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00:00There are many places where you can come face-to-face with the ancient world, but I have to say
00:10this is hard to beat.
00:22This colossal stone head is almost 3,000 years old.
00:28It was made by the Olmec, the earliest civilisation in Central America.
00:37It really is big.
00:39Its eyeballs are more than a foot across and it weighs in at almost 20 tonnes.
00:47Between his lips you can just about glimpse his teeth and his irises are traced out on
00:53his eyes and he has a furled, slightly frumpy brow.
00:59It's hard not to feel just a little bit moved by this close encounter with the image of
01:06a person from the distant past.
01:12Since it was unearthed in 1939, this head has been a real puzzle.
01:18Who does it depict?
01:21Why was it made and why just a head?
01:26The Olmec left us very few clues, but what they did give us is a powerful, in-your-face
01:33reminder that no matter where in the world, when civilisations first made art, they made
01:40it about us.
01:47I want to explore why that is.
01:50What were those early people doing this for?
01:55What part did images of the body play in the societies which first created them?
02:02I'm not just going to be concentrating on the artists.
02:06I want to take a different approach.
02:09I'll be trying to see these bodies through the eyes of the people who lived with them,
02:16who used them, and looked at them.
02:20And that's not all.
02:24I want to show how one particular way of representing the human body, one that goes all the way
02:32back to ancient Greece, became more influential than any other, coming to shape our Western
02:41ways of seeing.
02:45And returning in the end to the Olmec, we'll see how the way we look can confuse and even
02:52distort our understanding of civilisations beyond our own.
03:41Can we ever look through the eyes of people in the distant past?
03:47It's hard, but just occasionally we get the chance.
03:53It was some 2,000 years ago when the Roman Emperor Hadrian arrived in Thebes with his
03:59entourage.
04:03He'd come for a look-see around the fringes of his empire and to take in the wonders of
04:09Egypt, already thousands of years old.
04:16Hadrian was by far the most committed traveller of all the Roman Emperors, and he seems to
04:22have gone everywhere.
04:23And on this occasion, he wanted to visit perhaps the most famous heritage site in Egypt, perhaps
04:32the greatest five-star tourist attraction in the whole of the ancient world.
04:41It wasn't the great pyramids he longed to see, but these colossal statues.
04:49Made around 1300 BC, they were originally statues of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep,
04:56marking his tomb.
04:57But over time, their meaning had changed, and by Hadrian's day, they were thought to
05:05depict a mythical African king, Memnon.
05:11And what had made them such a draw was that one of these statues could do things no other
05:16statues could.
05:17If you were lucky and came early in the morning, believe it or not, you could sing.
05:26It was a bit like a lyre with a broken string.
05:31And even in its prime, it couldn't be relied upon to make a sound every day.
05:36It was taken as a very good omen, if it did.
05:42What's amazing is that Hadrian's encounter is recorded, thanks to a piece of vandalism.
05:48For ancient tourists, part of the fun was to have their reactions carved onto the statue's
05:55leg.
05:56In Hadrian's party, the vandal was a lady-in-waiting, Julia Balbilla, who recorded her impressions
06:03in Greek verse.
06:06I've waited half my life to be up here, searching out Balbilla's poetry.
06:15Here is one of the things she wrote, and in some ways, this is the beginning of her diary
06:20of the Memnon experience.
06:22Because on this occasion, she says they got here really early, but they didn't hear anything.
06:29But there's another one.
06:30It's got Julia Balbilla's name written at the top.
06:34And this is a bit more triumphalist, because here she says her lord, Hadrian, actually
06:40heard Memnon.
06:43The truth is, it's not great poetry.
06:46But the verses do give us that kind of first-hand glimpse of what it felt like to be here.
06:52There's something touching about being able to tread in the footsteps of Hadrian's party,
06:59to share their gaze, even if we can't actually hear the singing.
07:07Nobody knows exactly how the sound was made, or why it stopped, because the statue is completely
07:13silent now.
07:16But one thing, I think, is clear.
07:19The story of Memnon's statue is a great example of how images of the human body operate in
07:25the world, not just as passive objects to be admired or wondered at, but as players,
07:34as part of an interactive two-way relationship.
