Islamic calligraphy and whistling statues – we’ve come a long way from the Kenneth Clark’s patrician worldview. There’s one particular photograph that sums up Kenneth Clark’sCivilisation, the 1969 BBC cultural history series that assumed the male, patrician gaze is the only one that matters. The image, a publicity still for the programme, shows Clark in leafy summertime Paris, posed against the backdrop of Notre Dame. He is wearing a sports jacket and tie, and between elegant fingers he dangles a lit cigarette in a holder. Here’s the odd thing, though. Clark is standing with his back to the cathedral, gazing in the opposite direction. It’s as if he has seen enough, and is occupied instead with running those flying buttresses through his mental database before deciding their proper place in the league table of Civilisation’s greatest hits. Above the Parthenon’s columns but below the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling? Clark squints into the middle distance and ponders.
Mary Beard includes this photograph in her new book as a way of marking the distance travelled over the last 50 years from a concept of “Civilisation” as a matter of connoisseurship, available only to those with Clark’s storehouse of knowledge and natty way with a fag. Beard is one of three presenters of the BBC’s new Civilisations, a reworking and opening-up of the original 1969 series, and this book is an accompaniment to the two episodes that she will present out of the total nine.
Singing kings … The colossi of Memnon in Luxor Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images
On the evidence of the photographs in the book, Beard won’t be squinting at art objects from a distance, let alone turning her back on them. Instead she is pictured clambering over hot, dusty stones in an attempt to get their full measure. We are clearly a long way from the 4th arrondissement too. Whereas Clark didn’t stray beyond Europe (he missed out Spain completely, perhaps because its elements of Moorish culture made it worryingly suspect), Beard travels from Mexico to China, in search of the kind of ancient artefacts that her predecessor would have unhesitatingly assigned to civilisation’s shadow side.
What Clark would have found barbaric about the terracotta army of Shaanxi province or the Olmec statuary of ancient Mexico is that these objects have no designated maker, no individual signature. Beard, by contrast, remains unfazed and argues that the significance of any historical artefact lies not so much in who made it as what others made of it. In one excellent section she tells the story of the singing statue of Memnon, a 65ft-high colossus from the age of the pharaohs. In November AD130, Hadrian, the fidgety Roman emperor, arrived in Thebes to behold the ancient giant who was said to have the power of song. On some mornings Memnon could be heard to wheeze tunelessly – the result either of desert wind sighing through a crack in the stone or else generations of naughty boys hiding round the back with an old lyre string. But on the first morning of the imperial visit either the wind or the boys were on strike, since no noise emerged. Only on subsequent days did the ancient king deign to sing, if not sweetly, then at least loudly enough to make himself heard above the tourist chatter.
We know all this because a member of the emperor’s entourage, Julia Balbilla, wrote a poem on the subject. Not any old poem, either, but one designed to be chiselled by a compliant craftsman on to the “skin” of the statue. Balbilla’s lumpy lines were far from being Memnon’s first bit of arty graffiti – his left leg was already a veritable scribble of tributes left by ancient visitors. What makes this account so Beard-ian is the way it insists on paying more attention to the statue’s scratchy afterlife than the moment of its making, which anyway remains lost in deep time. Meaning is always an ongoing process for Beard, concerned not so much with making as making-over.
Of course there are downsides to this way of doing things. Beard can’t give us a seamless chronology in the way that Clark did: he saw civilisation as an artistic relay race undertaken by one famous man passing the baton on to the genius just in front of him. Beard, by contrast, skips about the centuries and the globe in pursuit of thematic patterns, unfussed by yawning gaps in her timeline. This alone demonstrates how today’s readers and viewers are comfortable consuming a narrative that 50 years ago would have struck their grandparents as hopelessly hiccupy.
Less happy perhaps is the way that Beard’s book is abruptly divided at its midpoint into two sections, each corresponding to one of the episodes that she will present on television. The first half is concerned with making art out of the human form, while the second deals with the place of art in religious faith. Still, Beard works hard to show the continuities across the gutter of her book. A fine section on the “crying” Madonna of Macarena in Seville not only leads into an exploration of the tension between inspiration and idolatry in Christian art, but also nods back to that earlier “living” statue, the frog-throated Memnon.
In the second part a standout section sees Beard upending that stale old assumption about Islam being an artless religion. To prove her point she takes us into the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and points out that, while there may be no images of human or divine forms, joyous streams of holy writ dance along the ceramic walls and ceiling. So exquisite is this monumental calligraphy, with its repeating visual rhymes and rhythms, that at some point the script ceases to be text and becomes instead its own picture. This effect is even more striking given that the majority of visitors to the mosque will historically have had neither the laser-sharp vision nor the literacy in Arabic to make out the meaning of the words suspended hundreds of feet above their heads. What we are looking at on the walls of the Blue Mosque is nothing less than the divine in visual form.
It is this ability to read closely in the interstices of culture that makes Beard such an invigorating guide. A case in point: she introduces us to the Edwardian artist Christiana Herringham, who travelled to Hyderabad to record the fading Buddhist paintings on the cave walls at Ajanta before they finally succumbed to age and bat guano. On her return to Britain she produced a lavish book containing exquisite reproductions of the best images, all worked up from her meticulous tracings. Exquisite but fallacious. For what Lady Herringham had imagined she had seen on the cave walls was the Indian equivalent of Renaissance religious art, and she set about filling in its gaps and ambiguities accordingly, using colours and shapes and narratives that would have made no sense to the original pilgrims.
