Civilisations - S1.E6 ∙ First Contact
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00:00When civilizations meet one another for the first time, there is always the danger of
00:11conflict.
00:12A global era of many first encounters began 500 years ago.
00:21It was the dawn of a new age of discovery.
00:26Some encounters were peaceful, others incredibly destructive.
00:33But time and again, these momentous meetings sparked great artistic energy, and the clashing
00:40and the jostling of cultures impacted both sides.
00:46As a historian, I believe that in art we find profound truths about these encounters.
00:53In the masterpieces of 17th century Holland, in great works from Japan, in the paintings
01:00of late Mughal India, and other artistic treasures, we discover the destruction and creation combined
01:08to forge new art and culture in the first age of globalization.
01:38In the last years of the 19th century, thousands of people came to London to see an intriguing
02:06new exhibit.
02:11They came to marvel at the art of an alien culture, produced by a supposedly savage people.
02:18The very existence of these works of art represented a challenge to the dominant ideas of the time,
02:26ideas that underpinned an empire.
02:31The public were fascinated, but also troubled by what they saw.
02:37What bothered them was that this was the work of an African society, and almost everybody
02:42in the 19th century believed that Africans lacked the technical skills needed to produce
02:46great art, and the cultural sophistication needed to appreciate it.
02:51It was in fact widely believed that the people of the dark continent had no history and no
02:56culture and were incapable of generating this thing called civilization.
03:07These reliefs that so disturbed the Victorians are the Benin Bronzes.
03:13They're now regarded as one of Africa's greatest treasures.
03:18Created from the 16th century onwards in the ancient West African kingdom, they record
03:23Benin's great kings, her wealth, her military power, and the history that Africans were
03:30supposed to lack.
03:33I've been coming to see these works of art my whole life.
03:36I was first brought to see them when I was just a little boy by my family.
03:40I've spent hours and hours over the years standing here looking at them, and as someone
03:46born in Africa, feeling a strong sense of connection to them.
03:51But despite all their beauty, they are, to me, tragic works of art, because they are
03:56loaded with a sense of loss.
03:58And that's because today they're not in Nigeria, among the people whose ancestors made them.
04:04They're here in London, in the British Museum.
04:09The Benin Bronzes came to Britain as the spoils of an act of plunder.
04:15In 1897, British colonial forces attacked Benin City.
04:20It was an act of revenge for the ambush of an earlier British expedition.
04:25They deposed the king, the Oba, or Vanuamwen, sent him into exile and burned his palace
04:31to the ground.
04:34They looted the brass plaques and statues that once decorated the palace walls, took
04:39them back to London and sold them off.
04:43Some were put on display in the British Museum.
04:49But many of the Victorians, who puzzled over the existence of the bronzes, had forgotten
04:53that they were not the first outsiders to see the art of Benin.
05:00Centuries earlier, Portuguese explorers had encountered the bronzes in their original
05:05home, on the walls of Benin's royal palace.
05:09It stood at the heart of a vast city, ringed by one of the largest earthwork walls in the
05:15world.
05:19These early European travellers came not to conquer, but to trade.
05:25Before the prejudices of later centuries, they had no trouble recognising Benin as a
05:30powerful, sophisticated civilisation, one that was capable of producing great art.
05:38And it's in the art that we find evidence of these first relationships between West
05:43Africans and Europeans.
05:46Evidence that shows the faces of early Portuguese traders, complete with beards and long European
05:52noses.
05:56This is art that reveals a very different civilisation to the one the Victorians imagined.
06:01Not an isolated kingdom, but one shaped by centuries of contact with the wider world.
06:17Today the Kingdom of Benin is part of Nigeria.
06:24Yet its ancient culture has not vanished, but adapted, and survived its many encounters
06:30with others.
06:34The people of Benin still pay homage to an oba.
06:37Eoware II is the 39th ruler in a line that stretches back to the 12th century.
06:48And the artworks that we call Benin bronzes, in fact made of brass alloys, are still created
06:54by the people of Benin using the same ancient metal casting technique.
07:01Mr Ine is part of a long artistic tradition.
07:05He learned his skills from his father, who learned them from his father.
07:09So this artistic form has been passed down over the centuries, family by family, generation
07:14by generation.
07:15And today the bronze casters of Benin, like their predecessors, are members of an exclusive
07:20guild.
07:21And they still use the same methods to produce their art, the lost wax method, and almost
07:26every stage in that process is performed today as it was centuries ago.
07:35Yet despite their ancient heritage, Benin's craftsmen were not the first West Africans
07:41to use the technique.
07:46In the 13th century, the people of Ife cast lifelike heads in metal that are thought to
07:51represent now long-forgotten rulers.
07:58They achieved such a sophisticated level of realism that Europeans would later suggest
08:04the heads were evidence of the lost civilisation of Atlantis.
08:12This was the indigenous artistic tradition inherited by the Benin Empire, who used it
08:18to honour their oboes.
