Beard skips about the centuries and the globe in pursuit of thematic patterns
Presents analysis of how works of art have depicted the way human body has been seen
CIVILISATIONS: HOW DO WE LOOK AND THE EYE OF FAITH Mary Beard Loot.co.za (R 278) Profile
REVIEWER: SUE TOWNSEND
CIVILISATIONS is a 2018 British art history television documentary series produced by the BBC in association with PBS as a follow-up to the original 1969 landmark series Civilisation by Kenneth Clark. It also pays homage to the wonderful John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.
The presenters are Mary Beard, Simon Scharma and David Olusoga. Dame Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University, has written this two-part book covering her two episodes in the series.
In the first section, How Do We Look, which covers a wide range of images, many beautifully reproduced in colour on impressive paper stock, Beard presents an analysis of how numerous works of art from pre-history, Ancient Greece, Central and Southern America and China have depicted the way the human body has been seen.
The second part, The Eye of Faith, deals with images of gods and God. Again Beard draws from classical antiquity, stunning Islamic calligraphy (the word of God as opposed to the image thereof) and Byzantine iconography, among others.
Beard is known for plain speaking and accessibility, as anyone who has ever watched her TV presentations on ancient Rome and other classical matters will attest. Touching on a broad range for the length of the book, I was taken with the way in which she managed to impart information by gently guiding through posing questions, exploring ideas and thinking more deeply about the images and their meanings.
There are, however, drawbacks to this way of doing things. Beard does not give us a seamless chronology in the way that Kenneth 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 way of contrast, skips about the centuries and the globe in pursuit of thematic patterns, unfussed by yawning gaps in her time line.
Having said this, there is a very useful time line at the end of the book! An important section in The Eye of Faith has Beard disputing the assumption that Islam is an artless religion. In the Blue Mosque in Istanbul she points out that, while there may be no images of human or divine forms, the ceramic walls and ceiling are adorned with exquisite calligraphy with its repeating visual rhymes and rhythms, creating the divine in visual form.
This is striking, as most visitors will historically have had neither the laser-sharp vision nor the literacy in Arabic to make out the meaning of the words hundreds of feet above their heads.
It is this ability to read closely in the chinks of various cultures that makes Beard such a wonderfully invigorating guide.
In her “Afterword”, she reflects briefly on problems associated with the approach of her work, and she says: “For all the disagreements and frustrations with him… I have also come to appreciate more clearly what I owe to Kenneth Clark.”