Yet Beard makes it clear that Herringham was no cultural colonialist. She understood the religious significance of the art she was trying to save and, once home, was racked with guilt that she might have disturbed a holy shrine. What’s more, given her great support for suffrage and her founding of the National Art Collections Fund, which still saves paintings for the nation today, in another kind of historical narrative she would be held up to us as a heroine, a proto-modern on the side of the angels. The way Beard presents Herringham’s story – alive to its muddled intentions and unintended appropriations – is a reminder once again that we get closer to the material past when we consider all the human souls, not just the artists, aristocrats and men of genius, who had a hand in its making.
On the evidence of the photographs in the book, Beard won’t be squinting at art objects from a distance, let alone turning her back on them. Instead she is pictured clambering over hot, dusty stones in an attempt to get their full measure. We are clearly a long way from the 4th arrondissement too. Whereas Clark didn’t stray beyond Europe (he missed out Spain completely, perhaps because its elements of Moorish culture made it worryingly suspect), Beard travels from Mexico to China, in search of the kind of ancient artefacts that her predecessor would have unhesitatingly assigned to civilisation’s shadow side.
What Clark would have found barbaric about the terracotta army of Shaanxi province or the Olmec statuary of ancient Mexico is that these objects have no designated maker, no individual signature. Beard, by contrast, remains unfazed and argues that the significance of any historical artefact lies not so much in who made it as what others made of it. In one excellent section she tells the story of the singing statue of Memnon, a 65ft-high colossus from the age of the pharaohs. In November AD130, Hadrian, the fidgety Roman emperor, arrived in Thebes to behold the ancient giant who was said to have the power of song. On some mornings Memnon could be heard to wheeze tunelessly – the result either of desert wind sighing through a crack in the stone or else generations of naughty boys hiding round the back with an old lyre string. But on the first morning of the imperial visit either the wind or the boys were on strike, since no noise emerged. Only on subsequent days did the ancient king deign to sing, if not sweetly, then at least loudly enough to make himself heard above the tourist chatter.
We know all this because a member of the emperor’s entourage, Julia Balbilla, wrote a poem on the subject. Not any old poem, either, but one designed to be chiselled by a compliant craftsman on to the “skin” of the statue. Balbilla’s lumpy lines were far from being Memnon’s first bit of arty graffiti – his left leg was already a veritable scribble of tributes left by ancient visitors. What makes this account so Beard-ian is the way it insists on paying more attention to the statue’s scratchy afterlife than the moment of its making, which anyway remains lost in deep time. Meaning is always an ongoing process for Beard, concerned not so much with making as making-over.
Of course there are downsides to this way of doing things. Beard can’t give us a seamless chronology in the way that Clark did: he saw civilisation as an artistic relay race undertaken by one famous man passing the baton on to the genius just in front of him. Beard, by contrast, skips about the centuries and the globe in pursuit of thematic patterns, unfussed by yawning gaps in her timeline. This alone demonstrates how today’s readers and viewers are comfortable consuming a narrative that 50 years ago would have struck their grandparents as hopelessly hiccupy.
Less happy perhaps is the way that Beard’s book is abruptly divided at its midpoint into two sections, each corresponding to one of the episodes that she will present on television. The first half is concerned with making art out of the human form, while the second deals with the place of art in religious faith. Still, Beard works hard to show the continuities across the gutter of her book. A fine section on the “crying” Madonna of Macarena in Seville not only leads into an exploration of the tension between inspiration and idolatry in Christian art, but also nods back to that earlier “living” statue, the frog-throated Memnon.
In the second part a standout section sees Beard upending that stale old assumption about Islam being an artless religion. To prove her point she takes us into the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and points out that, while there may be no images of human or divine forms, joyous streams of holy writ dance along the ceramic walls and ceiling. So exquisite is this monumental calligraphy, with its repeating visual rhymes and rhythms, that at some point the script ceases to be text and becomes instead its own picture. This effect is even more striking given that the majority of visitors to the mosque will historically have had neither the laser-sharp vision nor the literacy in Arabic to make out the meaning of the words suspended hundreds of feet above their heads. What we are looking at on the walls of the Blue Mosque is nothing less than the divine in visual form.
It is this ability to read closely in the interstices of culture that makes Beard such an invigorating guide. A case in point: she introduces us to the Edwardian artist Christiana Herringham, who travelled to Hyderabad to record the fading Buddhist paintings on the cave walls at Ajanta before they finally succumbed to age and bat guano. On her return to Britain she produced a lavish book containing exquisite reproductions of the best images, all worked up from her meticulous tracings. Exquisite but fallacious. For what Lady Herringham had imagined she had seen on the cave walls was the Indian equivalent of Renaissance religious art, and she set about filling in its gaps and ambiguities accordingly, using colours and shapes and narratives that would have made no sense to the original pilgrims.
Yet Beard makes it clear that Herringham was no cultural colonialist. She understood the religious significance of the art she was trying to save and, once home, was racked with guilt that she might have disturbed a holy shrine. What’s more, given her great support for suffrage and her founding of the National Art Collections Fund, which still saves paintings for the nation today, in another kind of historical narrative she would be held up to us as a heroine, a proto-modern on the side of the angels. The way Beard presents Herringham’s story – alive to its muddled intentions and unintended appropriations – is a reminder once again that we get closer to the material past when we consider all the human souls, not just the artists, aristocrats and men of genius, who had a hand in its making.
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