文明

1.纳巴泰人的香薰是树脂2.玛雅文明也是象形文字3.埃及门农雕像起风时会唱歌，不是每天都有，如果有机会去蹲守一个月或半年，听一下。

4.公元前600年的希腊雅典陶器上的图画就已经告诫人们控制酒量，人和动物之间的界限在哪？

喝多少酒会变成野兽。

5公元前550年古希腊大理石雕像《佛雷斯科莱》和观众是有互动的，她面带微笑的看向正前方，挑战着我们去回看她，她手里有一朵花，看不出来这是给她自己的还是要给我们的，有涂料痕迹说明雕塑曾经是有颜色的。

6.和自然界相似风景画一直是化解人世间种种动乱纷争的一剂良药，然而，与其说是对世界的客观描绘，风景画更多的是表达我们对世界的愿景。

有时它传达了自然与人类之间的一种和谐感，有时它是丹青勾勒的家国故土，有时它是经纬编织的梦中天堂，又有时它是透镜折射的刹那风光，但最重要的它是一个理解我们文明的方法，让我们感悟大千世界中最令人恐惧却又最令人振奋的真相，浩瀚宇宙中我们生存的地方。

7.元代王蒙《青卞隐居图》解读得太好了，在配乐的烘托下几个特写镜头和全貌，展现了动荡焦躁不安敏感紧张的情绪，在这样的山水间隐居的人也像要面临山崩地裂大山压顶的危险。

这是一幅心像画，他的不祥感并非无缘无故，不久之后他被政敌迫害死在狱中。

有时无边无际的风景使你心荡神驰，但有时重重山墙也会将你围困，阻绝一切光亮。

8.1565年雅科波·丁托列托《耶稣受难》尺寸巨大，画家所做的就是模糊观者和画作之间的界限，如果我们站在画前，几乎就会感觉你成了中央场景周围人群的一份子，这里再三强调的是，耶稣被钉死在十字架上，既是一件发生于过去的历史事件，也是一件宗教事件，于是时间和空间的屏障被打破。

9.伊斯兰国家也有自己的书法，文字转化为图像装饰在清真寺里。

10.印度的泰姬陵和小泰姬陵非常典雅精致，记得有空去看看。

11.非洲贝宁国的青铜雕塑在大英博物馆，BBC很客观的反思了不同文明的碰撞，葡萄牙人是贸易往来，英国却是殖民掠夺。

12.18世纪晚期，圆山应举《冰图屏风》表达了佛教中，缺憾与无常的概念，无常是因为这些线条是不受控制且不规则的，缺憾是因为冰终将融化。

13.日本艺术将莫奈引向无限多可能性的连作创作方式，将不同时间与不同光线下的同一事物绘入作品中，这不是单调乏味的重复，反而引领了艺术新潮流。

14.最强大的当代艺术品具有神奇的转化之力，它能将昨晚生命短暂的废物、宿醉的纪念品转化为某种永恒的真正保持传统的东西，最灵巧的双手，可以将破坏的对象转化为创造的基础。

15.米哈尔·罗夫纳 照片上的无数个渺小的动态个体不停前行，无法安顿下来，文明预设了一个固定的城市人口，但罗夫纳的作品呈现了人们迁移的处境，永远在各个地方之间辗转。

而其他的则像天书一样，但当你近看的时候，你发现这些字符就是人类，我们就是我们所写，我们的语言定义了我们。

16.卡萨特《包厢》画的歌剧院中一位装扮优雅的女性，用观剧镜凝视舞台，但她自己也没有逃过一位坐在远处的男性的注意，他透过观剧镜盯着她仔细观察，就像观赏画作的我们一样，这也许是在隐晦地批评这种具体化的男性审视目光，正是这目光造就了19世纪艺术品中大量的女性裸体。

17.《亚维农的少女》毕加索将西方对于艺术的观念画在了她们头上，他想要表达的不仅仅是美学上的美丽，还有可怕的关于性、暴力甚至是死亡的原始感觉，这样的手法之所以能成功，部分是因为那些第一次看到这幅画的人会在脑海中，将非洲面具和他们所认为的原始文明联系起来，正是这些东西显而易见的威胁感，使它们看上去如此令人震惊，而我们感受到的其背后文化的野蛮感，增强了人们对于欧洲文化所谓优越性的认同。

BBC在2018播出的纪录片Civilization绝对是当之无愧的鸿篇巨制。

制作团队的视野之宏大，在开篇就一览无遗。

讲述文明，竟从讲述文明如何被残酷地毁去开始。

伊斯兰国占领古城巴尔米拉之后，大肆摧毁遗迹和文物。

这些先人的智慧结晶，经住了千百年来自然与人类战火的考验，却在恐怖分子的铁锤下毁于一旦。

巴尔米拉博物馆馆长，81岁的哈立德·阿萨德，因为拒绝透露古城艺术品的隐藏地点，被斩首示众。

为了起到恐吓作用，恐怖分子甚至把他的残躯挂在信号灯上，头置于两腿之间，并在一旁告示上将他称为邪神的崇拜者。

讲述文明，为何要从一段刚发生不久的鲜血淋漓的历史开始？

主讲人之一西蒙·沙玛的一段话说出了原因。

"We can spend a lot of time debating what civilisation is or isn't, but when its opposite shows up in all its brutality and cruelty and intolerance and lust for destruction, we know what civilisation is. We know it from the shock of its imminent loss as a mutilation on the body of our humanity. The record of humanity brims over with the rage to destroy. But it's also imprinted with the opposite instinct - to make things that go beyond the demands of food and shelter, things that make us see the world and our place in it in a different light."

（第一集）史前人像绘画：南非欧洲，法国：布拉桑普夫人（雕刻女性头像）头部为猛犸象牙脸部特征具有光影变化

布拉桑普夫人BC2000埃及文明与称为米诺斯的航海文明（希腊）进行通商由亚瑟·埃文斯（英国）发掘米诺斯文明的象征物：公牛、金戒指BC1627年火山爆发毁灭圣托里尼岛克里特文明灭绝产生迈锡尼文明约旦，佩特拉古城

佩特拉古城地形险恶环境决定一切香料贸易树脂燃烧产生香气仅生长在阿拉伯地区纳巴泰人凭借自己对地形的熟悉垄断了香料贸易壁画歌颂酒神也有拜占庭风格的马赛克壁画有希腊化的建筑竹子加以象头只出现在佩特拉古城AD1鼎盛 106年被并入罗马帝国 7世纪被伊斯兰军队入侵多次地震残破废墟被遗忘的文明三星堆文明，中国四川与中国黄河文明平行发展有文化交流（中国文明记得比较简略 因为介绍的也简单）玛雅古国，墨西哥卡拉克穆尔 通过人力石城，通过建造公共建筑，广场来强化自我意识玛雅文明活泼多样充满创意

玛雅人对图形有着狂热的爱好因此发明了象形文字到处有文字（更像是有文本意义的图像）

玛雅象形文字洪都拉斯，科潘古城建筑立面色彩鲜艳被保存完好象形文字梯，统治者在石阶上刻象形文字

象形文字梯（第二集） 墨西哥，塔巴斯克州最早出现人像的文明之一，奥尔梅克文明巨大石雕高2米的人脸眼睛直径30cm，由一整块玄武岩雕刻而成

2. 埃及，门农巨像奥西曼提斯，雪莱受门农巨像启发所创作

传说其中一尊会在黎明时歌唱（风吹过雕像的裂缝）希腊人将巨像与自己的文明传说相连接因此叫做门农巨像重新命名是一种对当地进行统治的策略3.弗拉西克来亚雕像，希腊

弗拉西克来亚雕像上残留有红色颜料，表明希腊雕像都是色彩鲜艳的，动作略显僵硬4.阿泰米多乌丝，非常写实古罗马统治下的埃及艺术（AD60-150）埃及的希腊罗马时期，艺术风格截然不同棺材上画有制作木乃伊的场景，表现了死后世界，源自古埃及，红色背景源自古罗马

