(NARRATOR) Images dominate our lives,
They tell us how to behave,
- What to think, - (BLAIR) Yes, Prime Minister.
Even how to feel,
They mould and define us,
But why do these images,
the pictures, symbols and the art we see around us every day,
have such a powerful hold on us?
The answer lies not here in our time
but thousands of years ago.
Because when our ancient ancestors first created
the images that made sense of their world,
they produced a visual legacy which has helped to shape our own.
In this series we'll be travelling around the globe,
discovering the world's most stunning treasures,
We'll see how the struggles of early artists
led to the triumphs of the world's great civilisations.
Our journey will take us through a hundred thousand years of history,
We'll be witnessing some of the extraordinary ceremonies of the world's oldest artistic cultures.
And we'll reveal how they unlock the deepest secrets of ancient art,
We'll be hearing from the people who made these discoveries,
(DAVID ATTENBOROUGH) I have very vivid memories of looking up
and seeing this huge barramundi fish on the ceiling.
It was unforgettable,
(SPIVEY) And we'll be using science to uncover
how thousands of years ago the human mind drove us to create astonishing images,
You'll never look at our world the same way again,
for this is the epic story of how we humans made art
and how art made us human.
These people are looking at something we all see dozens of times a day,
It inspires us
and manipulates us,
it affects what we think of others
and even what we think of ourselves,
It is the human body,
No other image dominates our lives so completely.
Pictures of the body fill our high streets, our magazines, our television screens.
And then there's the art world.
The human form has obsessed some of the world's greatest artists,
The range of bodies they've created is breathtaking,
And yet there's something that all these images have in common,
Whatever their use
and wherever they appear,
the world's most popular and influential images of the human body
share this one thing,
Have you noticed that none of these images resembles a real human being?
I mean, do you Know anyone who actually looKs liKe that?
Just imagine if human bodies
were like the images we created of them,
Imagine if we walked around looking like this,
The fact is, people rarely create images of the body that are realistic,
What's going on?
Why is our world so dominated by images of the body that are unrealistic?
If we can solve this mystery,
we can reveal something not just about our bodies but about ourselves,
something really fundamental about us as human beings.
To do it, we need to start not here in the modern world
but bacK in time,
when our ancient ancestors began creating the very first images of the human body.
It's a journey that starts here in the north east of Austria,
where the great river Danube winds its way through the Wachau Valley,
Today, this land is cultivated by farmers and wine growers,
But there was a time many thousands of years ago
when the people who lived in this valley weren't settled farmers
but hunter-gatherers foraging for what food they could find.
The same was true all over Europe.
What's remarkable about the people who passed through this valley
is something that they left behind them.
Nomadic people lived and hunted in small groups and rarely stayed in one place long,
so knowing where to look for evidence of their lives has always been hard,
But at the start of the last century, excavation began near the little village of Willendorf,
It was led by three Austrian archaeologists,
who knew they could make their reputations with an important find,
They didn't know the half of it,
What was found was more startling than anyone could have imagined.
It happened on 7th August 1908.
The three archaeologists weren't on their site here above the village.
They'd retired to a nearby tavern to sample some of the local vintage.
It was one of their workmen who made the discovery.
He pulled from the mud the figure of a woman, completely intact.
It was a statue and it was 25,000 years old.
The three archaeologists soon started squabbling
over who would get the credit for the find.
Theirs was a feud that was never really settled,
but they did decide one thing, a name.
They called her the Venus of Willendorf.
Now, if you're a little surprised that nomadic people lugged this thing around with them,
then don't worry, this isn't the real statue,
This is.
Just four inches high,
carved of limestone
and quite dinky enough to be carried from place to place by the nomad who created her.
The term ''Venus'' could be applied to just about any female nude from the past,
but there's something particularly special about this little lady.
She's special, in fact, in a way that those three archaeologists could never have predicted.
She's certainly far too grand to live in Willendorf.
That's why she stays here,
in the Natural History Museum in Vienna.
