All language subtitles for BBC.Civilisations.3of9.Picturing.Paradise.1080p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.eng

When your world is collapsing,

when everything is closing in...

..what you want is to be
somewhere else.

Somewhere you can breathe in peace.

A scrap of beauty,
far from the noise and ugliness.

But, if there is no escape,
then you go there in your dreams...

..and you paint that landscape
into existence.

This is what happened in China in
the 1970s to the artist Mu Xin.

During Mao Zedong's
Cultural Revolution,

he was an obvious target.

Middle-class, intellectual,
a lover of decadent, Western art.

Mu Xin was subjected
to solitary confinement,

forced labour and then house arrest.

But the paper supplied
for weekly confessions

became the material
of his liberation.

Mu Xin broke out of his confinement
by making visible,

albeit in deadly secrecy,

the landscapes which
unfolded in his mind.

The art memory of China,
its peaks and its valleys.

The culture which had given
the rest of the world,

1,000 years before,
true landscape art.

While everything else was being
smashed up, he was determined

that art - now judged
a reactionary crime - would survive.

Like nature itself,

landscape art has always been
an antidote

to the anarchy wrought by
the hand of man.

Yet it's rarely a depiction
of the way the world is,

but a vision of the way
we would like it to be.

Sometimes it delivers
a sense of harmony

between nature and humanity.

Sometimes, it's a picture of
a nation's home.

Sometimes, it's a dream of heaven
writ in fabric.

Or glimpsed through a lens.

But, most of all, it's a way to
understand our civilisation

and to behold that most terrifying
and thrilling of all truths -

our place in the cosmos.

"The nation is broken,
but mountains and rivers remain."

Those words could have come from
Mu Xin in the 1970s,

but, actually, they were written
1,000 years earlier.

In the early 10th century, China
was torn apart by endless civil war.

As feuding states vied for power,

they burned cities and towns,
and slaughtered their people.

Yet it was out of this anarchy and
chaos that the Chinese tradition

of landscape painting first
blossomed

as the great subject of art.

For the Song dynasty, who finally
triumphed in the year 960,

landscape art represented both
a glimpse of a better world

and a means to unite
this shattered country.

I'm looking at a document that
attests to a profound alteration

in human sensibility,
because it was in Song China that,

for the first time, landscape
painting with ink and brush

became the true and absolute sign of
what civilisation was,

both for those who practised it
and for those who owned

these precious scrolls.

This painting is more than
1,000 years old.

And it's thought to be by
one of the first truly great

landscape artists, Li Cheng.

Dominating the scroll are mountains,

symbols of the Song dynasty.

The biggest, most imposing peak
is the Emperor,

the lesser peaks are his ministers.

Li Cheng's message is that this is
the protecting force

beneath which China
can recover its harmony

and rebuild its civilisation.

He's an absolutely brilliant painter

of human activity,
from man on a donkey

to people having their meal,

to perhaps dumplings being cooked
in the back kitchen there.

And this bottom half of the scroll
is crowded,

not just with people, there's all
sorts of things going on.

This is our world,
this is the place we inhabit.

This is more than mere propaganda.

Li Cheng asks profound questions,

which go to the heart of our
relationship

with the world around us.

As our eye ascends through
the painting,

so our whole approach to it

also ascends to a higher order
of question.

Right in the visual centre of this
beautiful painting

is the temple itself, and the temple
is almost more important

than the whole mountain.

It is the place of equipoise,
the place of peace.

Above the temple, there is no human
action at all,

and Li Cheng has changed
the wash of the ink.

It's lighter, finer, more ethereal.

So this is a borderland between
the human and the spiritual world,

and gradually we move up and face
the greatest questions of all.

What is nature?

What lies beyond surface appearance?

What truly moves the universe?

And how, above all, does
the dialogue between flowing water

and the adamant face
of that eroded rock

bring us harmony and bring us what
everybody in China wanted -

happiness and peace?

Li Cheng offers us a glimpse
of who we are

by linking the comings and goings of
our little lives

to the majesty of the cosmos.

And that sense of fit between things
mortal and things eternal

fills the mind with the ancient
Confucian sense of rightness.

Everything in its ordained place.

This is how life is supposed to be.