5.兵马俑流水线工程身体的不同部分由不同的人负责6.埃及，底比斯拉美西斯二世，巨像爱好者

7.北方天使，艺术家葛姆雷的作品8.被绘制的花瓶，

上面的图像体现了演变中的社会制度同性社会性女性生产羊毛和孩子9.古希腊风格雕像，罗马希腊：多次打败强于自己的劲敌进而产生了自己是优越民族的思想他人即野蛮和谐是核心要义身体的和谐反映宇宙的和谐古罗马吸取学习了古希腊的雕像艺术

休息的拳击手10.贝尔维德尔的阿波罗

温克尔曼将阿波罗视为高级文明的象征，古典主义随即影响了整个西方审美11.奥尔梅克摔跤手可能是fake，过于现实化，具有希腊罗马风格，与同时期作品格格不入，玄武岩非当地产12.美第奇的维纳斯 BC75，普拉克西特

第一尊裸体雕像由古希腊影响的古典主义审美影响了人们对于美的人体的定义

解说写的实在太漂亮，决定挑一些喜欢的誊下来。

时隔一年半，我终于把剩下的三集看完了。

一集一集写。

E06 Radiance26’20’’ GoyaThe Black Paintings seem to me to be an endgame for Goya, not just in his own life and career in his 70s, but also his feeling about an endgame for art, the art that aspired through beauty to ennoble the spirit of civilization.

Shock at his own monstrousness, Francisco de Goya,1820-1823 https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/saturn/18110a75-b0e7-430c-bc73-2a4d55893bd6One of the most terrifying of all these paintings, perhaps the most famous one, shows Saturn devouring one of his children. That’s what it’s come to. The huge tradition of classical mythology reduced to a mad, antic, capering monster, chewing on the stump of a small body, but look at that body. Not a child at all. It’s the body miniaturized of a female nude. Two millennia of looking at the nude, of seeing it as a symbol of art’s perfection is reduced to this horrifying image of sadistic cruelty.

Fight with Cudgels, or Fight to Death with Clubs, Francisco de Goya, 1820-1823https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/duel-with-cudgels-or-fight-to-the-death-with-clubs/2f2f2e12-ed09-45dd-805d-f38162c5beafIn one of the paintings, he puts the lights back on. We’re able to see something, but what is it we’re seeing? The light is given to us to reveal another kind of horror. These two huge peasant-like figures beating the living daylights out of each other. Blood is streaming down the head of one of them, even as they sink deeper and deeper into a kind of sandy quagmire. This is what Spain has become. Endless, relentless, mutual slaughter. Now, all these monsters and horrors and demons and dragons of course had appeared all over European art before, but where had they appeared? They’d appeared in images of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse, and they were always balanced by a sense of the optimism of salvation. But Goya has come to the conclusion that God is absent without leave and there is one painting, which in a sense is least likely to have the horrifying pessimistic eloquence, but it does.

The Drowning Dog, Francisco de Goya, 1820-1823https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-drowning-dog/4ea6a3d1-00ee-49ee-b423-ab1c6969bca6There are no figures, there’s just a dog, a mutt. But for this dog, the master is gone, dead, slaughtered, missing. He’s no longer going to be fed. He’s simply faced with drowning inside this formless brown vacuum. It’s all come down to this, then. A dog without a master. Spain without its god. Humanity absolutely without civilization.E01 Second Moment of Creation4’53’’We can spend a lot of time debating what civilization is or isn’t, but when it’s opposite shows up, in all its brutality and cruelty and intolerance and lust for destruction, we know what civilization is; we know it from the shock of its imminent loss as a mutilation on the body of our humanity.16’58’’With this exquisite, intensively carved female head, we have for the first time, something immensely and movingly momentous. We have the revelation of the human face. It’s a tiny thing, it can just go in the palm of your hand and it could have only been made by an extraordinary array of dexterous skills. 39’36’’Ultimately, all civilizations want exactly what they can’t have: the conquest of time. So they build bigger, higher and grander as if they could build their way out of mortality, and it never works. There always comes a moment where the most populous of cities with their markets and temples and palaces and funeral tombs are simply abandoned. And that most indefatigable leveller of all, mother nature, closes in, covering the place with desert sand, or strangling it with vegetation. And then, civilization dies the death of deaths, invisibility. E02 How do we look?25'41"The one thing you really get here is that size matters. These vast monumental figures, perhaps four or five times life size and with that nice hint that they’d been even bigger if they bothered to stand up for you, simply dominate. They take over your field of vision. It’s an assertion of the power of the pharaoh through his huge, superhuman, enthroned body.33’31”If early Athenian pottery reflects how man and women were expected to live within the social context of the city, its statues attempt to embody the interior life within. The beginning of the fifth century BCE saw an amazing transformation in Greek sculpture. Rigid figures with the fixed gaze of phrasikleia give way to daring new experiments in the human form. One of the first of these is known as the Kritios boy, and he would transform how we see the sculpted human body.The Kritios boy show us that you can signal anteriority through the person’s movement, through their stance. But particularly, if you lose the archaic smile, and you have an expression which isn’t necessarily blank, that immediately invites you, the spectator, to psychologise it. So with that one step, the statue acquires not just a body that is an organism rather than a mechanism, but also what we would probably call, a soul.41’57’’“This was quite simply the most sublime statue of antiquity to have escaped destruction. An eternal springtide, clothes the alluring virility of his mature years with a pleasing youth and plays with soft tenderness upon the lofty structure of his limbs."49’46’’We still have a lot of really unexamined assumptions about what constitutes a beautiful or desirable body. We have a lot of unexamined assumptions about what constitutes an attractive, or aesthetically appealing way to look. And you have only to open up the pages of a women’s magazine, as people are commonly pointing out, to see how incredibly narrow the space is in a certain kind of western aesthetic consciousness, for what a woman can look like. Similar kinds of things can be applied to men as well.Reinforced by commercial interests, the cult of youth and beauty begun by the ancient Greeks, is perhaps more powerful than ever today. E03 Picturing Paradise6’34’’

李成《晴峦萧寺图》http://collection.sina.com.cn/zgsh/20121116/152092655.shtmlWhat makes Li Cheng’s painting a masterpiece, is that it literally rises above royal propaganda. As our eye ascends through the painting, so our whole approach to it also ascends to a higher order of question. And Li Cheng has changed the wash of the ink. It’s lighter, finer, more ethereal. It suggests deep distance. But depths of our own response as well as physical depths. What is nature? What lies beyond surface appearance? What truly moves the universe? And how above all, does the dialogue between flowing water and the adamant face of that eroded rock, bring us harmony?18’56’’But renaissance humanism took a different attitude to the serpent of temptation. This is Villa Barbaro. … A place where renaissance ideals of culture and sophistication could meet the earthy pleasures of the country. A building of harmony, grace and pleasure, where it would be forever summer. Leonardo Da Vinci wrote something fascinating. He says, “one of the values of painting is it can show you the beauty of nature and perhaps your lover in nature, in the middle of winter.” When you’re stuck inside, you’re stuck indoors, but you can remember what the meadows and what lovely picnics were like last summer by looking at a painting of it.If you extend that into a kind of a theory of landscape art, you might say that the first way that people express the desire to escape into landscape is by actually creating escapist worlds.30’41”

Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel 1565https://www.wikiart.org/en/pieter-bruegel-the-elder/hunters-in-the-snow-1565Bruegel painted these compendious, visually inexhaustible masterpieces after the longest, bleakest, coldest Flemish winter anyone could remember. Let’s just think for a minute the way in which Bruegel makes us look at these pictures. On the one hand, they are an invitation into a wealth of detail, wherever our eye travels, it picks out these lovely minutiae of work and play. The skaters gliding across the ice. Our eye travels from one kind of landscape, a village huddled on the hill, to a completely different one. A frozen mountain or a storm tossed estuary out to the broad open sea. But there are moments as well when the pure compositional muscle that Bruegel can command makes everything come together in one great universal vision. It makes us stop. It makes us have a moment of contemplation. And then If we’re very, very lucky, like these wonderful paintings, it all seems to add up. A whole of the human condition and our special little place within it. 40’30”There were a few kind of particular characteristics that marked out the American approach to the landscape. One of those was a sense of inferiority and competition with Europe that Americans in the 18thcentury and the early 19thcentury, were the poor country cousins. And they were on the outermost fringe of an European world in which they had been taught that Rome is the centre of all art, that the best landscapes, the tallest mountains are to be found in Switzerland. And here are Americans, on the threshold really of their own great continent, which they are beginning increasingly to move west across, trying to say, “wait, you know what, we have really high mountains also. And we have really big animals that we can celebrate in the same terms you guys are using but with our characters instead.” And I think that was out of inferiority in a funny sense, that a kind of American pride in the American landscape was born. 43’21”More and more (Ansel) Adam’s photographs became preachy. But those vision sermons were radiant, mystical, ecstatic. They were passionate statements about how humanity could be redeemed through the encounter with nature. But throughout, he remains steadfast that his job in life is to give visual form to that silken cord, tying together the fate of man with the fate of the earth.E04 The Eye of Faith43’49’’What all of these movements within religions have in common is that they come along saying we have a purer form of faith than the one that is currently being practiced, and if your fundamental goal is purity, then one of the central things you might try to do would be to eliminate opulent aesthetic or potentially sinful representations of things to act as intermediaries, because then maybe you’re just worshipping the object, you’re not actually worshipping the divine. So it makes sense that protestants in the Reformation went into the monasteries and stripped everything out saying “it’s time to get rid of these images.” 51’35’’We passionately want to rediscover the spiritual in art, we passionately want to discover that kind of power and purpose that religious art has. Whether it’s reinventing Christian art in cathedrals or whether it’s reinventing Islamic art, it’s about wanting to resacralise art, wanting to rediscover that wonderful, almost magical, charismatic purpose that religious art has. For much of history, art has been religious art. For some, the creative impulse has been the very expression of divinity. For others, a challenge to God’s authority. For those that believe, religious art has always been transformative; yet for everyone, art retains a primal, spiritual feeling, a way to express the mysterious and it speaks to our earliest human drive to touch and define a world beyond our own. E05 The Triumph of Art50’49’’Out there the western hurly burly is getting ready to make terrible mischief to smash its way into the domed heavenly vault, to stick its bloody great brutal boots right into the paradise garden. It’ll make an empire based on machines, money and muskets. Then slowly but surely, the Moghul Empire will disappear entirely inside its courtly refinement, becoming inextricably just a cultural ornament. After centuries of extraordinary flowering, the eastern Renaissance was transformed by the twin forces of empire and colonialism. The delicate blooms and glowing jewels survived in what Europeans wore on their bodies and how they decorate their homes. While painters were mislabeled as miniaturists, as they were forced at least for a time, to rely on the patronage of their new British rulers. Western art critics increasingly called the artistic beauty of the east decorative, to distinguish it from pictures they put in frames where Europeans consider real art. But it was in the east, that the ancient meaning of ars, craft was preserved in all its splendor and still is. Because here, unlike in the west, the Renaissance wasn’t about the rebirth of classical knowledge. Unlike Europe, the east had never lost touch with its ancient heritage. A rich heritage which it continues to celebrate and share with the world to this day. E06 First Contact 28’07’’

《冰山屏风》圆山应举Cracked Ice, Maruyama Okyohttps://theartsdesk.com/tv/civilisations-first-contact-bbc-two-review-david-olusoga-goes-goldWhat’s regarded as his greatest work, cracked ice, combined everything Okyo knew from both eastern and western traditions. It’s so subtle, so minimal, a work of art that almost feels like it isn’t there. And everything about it feels ephemeral and frail. It’s painted on paper not canvas as in the west, and great expanses of it are just white blank areas that seem almost untouched by the artist. And yet all of that belies the fact that this is one of the most sophisticated works of cultural synthesis that I know. It shows a sheet of ice, presumably on a lake, and these broken jagged cracks in the ice disappeared into the mist. The effect is three-dimensional space. Now, that is European vanishing point perspective. And yet, this is one of Okyo’s masterworks, just could not be more Japanese, because it’s a philosophical contemplation of two concepts, fundamental to Buddism, imperfection and impermanence. Imperfection because these lines are uncontrolled and irregular; Impermanence because of course the ice will melt. And those two are just as fundamental to Japanese art, as the classical Greek roman ideas of beauty and perfection are to European art. So this is Okyo incorporating European ideas into his art, but in ways that are in keeping with Japanese philosophy and Japanese tastes. 32’11’’In this frenzy of trade and wealth, Dutch art also became the object of conspicuous consumption. A modern commercial art market was born, supplying landscapes, still lifes, portraits and scenes from Dutch life to the aspirational new merchant class. What they wanted in their art was not the pomp of monarchy, or the flamboyance of the catholic church, but a new type of realism, one that reflect their protestant desire to portray the world as it truly was, often with warts and all moral lessons. With art from renaissance, it’s about beauty. Dutch art, it’s not about that, it’s about reality. So you do paint rotten fruits, and you do paint fat ladies that just woke up in their bed. And you do look at dirty dogs in the street. Because it’s about nature in every sense, and not just in the sense that you want it to be, but in the sense it is. 33’22’’One of the star artists of this golden age of Dutch painting was Vermeer. Jan Vermeer is not an artist known for his epic landscapes. Most of his paintings are famously intimate, set within a neat, ordered, almost claustrophobic world of the Dutch home.What Jan Vermeer specialized in was the art of everyday life and his world was an interior world. What he captured on canvas were simple fleeting moments. A woman reading a letter is bathed in a delicate light that pours from a side window. But that only serves to emphasize the fact that we are in an enclosed room and the rest of the world is hidden from sight, that it’s somewhere out there. But if you look a little more closely at the details, what you realise is that Vermeer’s seemingly interior domestic space is infused with the globalism of the Dutch golden age. From the innovative pottery of his hometown of Delft, which mimicked Chinese porcelain, to prized rugs from the orient, and a geographer wearing a fashionable Japanese robe, Vermeer captures a world built on encounters with distant civilizations and peoples.50’05’’Hundreds of public buildings built in the British neoclassical tradition would follow. They represented not only a separation of cultures that had before freely intermingled, they also marked the passing of the age of discovery. The world had entered an age of high empire, in which to justify their exploitations and conquests, European powers would willfully overlook the achievements of other civilisations. It was a story that would be repeated around the globe and we are only just emerging from its cultural legacy today. In a wonderful twist, Richard Wellesley’s government house is used by the government of Bengal. It has been taken back by Indians for their own government. And so we have to unthink some of the inevitability that we tend to ascribe to encounters that ultimately led to European dominance. If you look at the history of European encounters with the non-European world, you find a huge range of ways that they took shape.And although there is a history that has to be told, a story that is one of imperialism, but a story that is also one of globalization, one of increasing interconnection across different parts of the world that has yielded the world in which we live today. Our modern world of digital communication has massively broaden the scope of our encounters, both with foreign cultures and civilisations and within the different cultural groupings of our own. And by connecting new audience with traditional artistic practices, the global art market continues to transform new encounters into new kinds of art. From the reemergence of the long overlooked sacred art, like that of North American first nations, the indigenous people of Australia and the carvings of the African Makonde people, to new artists such as Ghanaian born sculptor El Anatsui, who sews together bottle tops into large scale assemblages that comment on consumption, waste and the environment. Today, in our increasingly globalized civilization, the sheer variety of our encounters both foreign and at home continues to be a major source of inspiration, shaping both our art and our world.