Despite a vast collection of artefacts from around the world,
this Venus is the museum's most prized possession,
It's not every day you get to carry a piece of limestone worth 60 million dollars,
She's an outstanding relic of our ancient past,
but she's also more than that,
This lady is our first clue
as to why the modern world is so dominated by unrealistic images of the body,
The Venus is clearly unrealistic,
Her breasts, stomach, hips and thighs are grotesquely big,
Even her sexual organs are extremely pronounced,
She may have been a symbol of fertility or motherhood,
but that doesn't explain why her arms are almost nonexistent,
why her face isn't shown at all,
She was made with great care and skill,
She doesn't look like this by accident,
This is all deliberate,
For some reason, the people who once hunted and lived in these hills
felt compelled to exaggerate some parts of her body and ignore others completely,
What's more, they were not alone,
It seems that this compulsion continued for many thousands of years,
Let me show you what I mean,
Imagine that this line of trees represents the entire history of us as a species,
modern human beings.
We've been around for something like 150,000 years.
Well, it wasn't till around here,
that's about 80,000 years ago,
that we began to make anything that you would ever call art.
What's more, it wasn't until we got here,
that's about 30,000 years ago,
just before our friend the Venus of Willendorf,
that we started to make statues and images of the human body.
What's really remarkable about this
is that over the next 20,000 years
whenever one person made an image of another
it showed the same exaggerated features
and they cropped up in all sorts of places.
From the Russian steppes to southern Europe,
wherever people made statues of the body,
they exaggerated the same key features and utterly ignored others,
just as they had with the Venus of Willendorf,
But why? What drove early humans to do this?
Why were they more stimulated by images like this?
It's a question that's baffled experts for years,
But now one man believes he's found the answer,
He is not an archaeologist or even an expert in art,
He's a brain scientist,
(SCIENTIST) I think it's fair to say that until about ten years ago I had absolutely no interest in art,
I started asking myself, as a neuroscientist,
''Why are these images so beautiful?''
This raises the question ''What is art? Why is art beautiful? How does it worK?''
''What's going on in the brain of the viewer when you looK at a great work of art?''
(SPIVEY) Professor Ramachandran wondered
if there was something about the brains of ancient humans
that explained why the Venus is the shape she is,
When you look at the Venus figurine,
what strikes you immediately is that certain features are not emphasised,
they are played down or ignored,
such as the face and the arms,
whereas other features such as the breasts and the stomach are grotesquely exaggerated.
The question is, why did the artist do this?
What was going on in the artist's brain when he created this image?
Well, obviously, you can't go back in time and study his brain,
but I realised
that one clue might come from research that was done on seagulls nearly 50 years ago at Oxford.
(SPIVEY) Yes, you heard him,
He did say seagulls,
Professor Ramachandran began to wonder
if a herring-gull colony, like this one on the coast of Spain, could provide an answer.
To be honest with you, I find it hard to believe how seagulls -
seagulls! - can explain the shape of the Venus of Willendorf.
Apparently, it's to do with the behaviour of the gull chicKs.
Professor Ramachandran became interested in scientific research into the chicks of herring-gulls,
As soon as they hatch, they tap the beak of their mother to ask for food
and, sure enough, she obliges,
The researchers discovered the chicks do this not because they recognise their mother
but because they're stimulated by the sight of the red stripe on her beak
and they proved it with a beautifully simple test,
What the scientists did was show the chicks not their mother's beak
but a stick with a red stripe on it.
Let's see what happens.
The chicks are happily tapping away.
It's awfully sweet.
The brain of a gull chick is clearly stimulated by the sight of a red stripe,
Nothing, it seems, gets it more excited or so it was thought,
What the scientists did next was to show the chicks a stick with three red stripes on.
Doesn't look much liKe a beak,
but it was their reaction to this that so intrigued Professor Ramachandran.
Can't get enough of it. Just looK at that.
The chicks are tapping not only more often
but more enthusiastically than they did with the stick that only had one stripe on it.
Even when I offer them a choice, the chicKs prefer three red stripes to the single one.
It even ignores the single stripe,
But exactly how does all this relate to the shape of the Venus of Willendorf?