So powerful was the message
that, within a century,

landscape art had sunk deep roots
into the culture of Song China.

New painting academies flourished
where it was practised.

Weighty tomes were written
about its philosophy and technique.

To be Chinese meant to be civilised

and to be civilised meant to paint,

above all, landscapes.

In the more intimate, private
pleasures of the hand scroll,

the painted landscape evolved
into something new.

Hand scrolls were
river-shaped journeys,

stories revealed as you unrolled
the scroll

and travelled almost cinematically
through space and time.

This hand scroll was painted
by the artist Qiao Zhongchang.

It was based on one of the most
famous Chinese poems,

written by a government official,

a man of culture and refinement,
called Su Shi.

Su Shi had been exiled
after a political purge

and spent his days writing about
excursions he took with his friends

up the Yangtze River.

Here he is carrying fish and wine

as his wife sees him off
on the journey.

We turned the boat loose to drift
with the current.

All around was deserted and still.

A lone crane flew overhead.

The painting evokes both
the pleasures of friendship

and the melancholy of the exile.

A dream, but one
with a bittersweet taste.

But landscape painting wasn't
always about escape.

Sometimes, artists captured
the violence of history.

200 years after Su Shi
wrote his poems,

China's Song dynasty had fallen
to Mongol invaders.

The painter Wang Meng refused to
serve the Mongol emperors,

preferring to retreat
to a very particular place,

his family's estate in the
Qingbian mountains.

Those mountains became the subject
of his greatest painting.

Well, when you're in the presence of
a bona fide masterpiece,

which this is, words somehow
struggle to be formed.

But I'm going to do my best.

Not least because this is an
extraordinary painting

because it belies all
the pleasing stereotypes

we have about Chinese landscapes.

When you think of Li Cheng,

you think of that first generation
of northern Song painters

and it is all about feeling
protected by the Imperial mountain.

None of this is happening
with Wang Meng.

This is, above all,
a painting about turbulence.

It's full of a kind of restless,
writhing, sensuous, intense energy.

There's a reason
for this turbulence.

By the time he painted this,

Wang Meng's family mountain retreat
was right in the middle

of a battlefield fought over
by armies 200,000 strong.

The reality was marauding
and massacre.

These are not mountains
which protect us.

Instead, they trap and threaten us.

Here is a man beautifully painted,
picked out with a conical cap,

which is a cap of
this particular region,

and is echoed by the shape
of the peak.

So, you think the man belongs
to the mountains,

but the man has nowhere to go.

There are paths which make
no sense at all.

He moves his way through
scrubby pines.

Wang Meng has lit this dramatically
to make it more difficult,

to make it more exciting, to make it
more perilous and energised.

Eventually, we see one isolated,
tiny figure, alone.

And this huge orchestration,

musical energy,
these animated, pulsing rocks,

look as though they're
about to topple down on him.

What's happened to landscape
painting in the hand of Wang Meng

is that it's gone from being not
just a place of calm,

but to an intensely personal
expression of his own mood

and his own feeling of insecurity.

So, everything that is coursing
through the imaginative energy

of the artist gets registered

in these sudden, jabbing,
repeated strokes.

This, then, is a state of mind
rather than a state of mountain.

If this painting depicts Wang Meng's
deepest anxieties,

then his sense of foreboding
was well founded.

Shortly after completing it,

he fell victim to his political
enemies and died in prison.

Sometimes, the vision of boundless
space will set you free.

But, sometimes, the mountain walls
close in and shut out the light.

Further west, in the Islamic world,

landscapes came to have a very
different meaning.

They were not cherished for their
remote vistas, but, instead,

for the way nature was made
part of life in town.

And the form that oasis of peace
took was a garden.

A welcome, shady retreat from
the heat and dust of the day.

To the faithful, this was more than
a collection of plants and pools.

It was an earthly reflection
of the heavenly realm.

The Islamic garden evolved from
a much older Persian tradition,

the enclosed garden,
called the paridaiza,

which gave us the word paradise.

Islamic rulers from the Nasrids
in Spain to the Mughals in India

laid out their gardens according to
the Koran's description

of the afterlife.

Four quarters,
bounded by four rivers,

which, in paradise, it was said,

would flow with water,
wine, milk and honey.