07:38Singing might be a rarity, but images often do something.
07:44Even more, the story is a reminder that the history of art isn't just a history of artists,
07:51of the men and women who painted and sculpted.
07:55It's also a history of the men and women like Julia Balbilla who looked, who interpreted
08:01what they saw, and of the changing ways in which they did so.
08:05If we want to understand images of the body, I think we've really got to put those viewers
08:12back into the picture of art.
08:17And one of the best places to do that is ancient Greece, in particular the city of Athens,
08:25from around 700 BC.
08:29Never much more than a small town in our terms, it was a place where you could find people
08:34of different classes and backgrounds, cheek by jowl, in a grand experiment in urban living.
08:43And one of the most distinctive things about Athenian culture
08:47was an intense focus on the youthful, athletic body.
08:55This body was a symbol of political and moral virtue, and Athens became a whole city of images
09:03devoted to the human form.
09:08Greek art almost never means landscape.
09:12It almost never means still life.
09:15Greek art means statues and drawings, paintings and models of human beings.
09:23These images were everywhere.
09:26They were out in the world playing their part.
09:30Imagine the public plazas and the shady sanctuaries
09:34full of people in stone as well as people in flesh and blood.
09:42We begin to get the point of all this if we look at the art form
09:46that contained more bodies than any other.
09:51The red and black of Athenian ceramics.
09:55These are some of the finest examples we have.
10:02Made from around 600 BC, they were produced in luscious colours
10:07using an intricate process of multiple firings.
10:13They were turned out in their millions,
10:16and with almost every surface displaying pictures of people.
10:20It was pottery that made the human image ubiquitous across Athens.
10:27These are two of my very favourite Greek pots.
10:31This is ordinary crockery.
10:34It's everyday homeware, the kind of thing you might have found
10:38on the kitchen shelf in an Athenian house.
10:42The larger of the two is a rich man's wine cooler.
10:46The smaller one is an ordinary water jug.
10:49But the images on both are much more than just pleasing decoration.
10:56These images are telling the Athenians how to be Athenians.
11:02This one here is, in a sense, a template for being an Athenian wife.
11:07It's a picture of a woman in a bathrobe,
11:10and this is a picture of a man in a bathrobe.
11:13This is a template for being an Athenian wife.
11:17There she is, she's sitting down,
11:19she's being handed her baby by a servant girl,
11:23and at her feet, she's got a wool basket.
11:28That about sums up the answer to the question,
11:31what were Athenian wives for?
11:34They were for making babies and making wool.
11:38This one is a bit different,
11:40because it's covered with mythical creatures called satyrs,
11:45who are half human and half animal.
11:48And they're all over this, getting absolutely plastered.
11:54They're balancing goblets in very silly places.
11:59And this one here is having wine
12:02poured straight into his mouth from an animal skin.
12:07It's kind of the equivalent of drinking whiskey straight from the bottle.
12:12Now, what was that doing on the drinking party table?
12:18If this pot was telling Athenian women how to be women,
12:26this one was raising more difficult questions
12:30about where the boundary really lies between the human and the animal.
12:37About how much wine you have to consume
12:41before you really do turn into a beast.
12:47These aren't government health warnings, in our sense,
12:50but the images are one way in which the Athenians
12:53paraded their idea of what civilisation was,
12:58defining themselves against the barbarians beyond the city.
13:03And it's a version of civilisation that's a long way
13:06from the lofty ideas of Greek culture we're often peddled.
13:11It's deeply gendered and rigidly hierarchical,
13:15and it explicitly derides all those who have faces or bodies
13:20or habits that somehow don't fit,
13:23from barbarous foreigners to the old and ugly,
13:27the fat and the flabby.
13:29But, like it or not, what we're seeing here are visual images
13:35constructing one idea of a civilised human being.
13:43Of course, the human body can do many different things,
13:47and so can its images.
13:49And the Athenians exploited that range,
13:52creating other bodies for very different purposes.
13:57This is one of the most gorgeous memorial statues
14:00ever to have been found in ancient Greece.
14:05Her name is Frasiklaia,
14:07and that means something like, aware of her own renown.