《文明》是一部深度而又富有洞见的纪录片，由历史学家西蒙·沙玛、玛丽·比尔德和戴维·奥卢索加主持。

该片全面展示了人类文明的进程，以及各种艺术和文化对社会的深远影响。

透过这部纪录片，我们可以看到人类历史的宏大叙事，理解各种文化的价值和影响。

这部作品充满洞见，富有启发性，是一部难得的历史纪录片。

第一集创世纪的第二个瞬间。

认知革命，人类开始创造艺术，乐器，雕塑，绘画，城市。

整个就是全世界到处切换啊，中间又见到了帕特拉古城，崛起是因为位置重要，垄断香料贸易。

衰落是因为归入罗马，别的城市成为线路必经之地，这就是帕尔米拉，就是开头文物被破坏，馆长被处死的那个地方。

最后给玛雅文化更多的篇幅，四十多个城堡相互征战，为了竞争，互相之间修建更高更好的金字塔，牺牲更多的人，最后天灾水土流失加上社会动乱，玛雅灭亡。

非常羡慕主持人真全球各地现场参观啊，这个只有大型制作组才有这财力，继续看。

第二集如何自视。

各种人像。

墨西哥奥尔梅克文明的各种小人像，这个后面还会讲到被视为最高成就高价购得的摔跤手可能是假冒的。

古希腊纯真的少女，手握花蕾面带神秘微笑。

中国兵马俑，作为活人的替代品殉葬，埋入地下没有多久就遭到起义军的破坏。

大工厂流水线的产物，最后一步雕琢让每个人都有不同。

这段用的是美丽中国的配乐，好亲切。

埃及拉美西斯二世，这人超级自恋，自己给自己搞个人崇拜，把前面法老的雕像也换成自己的名字。

希腊那种红黑的酒杯，专用于仅有男性的宴会，嗯，促进男性之间的友谊。

对女性的描绘就是多生孩子多纺羊毛。

罗马的阿波罗雕像，这个看着很像大卫。

休息的拳击手，美丽和野蛮可以在同一人身上完美体现，这个在当年是失败品。

第三集风景画。

中国李成的山水画，还有乔仲常画的关于苏轼的，画面中苏轼一手提鱼一手提酒，收藏者说这人多才多艺，还是个厨师，发明了好多菜，感觉收藏家可能是饿了。

巴基斯坦的流水花园，天堂就是有水的地方，斑斓地毯，画面里面出现的编织工都是男性。

意大利Barbano别墅，委托人建造者绘画家都是当时的名人，充满玩乐气氛，太会玩了。

又见到了勃鲁盖尔德画，话说还是这么电视上看画好，局部非常清晰，现场看也没这待遇。

荷兰的风车，上帝创造了地球，荷兰人创造了荷兰，想去看看。

地球的一张蓝色弹珠的照片拍摄于1972年，后来还有一张叫pale blue dot. 第四集神的艺术。

Art is the way to wake up the soul，即使语言不通，艺术也可以表达我们的感受。

lionman的那个作品，竟然需要几百个小时的工作量。

吴哥窟每年两次竟然有这么多人来到现场看完美的瞬间，这里是印度教的神殿。

印度ajanta的神庙，如今应该是已经废弃了，拿着蜡烛走向内部画像像活过来一样，没有顺序，每个人都需要自己探索自己找答案。

那个特别的现代清真寺，真是太强了，用的是默罕默德获得启示的山洞的意向。

蓝色清真寺，规模宏大，富丽堂皇，完全想不到修建于帝国即将崩塌的前夕，其实很可能就是依然要向人民和对手显示，你看我还很牛还可以继续，结果花钱太多说完倒闭。

花体是真好看啊，好费工夫。

西班牙征服了墨西哥，把当地的宗教形象用基督教去替代，巧了两边都认为流血会维护世界平衡，最受欢迎的是圣母。

说到圣母，西班牙本国macarena圣母一年一度的复活真是壮观啊，在现场好多泪流满面的。

说到人像崇拜，没有比印度更广泛的，但奇特的是，完全没有造成困扰，各路神仙和平共处，各司其职，日本也是。

伊斯兰向印度扩张的时候，拆了印度教的很多神庙，毁坏砖上面的画像或者倒过来使用，建立了高达72米的清真寺。

清教徒也同样毁坏过基督教的圣像，到底崇拜的是神性还是形象和物体，究竟从什么时候开始走偏，到什么程度又需要纠正呢。

第五集艺术的胜利。

东方西方走了不同的路，西方更注重个体的表达，东方不需要复兴，因为从来没有断过。

真没想到当年索菲亚清真寺和圣彼得大教堂竟然施竞争关系，基本同时，又都是两大宗教的重点建筑。

米开朗基罗举办感谢工人的宴会，在那个时代非常特殊了。

切利尼的黄金盐盒，书上读到过还被偷过。

美第奇家族还挺记仇，卷土重来以后定做了美杜莎被砍头的雕像，制作过程惊心动魄，效果动人心魄，还让美杜莎盯着大卫的方向，非常想超越偶像。

莫卧尔帝国的阿克巴皇帝，养了一百多位画家，不管什么画自己都是最伟大的那个，嗯，一般都有这个想法。

卡拉瓦乔把圣母拉进了平常人的生活。

那位经历坎坷的女画家，在英国大胆表达了女人也要表达，不要堵住我的嘴。

宫女这个画，前面看书竟然没看懂啊，我记得这画好像委托人不太满意，以及伦勃朗的夜巡，委托人们也不满意，都给了钱，为啥把我画的这么靠后。

现在看来，当年都是极为大胆的形式。

泰姬陵出场，不过要介绍的是比它早十年的另外一座陵墓，是当时的皇后为自己的父亲设计，内部装饰色彩明艳，花朵遍布，确实漂亮。

还是一如既往的喜欢慢动作特写，话说为啥有些画面边缘是糊的，难道是打码，也不像，都是风景不需要打码，可能还是他们觉得好看吧。

第六集初次邂逅。

说的是东方和西方，日本和印度在与西方的交流中产生的艺术。

奇怪，上一集和这一集都没有中国，难道是咱们同一时期没有交流吧。

贝宁的青铜器制造，早期就很发达，如今依然存在，统治者已经是第39代了。

葡萄牙的里斯本是当时的大都市。

日本和葡萄牙的交流，各种其它地区的物产，动物，丝绸，世界各地的人，包括传教士，这引起了日本的恐慌，幕府开始闭关，用宗教茶道教育武士阶层，只留下和荷兰的沟通，因为这家比较听话。

南蛮屏风，荷兰玻璃，都是那个时代的交流印证。

混沌武士里面女主的父亲就是被驱逐的传教士，这片音乐故事都相当赞。

荷兰阿姆斯特坦是当时的国际大都市，自由没有审查还钱多，笛卡尔很喜欢，还有一位女插画家在这里出版了插画，而且还在52岁没有男性监护人陪伴的情况下跑到苏里南继续观察昆虫，回到荷兰又出版了一本畅销书。

用水彩不用油画，是因为当时被禁止，现在看来恰恰是油彩才适合。

Vermeer，差点以为戴珍珠耳环德少女又要出镜了还好没有。

看起来封闭的空间，实际上已经受到了外界的影响和改变，东方的地毯，瓷器，衣物服饰。

英国和印度当地贵族的争斗，推行新古典主义建筑，体现自己的优越感。

荷叶作为时间之轮那个挺特别。

左手放大镜右手画笔，画起来也很累。

第七集光辉颜色。

亚眠大教堂门口那一排排的圣徒和天使，打上彩光衣服上色，如此光彩夺目。

沙特尔大教堂里炫目的宝石，靓丽多彩德彩色花窗，犹如置身天堂的体验。

金青色在可以现代合成之前，价格贵过黄金只能用在圣母身上，可是贝利尼打破了这一惯例，世俗画普通人照用，确实美。

油画最大的作用是颜料干的更慢，可以有更充足的时间调出满意的颜色。

维尔茨堡宫四大洲画的那个，前不久那本书上也有，果然壮观，这富炫的有水平。

戈雅相隔三十年同一地点的两幅画，一个明亮充满希望一个彻底绝望，艺术家对传统古典画的彻底灰心，最绝望的就是一条狗的那个，Dog without master. Spain without God. 日本的浮世汇，葛饰北斋是佼佼者，其画作影响了西方画家。