08:22In the hands of Benin's craftsmen, the style became more abstract, imbued with magical,
08:28symbolic power.
08:38Benin's art would continue to evolve after the arrival, in the late 1400s, of Portuguese
08:44traders, the first Europeans to reach West Africa.
08:52Within Benin's art is evidence that the Portuguese were more than just trading partners.
08:58This brass statue, made by Africans for Africans, is of a Portuguese soldier.
09:09He is quite possibly one of the mercenaries who fought in the oboe's army.
09:14A statue like this could well have adorned the oboe's palace.
09:20And one of the greatest of all Benin's art treasures gives us an insight into the way
09:25Benin saw the Portuguese.
09:29Made not of metal, but carved ivory, it's believed to show the face of a 16th-century
09:34Queen Mother, Idia.
09:37It's an expression of elegance and power.
09:46But most intriguing is her crown.
09:49It's a row of tiny bearded faces, symbolising the seafaring Portuguese.
09:55They were said to be messengers of Benin's water god, Olukon, so their images reinforced
10:02the authority of the Queen.
10:13Trade with the Portuguese meant that the Kingdom of Benin, like a number of African societies,
10:17was drawn into a new Atlantic world.
10:21African traders loaded locally produced goods onto European ships that sailed up African
10:26rivers.
10:27They traded in cloth and in pepper, in gold and ivory, and also in slaves, though at this
10:32point in very small numbers.
10:35But Africans also exported the work of African artists, who found new customers in Europe.
10:45The craftsmen of Benin carved elaborate salt cellars from ivory, in the process creating
10:51a new Afro-Portuguese style.
10:55With their Christian crosses and distinctive clothes, these figures are unmistakably 16th-century
11:01Europeans.
11:07The lid is crowned with a tiny Portuguese sailing ship, topped with a crow's nest.
11:15As a witty flourish, we see a sailor peeping out.
11:20These luxury items were all destined for Portugal's great port city, Lisbon.
11:34By the late 1400s, contact with a world beyond Europe was transforming the way the Portuguese
11:39saw themselves, as more inquisitive and more outward-looking.
11:50The fortified Tower of Belém, built to protect Lisbon harbour, boasted ornate braided details,
11:56thought by some to be influenced by African carvings, like the ivory salt cellar ship.
12:06On one corner of the tower is a celebrated trophy of Portuguese globalism.
12:13It's a rhinoceros, modelled on a real animal, sent by an Indian prince as a gift to the
12:19King of Portugal.
12:20Brought by ship around Africa and paraded through the docks of Lisbon, it was the first
12:25rhino seen in Europe since the Romans.
12:30The same animal was famously immortalised by the German artist Albrecht Dürer.
12:36He never sold the beast himself, but transformed someone else's sketch into an engraved masterpiece,
12:44which he reproduced and sold in thousands of woodcut prints.
12:51This is the image that helped establish Dürer as a master of the new medium of mass communication,
12:59the printing press.
13:10By the 16th century, Lisbon had become perhaps Europe's most cosmopolitan city.
13:22A reality that was captured in a uniquely revealing painting.
13:29King's Fountain.
13:32It's believed that the artist who produced this, whose name has been lost, was from the
13:36Netherlands.
13:37But this is not a picture of Delft or Amsterdam.
13:40This is Lisbon.
13:41This is Lisbon in the 16th century, at the very height of Portugal's global trading empire.
13:46It's a part of the city called the King's Fountain, and the fountain is shown here.
13:52What's striking about this picture is the people.
13:58Lisbon, in this painting, looks more like a 21st century capital, because as Portugal's
14:03trading empire expanded around the world, people from across that empire came to Lisbon.
14:09Incredibly, it's believed that 10%, one in ten of Lisbon's population were Africans.
14:15The Africans in this painting are existing at every level of the social strata.
14:21There are the aguaderos.
14:22These are water carriers.
14:23They are almost certainly slaves, but there were white slaves as well as black slaves.
14:30There's a criminal who's been arrested here.
14:33There are the boatmen who are ferrying people across the river.
14:37But there's also figures like this.
14:38This is a black knight, a man of the order of Santiago, on his horse with his sword and
14:44his cloak and all his finery.
14:49And it's a snapshot of a world that we've forgotten about.
14:53Lisbon at the centre of a global empire, Lisbon at the centre of the first stage of globalisation.
15:05This is art that captures a moment when the balance of military and economic power meant
15:10that Europeans and Africans encountered one another on terms of relative equality.
15:17Yet other art, plundered from Central America just decades later,
15:22tells of a very different encounter.
15:25An encounter that would prove to be one of the most cataclysmic events in all human history.
15:47On the eve of Spain's arrival, Central America was dominated by the Aztecs.
15:58They had their own writing system and a sophisticated cyclical calendar.
16:08Their complex beliefs demanded sacrificial sacrifice.
16:13Their complex beliefs demanded sacrificial victims in vast numbers,
16:18to appease the gods and ensure the continuation of life.