14:14Frasiklaia was carved in marble around 550 BC
14:19and was only rediscovered in the late 19th century.
14:22She has a wonderfully patterned dress,
14:25clothed for eternity in her finest.
14:29And the traces of red pigment are a useful reminder
14:33that most Greek sculpture was richly, even gaudily, painted.
14:39And she wears that smile, that sign of life so common in her life,
14:45that it's hard to imagine a statue of her
14:49that sign of life so common in early Greek sculpture.
14:56What I like about her so much
14:58is the way that she engages us as viewers.
15:02She's looking straight ahead
15:04and she's challenging us to look back at her.
15:07And she's got a flower in her hand.
15:10It's not quite clear whether it's for her
15:13or she's about to give it to us.
15:16And in the inscription, she actually almost speaks to us.
15:21It says that it is the tomb sculpture of Frasiklaia.
15:26And then, as if in her own voice, it says,
15:29and I shall always be called a maiden
15:33because I got that name from the gods instead of marriage.
15:40That is, she died before her wedding day.
15:44But what's great about it is the encounter it sets up.
15:49And it's an encounter that, if we try hard, I think we can still enjoy.
15:57Frasiklaia faces death in the most forthright way,
16:02resolutely refusing to be forgotten.
16:07But can an image of a person ever fix time?
16:13Suspend death?
16:17Or even, for a moment, deny it?
16:26That's what these vivid faces from Roman Egypt appear to do.
16:35Though 2,000 years have passed since these people died,
16:39it feels like they're still with us.
16:43They look like the kind of portraits that hang on gallery walls.
16:49And that's where we often see them.
16:53But these portraits actually belong on coffins.
17:01Few have remained intact, but this is one of them.
17:07It contains a man named Artemidorus and his extravagant sarcophagus.
17:13It portrays a cosmopolitan way of death.
17:19His mummy is a wonderful amalgam of the traditions of Egypt, of Greece and of Rome.
17:27On the casing, you can see typically Egyptian scenes.
17:32There's a mummy being laid out on a couch
17:36and those strange, animal-headed Egyptian gods.
17:41His name is Greek.
17:43Artemidorus, farewell, it says.
17:48His face is a quintessentially Roman portrait.
17:54Of course, other cultures before had represented the human face,
17:59but it was the Romans who made this kind of individual likeness very much their own.
18:05Modelled with light and shade, flesh layered in paint and wax,
18:11and a clever catchlight in the eyes,
18:14these were the means by which Roman painters
18:17captured the infinite variety that we see in the human face.
18:23When Romans thought about where the impulse to portraiture came from,
18:28even the impulse to painting as a whole,
18:31they had a very vivid story to tell
18:33about a young woman who was the creative genius
18:37behind the very first portrait.
18:40Her lover was going away on a long journey.
18:44And before he went, he got a lamp
18:48and she threw his shadow against a wall
18:50and traced round it to create a silhouette.
18:55She was trying not just to memorialise him,
18:58not to memorialise him, but to keep his presence in her world.
19:05I think something like that going on with the face of Artemidorus.
19:11Domestic wear and tear, even children's scribbles on some coffins,
19:16suggest that they weren't instantly confined to the grave.
19:20For a while, they may have stood in the land of the living,
19:24perhaps in the family home.
19:27These portraits, then, are not just memorials.
19:32They're attempts to keep the presence of the dead among the living
19:37and to blur the boundary between this world and the next.
19:45Painted faces and sculpted bodies always played vital roles
19:49in the lives of ancient people who lived with them and looked at them.
19:58But how do we make sense of those ancient statues
20:02that were not designed to be seen at all?
20:11China, as we know it, was born around 200 BC,
20:17united under its first emperor, Qin.
20:21Just as the Romans would do in the West,
20:23he standardised everything in his efforts to exert control.
20:31Currency, weights and measures, taxes, roads and transport,
20:38they were sweeping reforms,
20:40and he left his mark on all aspects of Chinese life.
20:44But no Roman emperor would ever be buried
20:48on the same grand scale as Qin, or with so many bodies.
20:54It was just a mile away from the mound to the east
20:58that the Chinese made their historic discovery.