Flora and fauna, the fertile
attributes of God's blessing,

also found their way into
decorations on the pavilions

and palaces which gracefully stand
amidst the gardens.

But the art of the paradise garden
found its richest expression

in a form that sprang, like Islam
itself, from the desert.

It was the garden you could
carry with you -

the carpet.

For the nomadic tribes of the Middle
East, everything in life -

talking, eating, praying -
was done close to the ground.

Carpets made life not just bearable,
but civilised,

especially when woven with an
image of paradise.

By the late Middle Ages,

the garden carpet had migrated from
its humble origins in Arabia and

Central Asia to become a symbol of
luxury and sophistication

in the royal court of
the Persian Shah.

The 16th and 17th centuries
were a golden age

for Persian garden carpets.

And this is an extremely rare,
fragile survival.

Known as the Wagner Carpet,
after a recent German owner,

it is crammed with every kind of
living thing,

teeming through the foliage.

There are butterflies and birds.

A leopard pounces on a goat.

Fish swim in
the four legendary watercourses

which meet in a central pool.

The garden carpet was more than
an oasis of super-abundance.

Any Muslim who sat upon it,
whether emperor or humble tribesman,

found themselves in that most
uplifting of all places,

the heart of heaven.

In Christian Medieval Europe,

paradise gardens came with
a health warning.

After all, the whole mental world of
Christendom turned on a single,

fateful moment back in Eden.

That moment when the serpent
tempted Eve and set in motion

the great epic of sin and salvation,

culminating in the crucifixion
of Christ.

But, in 14th-century Siena,

anxieties about dangers
lurking in the vegetation

gave way to an exercise in the
self-congratulation of urban rulers

who, in this fresco
by Ambrogio Lorenzetti,

ride out to enjoy
the fruits of wise government.

The satisfying sight of
the contadini, Italian peasants,

sewing and harvesting in peace
and fruitfulness.

Two seasons in one painting.

In the Renaissance,
this rural test of urban leadership

found its vindication
in the rediscovery

of pagan classical
writings about the landscape.

Rusticating townsmen turned to their
favourite Latin author, Virgil,

whose nature poem, The Georgics,
written for urbanites, of course,

extolled the pleasures
of country life and labour.

"If they but knew!

"They're steeped in luck,
country people

"Far removed from the grinds of war

"Where earth that just showers them

"With all they could ever ask for

"What they have is the quiet life -

"Carefree, no deceit,
wealth untold -

"Their ease among the cornucopia."

Virgil is looking hard in only the
way that only a real countryman can.

He's sort of poking the pigs and
checking the flocks and herds.

There is a wonderful line in
The Georgics

when it's coming on to rain,

and he talks about a heifer looking
suspiciously at the sky,

working his nose to sniff the wind.

You really feel the flavours
and the sounds

and the perfumes
of rustic life here.

Virgil is staring at the soar
of a lark and listening

to the croak of frogs
down in the mud.

For Italian nobles of the 16th
century who'd read their Virgil,

that vision of a balanced life in
the countryside proved irresistible.

They took their identity
as gentlemen farmers seriously,

and the ground floor of their villas
was where carts and scythes

and even some animals were kept.

But the rest of the villa was for
a different kind of rustication -

the play of intellect.

But that didn't always preclude
a sense of humour.

This is the Villa Barbaro, built
around the 1560s in the Veneto,

the countryside surrounding Venice.

The man responsible for this
gem was Daniele Barbaro,

a wealthy cleric in the unstrenuous
Venetian style,

but also the epitome
of a Renaissance man,

learned in pretty much everything.

To create this little realm of
a well-ordered Arcadia,

Daniele turned to his friend,
the architect Andrea Palladio,

who designed the villa so that
its horizontal lines

would rhyme with the lay
of the land.

The two of them,
Daniele and Palladio,

co-opted the genius of a third
for their collaboration -

the painter Paolo Veronese.

His brief was to cover the villa
walls with frescoes.

What makes this villa special
is its sense of playfulness.

Now, Daniele Barbaro
is a heavyweight intellectual,

and, so, in his way, of course,
is Andrea Palladio.

They read all the textbooks on
optics and perspectives,

and actually written some of them,

and Daniele's translated the great
classical work on architecture.

