Civilisations - S1.E3 ∙ Paradise on Earth
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00:00When your world is collapsing, when everything is closing in,
00:16what you want is to be somewhere else.
00:21Somewhere you can breathe in peace.
00:26A scrap of beauty far from the noise.
00:30And ugliness.
00:34But if there is no escape, then you go there in your dreams.
00:40And you paint that landscape into existence.
00:48This is what happened in China in the 1970s to the artist Mu Xin.
00:54During Mao Zedong's cultural revolution, he was an obvious target.
00:59Middle class, intellectual, a lover of decadent Western art.
01:05Mu Xin was subjected to solitary confinement,
01:08forced labour and then house arrest.
01:14But the paper supplied for weekly confessions
01:17became the material of his liberation.
01:20Mu Xin broke out of his confinement by making visible, albeit in deadly secrecy,
01:28the landscapes which unfolded in his mind.
01:32The art memory of China, its peaks and its valleys.
01:38The culture which had been a part of his life.
01:42The art memory of China, its peaks and its valleys.
01:48The culture which had given the rest of the world,
01:51a thousand years before, true landscape art.
01:58While everything else was being smashed up,
02:00he was determined that art, now judged a reactionary crime, would survive.
02:08Like nature itself, landscape art has always been an antidote
02:13to the anarchy wrought by the hand of man.
02:19Yet it's rarely a depiction of the way the world is,
02:22but a vision of the way we would like it to be.
02:29Sometimes it delivers a sense of harmony between nature and humanity.
02:34Sometimes it's a picture of a nation's home.
02:38Sometimes it's a dream of heaven,
02:41writ in fabric or glimpsed through a lens.
02:48But most of all, it's a way to understand our civilisation
02:52and to behold that most terrifying and thrilling of all truths,
02:58our place in the culture.
03:00And most of all, it's a way to behold that most terrifying and thrilling of all truths,
03:06our place in the cosmos.
03:30HEAVY RUMBLING
03:49The nation is broken, but mountains and rivers remain.
03:55Those words could have come from Muxin in the 1970s,
03:59but actually they were written 1,000 years earlier.
04:06In the early 10th century, China was torn apart by endless civil war.
04:11As feuding states vied for power, they burnt cities and towns
04:16and slaughtered their people.
04:18Yet it was out of this anarchy and chaos
04:21that the Chinese tradition of landscape painting
04:24first blossomed as the great subject of art.
04:34For the Song dynasty, who finally triumphed in the year 960,
04:38landscape art represented both a glimpse of a better world
04:42and a new era.
04:48It was a means to unite this shattered country.
05:00I'm looking at a document that attests to a profound alteration
05:06in human sensibility, because it was in Song China
05:10that, for the first time, landscape painting,
05:13with ink and brush, became the true and absolute sign
05:18of what civilisation was, both for those who practised it
05:22and for those who owned these precious scrolls.
05:28This painting is more than 1,000 years old,
05:31and it's thought to be by one of the first truly great landscape artists,
05:36Li Cheng.
05:38Dominating the scroll are mountains, symbols of the Song dynasty.
05:44The vast, most imposing peak is the emperor.
05:48The lesser peaks are his ministers.
05:52Li Cheng's message is that this is the protecting force
05:57beneath which China can recover its harmony
06:00and rebuild its civilisation.
06:03He's an absolutely brilliant painter of human activity,
06:08from man on a donkey to people having their meal
06:12and perhaps dumplings being cooked in the back kitchen there.
06:16And this bottom half of the scroll is crowded, not just with people.
06:19There's all sorts of things going on.
06:21This is our world. This is the place we inhabit.
06:28This is more than mere propaganda.
06:32Li Cheng asks profound questions which go to the heart
06:36of our relationship with the world around us.
06:40As our eye ascends through the painting,
06:44so our whole approach to it also ascends to a higher order of question.
06:52Right in the visual centre of this beautiful painting
06:56is the temple itself,
06:58and the temple is almost more important than the whole mountain.
07:02It is the place of equipoise, the place of peace.
07:10Above the temple, there is no human action at all,
07:14and Li Cheng has changed the wash of the ink.
07:17It's lighter, finer, more ethereal.
07:21So this is a borderland between the human and the spiritual world,
07:26and gradually we move up and face the greatest questions of all.
07:33What is nature?
07:35What lies beyond surface appearance?
07:40What truly moves the universe?
07:43And how, above all, does the dialogue between flowing water
07:48and the adamant face of that eroded rock bring us harmony
07:54and bring us what everybody in China wanted, happiness and peace?
08:04Li Cheng offers us a glimpse of who we are
08:07by linking the comings and goings of our little lives
08:11to the majesty of the cosmos.
08:14And that sense of fit between things mortal and things eternal
08:19fills the mind with the ancient Confucian sense of rightness,
08:23everything in its ordained place.
08:27This is how life is supposed to be.