21:02It was 1974 when farmers in Shaanxi province
21:07discovered fragments of human remains in a well.
21:11Farmers in Shaanxi province discovered fragments of human forms
21:16buried in the earth.
21:19Scenes of mass archaeology followed,
21:22the finds assembled in an extraordinary display.
21:26It lies beneath this vast, hangar-like structure.
21:34It would capture the world's attention
21:36for the most surprising archaeological find of the 20th century.
21:46It was, of course, the Terracotta Army.
21:50It's a menacing sight, this grey, ghostly remnant of an army.
21:57Rows and rows of life-sized terracotta soldiers.
22:04These figures represent the imperial guard of the Emperor Qin.
22:09They were buried in the ground beneath the well.
22:12These figures represent the imperial guard of the Emperor Qin.
22:17They were buried with him at his funeral and stand guard over his tomb.
22:25There were once more than 7,000 of them,
22:28but only a fraction have been excavated,
22:31and that alone gives an idea of the vast scale of this whole complex.
22:36This is quite simply the biggest,
22:40quite simply the biggest tableau of sculpture
22:45made anywhere in the planet, ever.
22:59Millions come here to be wowed by the sight of the army.
23:06But it's not just the scale that's impressive,
23:09it's the detail too.
23:15Up close, you can see the individual plates and rivets of their armour.
23:24And their heads have been modelled so no two look alike.
23:33The contours of their faces differ, eyes and ears delicately worked.
23:39And a range of styles and textures have been used for their hair.
23:49But the individuality that we're at first so struck by
23:53isn't quite as simple as it seems.
23:56It's true that no two of these figures are quite alike,
24:00but the differences between them that the craftsmen have introduced
24:05turn out to be rather formulaic.
24:07There's not much more than a handful of different eyebrow types
24:11or different moustache types, for example.
24:15They're a very standardised, institutionalised version of individuality.
24:21As one archaeologist has nicely put it,
24:24their faces are likenesses, but they're likenesses of no one.
24:30They're not, in the terms of Western art history, true portraits.
24:38Some have admired this ancient form of artistic mass production.
24:43Others feel it a perfect way of expressing a regimented army.
24:48Whatever you feel about them,
24:50they certainly raise all kinds of questions about what a likeness is.
24:59But one thing's for sure, in the scale and complexity of the two,
25:05and even, I think, in the artistic detail
25:08that the emperor, dead or alive, could command,
25:12there's a strong assertion of imperial power.
25:16And that's definitely the message of what happened
25:19just a few years after the emperor's death.
25:23Because the famous terracotta army that we see
25:26were discovered in pieces, smashed and burnt by a rebel
25:32against the dynasty of the first emperor,
25:34who launched a direct attack on his tomb.
25:39There's something in that keen desire to destroy them
25:45that gives us our clearest sense of the power of these images.
25:53It was one thing to destroy the images of the emperor's terracotta protectors,
25:59and so to nullify his power beyond the grave.
26:08But power in the here and now
26:10called for bodies of an entirely different order.
26:29This is the figure of Ramses II,
26:33who ruled Egypt around 1200 BC.
26:37He was the pharaoh who invested more in his image than any other.
26:43And his figure is found all over Egypt.
26:47But by far the most imposing and memorable
26:51are these great colossal statues that stand guard at his temple in Thebes.
26:59The one thing you really get here is that size matters.
27:04These vast monumental figures,
27:07with that nice hint that they'd be even bigger if they bothered to stand up for you,
27:12simply dominate.
27:13They take over your field of vision.
27:16It's an assertion of the power of the pharaoh
27:20through his huge superhuman enthroned body.
27:25However fragile that power might have been in real life,
27:30the modern world has comprehensively bought in
27:33to the monumentality of the Egyptian ruler.
27:38And it's impossible not to think
27:41that when people walked past here 3,500 years ago,
27:46that they too would have got what the message was intended to be.
27:54This kind of bombastic, bare-chested display
27:58fits the picture we have of autocrats today.
28:02Impressive though such images are,
28:04I'm sure some ancient Egyptians would have found them
28:08as vulgar or as irritating as we might.
28:12But beyond the gates of the temple,
28:14there's another set of statues whose power and purpose is harder to fathom.