When the chick looks at this elongated object with three red stripes,
it responds even more to this strange object than it does to a natural beak.
So, what I'd like to argue is
that if seagulls had an art gallery
they would take this long thin stick with the three red stripes, hang it on the wall,
pay millions of dollars to purchase it,
worship it, call it a Picasso.
This would be a great work of art but they wouldn't understand why.
They would say, ''The damn thing doesn't resemble anything.
''Why am I mesmerised by it?''
I think there's an analogy here in that what's going on in the brains of our ancestors,
the artists who created these Venus figurines,
were producing grossly, almost grotesquely exaggerated versions,
the equivalent for their brain of what the stick with the three red stripes is for the chick's brain.
(SPIVEY) So the brains of the hunter-gatherers who made the Venuses
were preprogrammed to exaggerate what mattered most,
They were living in a harsh ice-age environment,
Features of fertility and fatness would have been highly desirable,
so their brains compelled them to exaggerate these features above others,
But can a primeval instinct really explain
why all human beings create unrealistic images of the body?
This herring-gull theory suggests
that the Venus figure looks the way she does
simply because of how the brain of the person who made her was wired up.
Well, if that was true for the nomads, it should also be true for people who came after them.
Let's find out.
After more than 100,000 years of nomadic hunting and gathering,
life for humans across the globe was about to change,
It began with the weather,
Here in North Africa,
the sort of nomadic lifestyle that created the Venus figurines would soon be impossible,
A major change in climate meant that water became scarce.
Lush vegetation began to die away
and with it disappeared all the wildlife on which the hunters depended.
Forced to settle somewhere where there was water,
nomadic people came from far and wide
and gathered along the banks of one major river.
That river was the Nile,
and the civilisation that flourished there is crucial to our story.
By 5000 BC, Egypt had become a fully settled civilisation,
one of the first on earth,
Because the Nile flooded with precise regularity
Egyptians could build a stable agricultural existence,
This in turn produced an organised system of government and a strict social hierarchy,
But Egyptians were also the first settled humans to use images of the body extensively in their art,
So, what we need to find out is
what happened to the herring-gull instinct of exaggeration in this new civilisation?
Where we are now begins to answer that question.
We're several hundred feet underground in the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses VI,
and I am literally surrounded
by thousands of images of the human body.
This place was carved out of solid rock
and decorated by highly skilled artists
as a home for the Pharaoh in the afterlife,
But, unlike the Venus of Willendorf,
these bodies don't have exaggerated features,
They don't have swollen hips or breasts,
In fact, their arms, legs, head and feet
are all just about the right size,
So, the nomadic way of showing the body appears to be dead and gone,
The primeval instinct to exaggerate
clearly didn't survive in this new modern civilisation,
The herring-gull instinct may have led the nomads to exaggerate their images of the body,
but that's not what's happening here.
These images are driven by something altogether different.
But what is it?
To start with, they're hardly realistic,
Could they provide the next clue in our mystery?
After all, they were produced by an organised society much more like ours,
Could they explain why our world is so filled with unrealistic images of the body?
To find out, we need to discover what's behind these distinctive images,
It seems that rather than exaggerating parts of the body,
Egyptian artists chose to show each part from its clearest angle,
To understand exactly what that means,
let's taKe the body parts one by one.
Suppose they want to maKe a painting or a wall carving of me.
Starting with the chest
they'd want to show that front on, to emphasise its characteristic V shape.
But my face would be seen more clearly in profile,
like so,
and to make the image less complicated
they'd want me to be
two-dimensional.
But it doesn't stop there.
Even though my chest is being shown front on,
my arms can still be put together
if it shows more clearly what they're doing.
Showing the left hand is different from the right hand was just unnecessary.
They preferred to show them palms outwards
and all the fingers are nice uniform length.
What's more, seen from straight on, legs and feet aren't very distinctive
so they'd be shown sideways, too.
Last, but not least, my head,
because however clear my face might be in profile, my eyes would be seen from straight on.