And what you expect from all this
obsession with musical intervals

and harmony and mathematics,

almost a kind of algorithmic
approach to the perfect house,

is to have that translated in
painting by Veronese into allegory.

The planets and the gods,
cavorting on the ceiling.

And, yes, that's what we have.

We have a mysterious white woman
in the middle.

We have the gods of
abundance and family life.

And, then, suddenly,
you catch sight of a parrot.

And then you notice the woman,
almost certainly Marcantonio,

the brother's wife,

in a gorgeous, haute couture number.

And, next to her, a nurse, with
the fantastic, leathery skin,

a woman of the ordinary people.

And you think, "Hang on a minute,
they don't belong with the gods."

Something extraordinary
is going on here.

We have a mix of the immortals
and the mortals,

of reality and illusion,
and that goes right through

everything we see in the villa.

Real windows and fake windows,

and the villa turns into

a spectacularly teasing
kind of fun house.

Now, whatever you think about
Renaissance painting,

you don't usually go for it
for jokes, really.

But jokes can be graceful
and elegant,

and that was Veronese's
cast of mind.

And you also see that he's cutting
into all this dense theory

with what he could do best,
with what Venice did best.

Gorgeous colours, sensational,
sensuous brushwork,

having fun with the brush,

even if you're doing it in fresco
rather than oils.

And you turn round and you've got an
extraordinary sense of the place

still being inhabited because we've
also got people down at our level,

people coming at you,
behind you - hello!

Here's our friend coming through a
door which isn't quite a door,

and you realise the whole place
is alive with mischief.

But though the columns and
the vistas they frame

are eye-teasing fakes,

the mind-set is real enough.

Happy, horsey comings and goings.

An avenue of graceful trees,

the unhurried pleasures of
a country house weekend.

Villa Barbaro, with its frescoes,

is a perfect slice
of Renaissance escapism,

a blend of the serious
and the witty,

created at a moment when,
in the countryside beyond,

there were harvest failures
and peasant riots.

And the once-great Venetian Republic
was in retreat

from the Ottoman Turks.

But, here at Villa Barbaro,
it was always spring or summer.

The grapes would always be ripening,
the lutes would always be playing.

Daniele and Andrea Palladio would
go for long, philosophical walks,

and the great entertainer
Paolo Veronese could take a break

and shoot a pheasant or two,
his dog trotting at his heels.

His landscapes on the walls
were dreamscapes,

and you could stare and stare
and stare at them

and feel warm inside forever.

As landscape painting
came off the walls,

it turned its back
on the bucolic dreamworld.

And it happened in a place which
couldn't be more different

from the glowing, sunlit stone of
the villas of the Veneto.

It was in the 1500s, in the dark,
primeval forests of Bavaria

in southern Germany that
European landscape art

really came into its own.

Albrecht Altdorfer was a painter
who'd spent his career depicting

religious scenes, albeit ones
strangled in greenery.

But the undergrowth began
to take over,

until Altdorfer made nature itself,
by itself, the whole story.

It may seem a bit over the top
to describe this scrappy, tiny,

sketchy little thing as constituting
a revolution in art, but, you know,

that's pretty much what it is.

Because with this little painting,
the landscape suddenly happens.

By which I mean,
landscape, the word,

stops being a description of
background, of setting,

and becomes the work of art itself.

What is that revolution?

Well, what Altdorfer has done is
something extraordinary.

He's removed from the picture any
semblance of a story,

any kind of characters.

Yes, there is one
little fellow here,

which gives this watercolour
painting its title, Woodcutter.

And if you look very, very closely,

he's on lunch break.
He's got a jug of something.

It's the German world, it's got to
be beer, I would think.

And he's laid his axe down.

If you look really carefully,

he's got a devastating pair of
scarlet stockings on there,

but he's not really the kind of
character you expect

when you see landscape
as background.

There, the characters
are full and frontal.

There is, of course, a heroic
character in this painting.

A monster, a giant,
and it is the tree itself,

dwarfing the little figure
sitting at its base.

And doesn't that tree remind you
of someone else?

Of the twisted torso of the
crucified Christ

on his wooden cross,
arms outstretched?

What we've got here, in effect,
is a disguised religious picture,

and I think there's a reason
for the disguise.