08:30So powerful was the message that, within a century,
08:33landscape art had sunk deep roots into the culture of Song China.
08:38New painting academies flourished where it was practised.
08:42Wui-Chi tomes were written about its philosophy and technique.
08:49To be Chinese meant to be civilised,
08:52and to be civilised meant to paint.
08:55In the more intimate, private pleasures of the handscroll,
08:59the painted landscape evolved into something new.
09:03Handscrolls were river-shaped journeys,
09:07stories revealed as you unrolled the scroll.
09:11The landscape was a place of life,
09:13a place of peace, a place of harmony.
09:17The landscape was a place of peace,
09:19a place of harmony, a place of peace,
09:22a place of harmony, a place of harmony,
09:25and travelled almost cinematically through space and time.
09:37This handscroll was painted by the artist Chow Chung-Chang.
09:45It was based on one of the most famous Chinese poems,
09:49written by a government official,
09:51a man of culture and refinement called Su She.
09:58Su She had been exiled after a political purge
10:01and spent his days writing about excursions he took with his friends
10:05up the Yangtze River.
10:11Here he is carrying fish and wine
10:14as his wife sees him off on the journey.
10:21We turned the boat loose to drift with the current.
10:26All around was deserted and still.
10:30A lone crane flew overhead.
10:40The painting evokes both the pleasures of friendship
10:44and the melancholy of the exile.
10:47A dream, but one with a bittersweet taste.
11:12But landscape painting wasn't always about escape.
11:17Sometimes artists captured the violence of history.
11:22200 years after Su She wrote his poems,
11:26China's Song Dynasty had fallen to Mongol invaders.
11:31The painter Wang Meng refused to serve the Mongol emperors,
11:34preferring to retreat to a very particular place,
11:39his family's estate in the Jingbian Mountains.
11:43Those mountains became the subject of his greatest painting.
11:55Well, when you're in the presence of a bona fide masterpiece,
11:57which this is, words somehow struggle to be formed.
12:02But I'm going to do my best,
12:04not least because this is an extraordinary painting
12:07because it belies all the pleasing stereotypes we have.
12:12About Chinese landscapes, you think of Li Jiang,
12:15you think of that first generation of Northern Song painters,
12:19and it is all about feeling protected by the imperial mountain.
12:24None of this is happening with Wang Meng.
12:28This is, above all, a painting about turbulence.
12:32It's full of a kind of restless, writhing, sensuous, intense energy.
12:39There's a reason for this turbulence.
12:42By the time he painted this, Wang Meng's family mountain retreat
12:46was right in the middle of a battlefield
12:48fought over by armies 200,000 strong.
12:54The reality was marauding and massacre.
13:00These are not mountains which protect us.
13:03Instead, they trap and threaten us.
13:12Here is a man, beautifully painted, picked out with a conical cap,
13:16which is a cap of this particular region,
13:18and is echoed by the shape of the peak.
13:21So you think the man belongs to the mountains,
13:23but the man has nowhere to go.
13:25There are paths which make no sense at all.
13:28He moves his way through scrubby pines.
13:32Wang Meng has lit this dramatically to make it more difficult,
13:37to make it more exciting, to make it more perilous and energised.
13:43Eventually, we see one isolated, tiny figure alone.
13:50And this huge orchestration, musical energy,
13:54these animated, pulsing rocks
13:58look as though they're about to topple down on him.
14:01What's happened to landscape painting in the hand of Wang Meng
14:05is that it's gone from being not just a place of calm,
14:09but to an intensely personal expression of his own mood
14:14and his own feeling of insecurity.
14:17So everything that is coursing through the imaginative energy of the artist
14:22gets registered in these sudden, jabbing, repeated,
14:27This, then, is a state of mind, rather than a state of mountain.
14:36If this painting depicts Wang Meng's deepest anxieties,
14:40then his sense of foreboding was well-founded.
14:44Shortly after completing it,
14:46he fell victim to his political enemies and died in prison.
14:50Sometimes, the vision of boundless space will set you free.
14:56But sometimes, the mountain walls close in and shut out the light.
15:10Further west, Wang Meng's painting is about a man
15:13who's lost his way in the world of painting.
15:17Further west, in the Islamic world,
15:20landscapes came to have a very different meaning.
15:24They were not cherished for their remote vistas,
15:27but instead for the way nature was made part of life in town.
15:32And the form that Oasis of Peace took was a garden,
15:37a welcome shady retreat from the heat and dust of the day.
15:41To the faithful, this was more than a collection of plants and pools.
15:45It was an earthly reflection of the heavenly realm.
15:52The Islamic garden evolved from a much older Persian tradition,
15:57the enclosed garden, called the paridaiza,
16:01which gave us the word paradise.
16:05Islamic rulers from the 19th century
16:09Islamic rulers from the Nasrids in Spain to the Mughals in India
16:14laid out their gardens according to the Qur'an's description of the afterlife.
