridge

Narrative and Event in Ancient Art
Peter J. Holliday

Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Studies in the History of Art 16 (1985)

Contemporary Aboriginal Art
S. McCulloch

To Death and Back

Digging Up Jericho
Kathleen Kenyon

The Archaeology of Death And Burial
Mike Parker Pearson

Etruscan Civilization: A Cultural History
Sybille Haynes

City of Sacrifice: Violence From The Aztec Empire to the Modern Americas
David Carrasco

The Denial of Death
Ernest Becker, 2000

Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc
Includes a virtual tour of this beautifully painted cave.

The Altamira Cave
A history of the cave and details of how to visit.

Lascaux Cave
Includes a virtual tour and stunning images.

The Amesbury Archer
The story of the Archer and its excavation.

Stonehenge
Official English Heritage website.

The Vatican Museums
Take a virtual tour through centuries of history, including the Statue of Augustus.

Royal Tombs of Vergina, Imathia
Information on tombs of the Macedonian kings

The British Museum
See Assyrian art at the British Museum

University of California Irvine
Introduction to early written records of Mesoamerica

The Mysterious Etruscans
Introduction to Etruscan culture

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

How Art Made the World is a 2005 five-part BBC One documentary series, with each episode looking at the influence of art on the current day situation of our society. [1] [2]

«The essential premise of the show,» according to Nigel Spivey, «is that of all the defining characteristics of humanity as a species, none is more basic than the inclination to make art. Great apes will smear paint on canvas if they are given brushes and shown how, but they do not instinctively produce art any more than parrots produce conversation. We humans are alone in developing the capacity for symbolic imagery.» [3]

Episodes

Images dominate our lives. They tell us how to behave, even how to feel. They mould and define us. But why do these images, the pictures, symbols and the art we see around us every day, have such a powerful hold on us? The answer lies not here in our time but thousands of years ago. Because when our ancient ancestors first created the images that made sense of their world, they produced a visual legacy which has helped to shape our own.

In this series we’ll be travelling around the globe, discovering the world’s most stunning treasures. We’ll see how the struggles of early artists led to the triumphs of the world’s great civilisations. Our journey will take us through a hundred thousand years of history. We’ll be witnessing some of the extraordinary ceremonies of the world’s oldest artistic cultures. And we’ll reveal how they unlock the deepest secrets of ancient art, We’ll be hearing from the people who made these discoveries. And we’ll be using science to uncover how thousands of years ago the human mind drove us to create astonishing images, You’ll never look at our world the same way again, for this is the epic story of how we humans made art and how art made us human.

Episode one: More Human Than Human.

The first episode asks why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are so unrealistic. [4] [5]

The fact is people rarely create images of the body that are realistic. What’s going on? Why is our world so dominated by images of the body that are so unrealistic?

Dr. Spive begins his investigation by travelling to Willendorf, where in 1908 three Austrian archaeologists discovered the Venus of Willendorf, an 11 cm (4.3 in) high statuette of a female figure, estimated to have been made between 24,000 and 22,000 BCE. Spivey travels to the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna to examine the Venus’s grotesquely exaggerated breasts and abdomen, as well as its lack of arms and face, which shows the desire to exaggerate dates back to the very first images of the human body created by our ancestors. Spivey speculates that, The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age environment where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable, and several similar statuettes collectively referred to as Venus figurines show that this exaggerated body image continued for millennia. [6]

Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran speculates that the reason for this lies in a neurological principle known as the supernormal stimulus, which Spivey demonstrates by replicating Nikolaas Tinbergen’s experiment with Herring gull chicks. When the chicks are shown a yellow stick with a single red line made to represent their mother’s beak, they tap on it as they are programmed to do to demand food. However, when they are presented with a stick with three red lines they tap on it with increased enthusiasm even in comparison to the original beak. Ramachandran concludes, «I think there’s an analogy here in that what’s going on in the brains of our ancestors, the artists who were creating these Venus figurines were producing grossly exaggerated versions, the equivalent for their brain of what the stick with the three red stripes is for the chick’s brain.» [7]

Spivey next travels to Egypt to discover if the gross exaggerations of hard-wired herring gull instincts of the nomadic artisans survived into the era of civilization. The Egyptian images of the human body, which he discovers at the Tomb of Pharaoh Rameses VI and the Karnak Temple Complex, were regular and repeated, and nothing about them was exaggerated. Mapped onto the wall at the unfinished Tomb of Amenhotep III’s vizier Ramose he discovers the grid which dictated the precise proportions and composition of these images for three thousand years. The Egyptians created images of the body this way, Spivy concludes, not because of how their brains were hard-wired but because of their culture. [8]

Spivey finally travels to Italy, where Stefano Mariottini relates his extraordinary discovery off the coast of Riace, near Reggio Calabria. As revealed in an antique copy of Herodotus in St John’s College Old Library, Greek sculptors learned the Egyptians’ techniques and initially created truly realistic depictions of the human body, like Kritian Boy at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece. However, according to Ramachandran, the problem with the Kritian Boy is it was too realistic, that makes it boring, and the style was soon abandoned. Spivey states that, the Greeks discovered they had to do interesting things with the human form, such as distorting it in lawful ways, and examines the pioneering work of a sculptor and mathematician called Polyclitus, as exemplified in the Riace bronzes at the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia. Spivey concludes that the first civilisation capable of realism had used exaggeration to go further, and it’s that instinct which still dominates our world today. [9]

This is the answer to our mystery. This is why the bodies in our modern world look the way they do. The reality is we humans don’t like reality. The shared biological instinct to prefer carefully exaggerated images links us inexorably with our ancient ancestors, and yet what we choose to exaggerate is where science gets left behind. That’s where the magic comes in.