Altdorfer is actually in
a sticky position.

He was living in a Catholic town at
the beginnings of the eruption

that was the Protestant Reformation.

He'd been involved in organising
town ceremonies and pilgrimages,

and part of the force of
Protestantism

was about the so-called
idolatry of images.

With this painting,

he neatly sidesteps the whole issue

of brutal and bitter partisan
religious conflict.

We have religion implied by the body
of the Christ in the tree,

rather than frontally represented.

This is a very stylish picture,

but it is also very raw
and rough and coarse.

It's almost at
times as if he painted it

with a pointed, sharpened twig.

There is a kind of slashed,
cut element to some of the details

over which the paint drips and hangs

when it describes these leaves.

This is a portable thing.

It's not stuck in a church,
like an altar piece.

It's not stuck on a wall,
like a fresco.

You can own this,
you can carry it around.

A new kind of art is born here,
and Altdorfer knows that very well.

Altdorfer's landscapes managed to
dodge religious schism

by disguising it in nature.

But they did something else as well.

They tapped into a Teutonic sense
of identity.

The notion of a natural German
homeland in the forest.

When Altdorfer used woodcuts to
reproduce his paintings,

the audience for landscape art
dramatically increased.

And what his audiences
were buying into

were landscapes
loaded with symbolism.

The sacred tree, the Gothic wood.

Mostly, though,
they were devoid of human beings.

But, in Flanders,
in the Low Countries,

a different artist would crowd his
landscapes with people.

In 1565,

the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel

painted a set of landscapes which

reinvented that traditional medieval

cycle, the labours of the months.

These, of course,
are on an epic scale.

But, here, there's not a single
feudal lord to be found.

The man who commissioned them came
from bustling, commercial Antwerp,

a merchant called
Nicolaes Jonghelinck

who wanted them to decorate
the grand dining space

of his suburban villa.

Perhaps this was Jonghelinck's way

of identifying with
the ordinary folk,

because what we have,
for the first time,

is a credible vision
of country society,

real villages with people
working and playing together.

Bruegel himself was
no brush-wielding yokel.

He was learned and well-travelled.

He'd taken a trip over the Alps to
Italy, sketching as he went.

Some of those Alpine peaks appear,
incongruously,

alongside depictions of his
low-lying, Flemish home.

But that only increases
the telescopic sense of deep space

Bruegel gives us,
using those tree lines

and the curve of the peaks to send
our vision plunging,

like the flight of that bird,

from huge vistas
to the smallest detail.

Along with that optical drama,
we get another kind of perspective,

a philosophical confrontation with
our relationship to nature itself -

unsentimental, rugged,
which demands a closer look.

I know you've all seen this on
countless Christmas cards,

but was there ever an image less
brimming with Yuletide cheer?

Those hunters haven't got much to
show for their trouble.

A skinny fox suspended
from their poles.

The exhausted dogs, trying to lift
their legs out of the heavy snow,

feel the pain as much
as their masters.

Bruegel painted these compendious,
visually inexhaustible masterpieces

after the coldest,
most frigid Flemish winter

that anybody could remember
in their lifetime.

But he also painted them on
the cusp of a long,

terrible civil war that would divide
the Netherlands between

Protestant and Catholic,
north and south,

the Spanish Empire
and the free Dutch Republic.

And Bruegel would actually find
himself right in the middle

of all those troubles.

But, while we're looking at these
glorious landscapes,

none of that history
seems to matter.

For Bruegel, the natural world

is a consolation for the traumas
afflicting civilisation.

Whatever happens in
our human world,

the God-given seasons will still
roll around,

the cattle will still return to
their winter pasture.

Let's just think for a minute

about the way he wants us to look at
these paintings.

It's a dialogue, in a way,

between the universal
and the particular.

On the one hand,
wherever the eye travels,

we are invited into a wealth of
detail of work and play.

The trudge through the snow,

the glide of the skaters
across the ice.

And wherever we travel with our eye
through the landscape,

we're carried to dramatically
different places.

From a Flemish village huddled
against the hillside,

out to a storm-tossed river estuary,

out to the broad, open sea.

An experience of looking at these
paintings becomes, surely,

like the experience of
all of our lives.

On the one hand, we're immersed in
the here and now.