16:22Four quarters, bounded by four rivers,
16:25which in paradise, it was said, would flow with water, wine, milk and honey.
16:33Flora and fauna, the fertile attributes of God's blessing,
16:38also found their way into decorations on the pavilions
16:41and palaces which gracefully stand amidst the gardens.
16:50But the art of the paradise garden found its richest expression
16:55in a form that sprang, like Islam itself, from the desert.
17:02It was the garden you could carry with you, the carpet.
17:08It was the garden you could carry with you, the carpet.
17:12It was the garden you could carry with you, the carpet.
17:14It was the garden you could carry with you, the carpet.
17:16It was the garden you could carry with you, the carpet.
17:19For the nomadic tribes of the Middle East, everything in life,
17:22talking, eating, praying, was done close to the ground.
17:27Carpets made life not just bearable, but civilised,
17:31especially when woven with an image of paradise.
17:38By the late Middle Ages, the garden carpet had migrated
17:41from its humble origins in Arabia and Central Asia
17:45to become a symbol of luxury and sophistication
17:49in the royal court of the Persian Shah.
17:54The 16th and 17th centuries were a golden age for Persian garden carpets.
18:01And this is an extremely rare, fragile survival.
18:06Known as the Wagner carpet, after a recent German owner,
18:09it is crammed with every kind of living thing, teeming through the foliage.
18:23There are butterflies and birds.
18:28A leopard pounces on a goat.
18:36Fish swim in the four legendary watercourses which meet in a central pool.
18:46The garden carpet was more than an oasis of superabundance.
18:52Any Muslim who sat upon it, whether emperor or humble tribesman,
18:57found themselves in the most uplifting of all places, the heart of heaven.
19:06In Christian medieval Europe, Paradise Gardens came with a health warning.
19:12After all, the whole mental world of Christendom
19:15turned on a single fateful moment back in Eden.
19:22That moment when the serpent tempted Eve and set in motion
19:27the great epic of sin and salvation.
19:30But in 14th-century Siena, anxieties about dangers lurking in a vegetation
19:36gave way to an exercise in the self-congratulation of urban rulers,
19:43who in this fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ride out to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
19:50The satisfying sight of the contadini, Italian peasants,
19:55sowing and harvesting in peace and fruitfulness.
19:59Two seasons in one painting.
20:04In the Renaissance, this rural test of urban rulers
20:08was a test of the power of the city.
20:12The city was a place of great prosperity,
20:16a place of great wealth.
20:17In the Renaissance, this rural test of urban leadership
20:21found its vindication in the rediscovery of pagan classical writings about the landscape.
20:30Rusticating townsmen turned to their favourite Latin author, Virgil,
20:34whose nature poem, The Georgics, written for urbanites, of course,
20:38extolled the pleasures of country life and labour.
20:43If they but knew their steeped-in-luck country people,
20:48far removed from the grinds of war,
20:50were earth that just showers them with all they could ever ask for.
20:58What they have is the quiet life,
21:02carefree, no deceit, wealth untold,
21:05their ease among the cornucopia.
21:09Virgil is looking hard in only the way that a real country man can.
21:14He's sort of poking the pigs and checking the flocks and herds.
21:18There's a wonderful line in The Georgics when it's coming on to rain,
21:23and he talks about a heifer looking suspiciously at the sky,
21:28working his nose to sniff the wind.
21:32You really feel the flavours and the sounds
21:36and the perfumes of rustic life here.
21:40Virgil is staring at the soar of a lark
21:43and listening to the croak of frogs down in the mud.
21:50For Italian nobles of the 16th century, who'd read their Virgil,
21:55that vision of a balanced life in the countryside proved irresistible.
22:01They took their identity as gentleman farmers seriously,
22:05and the ground floor of their villas was where carts and scythes
22:08and even some animals were kept.
22:11But the rest of the villa was for a different kind of rustication,
22:15the play of intellect.
22:20But that didn't always preclude a sense of humour.
22:27This is the Villa Barbaro, built around the 1560s in the Veneto,
22:33the countryside surrounding Venice.
22:37The man responsible for this gem was Daniele Barbaro,
22:41a wealthy cleric in the unstrenuous Venetian style,
22:45but also the epitome of a Renaissance man,
22:49learned in pretty much everything.
22:54To create this little realm of a well-ordered Arcadia,
22:57Daniele turned to his friend, the architect, Andrea Palladio,
23:02who designed the villa so that its horizontal lines
23:05would rhyme with the lay of the land.
23:09The two of them, Daniele and Palladio,
23:11co-opted the genius of a third for their collaboration,
23:15the painter Paolo Veronese.
23:20His brief was to cover the villa walls with frescoes.
23:24What makes this villa special is its sense of playfulness.
23:29Now, Daniele Barbaro is a heavyweight intellectual,
23:33so in this way, of course, is Andrea Palladio.