I think we can safely say that this is an unrealistic image of the body,
but could the reason the Egyptians created bodies like this
explain the unrealistic images of today?
To find out, I wanted to know if this was just a style favoured by certain artists
or something more significant,
The answer couldn't have been clearer,
TaKe this image here.
It's got all the aspects you saw me turn into earlier.
Fix that in your mind, OK?
Now come along with me.
That image is found in the oldest part of the great temple of Carnac,
There are many impressive monuments in Egypt,
but this place is truly awesome,
Carnac wasn't built all at once,
It was added to, bit by bit, by successive Pharaohs
and generations of craftsmen,
Walking through these columns you walk through time,
You can get lost in hundreds of years of Egyptian history,
which is why it's the perfect place to see just how Egyptian art changed over time,
The image of the body I just asked you to fix in your head
was carved in about 1900 B,C,
Where I am now was built a full 700 years later.
0ver 50 million Egyptians had lived and died
and in all that period, just look,
the way they depicted the human body hasn't changed a bit.
And that's just what you see here,
But, in fact, the Egyptian style didn't just last 700 years,
it lasted 3,000
and, in all that time, this was the only image of the body that anyone ever saw,
Just think of that happening today,
TaKe, say, one of those Picasso paintings with the arms and legs and eyes all over the place.
Now imagine that was the only image of the human body you ever saw
throughout your life
and then imagine it was the only image of the human body your children saw
and every generation up to the 41st century.
Something powerful had made the Egyptians preserve this style
for an immense amount of time,
But what was it?
The answer to this lies back underground,
Not far from Carnac is the tomb of a priest called Ramose,
Ramose was connected,
His brother was chief artist to the Pharaoh,
so before his death work began on decorating his tomb
with some exquisite paintings and reliefs,
But before it was finished, the Pharaoh died,
his brother lost the job and work ground to a halt,
Bad news for Ramose, Good news for us,
because on one of the unfinished walls
archaeologists found some telltale signs,
clues to why the Egyptian style never changed,
Traced across the surface of the plaster
are the fine red lines of a grid that covers the entire body,
They analysed this grid, recording numerous details,
The figure was 19 squares tall,
the feet were two and a half squares long,
the pupil of the eye was one square off the centre-line,
They then applied this same grid to other images from all over Egypt,
Sure enough, they fitted,
This is why the style remained unchanged for so long,
Egyptian society clearly didn't want it to change,
Their images were driven by a shared obsession with consistency and order,
precisely the cultural values
on which the entire civilisation had been founded,
And once you've seen this obsession in their paintings of the body,
you start to see it in everything they did,
You see it in their buildings,
The three pyramids at Giza
contain enough stone to lay a wall around Spain,
They're massive embodiments of the hierarchy that ran from the Pharaoh downwards,
Yet they were designed with absolute precision,
symbols of the order that had risen from the desert,
And you can also see this obsession with permanence and order in their statues,
Like their buildings, these were made on a simply astonishing scale,
Where nomads had made statues to carry around with them,
the Egyptians weren't planning on going anywhere,
They wanted their images of the body to last forever
and they developed revolutionary quarrying and masonry skills to do just that,
Again, their obsession with order
made these statues just as formal and rigid as their paintings,
The Egyptians created images of the body this way
not because of how their brains were hard-wired
but because of their culture,
(CAR H0RNS)
Perhaps this could explain the images that dominate our modern world,
It could be that they all reflect or represent a particular aspect of our culture,
So, surely there's the answer to our mystery,
culture is King.
The society that we live in, the values that we create for that society,
these are what dictate how we depict the human body.
Well, actually, our story doesn't end there.
(OPERATIC SINGING)
In 1972, an Italian on vacation made a discovery
which at first sight appeared to confirm that culture is indeed king,
That day, 16th August 1972,
is the day that changed my life.
