Ornate train of thought
OF ALL available religions, Orthodox Christianity is my favourite. Used to the bare, Protestant chapels of Northern England, I had my mind blown by the gold and silver ornateness of the Greeks and the Russians.
If I was ever going to convert I know where I’d go. And as GREAT CONTINENTAL RAILWAY JOURNEYS (BBC2) explained last night, I’d be in good company too. In Kiev, capital of Ukraine, Michael Portillo visited the stunning Church of Saint Volodymyr, founded in 1017.
Volodymyr, descendant of Vikings who went east instead of west, decided to ditch his pagan beliefs and interviewed the representatives of various other faiths to see which would fit. He rejected Islam because he couldn’t give up booze. In the end he converted to the Orthodox church because they had the most beautiful services.
Talking of the ornate, Michael Portillo excelled himself on the first leg of this new, Eastern trek, sporting jackets and trousers in colours I couldn’t even name.
None of this impressed the matrons at the spa in Odessa though. There might be politicians who’d pay good money to have a stern nurse ordering them out of their clothes and into a mud bath but if the former Conservative MP enjoyed it, he didn’t show it.
Nor was it clear whether the local mud worked for him. In the next scene he was descending the steps of the Opera House, thankfully with his clothes on but walking as if he’d had an accident.
What with all that and having twigs horse-whipped out of his mouth by Cossacks and being forced to down lethal shots of dark brown vodka to prove that he wasn’t a lily-livered Muscovite, his Ukraine trip was far from a stroll in the park. On the plus side, at least the trains ran on time.
CIVILISATIONS (BBC2) began with Professor Mary Beard and an ancient stone head. A remnant of the long-gone Olmec civilisation in Central America, the massive head has puzzled us ever since its discovery in 1939. What purpose did it have? Whose head was it?
Was there a body? By the end she had answered none of these queries but taken us on a fascinating tour through the history of the human form. Though it was rich, obviously, in things to look at, the classics expert wasn’t just presenting a slide show. She had things to say about the human image and whether we agreed or not, we were forced to think.
Maybe, she argued, the gigantic statues of pharaohs in Egypt were not there to impress lowly subjects but more to reassure the rulers.
Most portraits of kings and queens in their finery are found in palaces because what all-powerful, God-anointed monarch wouldn’t have the odd, private moment of doubt? Textbook history puts humans, technology and art on an upward curve, getting more sophisticated with every century. Mary Beard turned it upside down, wondering what had been lost.
Phrasikleia Kore, a memorial statue to a young woman from about 550 BC, gazed right at us, holding a flower, an inscription written as if it came from her. Technically, she wasn’t as remarkable as the bronze Boxer at Rest from two centuries later.
He has no name as he gazes into the middle distance and if his welts and cauliflower ears are cleverly done, they’re generic, like a pirate with a parrot. One statue remembers a loved one. One shows off the artist’s talent. If that’s civilisation, who wants it?