16:25The Aztecs also honoured their gods and their rulers in exquisite artefacts fashioned from gold.
16:34Gold that would prove an irresistible temptation to the first European arrivals.
16:40On the 8th of November, 1519, one of the most momentous meetings in all of history
16:46took place in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.
16:54And this meeting between two worlds, the old and the new, came down to a meeting between two men,
17:00Hernán Cortés and the Aztec emperor, Montezuma.
17:03And these were two men who occupied positions of radically different status in their respective societies.
17:15It's difficult to know what Montezuma, the god-emperor, made of Cortés, the ruthless, ambitious conquistador.
17:24Was Cortés the embodiment of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, whose imminent return had been prophesied?
17:31Or was he a dangerous enemy to be treated with caution?
17:36Either way, Montezuma decided to lavish upon the Spaniard
17:40some of the most beautiful artefacts Aztec society could produce.
17:45It's believed that this spectacular object was one of them.
17:54It's known today as the double-headed serpent.
17:57It's a piece of carved wood that's been covered in a mosaic
18:01made up of hundreds and hundreds of tiny pieces of turquoise,
18:05each of them very precisely fitted into place.
18:11And it's believed that it's a representation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl,
18:15who was sometimes shown as a snake covered in the shimmering feathers of the Quetzal bird.
18:23What we don't know is why.
18:25Why did Montezuma perhaps give this to Cortés?
18:29It could have been as an act of tribute,
18:32or perhaps Montezuma believed that he could, with this and other gifts,
18:37appease the Spanish and save the Aztec empire.
18:45But the conquistadors weren't interested in the aesthetic value of Montezuma's gifts.
18:51They wanted only gold.
18:56So with horses, weapons and a great deal of help from Montezuma's enemies, they attacked.
19:04Yet the truth is, it was the unexpected, devastating power of European diseases
19:10that finally broke Aztec resistance,
19:13and wiped out perhaps as much as 90% of the population.
19:19When Spain displayed the spoils of its conquest back in Europe,
19:23it took an artist's eye to really appreciate their beauty.
19:28None other than Dürer, the engraver of Lisbon's Indian rhino.
19:32He saw the Aztec works and wrote,
19:35''All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much
19:40''as these wonderful works of art.''
19:45But that didn't stop the Spanish from melting down
19:48almost every gold object for its commercial value.
19:54In Mexico, the Aztecs who survived faced a new onslaught.
19:59Catholic missionaries came, determined to eradicate Aztec beliefs.
20:04Especially the bloody, despised practice of human sacrifice.
20:11To break the bond between the people and the gods,
20:14they set about the wholesale obliteration of the Aztec religion.
20:19Hundreds of temples were destroyed,
20:21and on their ruins, churches were razed.
20:24Sometimes they were built from the same stones.
20:27And thousands of statues to the Aztec gods were toppled and burned.
20:37The conversion of hundreds of thousands of Aztec people to Catholicism
20:42was surprisingly swift and thorough.
20:45The Spanish unquestionably used force,
20:48but crucial, too, were similarities between the faiths.
20:54Aztec ideas about blood sacrifice and resurrection
20:58chimed with the story of Christ's crucifixion,
21:01enabling the fusion of the two faiths.
21:08And even this encounter, one of the most violent destructions
21:13of one civilisation by another, would produce great art.
21:28In a monumental work known today as the Florentine Codex,
21:32one Franciscan missionary, Father Bernardino de Sahagún,
21:36employed the skills of Aztec artists
21:40to help him create a detailed record of their civilisation.
21:46Sahagún believed that in order to convert people,
21:49you first had to understand them, their gods, their way of life,
21:53even their rituals of sacrifice.
21:58The text is written in both Spanish and the Aztec language, Nahuatl.
22:04But it's the images, painted by Aztecs,
22:07that most vividly portray a conquered people
22:10immortalising their own culture at the very moment it was being destroyed.
22:17And it wasn't only on the page.
22:19Through the fusion of the two faiths,
22:21aspects of Aztec culture survived into the modern world
22:26in the form of a festival.
22:29The annual Day of the Dead is actually a synthesis
22:33of the Catholic All Saints' Day
22:35and rituals inherited from the Aztec religion.
22:40It's a day when families gather together
22:42to remember those who have passed away.
22:47Doña Josefina lost her husband, Don Abram, three months ago.
22:52But until midnight, the festival is still going on.
22:56But until midnight, surrounded by family and friends,
22:59she is here to welcome her husband, as she did when he was alive.
23:07To guide Don Abram home, Doña Josefina has built an altar
23:11laden with offerings of bread and fruit.
23:16There are layers to represent heaven, earth and the underworld.
23:21And alongside them, the Aztec symbol of death.
23:26The calavera, the human skull.
23:31I've come here bringing with me all my Western presumptions,
23:35and I'm imposing my Western view of death as something tragic
23:39to be lamented and mourned onto what's happening here.