莫奈就有收藏，还做出了模仿，莫奈对着同一个景象重复画，没有确切的对象，一切都是感受，他画的是时间的颜色。

梵高开始的晚结束的早，他说自己是在给下一个弥赛亚铺路，这就是马蒂斯，开创了抽象画。

咦，这集竟然没有毕加索，可能时长不够了。

中国就出现了一点，红色的漆盒。

第八集进步崇拜。

工业文明提高了生活品质也激发了内心野兽。

上一集说没出现的毕加索在这里，上一集因为时间没到。

1798年拿破仑入侵埃及还带了很多专家去学习，还出版了大号书。

对东方主义的想象，出现了众多东方宫廷生活的绘画，DK的那本艺术有这段的介绍。

德拉克洛瓦的是真好看啊。

欧洲人觉得欧洲已经失去了田园味道到美国去体验，卡兹基尔山的瀑布，并非完全真实而是画家认为它应该的样子。

西进运动破坏了原住民的生活，天命论给白人理由夺走土著的生存空间，凯特林的那些单人肖像看着很有冲击力，但人家原住民艺术家说了，你这就是个商人，我们从来都是群体活动。

毛利人的纹身是为了表达信仰，当年发了财的部落酋长也要花大价钱赶个时髦留下自己的肖像，还真是有用，至今着肖像还在。

1830年左右照相机发明，第一张照片上巴黎大街空空荡荡，只有一个擦鞋的人，书上看到过，曝光时间太久，这擦鞋的是摄影师雇佣的，保持静止。

既然有了相机，那绘画就要做相机做不到的事情，那就是捕捉人类瞬间的情感。

毕加索的亚威农少女竟然画了一年啊，划时代振聋发聩的作品，当年得相当轰动。

高更这人虽然缺点不少，但才华确实惊人。

一战爆发，相机记录了战争的残酷，人性中的野蛮展露无遗，Otto Dix把他残酷的体验画出来，大国的谎言被揭穿，文明工具已经失效，士兵不再是勇士，他们只是受害者，人类的前方难道只剩下绝望和恐惧。

第九集重要的火花。

当人类面对恐惧，什么才是我们的护盾？

Terezin这个地方对犹太人的迫害，受害者留下的4500幅画，张张都是对自由和阳光的向往。

日本直岛那个地底博物馆，第一反应是着嘚多少钱啊。

蒙德里安的那些格子作品，主持人看来异常喜欢，抱歉我还欣赏不来，相比来说还是蔡国强的烟花爆炸来的直白震撼直达人心。

杜尚一切皆可商品。

德国艺术家对历史的反思，不能回避，要全力体会。

美国艺术家walker√种族主义的警惕，两位都对川普很有意见，反暴力。

这一集竟然有两位中国的，另外就是这一集基本都是活的艺术家，太难得了。

文明是人类的共通之光，是每个人留给素不相识的后来人的信息。

BBC的纪录片向来有口皆碑，题材广泛、制作精良是它的特色。

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

正如《地球脉动》和《人类星球》这样的佳作，几乎每一帧都美到窒息。

最近，BBC又推出了一部高逼格神作。

全片涵盖6个大陆，31个国家，介绍超过500件艺术品。

将人类各个时期，不同大陆的历史文化艺术通通串联起来，看过的人都大呼过瘾。

无论你是文物爱好者还是历史达人，这部纪录片都能让你在养眼之余还非常涨知识。

今天就来聊聊，这部讲述人类艺术创造力的新作——文明导演:阿什利·格辛/马修·希尔/蒂姆·尼尔编剧:西蒙·沙玛/玛丽·比尔德/戴维·奥卢索加主演:西蒙·沙玛/玛丽·比尔德/戴维·奥卢索加首播:2018-03-01(英国)集数:9单集片长:60分钟

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

全片共 9 集，每集时长为 1 小时左右。

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

纪录片主讲人，是三位致力于普及艺术知识的公共学者——哥伦比亚大学艺术史教授Simon Schama，剑桥大学的古典学教授Mary Beard，以及尼日利亚裔英国历史学家David Olusoga 。

