During the course of the 16th century it changed and developed and took on a multitude of new forms. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Renaissance VI: End of the Renaissance?
The culture of the Renaissance was itself being transformed. ibid.
Bruegel’s art doesn’t betray a lack of religious belief but it suggests that faith will have to be worked at. We have to find God; He won’t come looking for us. The Gloomy Day is another picture which encapsulates Bruegel’s most important legacy: the idea that life no matter how apparently insignificant has its own truth. ibid.
The dissolution of classical art and literature into the bloodstream of Europe was anything but straightforward. ibid.
This is the Egyptian desert of the pharaohs … I’m in search of a different form of buried treasure: some of the great masterpieces of early Christian painting obscured by centuries of neglect have recently been rediscovered here, and they truly are among the artistic wonders of the world. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of Eternity I: Painting Paradise, BBC 2007
These dazzling but barely known examples of the artistic accomplishments of early Christendom are far from unique. In temples, churches and holy places there are other outstanding works of early Christian art that deserve to be more fully appreciated. Paintings, mosaics and painted glass produced during a thousand years and more from the Classical period to the Renaissance but still suffer from an unfair degree of neglect. ibid.
To the Coptics, just as precious as the word is the image. ibid.
Egyptian museum: I wonder if it wasn’t the community of Greek artists in Egypt who were given the responsibility of creating early Christian art. ibid.
What other works of Christian art may be hidden in these deserts? ibid.
It seems that for the first 200 years the early Christians produce no visual art whatsoever. ibid.
An art that rejects natural space to suggest the supernatural, an art that conveyed a spirituality so powerful that it would captivate a Romen emperor, Constantine. ibid.
Christians over many centuries set about creating an art to balance the different dimensions of Christian spirituality. ibid.
The art of Byzantium: certainly the subject is abbreviated to a few simplifications in most histories of world art, and yet the art that was produced in the East was amongst the most vibrant, colourful and energetic the world’s ever seen. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of Eternity II: The Art of Byzantium
The centre of what came to be known as Orthodox Christianity. ibid.
The Church of the Hagia Sophia is an architectural marvel that became the great church of the Byzantine empire. ibid.
Some of the best surviving examples of this new wave of Byzantine art can be found in the monasteries of Greece. ibid.
Sicily: In 1060, just about the same time as they were going to invade England, the Normans arrived here. They seized control, and what followed was to be a great explosion of art and architecture. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of Eternity III: When East Meets West
But there’s another Spain: Spain has produced some of the most startling and original art ever created. Art that has been unfairly overshadowed by the rest of Europe. Art that we know little about. But Spanish art is the art that we need to know about because it holds the key to understanding all of Europe and its culture. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Spain I: The Moorish South, BBC 2008
The story of how Islamic Spain became one of the most remarkable civilisations ever seen. ibid.
The Great Mosque of Cordoba … one of the first mosques ever built … You actually feel lost in here, truly disorientated, and that’s the point. ibid.
This was an art inspired by fervent Catholicism and a yearning for contact with God. Out of such fervour would come darkness and even savagery. Religion and violence intertwined. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Spain II: The Dark Art
The greatest artist of the age, El Greco – the Greek. ibid.
When the conquistadors returned home from Peru they were determined to show off that money. ibid.
Velazquez painted ordinary people living their lives. ibid.
And out of this conflict would explode some of the most astonishing modern art ever seen. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Spain III: The Mystical North
Goya: He painted an extraordinary expression of his despair: they are known as the black paintings, black in subject matter and black in colour. ibid.
The man whose work exemplified Barcelona’s spirit of exuberance at the start of the twentieth century was the architect Antoni Gaudi. ibid.
Barcelona gave Picasso the subject to which he would obsessively return. ibid.
Miro saw the soil of Cataluna as his own vision of paradise. ibid.
The new territory of the mind … the great surrealist and all-round showman, Salvador Dali. ibid.
From the ghouls and demons of the German Middle Ages to some of the most beautiful sculptures ever created. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Germany I: A Divided Land, BBC 2010
The art of the Third Reich, where art was twisted into a tool for terror. ibid.
The influence of Flanders, of the northern renaissance. ibid.
No-one does ghouls better than the Germans. ibid.
For most of its history Germany was not a unified state, but an assemblage of disparate parts. ibid.
A love of nature, and also [sic] of the machine. ibid.
It’s the German Gothic Cathedral: Goethe likened it to: ‘A sublimely towering tree of God, with its thousand branches and millions of twigs.’ This is the Cathedral of Saint Peter. It was once the tallest building in the world. ibid.
This is a film about the most intruiging 20th century artist you may never have heard of … He’s an enigma. His name: Edward Burra. Andrew Graham-Dixon, I Never Tell Anybody Anything: The Life & Art of Edward Burra, BBC 2011
Edward Burra is one of the overlooked geniuses of British art, and one of the most acute chroniclers of the 20th century. ibid.
The single-most elusive British artist of the 20th century. ibid.
His joints began to visibly to deform from the age of five or six. And the pain never left him for the rest of his life. ibid.
Burra loved the un-English exuberance of Paris. ibid.
In 1973 the Tate would stage a retrospective of his work. ibid.
Every step of that journey has been traced through art. The story of American art is as epic as the story of America itself. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America I, BBC 2011
It’s the story of America’s struggle to find a sense of identity and a sense of direction. ibid.
John White made a whole series of breathtakingly vivid, deeply poignant water colours of the American Indians ... White used his pictures as advertisements. ibid.
American art was predominantly Protestant and inescapably provincial. ibid.
They turned to an artist called John Trumbull, an adequate portrait painter. ibid.
For much of the nineteenth century American artists would divide into two camps: those who supported government and all it stood for and those who questioned it. ibid.
And no painting depicts that myth more vividly than Emanuel Leutze’s picture Westward Ho! of 1865. ibid.
John James Audubon – he celebrated the beauties of America’s promised land, but also counted the cost of the push west ... One of the masterpieces of world art – The Birds of America. ibid.
George Catlin, the man who preserved these solemn, beautiful melancholy faces ... To Catlin these are the noblest surviving people in the whole world. ibid.
This is Kaaterskill Falls in upstate New York. And it was a favourite subject of Thomas Cole, unquestionable the greatest American landscape painter of the nineteenth century. ibid.
The whole series is shot through with a strong sense of Cole’s own bitterness, anger and irony. ibid.