23:42That's not at all how these people are regarding
23:45this celebration of the passing of one of their number.
23:49It's my problem, not their problem,
23:52because I see death as macabre and tragic.
23:55They see it quite differently.
24:00There is a striking irony in the fact that 500 years after
24:04Cortes and the conquistadors arrived,
24:07the element of Aztec culture that is most alive
24:11is their festival to the goddess of death.
24:15There was no society, whether victim or victor,
24:19that emerged from the Age of Exploration unchanged.
24:25Spain, too, was transformed.
24:27Vast amounts of silver and gold seized from the New World
24:31made her the richest nation in Europe.
24:36The Church justified Spain's conquests on the grounds
24:39that they helped the poor.
24:41They justified Spain's conquests on the grounds
24:44that they helped spread the Christian message.
24:48But while the Inquisition ruthlessly defended
24:51the purity of the Catholic faith,
24:53the exchange of ideas and influences was unstoppable.
25:01Spain's aggressive exporting of her culture and her faith
25:04to other parts of the world didn't render her immune
25:08to the flow of cultural influences from abroad.
25:11Here in Toledo, the spiritual heart of the Spanish Church,
25:15cultures met and mixed, and in doing so,
25:17some of the very greatest European art of all time was created.
25:21It was the work of a visionary,
25:23a man whose style and intensity was centuries ahead of its time.
25:28He'd been born in Crete as Dominikos Theotokopoulos,
25:32but he was known here in Spain as El Greco, the Greek.
25:39El Greco brought to Spain the traditions of Greek Orthodox art,
25:43as well as the strange distortions of Italian mannerism.
25:49But his great achievement was combining those influences
25:52in a way that expressed the fanatical intensity
25:56of the religious culture of 16th-century Toledo.
26:01In 1596, he began work on a dramatic view of the city.
26:06It's starkly lit beneath a stormy sky,
26:09a vision of a holy citadel where God's authority
26:13was made manifest through the Spanish Church.
26:17Rising up from the skyline is the spire of Toledo Cathedral.
26:23It was for this cathedral that El Greco painted
26:26one of his greatest masterpieces.
26:29El Greco's painting still hangs in the space for which it was created.
26:35This is the sacristy,
26:37where the priests put on their robes before performing Mass.
26:41So it's fitting that El Greco chose as his subject
26:45the disrobing of Christ.
26:49What we see is the moment just before Christ's clothes
26:52are ripped from his body.
26:54No other artist more vividly captured
26:57Catholic Spain's intense fascination
27:00with the brutal horror of Christ's sacrifice.
27:06Now, there's no blood in this painting,
27:08but we are symbolically reminded of the violence
27:11that's to be done to the body of Christ
27:13through the deep, intense red of the robe.
27:18It's a vivid depiction of the violence
27:21through the deep, intense red of the robe.
27:24It reminds us that the crucifixion was a blood sacrifice.
27:31A strange echo of the human sacrifices
27:33that were at the heart of the religion
27:36of the people who Spain had conquered, the Aztecs.
27:46El Greco made Christ's blood sacrifice explicit
27:49when he painted his battered, distorted body hanging on the cross.
27:54The bloodstains trailing down towards a view not of the Holy Land,
27:59but of Toledo, the beating heart of the Spanish Empire.
28:10But Spain's conquests in the New World
28:12were not the norm in the 16th century.
28:15They were, in a sense, the exception.
28:20When European explorers first reached the shores
28:23of more powerful empires like India and China,
28:27they initially found themselves marginal players.
28:35In Japan, they encountered a feudal society
28:38too robust to be conquered.
28:44Although the details are vague,
28:46it's believed that the very first Europeans to reach Japan
28:49arrived by accident.
28:51They were a group of Portuguese merchants
28:54on board a Chinese ship that was driven ashore by a storm
28:57around the year 1543.
29:00The Japanese were fascinated by these new arrivals,
29:03who they regarded as little more than exotic novelties.
29:06But within just a few years,
29:08the Portuguese began to arrive in these waters in their own ships.
29:12And from the very beginning, it was obvious to them
29:14that the Japanese were not a people who they could treat
29:17the way the Spanish had treated the Aztecs.
29:20Japan was extremely wealthy.
29:22She had an enormous population, a highly sophisticated culture,
29:25and militarily, she was a formidable power.
29:29This was not a country in which Europeans
29:32could even dream of being conquistadors.
29:34So the Portuguese instead became Japan's trading partners.
29:39Portuguese traders brought new goods and technologies
29:43from every corner of their trading empire.
29:48Though Japan believed firmly in the superiority
29:51of her own ancient culture,
29:53to begin with at least, she opened her doors to the traders,
29:57and a whole new art form emerged to depict their arrival.
30:02Folding screens like these were one of the innovations
30:05of Japanese art in the 16th century.
30:08They're called namban screens
30:10because namban was the Japanese word for Europeans.
30:14And what it means, rather unflatteringly, is southern barbarians.