23:36They read all the textbooks on optics and perspectives
23:40and actually written some of them,
23:42and Daniele's translated the great classical work on architecture.
23:46And what you expect from all these people
23:49the great classical work on architecture,
23:51and what you expect from all this obsession
23:54with musical intervals and harmony and mathematics,
23:59almost a kind of algorithmic approach to the perfect house,
24:03is to have that translated in painting by Veronese into allegory.
24:08The planets and the gods cavorting on the ceiling,
24:12and yes, that's what we have.
24:15We have a mysterious white woman in the middle.
24:18We have the gods of abundance and family life.
24:25And then, suddenly, you catch sight of a parrot.
24:31And then you notice the woman,
24:33almost certainly a Marcantonio, the brother's wife,
24:36in a gorgeous haute couture number,
24:39and next to her, a nurse with a fantastic leathery skin,
24:42a woman of the ordinary people.
24:44And you think, hang on a minute,
24:46they don't belong with the gods.
24:51Something extraordinary is going on here.
24:54We have a mix of the immortals and the mortals,
24:58of reality and illusion,
24:59and that goes right through everything we see in the villa.
25:04Real windows and fake windows,
25:06and the villa turns into a spectacularly teasing kind of fun house.
25:13Now, whatever you think about Renaissance painting,
25:16you don't usually go for it for jokes, really,
25:19but jokes can be graceful and elegant,
25:23and that was Veronese's cast of mind.
25:26And you also see that he's cutting into all this dense theory
25:30with what he could do best, with what Venice did best.
25:34Gorgeous colours, sensational, sensuous brushwork,
25:39having fun with the brush,
25:41even if you're doing it in fresco rather than oils.
25:44And you turn round and you have an extraordinary sense
25:47of the place still being inhabited,
25:49because we've also got people down at our level,
25:53people coming at you, behind you.
25:55Hello, here's our friend coming through a door
25:58which isn't quite a door,
25:59and you realise the whole place is alive with mischief.
26:08But though the columns and the vistas they frame
26:10are eye-teasing fakes, the mindset is real enough.
26:14Happy, horsey comings and goings, an avenue of graceful trees,
26:20the unhurried pleasures of a country house weekend.
26:28Villa Barbaro, with its frescoes,
26:31is a perfect slice of Renaissance escapism,
26:34a blend of the serious and the witty,
26:36created at a moment when, in the countryside beyond,
26:40there were harvest failures and peasant riots,
26:43and the once great Venetian Republic
26:45was in retreat from the Ottoman Turks.
26:50But here, at Villa Barbaro, it was always spring or summer.
26:55The grapes would always be ripening,
26:57the lutes would always be playing,
26:59Daniele and Andrea Palladio would go for long philosophical walks,
27:04and the great entertainer Paolo Varanese could take a break
27:09and shoot a pheasant or two, his dog trotting at his heels.
27:14His landscapes on the walls were dreamscapes,
27:17and you could stare and stare and stare at them
27:21and feel warm inside forever.
27:31As landscape painting came off the walls,
27:34it turned its back on the bucolic dream world.
27:37And it happened in a place which couldn't be more different
27:40from the glowing, sunlit stone of the Villas of the Veneto.
27:51It was in the 1500s, in the dark, primeval forests of Bavaria,
27:55in southern Germany,
27:57that European landscape art really came into its own.
28:08Albrecht Altdorfer was a painter who'd spent his career
28:11depicting religious scenes, albeit ones strangled in greenery.
28:18But the undergrowth began to take over
28:21until Altdorfer made nature itself, by itself, the whole story.
28:28It may seem a bit over-the-top to describe this scrappy, tiny,
28:33sketchy little thing as constituting a revolution in art,
28:37but, you know, that's pretty much what it is.
28:40Because with this little painting, the landscape suddenly happens,
28:44by which I mean, landscape, the word,
28:47stops being a description of background, of scenery.
28:52It's a description of the landscape itself.
28:54It stops being a description of background, of setting,
28:59and becomes the work of art itself.
29:03What is that revolution?
29:04Well, what Altdorfer has done is something extraordinary.
29:08He's removed from the picture any semblance of a story,
29:12any kind of characters.
29:14Yes, there is one little fellow here
29:17which gives this watercolour painting its title, Woodcutter.
29:20And if you look very, very closely, he's on lunch break.
29:25It's the German world, it's got to be beer, I would think,
29:28and he's laid his axe down.
29:29If you look really carefully,
29:31he's got a devastating pair of scarlet stockings on there,
29:35but he's not really the kind of character you expect
29:39when you see landscape as background.
29:41There, the characters are full and frontal.
29:46There is, of course, a heroic character in this painting,
29:51a monster, a giant,
29:53and it is the tree itself,
29:56dwarfing the little figure sitting at its base.