28:21Deep inside, we're dominated by yet more vast images of Ramses
28:27that can't be explained away as propaganda to the people.
28:33Only those closest to the king were allowed into this part of the temple.
28:40So what was the point of these towering statues?
28:46Some think they were aimed at powering the people.
28:48Some think they were aimed at powerful elites to remind them who was boss.
28:55Others think they were aimed at the all-seeing eye of the gods.
29:01I've got a different viewer in mind.
29:06And that's the pharaoh himself.
29:10Those of us with no inkling of power on a grand scale
29:15often forget how hard it must be to believe in oneself as monarch or autocrat.
29:23A person who really needs to be convinced that he is preeminent above the common herd
29:31is that ordinary human being who's masquerading as omnipotent ruler.
29:37That's why, as a basic rule of thumb,
29:40we find more pictures of kings and queens in all their finery
29:45in royal palaces than anywhere else in the world.
29:50And here in Egypt, too, monumental images of pharaohs commissioned by pharaohs themselves
29:59in vast numbers played their part in convincing the pharaoh of his own pharaonic power.
30:11These sculptures help the name of Ramses live on.
30:16But the style of this statuary would have a different and very extraordinary legacy.
30:24Almost certainly inspiring the earliest statues of the human form in ancient Greece.
30:37We're now on the Greek island of Naxos.
30:41It's a place famed since ancient times for its marble.
30:50With a coarse grain and grey-blue tint, it was easy to quarry and easy to work.
31:00From way back, it was shipped off to make some of the earliest monumental Greek sculptures.
31:09They were large, rigid and stylised figures like this.
31:19And up in the hills of Naxos, there's a disused quarry
31:24where you can find the remains of the ancient Greek pharaohs.
31:30Find one of those giant figures which never made it off the island.
31:39Now, I've read lots about this, but I've never actually seen it.
31:47What it is is a vast marble statue, half-finished, still in his quarry.
32:01This half-man, half-mountain was hewn out perhaps as early as 700 BC.
32:10As you can see, it was going to be one of those massive, static early Greek sculptures.
32:21Here are his feet.
32:24And I'm now walking up past his legs.
32:30And this thing here, this must be his outstretched arm.
32:37And then right up here, we come to his head.
32:44And by the looks of it, he was going to have a beard and they've already roughed out the shape.
32:51And it makes me think that some men can be very stubborn,
32:57but this guy hasn't budged for 2,500 years.
33:04Quite why he's still here is a mystery.
33:07Something must have gone wrong.
33:09But whatever, this figure gives us a great view
33:12of how the Greek sculptors went about their work.
33:16They must have cut a trench out all the way round it in order to get to it to work.
33:22And you can see a rather neatly worked trench at the back.
33:28For me, it's just a wonderful illustration of the number of people that must have been involved
33:35in making a statue like this.
33:37And every one of these little pockmarks has been made by somebody's tool,
33:42with hundreds of men hacking away to get this statue like this.
33:53I find it a bit weirdly surreal,
33:59but his feet make an extremely nice place to sit.
34:07Forever lying here in repose is a remnant
34:11of a style that the Greeks were soon to leave behind.
34:16Because shortly after he'd been abandoned,
34:19Greek sculptors developed an astonishing new style that was distinctly their own.
34:30There's a fundamental and universal paradox at the heart of the sculptor's art.
34:39The lived human body, its mobility, its warmth, its changing character,
34:46has to be fixed, suspended in the cold and lifeless mass that is stone.
34:56It's always an artificial compromise.
35:03But the beginnings of the 5th century BC sees Greek sculpture spring almost to life.
35:11The rigid figures of the past give way to daring experiments in form...
35:20..nuance and subtlety...
35:23..movement and musculature.
35:28In under 200 years, Greek sculptors seem to have developed the tricks and techniques
35:34to weave the illusion of a living human body.
35:38So radical was the change that it has been called the Greek Revolution.
35:48The exact cause of this revolution is one of the great mysteries of the history of art.
35:54Some believe it was Greek democracy and its new respect for the individual that launched it.
36:01Others, that Greek artists just got better.
36:04In truth, we don't know.