Crew [ edit ]

Consultants [ edit ]

Episode two: The Day Pictures Were Born

The second episode asks how the very first pictures ever made were created and reveals how images may have triggered the greatest change in human history. [4] [10]

I could draw almost anything in the world and you’d probably guess what it was, But there must have been some point in our human story when we first got this ability, some moment in time when we began to create pictures and to understand what they meant. So what happened back then? How did we first get this ability to create images? To find the answer, we need to go way back in time.

Dr. Spivey begins his investigation by travelling to the Cave of Altamira near the town of Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Spain, where in 1879 a young girl’s exclamation of Papa. Look, oxen. to her father, local amateur archeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, is explained to have meant that Maria had just become the first modern human to set eyes on the first gallery of prehistoric paintings ever to be discovered. The find revealed that, About 35,000 years ago, we began to create pictures and to understand what they meant. French priest Henri Breuil believed that, prehistoric artists painted animals to increase their chances of a successful hunt, but the animals painted here and at other sites such as the Pech Merle in France, also visited by Spivey, did not match the bones discovered and abstract patterns revealed the artists weren’t merely copying from real life.

Spivey next travels to the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa, where rock painting made 200 years ago by the San people and similarly dismissed as hunting scenes, are revealed by anthropologist David Lewis-Williams to contain many of the same unusual features. 19th century interviews with the San by German linguist Wilhelm Bleek reveal the importance of trance within their culture, an observation confirmed by Spivey after watching a shamanistic ritual performed by their present-day descendants in a village near Tsumkwe, Namibia far from the mountains. Lewis-Williams theorises that, the paintings were not just pictures of everyday life, but they were about spiritual experiences in a trance state.

Crew [ edit ]

Consultants [ edit ]

Media information

DVD release

Released on Region 2 DVD by BBC DVD on 30 May 2005. [11]

Companion book

The 2005 companion book to the series was written by presenter Nigel Spivey. [12]

How Art Made the World

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

How Art Made the World is a 2005 five-part BBC One documentary series, with each episode looking at the influence of art on the current day situation of our society. [1] [2]

«The essential premise of the show,» according to Nigel Spivey, «is that of all the defining characteristics of humanity as a species, none is more basic than the inclination to make art. Great apes will smear paint on canvas if they are given brushes and shown how, but they do not instinctively produce art any more than parrots produce conversation. We humans are alone in developing the capacity for symbolic imagery.» [3]

СОДЕРЖАНИЕ

Эпизоды

Образы доминируют в нашей жизни. Они говорят нам, как себя вести, даже как чувствовать. Они формируют и определяют нас. Но почему эти образы, картинки, символы и искусство, которое мы видим вокруг себя каждый день, так сильно влияют на нас? Ответ кроется не в нашем времени, а тысячи лет назад. Потому что, когда наши древние предки впервые создали образы, объясняющие их мир, они создали визуальное наследие, которое помогло сформировать наш собственный.

В этой серии мы будем путешествовать по миру, открывая для себя самые потрясающие сокровища мира. Мы увидим, как борьба ранних художников привела к триумфам великих мировых цивилизаций. Наше путешествие проведет нас через сто тысяч лет истории. Мы станем свидетелями необычных церемоний древнейших художественных культур мира. И мы расскажем, как они открывают самые сокровенные секреты древнего искусства. Мы услышим от людей, сделавших эти открытия. И мы будем использовать науку, чтобы раскрыть, как тысячи лет назад человеческий разум заставлял нас создавать удивительные образы. Вы никогда больше не будете смотреть на наш мир таким же образом, потому что это эпическая история того, как мы, люди, создавали искусство и как искусство сделало нас людьми.

В первом эпизоде ​​спрашивается, почему люди окружают себя такими нереалистичными изображениями тела.

Дело в том, что люди редко создают реалистичные изображения своего тела. Что происходит? Почему в нашем мире так доминируют изображения тела, которые так нереалистичны?

Экипаж

Консультанты

Эпизод второй: День рождения картин

Во втором эпизоде ​​спрашивается, как были созданы самые первые когда-либо сделанные изображения, и раскрывается, как изображения могли вызвать величайшие изменения в истории человечества.

Я мог рисовать почти все на свете, и вы, наверное, догадались, что это было. Но, должно быть, был какой-то момент в нашей человеческой истории, когда мы впервые получили эту способность, какой-то момент времени, когда мы начали создавать картины и понимать, что они имели в виду. Так что же тогда произошло? Как мы впервые получили эту способность создавать изображения? Чтобы найти ответ, нам нужно вернуться в прошлое.

Экипаж

Консультанты

Информация для СМИ

Выпуск DVD

Выпущен на DVD-диске «Регион 2» на BBC DVD 30 мая 2005 г.

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