30:02And doesn't that tree remind you of someone else,
30:05of the twisted torso of the crucified Christ
30:09on his wooden cross, arms outstretched?
30:13What we've got here, in effect, is a disguised religious picture,
30:18and I think there's a reason for the disguise.
30:20Altdorfer is actually in a sticky position.
30:24He was living in a Catholic town at the beginnings of the eruption
30:28that was the Protestant Reformation.
30:31He'd been involved in organising town ceremonies and pilgrimages,
30:36and part of the force of Protestantism
30:40was about the so-called idolatry of images.
30:45With this painting, he neatly sidesteps
30:49the whole issue of brutal and bitter partisan religious conflict.
30:54We have religion implied by the body of the Christ in the tree
30:59rather than frontally represented.
31:05This is a very stylish picture,
31:07but it is also very raw and rough and coarse.
31:12It's almost at times as if he painted it with a pointed, sharpened twig.
31:18There is a kind of slashed, cut element to some of the details,
31:23over which the paint drips and hangs when it describes these leaves.
31:32This is a portable thing.
31:34It's not stuck in a church like an altarpiece.
31:37It's not stuck on a wall like a fresco.
31:39You can own this, you can carry it around.
31:42A new kind of art is born here, and Altdorfer knows that very well.
31:49Altdorfer's landscapes managed to dodge religious schism
31:54by disguising it in nature, but they did something else as well.
31:59They tapped into a Teutonic sense of identity,
32:03the notion of a natural German homeland in the forest.
32:10When Altdorfer used woodcuts to reproduce his paintings,
32:13the audience for landscape art dramatically increased.
32:19And what his audiences were buying into were landscapes loaded with symbolism.
32:25The sacred tree, the Gothic wood.
32:30Mostly, though, they were devoid of human beings.
32:44But in Flanders, in the Low Countries,
32:48a different artist would crowd his landscapes with people.
32:55In 1565, the Flemish master Peter Bruegel painted a set of landscapes
33:01which reinvented that traditional medieval cycle, the labours of the months.
33:08These, of course, are on an epic scale.
33:12But here, there's not a single feudal lord to be found.
33:18The man who commissioned them came from bustling commercial Antwerp,
33:22a merchant called Niklas Jongelink,
33:25who wanted them to decorate the grand dining space of his suburban villa.
33:33Perhaps this was Jongelink's way of identifying with the ordinary folk,
33:38because what we have, for the first time,
33:41is a credible vision of country society,
33:45real villages, with people working and playing together.
33:51Bruegel himself was no brush-wielding yokel.
33:53He was learned and well-travelled.
33:56He'd taken a trip over the Alps to Italy, sketching as he went.
34:03Some of those alpine peaks appear incongruous
34:06alongside depictions of his low-lying Flemish home.
34:11But that only increases the telescopic sense of deep space Bruegel gives us,
34:17using those tree lines and the curve of the peaks to send our vision plunging,
34:23like the flight of that bird from huge vistas to the smallest detail.
34:31Along with that optical drama, we get another vision.
34:36Another kind of perspective, a philosophical confrontation
34:41with our relationship to nature itself,
34:43unsentimental, rugged, which demands a closer look.
34:51I know you've all seen this on countless Christmas cards,
34:55but was there ever an image less brimming with yuletide cheer?
35:01Those hunters haven't got much to show for their trouble.
35:05They've got a skinny fox suspended from their poles.
35:09The exhausted dogs trying to lift their legs out of the heavy snow
35:14feel the pain as much as their masters.
35:18Bruegel painted these compendious, visually inexhaustible masterpieces
35:23after the coldest, most frigid Flemish winter
35:26that anybody could remember in their lifetime.
35:29But he also painted them on the cusp of a long, terrible civil war
35:34that would divide the Netherlands between Protestant and Catholic,
35:37North and South, the Spanish Empire and the Free Dutch Republic.
35:41And Bruegel would actually find himself
35:44right in the middle of all those troubles.
35:47But while we're looking at these glorious landscapes,
35:52none of that history seems to matter.
35:55For Bruegel, the natural world is a consolation
35:58for the traumas afflicting civilisation.
36:01Whatever happens in our human world,
36:03the seasons will still roll around,
36:06the cattle will still return to their winter pasture.
36:10Let's just think for a minute about the way he wants us
36:14to look at these paintings.
36:16It's a dialogue, in a way, between the universal and the particular.
36:21On the one hand, wherever the eye travels,
36:24we are invited into a wealth of detail, of work and play.
36:31The trudge through the snow,
36:34the glide of the skaters across the ice.
36:39And wherever we travel with our eye, through the landscape,
36:43we go to dramatically different places,
36:46from a Flemish village huddled against the hillside,
36:49out to a storm-tossed river estuary,
36:53out to the broad open sea.
36:57An experience of looking at these paintings
37:01becomes, surely, like the experience of all of our lives.
37:06On the one hand, we're immersed in the here and now.
