First Civilizations

15 programs

Television rights and prices on request

3500 BC - AD 1000

The films in this section deal with the world's first developed cultures, those that provide the classical precedents and standards for many of our aesthetic judgments.

`Classicism' and `the classics' are terms used extremely broadly in art. At times `classical' means simply `traditional' (as opposed to avant-garde or innovatory), or of a high standard as judged against some accepted canon of earlier masterpieces. At other times it refers strictly to works from, or in the style of, the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. Notions of order and harmony derived from those civilizations have had an incalculable influence upon subsequent western culture - its taste, its ideas, its sense of proportion, its definitions of beauty. They inform Romanesque or `Roman-like' architecture in the Middle Ages. Similarly the Renaissance was seen as a `rebirth' of classical humanist arts, sciences and learning. In the later eighteenth century Neo-classicism again consciously sought to revive the forms of the ancient world in all the arts. In the modern period Classicism informed work as different as Maillol's serene statuary, de Chirico's haunted piazza scenes, Picasso's heavy, robed figures of the 1920s, Nazism's sinister `body beautiful' monuments, and even the uncluttered functionalism of the Bauhaus.

Abu Simbel, detail
From the program 'Nubia '64'