Picturing Paradise • 2018 • episode "3/10" Civilisations

Category: History

Simon Schama explores one of our deepest artistic urges - the depiction of nature. Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed nature - rather it is a projection of dreams and idylls, as well as of escapes and refuges from human turmoil, the elusive paradise on earth.

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Civilisations • 2018 • 10 episodes •

Second Moment of Creation

A look at the formative role art and imagination have played in the forging of humanity.

2018 • History

How Do We Look

In this episode of Civilisations, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China.

2018 • History

Picturing Paradise

Simon Schama explores one of our deepest artistic urges - the depiction of nature. Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed nature - rather it is a projection of dreams and idylls, as well as of escapes and refuges from human turmoil, the elusive paradise on earth.

2018 • History

The Eye of Faith

Professor Mary Beard broaches the controversial, sometimes dangerous, topic of religion and art. For millennia, art has inspired religion as much as religion has inspired art.

2018 • History

The Triumph of Art

Think Renaissance and you think of Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering.

2018 • History

First Contact

In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear.

2018 • History

Radiance

Simon Schama starts his meditation on colour and civilisation with the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres. He then moves to 16th-century Venice...

2018 • History

The Cult of Progress

If David Olusoga's first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century. David shows the growing ambivalence with which artists reacted to the idea of progress, both intellectual and scientific, that underpinned the imperial mission and followed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

2018 • History

The Vital Spark

Simon Schama begins Civilisations with this premise: that it is in art - the play of the creative imagination - that humanity expresses its most essential self: the power to break the tyranny of the humdrum, the grind of everyday.

2018 • History

Civilisations on your Doorstep

From Roman marbles and Egyptian mummies to Renaissance masterpieces and African sculptures, in this special accompanying programme to Civilisations, Mary Beard goes in search of extraordinary works of art from all over the world that can be seen here in Britain.

2018 • History

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2015 • History

The Vikings Uncovered

Dan Snow uncovers the lost Vikings in America with space archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak. Sarah uses satellites 383 miles above the earth to spot ruins as small as 30cm buried beneath the surface. As Sarah searches for Viking sites from Britain to America, Dan explores how they voyaged thousands of miles when most ships never left the shoreline. He also tracks their expansion west, first as raiders and then as settlers and traders throughout Britain and beyond to Iceland and Greenland. In North America they excavate what could be the most westerly Viking settlement ever discovered.

2016 • History

Wheels of Adventure

The World's Longest Motor Journeys Long distance car rallies, including the London-Sydney and the Pan African rallies, and attempts to drive round the world (by Kegresse half-tracks in the 1920s) and the length of the Americas. Epic footage of speed and endurance. With the development of the motor car man soon turned his attention from using it as a means of travel to using it for his sporting aspirations, to driving around the world, to remote corners, to those places where few men have ventured before. Driving in these early days was always a challenge. Dirt roads that the horse found perfectly acceptable became impassable quagmires of mud for the automobile. Despite these challenges, it was not long before the automobile transformed itself from novelty to necessity. The advent of the world's longest motor journeys took place with the London-Sydney and Pan Africa car rallies, in deserts and at tropical jungles. These were then followed by epic attempts of endurance to drive round the world and across the length of the Americas.

2/20The True Action Adventures of the Twentieth Century • 1996 • History

Emperors Ghost Army

Explore the buried clay warriors, chariots, and bronze weapons of China's first emperor. In central China, a vast underground mausoleum conceals a life-size terracotta army of cavalry, infantry, horses, chariots, weapons, administrators, acrobats, and musicians, all built to serve China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di, in the afterlife. Emperor's Ghost Army" explores how the Emperor directed the manufacture of the tens of thousands of bronze weapons carried by the clay soldiers. NOVA tests the power of these weapons with high-action experiments and reports on revolutionary 3D computer modeling techniques that are providing new insights into how the clay figures were made, revealing in the process the secrets of one of archaeology's greatest discoveries.

NOVA PBS • 2015 • History