We have no choice.
We go from minute to minute,

hour to hour, task to task.
It's our daily routine.

But, then, something else happens.

We stop and we contemplate and we
look at the whole picture,

like that one bird, perching
on that naked, leafless branch.

And everything, somehow,
is pulled together.

The whole of our life is laid out in
front of us, and, with it,

the entirety of human society.

And we're very, very lucky.

It all adds up,
the whole human condition,

and our particular, special,
little place inside it.

Bruegel was an encyclopaedist
of the human comedy,

and, as we cross the frozen pond,
we find, for me,

one of the most unforgettable
characters in all of European art.

A tiny, stooped figure,
an old woman,

bent with the burden of branches,

meant for fuel or thatching,
plodding home to her winter hearth,

the prospect of which makes that
burden just about bearable.

It's a lesson in the perseverance
of the poor.

For what alternative does
she really have?

Through these landscape paintings,
what Bruegel is really doing

is offering us a profound glimpse
not into the natural world,

but into the human condition.

Bruegel died in 1569,
spared the worst

of a war for religious and local
liberty in the Netherlands.

He couldn't know
it would last for 80 years.

But he evidently feared the worst.

A painting pretending to be a
Biblical massacre of the innocents

is done in contemporary dress,

with a documentary awareness of what
was in store for those countryfolk

when Spanish troops arrived.

What happened was what always
happens in such calamities -

a frantic, mass migration
of refugees.

The Netherlands became split along
the lines of the military slog -

Protestant north, Catholic south.

But, as so often in our story,

the most astonishing
flowerings happen

in the midst of human disaster.

In the Protestant Dutch Republic,

as art was purged from churches
branded as idolatry,

it simply shifted location
into other places,

especially private homes.

In the years when they were most
beleaguered by war,

the Dutch became most prolific

at buying pictures which reminded
them of what they were defending.

It was the first mass-market
for landscape art,

precisely the kind of low art
which Italians condescended to.

Willow-hung streams.

The life of the rustics.

It was what the Dutch were most
passionately attached to.

The simple face of their homeland.

Now, the reason why the Dutch felt
so emotionally invested

in this landscape was because
they had been responsible

for physically making so much of it.

There's this old saying that God
made the world,

but the Dutch made Holland.

And exactly at the time where they
reinvent landscape painting,

this was literally true.

This was an area called
the Beemster.

200,000 acres of what had been
the inland sea of the Zuiderzee

were turned into this glorious
pasture between 1607 and 1612,

while the Dutch were at war.

It was reclaimed with the aid of
43 windmills,

pumping the water out.

This wasn't just topography,
wasn't just land,

it was their homeland.

So, when the Dutch felt that,
under God's protection,

they were making a part of Holland,

it had this deep,
psychological effect on them.

They owned this countryside in a way
which was absolutely special,

and which gave their painters the
sense that they were painting their

country in both senses -
the countryside,

and their newborn nation
at the same time,

and the pictures they would produce
would belong to the whole people.

A new class of jobbing artists
emerged

to service this popular
demand for landscape art.

Jan van Goyen was one of
those workhorses.

He produced more than 2,000
paintings and drawings

during a 40-year career.

Van Goyen's was a deliberately
modest art,

unashamed of its simplicity.

But it's the realism with which
he paints the natural world

which makes Van Goyen's
paintings remarkable.

You forget what an amazing
breakthrough this represents.

Landscapes had been all about
fantasy and colour and

drenched in gold.

This is drenched in mud,
and even though we know

that Van Goyen really had
to work fast

and with rubbish materials that
didn't cost him very much money,

he's so always in debt,

there's a credible convergence
between what he's painting

and how he's painting it.
It's like a sketch.

It's like an immediate note
from his own vision,

and everything in it that's
kind of rough and raw

and crude and clay-like
and meagre about it

actually makes you feel there.

There are tops of houses, the roofs,

and you don't see anything else of
the house. Why?

Because they're
actually below the water line.

This delivers a world, the kind of
silvery quality of the canals,

little boat floating past,

and you think you're waking up and
you can smell the peat turned over.

It's a kind of raw day
in the middle of winter.

And you're absolutely enveloped
by the wind,

the dark, lead-coloured light.