30:18Southern because the Portuguese always seemed to arrive in Japan
30:21from the south, and that's because they were coming up
30:24from their home country, Japan.
30:26And the portuguese were coming up from their home country,
30:29and that's because they were coming up from their trading bases
30:32in India and China.
30:34And barbarians, because the Japanese were not at all impressed
30:37by European standards of hygiene or European table manners.
30:41What these screens tend to show
30:43are the great black ocean-going ships of the Portuguese empire,
30:47loaded with exotic trading goods.
30:50All of these goods are being lowered onto boats and ferried ashore,
30:54and then they're being taken on almost a ceremonial procession
30:58through the town.
31:02Now, the Japanese artists who produced these screens
31:05were very careful to pick out the most exotic
31:08and the most valuable products.
31:10Here is a folding Chinese chair of huge value.
31:14There's exotic animals, rare or unknown to the Japanese,
31:18being brought ashore in cages.
31:21But just as exotic and just as exciting as any of these goods
31:25are the people coming off these Portuguese ships.
31:29Africans, both free and enslaved,
31:31but there's also Indians, there's Malays, there's Arabs.
31:40Almost like a mirror image of the Aztec Florentine Codex,
31:44these Namban screens show us
31:46how a host nation recorded the arrival of visitors.
31:50Except here, it's very firmly on the terms of that host nation.
31:56But there's also a hint here that Japan's perception of the newcomers
32:00as relatively harmless was about to change radically.
32:06New arrivals are greeted by Jesuit missionaries
32:10who had come to Japan not to trade, but to save souls.
32:15By 1600, European missionaries
32:18had won nearly a quarter of a million local converts.
32:22So when a powerful new dynasty took control of Japan, the Tokugawas,
32:27they decided to make a stand against this threat to their culture.
32:31They executed converts, exiled the missionaries
32:35and banned the Christian faith.
32:38Their change of policy was undeniable.
32:42Their change of policy was undoubtedly influenced
32:45by reports from the New World,
32:47where Christian missionaries had tried to obliterate the local religions.
32:52But the Tokugawa warlords, the shoguns, went much further.
32:57They sealed Japan off from the outside world,
33:01attempting to turn it into a closed society.
33:07Almost all foreigners, not just the missionaries, were rejected,
33:10and Japanese people themselves were prevented from travelling abroad.
33:14The shoguns then promoted a sort of Japanese cultural renaissance,
33:19one that looked not outwards to other civilisations,
33:22but inwards, to Japan's own cultural traditions.
33:26And they used Japan's artistic traditions
33:28as a way of tightening their grip on power
33:31and creating a new sense of what it meant to be Japanese.
33:41The shoguns promoted Japan's older religions,
33:45in particular, the Zen school of Buddhism,
33:48which emphasised self-discipline.
33:53In Buddhist temples, the samurai, the warrior nobles,
33:57now studied refined arts,
34:00the controlled rituals of the tea ceremony,
34:04as well as poetry, calligraphy and calligraphy.
34:08As well as poetry, calligraphy and the business of serving the shogun state.
34:16It is tempting today to look at Japan's long age of isolation
34:20and conclude that this country's distinctive culture
34:24must have developed in something of a vacuum.
34:27But the idea that the Japanese were ever completely isolated is a myth.
34:32It was official policy that Japan should be a closed country,
34:36but the Japanese were never completely cut off from the outside world,
34:41or from the influences and the ideas of other civilisations.
34:49The Japanese became instead the masters of controlled contact,
34:53permitting only modest exchanges with a few favoured nations.
34:59Tiny Dejima Island, in the middle of Nagasaki Harbour,
35:03was home to Dutch merchants,
35:05the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan.
35:11The Dutch were tolerated,
35:13partly because they were far more interested in trade than religious conversion,
35:17but also because they willingly bowed the knee to the shogun,
35:21acknowledging him as their master.
35:26This relationship allowed the Dutch to import European innovations
35:30in art and science into mainland Japan.
35:41One popular scientific curiosity
35:44would have an unexpected impact upon Japanese art.
35:48An optical device, which the Japanese called Dutch glasses,
35:52was at first considered a frivolous Western plaything.
35:57When viewed through its convex lens, specially painted landscapes,
36:01using European rules of perspective, would appear more three-dimensional.
36:08Especially when compared with the flat, decorative style
36:12of Japan's dominant state-sanctioned school of art.
36:18One painter of Dutch glass landscapes, called Murayama Okyo,
36:22shrewdly focused on revered Japanese subjects.
36:27Like the medieval hollyhock festival, infusing them with a new sense of depth.
36:35Soon, his reputation grew.
36:44Okyo began to win more serious commissions.
36:47He began to paint on temple screens.
36:57On a pair of temple screens, he painted bamboo
37:00with more delicately observed naturalism
37:03than anything yet seen in Japanese art.
37:07On one side, buffeted by the wind.
