The first programme, Ye Gods, looks at the debt we owe to religion. It is a story that weaves together three great civilisations – Christianity, Islam, and the pagan culture of ancient Greece – showing how each has influenced the other, and how the art that all three religions have left behind continues to shape our world. Whatever our religious beliefs, the feelings we have about civilisation today would be unimaginable without the religious art of the past. Collings starts in ancient Greece. The Greeks absorbed the awesome power of representations of the gods left by older civilisations, particularly the ancient Egyptians, but it's the element the Greeks added that still fascinates us today: lifelikeness, the human body, the feeling that this is art that celebrates what it is to be human. Collings then explores how the religion that replaced the paganism of the Greeks, Christianity, has reacted to that momentous change in human consciousness. He traces the story of Christian art from primitive daubs in the catacombs beneath Rome, through the shimmering mosaics of Byzantine cathedrals, to the great Crucifixion scenes of Western art. Finally he visits mosques in Egypt, Turkey and southern Spain, to show how a third great religious tradition, Islam, proposed a very different view of how religious art should shape our lives. Three great religions, three jostling visions of reality - but it's our common humanity that's revealed today by the greatest art that they've produced.
The second film, Feelings, looks at how art came to express our human emotions and the full range of what it is to be human. We want art to be about our human emotions, to express the full range of what it feels like to be human. We take this for granted now, but the idea of putting man, rather than God, at the centre of art was originally a revolutionary break from the predominantly religious art of the past – "one of those times when civilisation says, Crikey - a momentous change in human consciousness!". In this episode, Matthew Collings goes in search of the origins of that change. It’s a journey which takes him from the glories of Renaissance Italy to the turbulent, violent Paris of the French Revolution. The programme focuses on two great 18th century artists who, in diametrically opposed ways, expressed this new sense of human potential in their art – the French painter Jacques-Louis David, and the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. David was a revolutionary, who became the official propagandist of the French Revolution and whose name is on the death warrant for the French King. Goya experienced the bloody aftermath of the Revolution in Spain. David's art is all about the nobility of man, our higher aspirations. Goya explores our baser side, our darker fears, our murderous drives. Together they're what Collings calls 'the yin and yang of feeling'. Freed to express itself, humanity can be great – but it can also be monstrous. It's a revelation whose consequences we're still living with today. Collings also travels further back in time, to discover the first glimmerings of this art of human feelings in the Italian Renaissance. He celebrates the loveliness of the art of the great Florentine artist Giotto, and tackles the famous mystery of the most celebrated icon of the new vision of humanity that the Renaissance produced: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. This is a film about how art shows us our own humanity – and about how we might not a
Save our Souls, the third of these four films, explores the impact of the industrial revolution on our ideas about art, nature and society, focussing on the visionary ideas of the British art critic John Ruskin. The rise of modern industrial society in the 19th century produced a crisis of faith and confidence in the very idea of civilisation – a crisis that continues to freak us out today. Workers were hideously exploited in the new factory system, and people everywhere felt increasingly alienated from their work, from nature, and from each other. In the third programme of the series, Matthew Collings follows in the footsteps of an eminent Victorian who diagnosed the problems of his age, and thought that art could be the solution to them: the visionary British art guru, John Ruskin. Ruskin is one of Collings’ heroes. He believed that art could save our souls. It could reconnect us with nature, and heal the spiritual wasteland created by industrialisation. And Matthew Collings argues that as it’s becoming ever clearer what damage we’ve been doing to nature, we need to listen to what Ruskin had to say more than ever. Ruskin wrote about art, nature and society, and showed how they were all connected. He famously championed the great British landscape painter JMW Turner, rescuing him from obscurity and pointing out to his fellow Victorians the urgency and power in Turner’s turbulent landscapes. Matthew Collings starts his journey with Turner’s work, exploring its visionary message – both for his own times and for ours. Then Collings travels to the places and explores the art which meant most to Ruskin, and which became the raw materials for his visionary message about how to save our souls. He visits the Alps, which inspired both Ruskin and Turner with the awesome power of nature and the need to respect it. He tours the architectural wonders of Venice, where Ruskin discovered some surprising lessons about what made a society healthy and
Tonight's concluding episode, Uncertainty, tells the story of modern art and culture, from its beginnings in artists like Picasso, Klee and Mondrian right up to the present day. Director Neil Crombie writes (Nov 07) In the final episode of Matthew Collings’ epic sweep through the history of art and civilisation, Collings brings the story from the birth of modern art around the turn of the 20th century right up to the present day. What are we now? What can we still believe in? Are we nearing the end of civilisation? Collings argues that modern art is fundamentally different from the art of the earlier periods of history he’s been exploring in this series in one fundamental respect. Instead of offering us a heroic vision of humanity, and reflecting back to us the higher values we might aspire to, modern art has always tried to show us as we really are: unheroic, free, confused, and above all uncertain. He starts his journey with some of the sensationally new and world-changing classic works of early 20th entury modernism – the savage impact of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, the dreamy abstracts of Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian, and the stunning, stark architecture of le Corbusier. He shows how art like this was a new vision of what we are, a vision more in tune with the fractured nature of modern reality. He tells the story of how the Nazis tried to eradicate and vilify modern art, and tried to replace modern art’s uncertainty with their own crushing certainties.