36:07But whatever the causes, over the next centuries,
36:11it was to have some truly astonishing artistic consequences.
36:35This is one of the places that the Greek Revolution leaves.
36:41It's impossible not to see this. It's an amazing work of art.
36:51Dating is hard, but my guess is that it was cast around 100 BC.
36:57Here, the hallmarks of the Greek Revolution are brought together
37:01and trained on the body of a battered and bruised boxer.
37:07Boxing was always an important part of the ancient athletic repertoire.
37:12You can tell that he once had a fit body, but it's really suffered.
37:19He's never been able to get his feet on the ground.
37:22that he once had a fit body, but it's really suffered.
37:28What's equally striking is the loving care
37:32with which this wreck of a human being has been depicted.
37:37He's got a broken nose and cauliflower ears,
37:41flabby from where he's taken all those blows.
37:44And in fact, he's still bleeding from fresh wounds.
37:49And there, the blood is shown in copper,
37:52and the bruises on his cheeks are brought out
37:57by the slightly different colour of a slightly different bronze alloy.
38:03It's almost as if the bronze has become the man's skin.
38:12What makes the boxer so impressive
38:14isn't just the extraordinary technique,
38:17it's the point the piece is making.
38:21The artist has used the descriptive powers of this version of realism
38:26to launch a devastating attack on the body culture
38:30that obsessed the ancient Greeks.
38:33He introduces a very different type of character
38:37from those early, youthful, well-toned athletes.
38:43Not just in the wounds and the scars,
38:46but in the emotional collapse.
38:52In a world in which there was something of a cult
38:55of youthful, athletic prowess,
38:59all those telling, realistic details add up to a reminder
39:03that the body beautiful was not so very far from the body brutalised.
39:11This work of art is prodding
39:13at the awkward underbelly of Greek culture.
39:19It's the incisive brilliance of sculptures like the boxer
39:23that gives the impression that the Greek Revolution
39:26was an unalloyed triumph of artistic achievement.
39:32But there's another way of looking at the Greek Revolution,
39:36and at its losses as well as its gains.
39:44Remember Frasikleia, who died unmarried?
39:48She was made long before that revolutionary change.
39:54What I love is her elegance and simplicity,
39:58the way she reaches out, offering a gift or meeting us eye to eye.
40:07That directness is exactly what gets lost in the Greek Revolution.
40:13Later sculptures may be more supple than Frasikleia,
40:18they may seem to move more adventurously,
40:21but they don't engage us in the same way.
40:25In fact, if you try to look them in the eye,
40:28many of them coyly avoid your gaze.
40:32And many of them, like the boxer, seem lost in their own world.
40:38It's almost as if the involved viewer has become an admiring voyeur,
40:44and we're one step on the way to sculpture becoming an art object.
40:51Now, Frasikleia is determinedly resisting being an art object,
40:57and one thing she's not is coy.
41:03But the problems of the Greek Revolution don't stop here.
41:08MUSIC CONTINUES
41:16Just a few hundred years after Frasikleia,
41:19this is what female sculptures in the Greek world had become.
41:30This sculpture exposes some of the dangers in the pursuit of realism,
41:37and that blurry and perilous boundary between artefact and flesh.
41:46This notorious body belongs to the Greek goddess Aphrodite.
41:52It's a Roman version of a groundbreaking statue
41:55by the sculptor Praxiteles in the 4th century BC.
42:01In the ancient world, this was celebrated
42:04as a milestone in classical art
42:07because it was the first naked statue of a woman.
42:14Today, it's difficult to see beyond the ubiquity of images like this
42:19and recapture just how daring and dangerous it would have been
42:24for the ancient Greeks.
42:28This sculpture broke through social conventions.
42:33It wasn't just that up to this point, female statues had been clothed.
42:39In some parts of the Greek world, real-life women,
42:43at least among the upper class, went around veiled.
42:47But that wasn't just the nakedness.
42:52This Aphrodite broke the mould in a decidedly erotic way.
43:02Just look at her hands.
43:05Are they modestly trying to cover herself up?
43:09Are they pointing us in the direction of what we want to see most?
43:15Or are they simply a tease?