37:10We have no choice.
37:11We go from minute to minute, hour to hour, task to task.
37:14It's our daily routine.
37:16But then something else happens.
37:19We stop and we contemplate and we look at the whole picture,
37:24like that one bird perching on that naked, leafless branch.
37:33And everything, somehow, is pulled together.
37:36The whole of our life is laid out in front of us,
37:40and with it, the entirety of human society.
37:44And if we're very, very lucky, it all adds up.
37:47The whole human condition
37:50and our particular special little place inside it.
38:01Bruegel was an encyclopaedist of the human comedy.
38:05And as we cross the frozen pond, we find, for me,
38:09one of the most unforgettable characters in all of European art.
38:15A tiny, stooped figure, an old woman,
38:20bent with the burden of branches, meant for fuel or thatching,
38:25plodding home to her winter hearth,
38:28the prospect of which makes that burden just about bearable.
38:33It's a lesson in the perseverance of the poor
38:38for what alternative does she really have?
38:45Through these landscape paintings, what Bruegel is really doing
38:50is offering us a profound glimpse, not into the natural world,
38:55but into the human condition.
39:00Bruegel died in 1569,
39:03spared the worst of a war for religious and local liberty in the Netherlands.
39:08He couldn't know it would last for 80 years,
39:11but he evidently feared the worst.
39:13A painting pretending to be a biblical massacre of the innocents
39:17is done in contemporary dress,
39:19with a documentary awareness of what was in store for those country folk
39:24when Spanish troops arrived.
39:29What happened was what always happens in such calamities,
39:33a frantic mass migration of refugees.
39:36The Netherlands became split along the lines of the military slog.
39:42Protestant north, Catholic south.
39:48But as so often in our story,
39:50the most astonishing flowerings happen in the midst of human disaster.
39:57In the Protestant Dutch Republic,
39:59as art was purged from churches branded as idolatry,
40:03it simply shifted location into other places,
40:07especially private homes.
40:12In the years when they were most beleaguered by war,
40:16the Dutch became most prolific at buying pictures
40:19which reminded them of what they were defending.
40:23It was the first mass market for landscape art,
40:27precisely the kind of low art which Italians condescended to.
40:33Willow-hung streams.
40:36The life of the rustics.
40:39It was what the Dutch were most passionately attached to.
40:44The simple face of their homeland.
40:51Now, the reason why the Dutch felt so emotionally invested
40:55in this landscape was because they had been responsible
40:59for physically making so much of it.
41:04There's this old saying that God made the world
41:07but the Dutch made Holland,
41:09and exactly at the time where they reinvent landscape painting,
41:13this was literally true.
41:18This was an area called the Beemster.
41:21200,000 acres of what had been the inland sea of the Zuiderzee
41:26were turned into this glorious pasture
41:29between 1607 and 1612
41:33while the Dutch were at war.
41:38It was reclaimed with the aid of 43 windmills pumping the water out.
41:49This wasn't just topography, it wasn't just land,
41:53it was their homeland.
41:58So when the Dutch felt that under God's protection
42:02they were making a part of Holland,
42:05it had this deep psychological effect on them.
42:09They owned this countryside in a way which was absolutely special
42:14and which gave their painters the sense
42:16that they were painting their country in both senses,
42:20the countryside and their newborn nation at the same time,
42:24and the pictures that they would produce
42:26would belong to the whole people.
42:30MUSIC PLAYS
42:33A new class of jobbing artists emerged to service
42:37this popular demand for landscape art.
42:40Jan van Goyen was one of those workhorses.
42:43He produced more than 2,000 paintings and drawings
42:48during a 40-year career.
42:52Van Goyen's was a deliberately modest art, unashamed of its simplicity,
42:57but it's the realism with which he paints the natural world
43:01which makes van Goyen's paintings remarkable.
43:07You forget what an amazing breakthrough this represents.
43:12Landscapes had been all about kind of fantasy and colour
43:16and drenched in gold.
43:18This is drenched in mud.
43:20And even though we know that van Goyen really had to work fast
43:24with rubbish materials that didn't cost him very much money,
43:28he's so always in debt,
43:30there's a credible kind of convergence
43:32between what he's painting and how he's painting it.
43:35It's like a sketch.
43:37It's like an immediate kind of note from his own vision.
43:41And everything that's kind of rough and raw and crude
43:45and clay-like and meagre about it
43:48actually makes you feel there.
43:52There are tops of houses, the roofs,
43:57and you don't see anything else of the house.
43:59Why? Because they're actually below the waterline.
44:05This delivers a world, the kind of silvery quality of the canals,
44:10little kind of boat floating past.
44:13And you think, you're waking up and you can smell the peat turned over.
44:17It's a kind of raw day in the middle of winter.
44:21And you're absolutely enveloped by the wind,
44:26the dark, lead-coloured light.