37:12On the other, in the rain, heavily laden and still.
37:18MUSIC PLAYS
37:28But it was for his masterpiece that Okyo combined everything he knew
37:32from both Eastern and Western traditions
37:35in one of the most breathtakingly beautiful of all Japanese works.
37:48It's so subtle, so minimal, a work of art,
37:52that it almost feels like it isn't there.
37:55And everything about it feels ephemeral and frail.
37:59It's painted on paper, not canvas as in the West.
38:03And great expanses of it are just white, blank areas
38:07that seem almost untouched by the artist.
38:10And yet, all of that belies the fact that this is one of the most
38:14sophisticated works of cultural synthesis that I know.
38:20It shows a sheet of ice, presumably on a lake,
38:24and these broken, jagged cracks in the ice
38:28disappear into the mist.
38:31The effect is a three-dimensional space.
38:35Now, that is European vanishing-point perspective.
38:38And yet, this, one of Okyo's masterworks,
38:41just could not be more Japanese
38:44because it's a philosophical contemplation
38:47of two concepts fundamental to Buddhism,
38:50imperfection and impermanence.
38:53Imperfection because these lines are uncontrolled and irregular,
38:57and impermanence because, of course, the ice will melt.
39:01And those two concepts are just as fundamental to Japanese art
39:05as the classical Greek-Roman ideas of beauty and perfection are
39:10to European art.
39:12So this is Okyo incorporating European ideas into his art,
39:16but in ways that are in keeping with Japanese philosophy
39:19and Japanese tastes.
39:30This synthesis of East and West was only possible
39:34because of the tiny trading bottleneck between Japan and Holland.
39:40But it was also possible because of the small size of Holland.
39:48Yet, from the Dutch point of view,
39:50it was just one of many global trading partnerships.
39:59It gave the tiny Dutch Republic an influence
40:02that was way out of proportion with its size.
40:06They were able to bring their clients abroad and back home
40:09with goods they wanted, as well as with new and exotic goods
40:13they hadn't even known they wanted.
40:17At the very centre of this vast intercontinental network
40:20of trading bases and this web of shipping routes
40:23lay the city of Amsterdam.
40:25In the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century,
40:28Amsterdam was one enormous market.
40:30Everything and anything was being bought and sold here.
40:34When Descartes arrived in the 1630s,
40:36he described it as a city where all of the commodities
40:40and all of the curiosities that one could wish for could be bought.
40:44So where was the Japanese that tried to block out the wider world?
40:49Their Dutch trading partners couldn't get enough of it.
41:05In Amsterdam, the Republic's wealthy merchants
41:08built their grand canal-side villas
41:11and filled them with the fruits of global trade.
41:16Blue and white Chinese pottery.
41:22Japanese lacquerware shipped from Nagasaki.
41:26Their fine clothes were made of silk from Persia.
41:31Their exquisite tableware crafted from New World gold and silver.
41:37Or exotic shells and coconuts.
41:42And to serve the Dutch their fine wines,
41:45enslaved African boys who became one of the greatest
41:50fashions of the age among the rich.
41:57Amsterdam was the testing ground for modern capitalism.
42:01Through its stock exchange, the Dutch East India Company
42:04became the world's first publicly traded company.
42:08Now anyone could own shares in Holland's global enterprise.
42:12And in this frenzy of money-making,
42:14Dutch art too was commodified.
42:19The modern art market was born,
42:21supplying whatever subjects the new aspirational merchant class wanted.
42:30And what they wanted, in their art,
42:32was not the pomp of modern art,
42:34but what they wanted, in their art,
42:36was not the pomp of modern art,
42:38and what they wanted, in their art,
42:40was not the pomp of monarchy
42:42or the flamboyance of the Catholic faith.
42:46Instead, they wanted to see a reflection of themselves.
42:50Proud Republicans who had worked hard for the new wealth they enjoyed.
42:56As ordinary Dutch citizens went about their ordinary lives,
43:00it's difficult to know how connected they felt to their overseas empire.
43:07While thousands of men and women set sail with the Dutch trading companies
43:11to seek their fortunes abroad,
43:13most never left their native soil.
43:16As far as we know, the artist Jan Vermeer hardly ventured further
43:20than the small Dutch city of Delft.
43:27Vermeer is not an artist known for wide horizons.
43:31Most of his paintings are famously intimate.
43:35They're set in the heart of the city,
43:37in the heart of the city,
43:39in the heart of the city,
43:41in the heart of the city,
43:43most of his paintings are famously intimate.
43:46They're set within the neat, ordered,
43:49almost claustrophobic world of the Dutch home.
43:55What Jan Vermeer specialised in was the art of everyday life,
43:59and his world was an interior world.
44:02What he captured on canvas were simple fleeting moments,
44:06a young girl laughing when an officer leans towards her,
44:10reading a letter by an open window,
44:12and another woman in the middle of a music lesson.