43:20Whatever the answer, Praxiteles has established
43:25that edgy relationship between a statue of a woman
43:29and an assumed male viewer that has never been lost
43:33from the history of European art.
43:37But that difficult boundary between statue and flesh
43:41was understood by the Greeks themselves.
43:45They told a tale that shows how they too knew of the perils they faced
43:50in creating what they saw as realistic images of the human body.
43:56One night, it was said, a young man became so aroused by this statue,
44:01he forced himself upon it, leaving a stain of lust on her thigh.
44:07He later threw himself over a cliff to his death in shame.
44:15That story of the stain not only shows how a female statue
44:22can drive a man mad,
44:24but also how art can act as an alibi for what was, let's face it, rape.
44:32Don't forget, Aphrodite never consented.
44:40But however troubling the Greek Revolution was in its own time,
44:44there's a deeper legacy that reaches the modern age,
44:48one to which we're often blind.
44:52BELLS CHIMING
44:59Inherited by ancient Rome, rekindled in the European Renaissance,
45:04faith in the Greek version of realism persisted through time.
45:09BELLS CHIMING
45:18And as the reverence for the classical style grew,
45:22it would be invested with even greater meaning.
45:27Not just as a model for figurative art to aspire to,
45:32but nothing less than a barometer of civilisation itself.
45:40To understand the forces at work,
45:43we have to follow in the footsteps of the classical bodies
45:47that left their original habitat of Greece and Rome.
45:55And by the 18th century,
45:57had found themselves in distinctly foreign worlds,
46:01adorning the mansions and palaces of Northern Europe.
46:10BELLS CHIMING
46:14Thion House was once the fashionable country house
46:18of the first Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.
46:26In the mid-1700s, they transformed the house
46:30into a vivid and imagined expression of the classical world.
46:39Here, we're in the company of ancient bodies,
46:43both originals and imitations.
46:49And it can seem an oppressive space,
46:52in which no other way of representing the human form is permitted.
47:02The climactic set piece of the house is in a central hall,
47:07where two great masterpieces of ancient sculpture face off.
47:14At one end, the dying Gaul.
47:18A figure who is said to embody
47:20the ancient virtue of nobility in defeat.
47:29But in this room, he's forever overshadowed by what stands opposite.
47:38BELLS CHIMING
47:45By far the most important sculpture in the entire house is this one.
47:52It's a replica of a classical work
47:54originally made perhaps around 300 BC.
47:59In the 18th century, it would achieve unparalleled fame
48:03as the greatest sculpture ever made.
48:07He's known as the Apollo Belvedere.
48:14The Apollo takes his name
48:16from the Belvedere Sculpture Court in the Vatican,
48:19where, since the early 16th century, he stood on display.
48:24And lovely as he is, that's probably where he would have stayed.
48:29One sculpture among many.
48:31But it did not beam for the international fame
48:34given to him by one man,
48:37Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
48:43This was, quite simply, he wrote,
48:45the most sublime statue of antiquity to have escaped destruction.
48:52An eternal springtime, he went on,
48:55clothes the alluring virility of his mature years
49:00with a pleasing youth
49:03and plays with soft tenderness
49:06upon the lofty structure of his limbs.
49:10How is it possible, he asked, to describe it?
49:17Winckelmann had worked his way up as librarian and right-hand man
49:22to some of the biggest art collectors of the day.
49:26Finally, he'd become Director of Antiquities at the Vatican itself
49:30and the author of some of the most important books on art history ever.
49:35Winckelmann was a man who'd enthused
49:39over any number of Greco-Roman bodies.
49:42But the Apollo Belvedere really tipped him over the edge.
49:47But Winckelmann offered more than words of adoration.
49:55He would devise a brand-new theory
49:58that would leave an awkward and lasting legacy.
50:04In the library at Zion is the book
50:07in which Winckelmann first laid out his theories.
50:11Originally published in 1764,
50:14it was in these pages that the Apollo was elevated
50:18above a mere artwork
50:21to stand as the ultimate symbol of civilisation itself.
50:31This is Winckelmann's most influential book.
50:34A History Of The Art Of The Ancient World.