44:30But this still, in its scraped-away authenticity,
44:35is a kind of home.
44:38Tastes changed.
44:40As the Dutch Republic became the richest country on Earth,
44:44so the moneyed wanted more sophisticated visions of their homeland.
44:51Every so often, a genius came along
44:54who could make masterpieces out of the same modest subject matter.
45:01Jacob van Rijsdael's great medium was the dappling Dutch light,
45:05so that the skies, which in the work of Van Huyen had been wet and dim,
45:10now became a grand opera of light and shade,
45:14with huge rolling clouds as its cast of characters.
45:21Rijsdael loved to exaggerate features to make them more theatrical.
45:27The romance of ancient ruins,
45:30the sinister darkness of a boggy wood.
45:34And in this painting,
45:36the great emblem of Holland has become a hero in its own right.
45:43Rijsdael's great gift was to take something homely and familiar,
45:48and it doesn't get more homely, does it, than a windmill,
45:51and big it up to the max until it is something epic, heroic,
45:56almost spiritually meaningful to everybody who's going to look at it.
46:00Rijsdael was essentially a dramatist of the landscape,
46:05and this is high theatre.
46:08Now, there really is a windmill at this town called Veetme Duisdede,
46:13but he's made it absolutely enormous.
46:16It has a kind of authority to it.
46:20The sky is heavy, there is dirty weather ahead.
46:24These clouds are boiling up into what might be a storm.
46:29There are deep shadows hanging over the landscape.
46:33These women with their bonnets covering their faces are hurrying home.
46:38And then I think of the date.
46:42This painting was done in 1670,
46:45and that was a moment of tension and nervousness
46:48that the Dutch had about going it alone in Europe.
46:52You think, correctly, that the great powers out there,
46:57jealous of your prosperity in the world, are plotting against you.
47:01England and France, as indeed they were.
47:04And two years after this painting was done,
47:07the Dutch Republic was almost engulfed by a pincer movement
47:11between those two hostile states.
47:14There's no doubt that that windmill, with the light shining on it,
47:19is a guardian against peril.
47:22The sails of the mill not accidentally form the cross of the Redeemer.
47:29There's a saviour, and the saviour is the windmill.
47:32And that cross, just in case you were wondering,
47:35is echoed visually by an opening in the sky
47:39down which this gorgeous light falls,
47:43the only warm bit in the painting.
47:45And if you're Dutch, you remember an old saying which says,
47:49just as a windmill needs the wind to move its sails,
47:53so man needs the breath of God to act.
47:58The moral is, never forget the word of God.
48:01You have a covenant with God.
48:04You are his modern chosen people.
48:07Just remember that when you look at the mill.
48:16When nations feel threatened, or when they're actually torn apart,
48:20the sense of God-protected homeland,
48:23somehow sheltered from catastrophe, comes swimming into view.
48:29Civil wars, as we've seen over and again,
48:33are the nurseries of great landscape painting.
48:37What held for the tight-bounded Dutch Republic,
48:40looking heavenwards to its boundless skies,
48:43was magnified on a continental scale in the 1860s
48:48in the bitterly divided American Republic.
48:52Though the American Civil War was in part a war about land,
48:56and the right to extend slavery into new Western territories,
49:01it was possible, in the mind's eye at least,
49:05to gaze west towards the setting sun and see an unclouded Eden.
49:13Some truly lurid panorama paintings
49:16were produced in the name of these paradise illusions,
49:20all shining with the stage lighting of Providence.
49:25All of these efforts, like most propaganda,
49:28were sentimentally forgettable once the war was over.
49:35But one great painting came out of the craving for landscape consolation.
49:43And it was a distinctly unromantic elegy,
49:46both tragic and hopeful at the same time.
49:51The veteran in a new field was the work of the greatest,
49:56in my view, of all 19th-century American artists.
50:01Winslow Homer was then just 29 and fresh from the battlefield.
50:08As a war illustrator for magazines and newspapers,
50:12he'd seen the carnage first-hand.
50:16Unlike the starry-eyed painters of expansive horizons
50:20with their Olympian points of view,
50:23Homer's picture comes down to earth and plants us deep in the soil.
50:29That soil is both infinitely fertile, bursting with gold,
50:34but also, of course, deeply blood-soaked.
50:38Homer painted it in 1865,
50:42just a few months after the bloodiest war in all US history
50:46had come to an end.
50:49The traumatic shock of Lincoln's assassination, too,
50:53was still raw in Homer's mind.
50:57In the solitary, epic figure of the veteran,
51:00there is, of course, something of the lonely nobility
51:03of the martyred president, thanklessly toiling,
51:06and I believe also something of Homer himself.
51:09Like his namesake from classical antiquity,
51:12Homer conjures the great themes of sacrifice and regeneration
51:17and, of course, the endless regiments of the fallen
51:21embodied in the wheat.