But this still, in its scraped-away
authenticity, is a kind of home.

Tastes changed.

As the Dutch Republic became
the richest country on Earth,

so the moneyed wanted more
sophisticated visions

of their homeland.

Every so often, a genius came along

who could make masterpieces out of
the same, modest subject matter.

Jacob van Ruisdael's great medium
was the dappling Dutch light,

so that the skies, which in the work
of Van Goyen had been wet and dim,

now became a grand opera of light
and shade

with huge, rolling clouds
as its cast of characters.

Ruisdael loved to
exaggerate features,

to make them more theatrical.

The romance of ancient ruins, the
sinister darkness of a boggy wood.

And, in this painting,

the great emblem of Holland has
become a hero in its own right.

Ruisdael's great gift was to take
something homely and familiar -

and it doesn't get more homely,
does it, than a windmill,

and big it up to the max until it is
something epic, heroic,

almost spiritually meaningful to
everybody who's going to look at it.

Ruisdael was essentially
a dramatist of the landscape,

and this is high theatre.

Now, there really is a windmill at
this town called Wijk bij Duurstede,

but he's made
it absolutely enormous.

It has a kind of authority to it.

The sky is heavy.

There is dirty weather ahead.

These clouds are boiling up
into what might be a storm.

There are deep shadows
hanging over the landscape.

These women, with their bonnets
covering their faces,

are hurrying home.

And then I think of the date.

This painting was done in 1670,

and that was a moment of tension
and nervousness

that the Dutch had about
going it alone in Europe.

You think, correctly,
that the great powers out there,

jealous of your prosperity in
the world, are plotting against you,

England and France,
as indeed they were.

And, two years after this
painting was done,

the Dutch Republic was almost
engulfed by a pincer movement

between those two hostile states.

And there's no doubt that
that windmill,

with the light shining on it,

is a guardian against peril.

The sails of the mill,

not accidentally,
form the cross of the Redeemer.

There's a saviour,
and the saviour is the windmill.

And that cross,
just in case you're wondering,

is echoed visually by an
opening in the sky,

down which this gorgeous
light falls,

the only warm bit in the painting,

and, if you're Dutch, you remember
an old saying which says,

"Just as a windmill needs
the wind to move its sails,

"so man needs the breath
of God to act."

The moral is
never forget the word of God.

You have a covenant with God.

You are his modern, chosen people.

Just remember that
when you look at the mill.

When nations feel threatened, or
when they're actually torn apart,

the sense of God-protected homeland,
somehow sheltered from catastrophe,

comes swimming into view.

Civil wars,
as we've seen over and again,

are the nurseries
of great landscape painting.

What held for the tight-bounded
Dutch Republic,

looking heavenwards
to its boundless skies,

was magnified on
a continental scale in the 1860s,

in the bitterly divided
American republic.

Though the American Civil War was in
part a war about land

and the right to extend slavery into
new western territories,

it was possible,
in the mind's eye at least,

to gaze west towards the setting sun

and see an unclouded Eden.

Some truly lurid panorama paintings
were produced in the name of these

paradise illusions, all shining with
the stage lighting of Providence.

All of these efforts,
like most propaganda,

were sentimentally forgettable
once the war was over.

But one great painting

came out of the craving
for landscape consolation.

And it was a distinctly
unromantic elegy,

both tragic and hopeful
at the same time.

The Veteran In A New Field was the
work of the greatest, in my view,

of all 19th-century
American artists.

Winslow Homer was then just 29
and fresh from the battlefield.

As a war illustrator
for magazines and newspapers,

he'd seen the carnage first-hand.

Unlike the starry-eyed painters
of expansive horizons,

with their Olympian points of view,

Homer's picture comes down to earth
and plants us deep in the soil.

That soil is both infinitely
fertile, bursting with gold,

but also, of course,
deeply blood-soaked.

Homer painted it in 1865,

just a few months after
the bloodiest war in all US history

had come to an end.

The traumatic shock of Lincoln's
assassination, too,

was still raw in Homer's mind.

In the solitary, epic figure of
the veteran, there is, of course,

something of the lonely nobility
of the martyred president -

thanklessly toiling, and, I believe,
also something of Homer himself.