(SPIVEY) On the last day of his summer holiday on the south coast of Italy,
Stefano Mariottini went spearfishing alone,
(MARIOTTINI) I was looking from the surface
when suddenly I,,,I saw a human arm,
The first moment, I thought it was a corpse,
When I went closer, then I recognised that the material was bronze,
(SPIVEY) Returning again and again to the seabed, 30 feet below the surface,
Stefano would gradually clear the sand
to reveal the body of an apparently realistic statue,
(MARIOTTINI) I was astonished, The face was wonderful,
I wanted to continue to remove sand,
I want to never finish,
to see again those details
so...so wonderful, so beautiful.
(SPIVEY) In fact, over the next two hours of exhausting diving and digging,
Stefano went on to uncover not one but two ancient statues,
When brought to the surface they would bring Stefano considerable financial reward,,,
,,and they would also solve our mystery,
They had been created by one of the most influential cultures in history,
They came from ancient Greece,
Greece may seem a little different today,
but 2,500 years ago it had very particular cultural values,
Ancient Greeks were preoccupied with philosophy and mathematics,
They believed in many different gods and goddesses, but there was something else -
something that in their culture was the equivalent of Egypt's fixation with order and precision,
Ancient Greeks were fixated with the body
and they had very firm ideas about what a body should look like,
To the ancient GreeKs, the perfect body was an athletic body.
So men took an obsessive shameless pride in their physiques,
to an extent that would strike us today as somewhat bizarre.
Imagine if men today behaved like they did in ancient Greece,
They'd display their bodies without hesitation or shame,
If you had a fine torso
you flaunted it,
But back then they had a special reason for all this,
They believed their gods took human form
and had beautiful bodies,
So the more impressive you could make your own,
the more like a god you were perceived to be,
It really was the case that if you looked good you were good,
But the belief that gods took human form
affected more than just their vanity,
This cult of the body beautiful
occupied the centre of life throughout the Greek world, from here in Athens
to here, Agrigento, on the coast of modern Sicily.
Right across the Mediterranean, wherever Greeks settled they built temples,
And it was here their belief that gods had human bodies was focused,
Here, they wanted to see images of their gods that were realistic,
Greek worshippers would have come to a temple liKe this not merely to contemplate their faith.
They came expecting to find their gods in residence,
actually to meet them face to face.
In order for that to happen, they needed statues.
But there was a technical problem.
Greek sculptors were mostly confined to things like this,
figurines on a small scale.
As late as 700 B.C.,
figurines were as close to lifelike and life-size as the Greeks could get.
And yet within just a few generations
the Greeks would realise their dream,
Temples like this would come to be filled with wonderful large statues,
And these statues would be so lifelike
that Greek worshippers would believe they actually were the gods in person,
watching them in the temple,
hearing their prayers,
What's even more extraordinary
is this transformation from small figurine to living god
happened in an amazingly short period of time,
In fact, it was the most rapid artistic revolution
in the history of mankind,
What happened?
How was it that after several centuries of effort
Greek sculptors suddenly acquired the necessary skills
to create lifesize, life-like images?
Well, the answer to that lies in a somewhat surprising place.
I'll give you a clue. Shh.
In the St John's College Library at Cambridge University,
there are over 32,000 books,
Buried in the pages of one of them is a small detail
which at first glance seems almost irrelevant,
This is an antique copy of the world's oldest surviving history book
by the great historian Herodotus.
It's in ancient Greek and I was never top of the class for ancient Greek
but I'm gonna give it a go.
The section we're interested in covers Egyptian history,
Here's the passage we're looking for.
Here it talks about an Egyptian called Psammeticus
around the time of the 25th Dynasty.
It's about 660 B.C.
This Psammeticus, we're told, swore to seize control of all of Egypt.
Shortly after foreign soldiers arrived on Egypt's shores.
Psammeticus seized his chance.
He hired these soldiers as mercenaries
and with their help soon won the throne of all Egypt.
Well, good for him.
What matters for us is where these mercenaries came from,
and it tells us here that they came from Ionia and Caria,
what we would Know as part of ancient Greece.