51:24But most of all, it's a picture of American gold,
51:27perhaps the only gold which truly mattered,
51:30the gold of the endless prairies,
51:33standing beneath an infinitely blue harvest sky.
51:39Tragedy, coloured by an impassioned religious faith
51:43in a boundless American future planted in boundless American space.
51:53Lincoln himself never lost that faith.
51:56Even before the war was over, he'd pushed through a law
52:00to protect and bequeath one particular landscape,
52:03one American Eden, to the people for all posterity.
52:08While America's wounds would stay livid and open
52:11for generations to come,
52:13this would be at least one place of miraculous healing.
52:19Yosemite, in the Sierra Nevada.
52:24Very rapidly, Yosemite became America's most sensational
52:28tourist destination,
52:30its lonely beauty instantly compromised by its popularity.
52:38And the images which promoted it made sure to represent it
52:44as they did much of America, as empty of native people.
52:49The Miwok Indians were either moved on or painted out.
52:57And when Yosemite eventually found its ultimate visual poet,
53:02he too cleared the view of humans.
53:08In 1916, a teenager from San Francisco
53:12visited Yosemite for the first time.
53:17Ansel Adams was always going down with something.
53:20The flu, measles, a nasty cough.
53:23The sort of thing budding pianists bent over the keyboard
53:26were supposed to get.
53:28And Adams was one of those.
53:31But while he was wheezing and hacking,
53:34he'd read a book about Yosemite
53:36and when a get-well trip was suggested,
53:39he'd go nowhere else.
53:45Visiting Yosemite was an epiphany for Adams,
53:48like falling in love.
53:50Gradually, the music faded,
53:53and surrendering to the drama of the Sierra Nevada light,
53:57photography became everything.
54:01Ansel Adams' miracle moment came in 1927.
54:05He climbed to 4,000 feet in deep snow
54:09to the precipitous spot known as the diving board.
54:13With the light failing and down to one glass plate,
54:16he had the inspired idea of using a dark red filter
54:20to turn the sky almost black
54:23and create an extreme contrast between snow and mountain.
54:29And he produced one of the greatest masterpieces
54:32of American or any other art.
54:37Adams called it his visualisation,
54:41not what his eye but the inner lens of his imagination could see.
54:49He became not just Yosemite's photographer,
54:52but its great artist,
54:54the high priest of its temple,
54:56its stone, its light and its water.
55:00And what he produced in those landscape altarpieces,
55:04because that's what they surely were,
55:06was an America irradiated with luminous majesty,
55:11taller than the highest skyscraper,
55:14more powerful than the mightiest business corporation,
55:18and he wanted Yosemite to be for everyone.
55:23This is our land.
55:28This land is your land
55:30And this land is my land
55:33From California
55:35To the New York island
55:37From the redwood forest...
55:40It was in the 1950s that Adams's photographs
55:43built into a mission for mankind,
55:46a protest against the damage that could be done to the earth
55:50by the lust for a fast park.
55:53It culminated in This Is The American Earth,
55:57a hymn to the beauty of the natural world
56:00and an instant bestseller.
56:03More and more, Adams's photographs became preachy,
56:07but those visual sermons were ecstatic, radiant, mystical,
56:11passionate statements about how humanity could be redeemed
56:15through its encounter with nature.
56:18In his later years, he became a kind of patriarch of environmentalism
56:22and every so often he'd put down his camera
56:25and even leave his beloved Yosemite
56:27to go and try and persuade presidents to his point of view.
56:31But throughout it all, he remained steadfast to his core belief
56:35that his job in life was to give visual expression
56:39to that silken cord tying together the fate of man
56:44with the fate of the earth.
56:49In 1977, the photographer-as-prophet had his moment.
56:55NASA prepared to launch its Voyager spacecraft
56:58on a mission to outer space.
57:00On board was the Golden Record.
57:03It contained pictures depicting human civilisation
57:07and the natural world.
57:10Adams's paradise images were among them.
57:13If they weren't the whole truth about our civilisation,
57:17then his photographs weren't a beautiful lie either.
57:20Like all landscape art, they sprang from the eye, the mind
57:25and the invention of the human heart.
57:28We all move on the fringes of eternity, Adams wrote,
57:33and are sometimes granted vistas.
57:39As Voyager prepared to leave our solar system,
57:42it turned around its camera for one final time.
57:46The result was the ultimate landscape photograph,
57:50one that has given us a new perspective
57:53on our place in the cosmos,
57:56our lonely planet, the pale blue dot.
58:09The Open University has produced a free poster
58:12that explores the history of different civilisations
58:15through artefacts.
58:17To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553
58:22or go to the address on screen
58:24and follow the links for the Open University.
58:31Civilisations continues next Thursday at nine
58:34and the full series is available now on BBC iPlayer.
58:38Music is one of the pillars of civilisation
58:41as explored by Tom Service on BBC Radio 3 Sunday evening at five.