Like his namesake
from classical antiquity,

Homer conjures the great themes
of sacrifice and regeneration and,

of course, the endless regiments of
the fallen, embodied in the wheat.

But, most of all,
it's a picture of American gold.

Perhaps the only gold
which truly mattered -

the gold of the endless prairies,

standing beneath an
infinitely blue harvest sky.

Tragedy, coloured by an impassioned
religious faith in a boundless

American future, planted in
boundless American space.

Lincoln himself
never lost that faith.

Even before the war was over,

he pushed through a law to protect
and bequeath

one particular landscape,
one American Eden,

to the people for all posterity.

While America's wounds
would stay livid and open

for generations to come,

this would be at least one place
of miraculous healing.

Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada.

Very rapidly,

Yosemite became America's most
sensational tourist destination.

Its lonely beauty instantly
compromised by its popularity.

And the images which promoted it
made sure to represent it

as they did much of America -
as empty of native people.

The Miwok Indians were either
moved on or painted out.

And when Yosemite eventually found
its ultimate visual poet,

he too cleared the view of humans.

In 1916,

a teenager from San Francisco
visited Yosemite for the first time.

Ansel Adams was always going down
with something -

the flu, measles, a nasty cough -

the sort of thing budding pianists
bent over the keyboard

were supposed to get,
and Adams was one of those.

But, while he was wheezing
and hacking,

he'd read a book about Yosemite and
when a get-well trip was suggested,

he'd go nowhere else.

Visiting Yosemite was an epiphany
for Adams, like falling in love.

Gradually, the music faded

and surrendering to the drama of the
Sierra Nevada light,

photography became everything.

Ansel Adams' miracle moment
came in 1927.

He climbed to 4,000 feet
in deep snow,

to the precipitous spot
known as the Diving Board.

With the light failing and down to
one glass plate,

he had the inspired idea of using
a dark red filter to turn the sky

almost black, and create an extreme
contrast between snow and mountain.

And he produced one of the greatest
masterpieces

of American, or any other, art.

Adams called it his visualisation.

Not what his eye but the inner lens
of his imagination, could see.

He became not just Yosemite's
photographer

but its great artist,

the high priest of its temple, of
its stone, its light and its water.

And what he produced in those
landscape altarpieces -

because that's what they
surely were -

was an America irradiated with
luminous majesty.

Taller than the highest skyscraper,

more powerful than the mightiest
business corporation.

And he wanted Yosemite to
be for everyone.

This is our land.

# This land is your land

# And this land is my land

# From California

# To the New York island

# From the redwood forest... #

It was in the 1950s that Adams'
photographs built into

a mission for mankind,

a protest against the damage that
could be done to the Earth

by the lust for a fast buck.

It culminated in
This Is The American Earth,

a hymn to the beauty of the natural
world, and an instant bestseller.

More and more,
Adams' photographs became preachy,

but those visual sermons
were ecstatic, radiant, mystical,

passionate statements about how
humanity could be redeemed

through its encounter with nature.

In his later years, he became a kind
of patriarch of environmentalism,

and, every so often,
he'd put down his camera

and even leave his beloved
Yosemite

to go and try and persuade
presidents to his point of view.

But, throughout it all,

he remained steadfast to
his core belief

that his job in life was to
give visual expression

to that silken cord tying together
the fate of man

with the fate of the Earth.

In 1977, the photographer
as prophet had his moment.

Nasa prepared to launch
its Voyager spacecraft

on a mission to outer space.

On board was the Golden Record.

It contained pictures depicting
human civilisation

and the natural world.

Adams' paradise images
were among them.

If they weren't the whole truth
about our civilisation,

then his photographs weren't
a beautiful lie either.

Like all landscape art, they sprang
from the eye, the mind,

and the invention of the
human heart.

"We all move on the fringes of
eternity," Adams wrote,

"and are sometimes granted vistas."

As Voyager prepared to leave
our solar system,

it turned around its camera
for one final time.

The result was the ultimate
landscape photograph,

one that has given us
a new perspective

on our place in the cosmos.

Our lonely planet.

The pale blue dot.

The Open University has produced
a free poster that explores

the history of different
civilisations through artefacts.

To order your free copy,
please call...

Or go to the address on screen

and follow the links
for the Open University.