虽然今天，人类的艺术成就浩如星海，但这一切都始于数万年前的一个掌印——我们的一位远古祖先，不知出于什么原因，在洞穴的岩壁上勾勒出掌印。

这是历史上最早的壁画，可以说是人类艺术的第一笔。

这就是人类文明觉醒的起点，超越衣食住行的生存需求，人们有了创造的冲动。

艺术的存在，让我们摆脱日常琐事，感受体会作为人的意义。

文化与社会也因此诞生，创造了伟大的文明。

画画是人本能的表达形式，而壁画则是人类最早期的艺术。

即便间隔数万年，艺术家的手法也不会改变。

像是毕加索，就深受远古洞穴壁画的影响。

而远古人类第一次对美的追求，体现在下面这个小小的人脸雕像上 。

现在看起来虽然工艺粗糙，五官模糊，但要知道它可是2万多年前的产物。

制作者显然被一位美人打动，试图努力雕刻出她的样子。

在墨西哥出土的玛雅文明，也让人看到了其天真淳朴，充满创意的一面。

这些小人塑像，实在是太可爱了。

但还有很多出土文物，在现代人看来相当神秘。

像中国古老文明的代表三星堆青铜人头像、青铜面具。

那巨大的眼睛和耳朵，令人印象深刻。

1986年，三星堆遗址在一处建筑工地被发现。

发掘出的考古坑中包含数百枚象牙、祭祀牲畜的遗骸，以及数目惊人的面具。

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

甚至还有人推测，三星堆和外星文明有关。

而秦始皇陵兵马俑，更是20世纪最伟大的考古发现。

这些真人大小，气势磅礴的军队，是世界上最大的雕像群。

其工艺和规模即便在今天，也是难以想象的。

中国在公元前200多年，由秦始皇实现了大一统。

而这项工程在秦始皇十几岁的时候，就开始动工了。

我们今天看到的，只是7000具陶俑中的一小部分。

中国古代贵族原本是用活人陪葬，但秦始皇却使用了真人大小的兵马俑。

据说他的陵墓内部也模仿现实世界，其间有日月星辰和山川河流。

秦始皇陵兵马俑，无疑是权力的象征。

而3000年前古埃及的雕像艺术，也同样是权力的象征。

古埃及的雕像往往都十分巨大，就为了使人产生望而生畏的臣服感。

然而尴尬的是，考古学家发现，拉美西斯二世的雕像比其他法老王都多。

原因竟然是他会篡改其他人的雕塑，在上面刻上自己的名字。

而人像雕塑的的技艺，在古希腊时期已经接近完美。

此时的人像越来越栩栩如生，每块肌肉，每个动作都完全复制真实的人。

而这种写实风格，通过丝绸之路影响了佛教的造像艺术。

传入阿富汗之后，又影响了早期的伊斯兰艺术。

世界文化互相影响，融会贯通。

而在绘画领域，纪录片中首先介绍的就是中国古代的山水画卷。

在古代战乱纷争不断的中国，文人创作出追求平静的山水风景画。

中国的水墨山水画，自成一体。

在此之前，绘画是没有以风景为主题的，风景只是一种陪衬。

直到宋朝，才开始出现了专门描绘风景的山水画。

风景画并不是对自然世界的描写，而是一种意境的表达。

让人对自然产生思考，以追求人和自然的和谐境界。

中国水墨山水画具有很深的哲学意味，已经打破了对于自然的模仿。

而日本绘画最具代表性的，当属浮世绘。

最初，是描绘市井生活和娱乐风月场所的木版画。

主题多是歌舞伎或妓女，还有春宫图。

色彩艳丽，具有装饰性。

而梵高深受日本版画影响，他本人就临摹过不少浮世绘作品。

梵高比同时代的印象派画家更奔放，喜欢表现出浓重的色彩。

甚至直接把颜料挤在画布上，用画笔粗犷地涂抹。

人类文明在建筑领域，也留下了很多宏伟的作品。

约旦的佩特拉古墓，就是在山岳表面雕凿而成。

地理位置空前绝后，与山体合二为一。

鲜为人知的是，不仅埃及有金字塔，玛雅文明也有金字塔。

玛雅文明的统治者向人民保证会祈求雨神每年降雨，而金字塔是给雨神祭祀的祭台。

不过，当旱灾来临后，玛雅文明就衰落消亡了。

建筑奇迹一直在被人类刷新。

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

米开朗基罗也因为设计出世界上最伟大的圆顶建筑，被同代人尊称为“圣者“。

宗教，往往催生伟大的艺术作品。

西班牙塞维利亚的玛格丽娜圣母像，就是一件十分动人的作品。

雕像为大理石制作，眼泪由玻璃制作。

但手却是木制的，也因此人们认为木头比大理石更有温度。

这部纪录片包含的信息量实在太大，由于文章篇幅有限，只能介绍一小部分。

在此，我十分推荐各位亲自去感受下这趟“全球文化之旅”。

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

然而，还有有大量的文物在战火中被破坏损毁。

巴米扬大佛，就曾被塔利班份子的炮火损毁殆尽。

短短几个小时之间，伊斯兰国就将人类文明的杰作毁于一旦。

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

讽刺的是，一些艺术品恰恰因为早期被劫掠，而逃脱了被毁的厄运。

在日内瓦艺术与历史博物馆，有几件巴尔米拉的工艺品被保存了下来。

我们可以花许多时间争论，文明是什么亦或不是什么。

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

从人类残破的肢体，文明的顷刻陨落，我们会真切知晓文明到底为何物。

所有文明最终都对无法实现的目标汲汲以求，那就是征服时间。

为此，它们致力于更大、更高、更壮观，以为这样就能通往不朽。

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

然后，不眠不休铁面无私的大自然母亲开始接管此地，用沙尘掩埋，以植被覆盖。

自此，文明便会淡出公众视线、彻底消亡。

每一个失落或繁荣的文明，都是文化的里程碑。

它们时而颠覆着现代人的认知，又不时吸引我们向前看。

文化所传达出的跨越时空的相似性，让我们理解过去，也指引未来。

文明是一个很宏大的词汇，但文明真正的力量，却来自那些简单的小东西。

像是壶，印刷品，挂毯以及雕刻品，或者源自那些恢宏的建筑和精美的画作。

它不是出自国家意志，或者某个富裕阶层的要求。

它更多的来自于那些天赋异禀的艺术家们，为全人类创造艺术的内心渴求。

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

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

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

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

虽然人生苦短，但艺术却让我们得以目睹那些相对不朽的事物。

艺术是文明的基石，是对人性的一种表达方式。

*本文作者：RAMA

ep1人类或许在基因中就带有艺术创作的冲动，在人类刚开始使用工具开始，就情不自禁地把自己所见、所想表达出来。

ep2帝皇、权贵的雕像、陵墓建造在当时是很让百姓厌恶的，因为劳民伤财，但很讽刺，正是他们的狂妄与傲慢，给后世留下了考察、研究当时社会的宝贵遗产。

这集的结尾提出的问题很有趣，人对美、艺术的认知是不是有一个标准答案？

会不会有一些对艺术有着绝对发言权的人设定了好艺术所应具有的标准，从而使我们对美的评价出现偏差或统一化？

于此，我还想到:如果一个人天生没接受过对美的评价的教育，那这个人会欣赏到我们所普遍认同的艺术品之美吗？

ep3风景画能够用独特的方式来表达作者的情感，或用笔触（如凌乱）、色调、意象、构图等，但结合作品创作出来的时代背景，才能更好地体会作者的创作意图及情感。

ep4宣扬宗教的画像、建筑、雕塑等也是艺术与文明的重要组成部分。

很多人把他们的信仰寄托在他们所看到的画像、雕塑中去，但这是宗教不希望看到的，而是希望宗教的图像、文字作为一种拉近人与神的媒介，让人能够透过这些表象、实物去看到背后的神谕。

里面讲到的两点很有趣，一点是宗教讲述的故事经常是碎片化，教义是艰涩的，其实这是希望人带着自己的理解，特别是积极的解读去阅读这些宗教素材，从而达到个人对教义的领悟。

而另一点讲到信仰与文明，信仰它解答了人的终极问题，即人从哪来，要到哪去，人活着的意义是什么，正是宗教能够解答这些问题，许多人皈依于它，其实，看到文明的发展与变迁，你也能从中得到问题的答案，并且也能挣脱宗教对人性的一些束缚。

ep5这一集讲的东西对我来说有点过于艰涩了。

大致领会到的是，15世纪中叶，东西方宗教日益壮大，掌握财力、人力、物力异常丰富，两方都借此建立起能名垂千古的宏伟宗教建筑。

但之后，东西方的艺术观念开始分化，东方坚持克制、一板一眼的准则；而西方的艺术家转而关注人自身，画作中的人物充满蓬勃的生命力，也拉近了其中人物与观看者的距离，画中人是如此贴近真实生活。

ep6航海时代的到来，各个文明开始更加密切交流，但迎来的却是残酷的、弱肉强食的时代。

西方的航海家来到新的国家、大陆，他们只想着那挣不完的金钱，若武力无法征服，则安分贸易；否则，大肆豪取强夺。

更为可怕的是，对落后的地区进行武力、文化双重侵略，这时期的艺术宛如用鲜血浇灌的花朵，它见证、呈现了各地文化的交融，诞生出独特的文化融合成果，也有的则记录了血淋淋的殖民地扩张历史。

ep7光与色彩是这集探讨的主题。

文艺复兴以来，画作的对象不再集中于诸神，而关注于人自身，且开始用各种色彩来凸显人的生命力与活力。

光与色彩能够很好地表现作画者的心境，同时，它们也是表现美丽的现实世界以及作画者心中的美丽天国的有力手段。

ep8工业革命兴起，技术的进步极大地影响人们的思想和生活，而且这种影响是具有时代性的，居于其中的个人是无力阻挡的。

一些人体会到技术带来的好处，生活变得更多姿多彩，城市更现代化，建筑整齐划一;技术的进步也促使文明的扩张，技术落后地区的原住民被驱逐、排挤、同化，一些人选择记录下这些消亡的文化;另外一些人则感受到技术进步给人带来的疏离感，贫富差距增大，任何物品，包括人都被标上价格，似乎金钱能完成所有事情，正因此，底层人民才感觉到自身的格格不入;还有一些人则受到技术对身心的摧残，技术进步后的战争更残酷了，人在枪炮面前根本微不足道。

建筑、绘画、摄影等皆是文明的代表，但更重要的是，它们反映了所处时代的人的所思所想，让此时的人能够有代入感，能够感受那个时代的脉络。

ep9人们通过具体的物件或者抽象的笔触、图案来表达心中所思、所想，它们不受时间、空间限制，也不受金钱或阶级束缚，它们只是用艺术的形式来把人们此刻的想法传递给未来的人，而文明也因此而形成。

E01 Second Moment of CreationExcavations in Iraq in the 1920s and 30s began to reveal how intensive irrigation of the planes between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates had allowed the world's first true cities to arise. By about 5,000 years ago, cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants, such as Ur and Uruk, were reproducing art that reflected the self-image of the powerful. Here is the Standard of Ur where mosaic inlaid in bitumen showed the scenes that mattered most.