50:37And on the front page, there is, in fact, a lovely drawing
50:41which includes the Apollo Belvedere.
50:44And what he did that no-one had systematically done before
50:48was to say that the best art
50:53was made at the time of the best politics in the world.
51:00The best art was made at the time of the best politics.
51:06It was almost as if he was wanting to argue
51:09that you could track the history, the rise and fall of civilisation
51:15through the rise and fall of the representation of the human body.
51:22Winckelmann's views would seduce even our most esteemed art historians.
51:29This is the figure that was the most admired piece of sculpture in the world.
51:35The Apollo surely embodies a higher state of civilisation.
51:41For more than 200 years,
51:43Greek sculpture was regarded as a beacon
51:46of the superior Western civilisation.
51:51The Northern imagination takes shape in an image of fear and darkness.
51:57The Hellenistic imagination
51:59in an image of harmonised proportion and human reason.
52:05But for me, Winckelmann's legacy goes even further.
52:11The inheritance of Winckelmann has been a distorting
52:16and sometimes divisive lens,
52:19deeply affecting the way people in the West
52:22have encountered and judged the art of other very different civilisations.
52:30I think Winckelmann has caught us in a narrow way of seeing
52:35that's difficult to perceive, much harder to escape.
52:44But there is a place where we can pin down the legacy of Winckelmann.
52:50It's back where we started, with the art of the Olmec.
53:01It was 1964, and Mexico was investing in a new national identity
53:07that asserted the glories of its ancient past,
53:11and central to the project was art.
53:19A new museum was purpose-built to showcase the depth of Mexican history...
53:27..and the treasures of its great civilisations laid out for all to see.
53:34Of vital importance was the celebration
53:37of Mexico's earliest civilisation, the Olmec.
53:44Along with this and other colossal heads
53:47was an array of extraordinary Olmec bodies.
53:55This gathering of stone figurines was found exactly as you see them.
54:04Whether religious symbolism or ancient vanity,
54:08this clay figure clasps a mirror to its chest.
54:13And what looks like a baby
54:16was one of hundreds known from Olmec cemeteries.
54:25But star of the show was a brand-new acquisition.
54:35It was the statue known as the Olmec Wrestler.
54:42Its display of anatomical detail and Greek-style proportion
54:47made it one of a kind in Olmec art.
54:56Held as proof that the Olmec civilisation
54:59was every bit as sophisticated as any in the classical world,
55:04he quickly became a poster boy,
55:07not just for the Olmec, but for all of ancient Mexico.
55:13And it's with the wrestler
55:18that we see the impact of Winkelmann
55:22and his version of classical form on our Western way of seeing.
55:35What appeals to us about him
55:38are those shades of Greco-Roman art
55:40that seem to fit with our own expectations of artistic achievement.
55:45The expressive twist of the body,
55:48the apparently naturalistic muscles,
55:50and the strikingly realistic face.
55:53There's even the name that he's been given
55:56with its echo of classical Greek sport.
55:59If this is the work of an outstanding Olmec sculptor,
56:04then that's one who, by chance, got later Western tastes spot on.
56:12But so perfectly does he measure up to Western ideals
56:17that some now believe that he is, in fact, a fake.
56:22The work of someone who understood
56:25the all-pervasive allure of the classical style.
56:29If true, it shows how Winkelmann's legacy
56:33can change our appreciation of other cultures,
56:36even taint our understanding of the past.
56:41But real or fake, the Olmec wrestler
56:45shows that ancient images of human figures
56:48can tell us much about the past and even more about ourselves.
56:55When we admire the Olmec wrestler,
56:58we're also facing our own assumptions
57:02that he makes a satisfying image of a human being.
57:07But he does more than that,
57:09because he always shifts the focus onto us as viewers
57:14and onto our own prejudices.
57:17So, in a way, the wrestler is an acute reminder
57:22of one fundamental truth of the art of the body,
57:26that it's not just about how people in the past
57:29chose to represent themselves
57:31or what they looked like.
57:33It's also about how we look.
57:40The Open University has produced a free poster
57:44that explores the history of different civilisations
57:47through artefacts.
57:50To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553
57:57or go to the address on screen
57:59and follow the links for The Open University.
58:26.