Video Details

Civilizations

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Survey the history of art, from antiquity to the present, on a global scale. Programs reveal the role art and creative imagination have played in forging humanity, and introduce viewers to works of beauty, ingenuity and illumination across cultures.

Episodes:

• Encounters

  See how advances in seafaring and a thirst for trade and exploration sent human beings around the planet. Distant and disparate cultures met for the first time, and art became the great interface by which civilizations understood each other.

  Length:	00:56:46
  Usage rights:	4/17/2018 to 2/28/2026

• How Do We Look?

  Explore the many functions of the human image in art. Portraits, paintings and sculptures, both life-size and colossal, perform a role-assuaging loss, expressing strength, inspiring fear-and were instrumental in depicting the human body today.

  Length:	00:56:46
  Usage rights:	4/17/2018 to 2/28/2026

• Paradise On Earth

  Explore one of humanity's deepest artistic urges: the depiction of nature. But landscape painting is seldom a straightforward portrayal of observed nature; it's a projection of dreams, idylls, escapes and refuges the elusive paradise on earth.

  Length:	00:56:46
  Usage rights:	4/17/2018 to 2/28/2026

• The Cult of Progress

  Examine the rise and fall of "progress" as an ideology, and see how the "civilizing" project that arose from Enlightenment ideas was fraught with contradictions that troubled European artists in different ways.

  Length:	00:56:46
  Usage rights:	4/17/2018 to 2/28/2026

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