44:16And each of those scenes is bathed in a delicate light
44:20that pours in from a side window,
44:23but that only serves to emphasise the fact that we're in an enclosed room
44:27and that the rest of the world is hidden from sight,
44:30that it's somewhere out there.
44:33But if you look a little more closely at the details,
44:37at the objects that have been placed on the tables,
44:40at the maps that hang on the walls,
44:43what you realise is that Vermeer's seemingly interior domestic space
44:48is infused with the globalism of the Dutch Golden Age.
44:57You see it in the Chinese pottery
45:00that the artisans of Delft learned to copy,
45:03and in the rugs from the Orient that were highly regarded.
45:08A hat made from North American beaver fur.
45:14A geographer wearing a fashionable Japanese robe pours over his charts.
45:20There's a globe perched on his cupboard.
45:23Though Vermeer never shows us the view out of the window,
45:27he constantly hints at the rich, complex universe that lies beyond.
45:34While Vermeer's window offers us glimpses of the wider world,
45:38another artist takes us through that window on a journey of discovery.
45:46The name Maria Sibylla Merian is now largely forgotten,
45:50yet she was one of the greatest biologists of her time.
45:54As a German immigrant to Amsterdam, she benefited from its freedoms,
45:59in particular, its freedoms for women.
46:02In Amsterdam, she was able to promote her groundbreaking studies of insects
46:07and their life cycles, illustrated with exquisite works of art.
46:13At the time, many people believed that insects emerged fully formed,
46:17spontaneously from the earth, that somehow they were born out of the mud.
46:22But Maria explained and painted their life cycle,
46:26their metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.
46:32She not only explained that process, she showed which plant species
46:36each butterfly species was dependent upon.
46:41This book revolutionised the study of insects in Europe,
46:45but it also helped Maria raise the funds to embark upon a journey
46:49to study the more exotic creatures that she knew she would find
46:53in the tropical regions of the Dutch Empire.
46:57Seduced, like so many others, by the Dutch Republic's connections
47:01to faraway lands, in 1699, Maria Sibylla set sail for South America
47:08and the Dutch colony of Suriname, on the tropical Caribbean coast.
47:15Maria Sibylla spent two years exploring Suriname,
47:19sketching and painting local plants and animals.
47:23Many of them were previously unknown to Europeans.
47:28Her work encapsulates the spirit of curiosity
47:31that helped fuel a scientific revolution.
47:35Just like the Dutch in Japan, the story of the British in India
47:39began with their merchants operating very much on the margins.
47:45Obliged to flatter the local princes and the lord of the land,
47:49the merchants were forced to sell their goods to the British.
47:55In the late 17th century, the Dutch were forced to sell their goods
47:59to the British.
48:01Obliged to flatter the local princes and the Mughal emperors who ruled them.
48:08But this story would mark a profound shift from the age of discovery
48:13to a new 19th-century age,
48:15when Europe's imperial ambitions came to dominate the globe.
48:21That shift, from trade to rule, was captured in the work of two artists
48:26from different sides of the encounter.
48:28Ghulam Ali Khan, resident painter in the royal court of India's Mughal dynasty.
48:34And Johan Zoffany, who came to India after making his name
48:38painting for the British royal court.
48:42For German-born Zoffany, India was an escape
48:45and a chance for a fresh start.
48:48In Britain, he'd wrecked his glittering career
48:51by offending the royal family
48:53with his cavalier approach to a royal commission.
48:59In 1783, he arrived in Calcutta,
49:02the main trading post of the British East India Company.
49:08Zoffany's come here to rebuild his career and to make some money.
49:12He's not exactly fallen on hard times,
49:15but he's alienated a swathe of London society,
49:18so this is a place where he can make a lot of money.
49:22That's what he's here to do.
49:24It's described by a contemporary of setting out to come to India
49:28to roll in gold dust.
49:30Fortunes are being made.
49:32Everybody in London knows that huge amounts of money are being made here
49:36and that this is a place where you can start again,
49:40you can rewrite your story.
49:45Within a year of his arrival,
49:47Zoffany produced one of the most astonishing insights
49:50into the relationship between British traders and their Indian clients.
49:56This is a painting that depicts an event that actually took place,
50:00a cockfight organised by Colonel John Mordent
50:04of the East India Company in 1784 in the city of Lucknow
50:08for his client, the Nawab of Oudh,
50:11two men who were almost living metaphors
50:14for what was happening in India in the late 18th century.
50:18Colonel John Mordent was the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat.
50:22He was a man on the make, trying to build his fortune.
50:26The Nawab of Oudh was a playboy.
50:29He'd already signed away much of his authority and some of his wealth
50:32to the East India Company,
50:34and Zoffany hints at the direction that he thinks the relationship
50:38between the British and the Nawab is heading
50:41by the fact that he has the British cockerel
50:44on the verge of killing the Indian bird.
50:47The painting is full of little subversive details.
50:51There's gambling. The men are trying to seduce the women.