The Standard or Ur - Mesopotamia (c.2500 BCE)Soldiers march

war wagons roll,

and on the reverse,

Standard of Ur - reverse sidea court convenes with the kind depicted larger than his priests and courtiers,

ranged below the catering classes, the toilers and hewers.

It's a complete social world, and it came with writing. These scripts usually recorded administrative matters, but sometimes told the stories of heroes and deities. And animals continue to provide the models for gods and monsters.

The Ram in the Thickets - Ur, Mesopotamia (c. 2600 BCE) - front

The Ram in the Thickets - Ur, Mesopotamia (c. 2600 BCE) - sideThis gorgeous goat, also from Ur, drew materials from far and wide.

The Ram in the Thickets - Ur, Mesopotamia (c. 2600 BCE) - sideWhite shells were from the Red Sea, the blue lapis lazuli from far Afghanistan and the gold leaf was the work of local goldsmiths.

The Ship Procession - Akrotiri, Greece (1550 BCE)

The Ship Procession - Akrotiri, Greece (1550 BCE) enhanced versionThese passengers aren't going to the afterlife, they're on ferries and festival excursions.

And on the land behind them, there are streets with multistorey houses, and in the richer of them, decorative paintings of the kind consumers would want forever after.

And yet in the British Museum, there's a little bronze sculpture, that's pulsing with natural energy that feels absolutely true to life.

Bull and Acrobat - Minoan Crete (c. 1600-1450 BCE)

Bull and Acrobat - Minoan Crete (c. 1600-1450 BCE)What strikes me as being physically real is the fact that this is not a stylised piece of work at all. It has physical immediacy. Even though our jumper has lost his legs, his back is braced, his head is flung back. And the bull, the bull is indeed a bull in full charge - front and back legs tensed. The eyes, you can actually see the eyes, are blazing, and the muzzle is snorting with dangerous foam. E03 Picturing ParadiseWhen your world is collapsing, when everything is closing in, what you want is to be somewhere else. Somewhere you can breathe in peace. A scrap of beauty, far from the noise and ugliness. But, if there is no escape, then you go there in your dreams and you paint that landscape into existence.

Mu Xin - Pure Bamboo by a Cool Stream (1977-79) (its full-size are not available for download)This is what happened in China in the 1970s to the artist Mu Xin. During MZD's CR, he was an obvious target. Middle-class, intellectual, a lover of decadent, Western art. Mu Xin was subjected to solitary confinement, forced labour and then house arrest. But the paper supplied for weekly confessions became the material of his liberation.

Mu Xin - Ancient Road at Shanyin (1977-79) (its full-size are not available for download)

Mu Xin - Ancient Road at Shanyin (1977-79) (its full-size are not available for download)Mu Xin broke out of his confinement by making visible, albeit in deadly secrecy, the landscapes which unfolded in his mind. The art memory of China, its peak and its valleys.

Mu Xin - Wandering in a Dream to West Lake (1977-79) (its full-size are not available for download)the Art Gallery in YaleThe culture which had given the rest of the world, 1,000 years before, true landscape art. While everything else was being smashed up, he was determined that art - now judged a reactionary crime - would survive. Like nature itself, landscape art has always been an antidote to the anarchy wrought by the hand of man. Yet it's rarely a depiction of the way the world is, but a vision of the way we would like it to be. Sometimes it delivers a sense of harmony between nature and humanity. Sometimes, it a picture of a nation's home. Sometimes, it's a dream of heaven writ in fabric or glimpsed through a lens. But, most of all, it's a way to understand our civilisation and to behold that most terrifying and thrilling of all truths - our place in the cosmos. ......"The nation is broken, but mountains and rivers remain." Those words could have come from Mu Xin in the 1970s, but, actually, they were written 1,000 years earlier. In the early 10th century, China was torn apart by endless civil war. As feuding states vied for power, they burned cities and towns and slaughtered their people. Yet it was out of this anarchy and chaos that the Chinese tradition of landscape painting first blossomed as the great subject of ar

Li Cheng - A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks (10th century)For the Song dynasty, who finally triumphed in the year 960, landscape art represented both a glimpse of a better world and a means to unite this shattered country.

I am looking at a document that attests to a profound alteration in human sensibility because it was in Song China that, for the first time, landscape painting with ink and brush became the true and absolute sign of what civilisation was, both for those who practised it and for those who owned these precious scrolls. This painting is more than 1,000 years old. And it's thought to be by one of the first truly great landscape artists, Li Cheng. Dominating the scroll are mountains, symbols of the Song dynasty. The biggest, most imposing peak is the Emperor, the lesser peaks are his ministers. Li Cheng's message is that this is the protecting force beneath which China can recover its harmony and rebuild its civilisation.

He's an absolutely brilliant painter of human activity, from a man on a donkey to people having their meal, to perhaps dumplings being cooked in the back kitchen there.

And this bottom half of the scroll is crowded, not just with people, there are all sorts of things going on. This is our world, this is the place we inhabit.

This is more than mere propaganda. Li Cheng asks profound questions, which go to the heart of our relationship with the world around us. As our eye ascends through the painting, so our whole approach to it also ascends to a higher order of question.

Right in the visual centre of this beautiful painting is the temple itself, and the temple is almost more important than the whole mountain. It is the place of equipoise, the place of peace.

Above the temple, there is no human action at all, and Li Cheng has changed the wash of the ink.

It's lighter, finer, more ethereal. So this is a borderland between the human and the spiritual world, and gradually we move up and face the greatest of all. What is nature? What lies beyond surface appearance? What truly moves the universe? And how, above all, does the dialogue between flowing water and the adamant free of that eroded rock bring us harmony and bring us what everybody in China wanted - happiness and peace?

Li Cheng offers us a glimpse of who we are by linking the comings and goings of our little lives to the majesty of the cosmos. And that sense of fit between things mortal and things eternal fills the mind with the ancient Confucian sense of rightness. Everything in its ordained place. This is how life is supposed to be. So powerful was the message that, within a century, landscape art had sunk deep roots into the culture of Song China. New painting academics flourished where it was practised. Weighty tomes were written about its philosophy and technique. To be Chinese meant to be civilised and to be civilised meant to paint, above all, landscapes. ......This handscroll was painted by the artist Qiao Zhongchang. It was based on one of the most famous Chinese poems, written by a government official, a man of culture and refinement, called Su Shi. Su Shi had been exiled after a political purge and spent his days writing about excursions he took with his friends up the Yangtze River.

Qiao Zhongchang (960-1127) - Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff - Left 1st

Qiao Zhongchang (960-1127) - Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff - Left 2nd

Qiao Zhongchang (960-1127) - Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff - Left 3rd

Qiao Zhongchang (960-1127) - Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff - Left 4th

Qiao Zhongchang (960-1127) - Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff - Right 3rd

Qiao Zhongchang (960-1127) - Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff - Right 2nd

Qiao Zhongchang (960-1127) - Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff - Right 1stHere he is carrying fish and wine as his wife sees him off on the journey.

We turned the boat loose to drift with the current. All around was deserted and still. A lone crane flew overhead.

The painting evokes both the pleasures of friendship and the melancholy of the exile.

.A dream, but one with a bittersweet taste. ......But landscape painting wasn't always about escape. Sometimes, artists captured the violence of history. 200 years after Su Shi wrote his poems, China's Song dynasty had fallen to Mongol invaders. The painter Wang Meng refused to serve the Mongol emperors, preferring to retreat to a very particular place, his family's estate in the Qingbian mountains. Those mountains became the subject of his greatest painting.

Wang Meng - Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains (1366)When you're in the presence of a bona fide masterpiece, which this is, words somehow struggle to be formed. But I will do my best. Not least because this is an extraordinary painting because it belies all the pleasing stereotypes we have about Chinese landscapes. When you think of Li Cheng, you think of that first generation of northern Song painters and it is all about feeling protected by the Imperial mountain. None of this is happening with Wang Meng. This is, above all, a painting about turbulence. It's full of a kind of restless, writhing, sensuous, intense energy. There's a reason for this turbulence. By the time he painted this, Wang Meng's family mountain retreat was right in the middle of a battlefield fought over by armies 200,000 strong.

