The meeting had already eaten up the morning when Michael Jackson, executive producer of the BBC’s new art epic, Civilisations, challenged me to explain why Michelangelo needed to be in a world history of art for a 21st-century audience.
I gave, I thought, a passionate explanation: that Michelangelo invented the very idea of the artist as an imaginative genius, that without him, not to mention the European Renaissance that he epitomised, we wouldn’t see artists as heroes or even be interested in art itself as a special, magical thing but would just see it as a bunch of luxury craft objects or religious decor.
It was a thrilling day. Around the table were some of the most powerful people in British television. In the middle were Julian Bell and me, the two art consultants who had been brought in to advise on how on earth to tell the story of art on earth.
We thrashed out a rough map of art, the universe, and everything. Then at the end of this rollercoaster trip through time Jackson asked me once more to justify Michelangelo’s inclusion.
In the completed nine-part series that starts next week, Michelangelo does, I’m happy to say, get his due in a startling, fresh, visionary way. A gorgeous bit of high-definition camera work takes us under a sublime dome – but this is not St Peter’s. This is the Süleymaniye Mosque, that Michelangelo’s rival Mimar Sinan built in Istanbul when the Italian genius was creating wonders in Rome – as Simon Schama tells us in one of the highlights of the series. Schama’s eye-opening global view of the Renaissance starts with a dazzle of domes, east and west, and goes on to reveal with great intellectual authority and rhapsodic beauty how Christendom and Islam interacted in an age of brilliance for both.
You can see why they called it Civilisations, plural. Casting my mind back I am pretty sure it was was me who put that name in the mix. I wasn’t trying to make a big multicultural point with the “s”. I just didn’t want there to be any confusion about what this ambitious project was trying to achieve.
Earlier that year the BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, blithely announced that the BBC would remake Kenneth Clark’s classic 1969 series Civilisation, one of the all-time jewels in the corporation’s crown. It was a truly visionary idea.
The remake of Civilisation is about so much more than emulating, or reacting against, what an aristocratic TV art critic in a tweed jacket said about art all those years ago. It is about recapturing the lost heights of British television and returning to the best ideals of the BBC.
When David Attenborough, who was at that time controller of BBC2, asked Clark to make a 13-hour series about art and that elusive thing “civilisation”, he kindled a golden age of factual television. Something about Clark’s quietly provocative defence of the great tradition of European art demanded responses and replies. Attenborough brilliantly commissioned them.
The polymathic physicist Jacob Bronowski made The Ascent of Man, an equally vast 13-part essay, first shown in 1973, that sees art and science as inseparable and – long before the current remake – recast the story of civilisation globally, showing, for instance, how medieval Arab mathematics inspired the European Renaissance perspective. John Berger critiqued Clark from a Marxist, and feminist, perspective in Ways of Seeing (1972), Attenborough himself explored the art of the surviving indigenous cultures in his magical 1975 series, The Tribal Eye, and, in 1980, the trenchant voice of Robert Hughes unforgettably nailed modern art in The Shock of the New.
As a child in the 1970s I found these programmes inspiring and liberating. Growing up in north Wales far from any big museums, the democratic miracle of having great art beamed on to our TV screen was like a bolt of illumination from a richer cultural universe. I remember sitting up with my dad to watch The Tribal Eye, enthralled. Bronowski’s book of The Ascent of Man became my bible.
Does it matter who speaks in a programme like this, does the class, race or gender of the presenter matter? Of course it does. Hughes with his Australian toughness was plainly not one of the English aristocrats who seemed to dominate art-talk and that itself made The Shock of the New subversive. I was not the only kid it thrilled: Damien Hirst has been known to sport a Shock of the New T-shirt.
So the BBC’s decision to give Civilisations three presenters, with David Olusoga and Mary Beard both doing two episodes each interleaved with Schama’s five, has a powerful justification. Everyone should be able to find a mirror in this truly universal story of civilisation(s).
The trouble is, dividing up the presenting exacerbates a problem the very idealism of Civilisations has generated. It’s all very well to accuse Clark of being “Eurocentric” in his original series but by sticking to Europe he gave himself something very useful in a TV programme: a cracking good story.
European art is not better than art made elsewhere. It is, however, more individualist. European artists since the Renaissance have seen themselves as part of a story, a progress, an evolution. Once Michelangelo invented the idea of genius the rate of production of geniuses was incredible: Rembrandt, Velazquez, Goya ...
That was my real point in the argument with Michael Jackson. If you throw away the scaffolding of European art’s relentless drive to change and its amazing characters, how can you tell a compelling story?
Civilisations has sacrificed story to space. What it gains in global richness it loses in narrative drive and, with three presenters all presenting personal essays, that is magnified.
It works anyway, I think – I hope – for two reasons.
The photography is sublime. It is so precise that when Schama explores Bruegel’s paintings in a Vienna museum you feel you are right there in a space so perfectly filmed it seems three-dimensional, and when Olusoga looks at the brass sculptures of Benin you can almost reach into the telly and touch them.
The other secret weapon is Schama. He gives an heroic performance, his best yet, I think. Not only does he deliver one dizzying spontaneous riff after another in front of masterpieces all over the world but he engages in a reflective and profound way with what civilisation is and why we need it. From Palmyra to Theresienstadt, he looks into the abysses of barbarism and reaffirms Clark’s message, that we need the “human spark” of creativity and the treasury of memory that civilisation embodies.
Civilisations begins on Thursday 1 March at 9pm on BBC2.
HIGHLIGHTS
1. The Pylos Combat Agate, c 1500 BC
In his opening episode Simon Schama gets justifiably excited about this powerful and visceral image of heroic fighters rippling their muscles, discovered in 2015 in a Mycenaean grave and shaking every assumption about early Greek art. It depicts a scene that could come from Homer’s Iliad but was apparently made hundreds of years before Homer. It does so in a super-real style whose energy anticipates the classical art invented 1,000 years later. Schama’s mind was blown and so will yours be.
2. Olmec head, Mexico, c 900 BC
“It really is big. Its eyes are more than a foot across,” enthuses Mary Beard as she walks around this colossal stone head in a scene that restages a classic moment in the original Civilisation, when a tiny-looking besuited Kenneth Clark stood next to Michelangelo’s David for scale. However, Beard argues that when we see art like this from non-European cultures our appreciation is muted by the constricting rules and hierarchies of the classical heritage. That must be why Homer Simpson was disappointed to get an Olmec head as a present from Mr Burns.
3. Benin Sculptures, c 15th century
David Olusoga movingly tells the horrific story of how Victorian Britain seized the brass and ivory artistic masterpieces of Benin in a “punitive” attack on this west African city state. Their racism forbade them to see this art for what it was, the work of an urban civilisation that in the Renaissance traded on equal terms with Europeans and portrayed the visitors with humorous realism. He admits that he’d rather they were back in Africa than on show at the British Museum.
4. Children’s art from Theresienstadt, 1940s
In his final episode Schama visits Theresienstadt, a show-ghetto where the Nazis pretended to treat Jews humanely, while in reality they were brutalised and doomed. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a gifted artist, was sent there and taught art to the ghetto’s children. The pictures they made as a result revealed desperate hopes and an innocent belief in life. Many of these children were soon to be murdered. Schama’s belief in civilisation, after this, even in the heart of this, sets the series alight.ends