50:55There is a British redcoat right on the edge of frame,
50:59slinking off into the distance with his Indian mistress.
51:03This is the British and the Indians enjoying one another's company,
51:08socialising, interacting together in easy informality.
51:13What there is no hint of whatsoever in this painting
51:17is the sort of deeply distrustful and highly racialised relationship
51:22that was going to develop between the British and the Indians
51:26later on in the 19th century.
51:37By 1800, India was a land in transition.
51:41As dissent and poor leadership had eroded the Mughal dynasty's power,
51:46the British East India Company had wasted no time
51:49in increasing its influence.
51:52On the throne in Delhi sat the blind puppet emperor Shah Alam,
51:57described by one poet as merely a chessboard king.
52:02Yet he was heir to a lavish court
52:05and a centuries-old tradition of Mughal art,
52:08painted in vivid jewel-like colours.
52:12To this court came William Fraser,
52:15a young Scottish representative of the East India Company.
52:20Fraser was not himself a painter but a patron of art,
52:24and though he was surrounded by the decaying remains of a royal city in decline,
52:29he was also dazzled by the art, the poetry and, above all, the people of Delhi.
52:39The more Fraser learned about the culture around him,
52:44the more he himself changed.
52:47He began to wear Indian clothes, he grew his beard in an Indian style
52:52and he fathered children with Indian women.
52:56He had, in the parlance of the day, gone native.
53:02Fraser was one of several company men who commissioned Indian artists
53:07to document the country's rich, complex culture.
53:17Known as company paintings,
53:20they depict scenes and characters from every level of Indian society.
53:26It is not quite clear how we should view this art
53:30because we often see it to a very British and rather colonial point of view.
53:35The fact that we call these works company paintings
53:39gives the impression that it was an entirely new genre
53:42that was invented by company men like William Fraser.
53:47But the real inventors were the Indian artists themselves,
53:51and the greatest of them all was the celebrated Ghulam Ali Khan.
53:59Ghulam Ali Khan was not just a master painter,
54:02he was part of a long tradition of Mughal artists
54:05and he was one of the few who could be considered a master painter.
54:09Ghulam Ali Khan was not just a master painter,
54:12he was part of a long tradition of Mughal artists
54:15and he was one of the few who signed his own work.
54:18He was the patriarch of a school of painters,
54:21but he was also a member of a family that for centuries
54:24had proudly served as painters to the Mughal court.
54:30The impoverished Mughals could no longer afford the services of Ghulam Ali Khan.
54:35So he offered his skills not only to the British, but others too.
54:39He combined Mughal and European painting traditions
54:43to depict an astonishing range of subjects.
54:48A portrait of the eminent Colonel James Skinner,
54:51a mixed-race Anglo-Indian offspring of the two cultures.
54:57Commissions from regional rulers, like the Nawab of Jajar,
55:01who now answered not to the Emperor, but to the British.
55:06And he painted many of India's great architectural treasures,
55:10capturing the life of the country at that last moment,
55:13just before British rule changed it forever.
55:26The signs of Britain's shifting relationship with India were already emerging.
55:32A new choice of architecture made it clear that company men
55:36were no longer content simply to pursue profit.
55:42When the company's Governor-General commissioned his new Calcutta headquarters,
55:46it was obvious he saw himself as an empire builder.
55:52Government House was completed in 1803,
55:55designed with no regard whatsoever for the spectacular architecture
55:59of the Indian traditions.
56:02Instead, its creators turned to the reference books,
56:05which they had brought with them from their mother country.
56:10These are published plans and architectural drawings
56:13of the finest stately homes in Britain.
56:16And what you get from books like this is a picture of Britain
56:20at the height of the neoclassical revival,
56:22the age when Greek and Roman designs were the height of taste and fashion.
56:27Government House was based on an aristocratic English mansion,
56:31Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire.
56:34Its wings, corridors, columns and porticos
56:37were transplanted onto the subcontinent.
56:41To build stately homes like this in the British countryside
56:45merely said that the families that lived there
56:47were people of education and taste and respectability.
56:51To build an enormous neoclassical palace
56:54on Indian soil said something completely different.
56:57What this building was intended to say
57:00was that European reason and rationality was superior
57:05and it triumphed over what the British increasingly regarded
57:08as Oriental superstition and despotism.
57:12This building is political theatre.
57:15It is shock and awe in marble and stucco.
57:20Other British neoclassical buildings soon followed,
57:24changing the face of Calcutta.
57:28From church to town hall...
57:31..bank to post office.
57:35These were not just buildings,
57:37they were buildings of the future.
57:40They were buildings of the past.
57:43They were buildings of the future.
57:46These were not just buildings,
57:48they were evidence that one age had passed
57:51and another had begun.
57:54The age of European global domination.
58:05The Open University has produced a free poster
58:08that explores the history of different civilisations through artefacts.
58:13To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553
58:18or go to the address on screen
58:20and follow the links for The Open University.
58:42www.openuniversity.co.uk