But the reality was marauding and massacre.

These are not mountains which protect us.

Instead, they trap and threaten us.

Here is a man beautifully painted picked out with a conical cap, which is a cap of this particular region. And it's echoed by the shape of the peak. So, you think the man belongs to the mountains, but the man has nowhere to go. There are paths which make no sense at all. He moves his way through scrubby pines. Wang Meng has lit this dramatically to make it more difficult, to make it more exciting, to make it more perilous and energised. Eventually, we see one isolated, tiny figure, alone.

And this huge orchestration, musical energy, these animated, pulsing rocks, look as though they're about to topple down on him.

What's happened to landscape painting in the hand of Wang Meng is that it's gone from being not just a place of calm, but to an intensely personal expression of his own mood and his own feeling of insecurity. So, everything that is coursing through the imaginative energy of the artist gets registered in these sudden, jabbing repeated strokes. This, then, is a state of mind rather than a state of the mountain.

If this painting depicts Wang Meng's deepest anxieties, then his sense of foreboding was well-founded. Shortly after completing it, he fell victim to his political enemies and died in prison. E07 Radiance

Vincent Van Gogh - Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888 With this epiphany in mind, Vincent gathered all the intensity of his spiritual longing into one all-consuming obsession - how to bring heaven to earth and turn it into a painting. So on a warm night in September in 1888, he comes down from his little apartment in Place Lamartine in Arles and goes around the corner and he sees this (Vincent Van Gogh - Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888). Great expanse of the River Rhone with the city of Arles reduced to a little rim of human activity, lit by rather sulphurous gas lights. And somehow, this amazing moment speaks to him that he can actually do this cosmic painting. And he creates a king of compositional double trinity. The first trinity is of land and water and sky. And the land is this little spit of the bank with those very Japanese boats tied up in the harbour there.

Then comes the river and then comes the burning night sky, delivered in great pulsing brushstrokes of heavily-loaded aquamarine.

And the three of them, land, water and sky, are all melting and dissolving together.And the second trinity, the one which really was most important, was that of light. The gas lamps are just indicated by a kind of stab of crusty, dark yellow. And then those gas lamps are reflected in the second element of the trinity lights. Beautiful reflections which soften their harshness.

And these kinds of fans of heavily-loaded brushstrokes just fall into the water.

And the third level of the lights is Ursa Major exploding in the sky. Taking his brush, he squashes it against the canvas, and on top of that, another brush loaded with lead white, and the points go, jab-jab-jab-jab-jab!

And those stars and everything explodes, and he knows he's got it. He's got what he's been looking for. He's got this extraordinary sense of us in the universe and this couple of lovers are staring out, feeling what he wants us to feel.

He said, you don't need to go church. The church of the day is this. This great illumination, like a burst of beauty from a stained-glass window. This is the radiance of here and now. E08 The Cult of ProgressBut Napoleon's invasion had had another purpose - not only to uncover the secrets of ancient Egypt, but also to impose European civilisation on the living, contemporary Egypt. Armed with a library of books and a printing press, Napoleon wanted to re-educate an Islamic world that Europeans had long seen as the enemy, a civilisation they considered to have lost its way. Ultimately, Napoleon's occupation would fail at the hands of the British. But, in a curious twist, Europeans became increasingly obsessed with the very culture Napoleon had tried to change. Or more accurately, their imagined fantasy of what that culture was. Soon artists began to travel throughout the Islamic world to paint the exotic places and people they encountered.

Eugene Delacroix - Women of Algiers in their Apartment 1834This is the painting that inspired an entire genre of 19th century European art - Orientalism. It's the work of the French artist, Eugene Delacroix who painted it in the 1830s, after he'd actually gone on a visit to Algeria, which had recently been conquered and colonised by France. And this is the first real serious attempt to portray ordinary life in the Islamic world.

But like many of the Orientalist paintings that were to follow, not everything about this is what it seems. Now, Delacroix claimed to have based the composition on a visit he'd made to an Arab household in Algeria, but it would've been extremely unusual for a male stranger to be given access to the women of an Arab household, so there's every chance that these women are in fact Jewish.

And there are other elements of this painting which were either fabricated or embroidered by Delacroix. So the painting was completed in Paris using exotic costumes, and the models are Parisian models.

And this figure of the black servant or perhaps black slave was of Delacroix's invention.

So what seems like a real scene is in fact a Parisian revelry of a supposed exotic sensuous world that didn't exist in Europe. Yet in Delacroix's gifted hands, there is a subtlety of shade and colour that was rarely achieved by the generation of Orientalist painters he inspired. Many Orientalists invented scenes that revelled in the decadence and despotism that Europeans considered being oriental qualities. Concubines languishing in hidden harems, naked female slaves for sale in busy markets.

Jean-Leon Gerome - The Slave Market 1866Orientalist themes became so popular that Ingres, master of the classical nude, set one of his greatest works in an imagined women's bathhouse, even though he'd never been to the Middle East.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - The Turkish Bath 1863These were European fantasies, and they suggest a desire to escape the turmoil of life in industrial Europe. As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, Europe's cities began to change beyond all recognition. To begin with, few saw the emerging factory landscapes as a worthy subject for art.

J.M.W. Turner - Dudley, Worcestershire (c.1832)But the British painter Turner did. In his view of Dudley, in England's industrial heartland, he juxtaposed the old town on the hill, its ruined castle and church steeple, symbols of tradition and faith ...

... with the blazing furnaces and busy canals of the modern age.

The great thinker and art critic John Ruskin saw in the picture an indictment of how the old way of life being destroyed by the factory and the machine.

1. 对于艺术的欣赏是一种能力，大部分情况下，艺术作品只是客观的呈现在那里，而对于作者想要表达的内容，每个人接收信息的能力不同，接收到信息以后能够将自己的感受表达出来的能力也不相同。

惊艳于西蒙·沙玛对于艺术作品内涵细腻的捕捉能力，以及强大的语言组织能力（我等就只能太美了，太有感染力了，太富有情感了），能够通过简明扼要的语言，让每一个即使是完全不懂艺术的人，也能够深入了解到作品及作品背后的意义，了解到什么叫做美，为什么叫做美。

2. 永远不要设定艺术的边界，人类文明的历史也是艺术的历史，从远古时期的极为粗糙的壁画，到中世纪精美的人物及自然画，到现代抽象到极致的波普艺术，从建筑、雕塑，甚至烟花，他们都通过不同方式表达出作者的主张，至少，证明了我们曾经存在过。

（有点好奇别的艺术形式都讲了，为什么不讲音乐呢？

因为无法通过图像表达么？

3. 战争，又是战争，讲到最后永远离不开对于战争的反思。

固然，战争是不对的，但是欧洲国家真的认真复盘，反思了自己的问题了么？

真的有认真的反思了殖民战争的野蛮性了么？

真的有切身想过布尔战争带来的伤害么？

有换位思考承认过凡尔赛条约的不平等么？

没有，永远都是一副受伤者姿态。

有真正解决了犹太人的问题么？

也没有，大家都还是歧视犹太人，不说而已4. 最后烟花那一段我觉得可能是没有达到预期效果，但蔡国强专门为这个节目作画，所以出于尊重强行尬吹了一波哈哈哈（或许也有可能是我没有鉴赏艺术的天赋吧哈哈哈）。

5. 【小小地吐槽一下】明明bbc也能够做出这种“正常心态”的纪录片，那为什么很多纪录片都是一种居高临下，仿佛只有自己是文明人，其他人都是不够开化，尚未发展成型的原始文明，动辄“在我们英国”，强行夹带私货，实在让人恶心。