This was enough to spark an artistic revolution,
Up until now, Greece and Egypt had been virtually isolated from each other,
Now they began to trade as never before,
exchanging ideas and know-how,
The outstanding masonry skills the Egyptians had developed for their statues
crossed the Mediterranean,
Now Greek artists could put their tiny figurines behind them
and create statues as tall as a man,
But Egypt's rigid style wasn't good enough for the Greeks,
Their culture still demanded realistic statues,
So they did something that no artists had done before,
They used their eyes,
They studied every detail of the human body,
Bit by bit, they strived to understand exactly how to reproduce it in their art,
Ears started to look like ears, real torsos began to appear,
each artist building on the progress of others,
And this explosive period, within just a few generations,
produced what no civilisation on earth had ever produced before,
This is Kritian Boy
and he's a milestone in the history of art,
He's carved from marble
and yet his skin appears to be taut over muscles,
his thighs look like they're bearing weight,
his back undulates over his spine,
which curves down perfectly in a relaxed stance,
Greek artists had created precisely what their society had urged them to,
a truly realistic human body,
And yet this is the final clue in our story
not because it's realistic
but because of the effect this realism had on the Greeks,
This exquisite statue gives us an absolutely historic moment.
For the very first time man creates an image of himself
that's fully nude and truly lifelike.
So, for the Greeks this was like the pinnacle of artistic achievement.
They'd reached their goal, art as the perfect imitation of life.
Now they could carry on producing gorgeous statues liKe this forever.
But that's just it, they didn't.
Within a generation, the Greeks stopped making realistic statues like this,
But why?
Why, when their culture had made them strive for reality,
did they almost immediately abandon it?
The answer reveals something fundamental about us as human beings,
When it comes to images of the body, we're driven not just by culture
but also by something we thought existed only in the earliest humans,
It's that primeval instinct to exaggerate,
as observed by Professor Ramachandran in the Venus of Willendorf,
The instinct, he argues, is hard-wired into the brains of all humans,
even if in some cultures it was suppressed,
(RAMACHANDRAN) The principle of exaggeration must be something that is hard-wired
in the neural machinery of the visual pathways in the brains of every human being,
When you speak of universals,
you have to realise that what's universal is the propensity to do this,
but this can be overridden by culture.
If you look at Egyptian art,
the pictures of anything are highly rigid, highly schematic
and they lacK the energy and movement and vigour
that you could convey using the principle of exaggeration.
(SPIVEY) Professor Ramachandran is convinced that Greek culture now had the right ingredients
to reawaken this ancient instinct
and it was this that made them reject the realism that they'd created,
(RAMACHANDRAN) The problem with the Kritian Boy is it was too realistic. That makes it boring,
If art's about realism, why do you need art?
They realised that this was boring,
that they had to do interesting things with the image, distort it in specific ways,
not randomly distort it but lawfully distort it,
to exaggerate the brain's aesthetic response to that body.
So the Greeks' dissatisfaction with reality was perfectly natural.
They couldn't know it, but they were preprogrammed to want more.
Like the nomads thousands of years before them,
they were hankering after something more human than human.
The question now was,
how could they adapt a real body into something that would satisfy them,
into statues worthy of their temples?
The race was on, This was the new challenge facing Greek artists,
Merely exaggerating muscles wasn't enough,
They had to discover their equivalent of the red-striped stick,
And in about 450 B,C,
a sculptor and mathematician called Polyclitus
made the breakthrough that would help them achieve just that,
Polyclitus wanted to find a way of showing the physical potential of an athlete,
He wanted a body that was both relaxed
and yet appeared ready to move,
He created a series of theoretical rods
passing through key points of the body,
He also divided the body down the centre
and across the middle,
With these four quarters marked out,
he began to move his figure in specific ways,
He bent one knee
and moved the same foot to ensure that it bore little or none of the body's weight,
He bent one arm
and left the other relaxed,
He rotated the body so the hips and head faced one way and the chest the other,
Now the body was divided into clear quarters,
top and bottom mirrored each other,
One side in motion, the other at rest,
The angles of the body which were once horizontal
now opposed and also complemented each other,
So Polyclitus captured an athlete poised for action...
..but for other artists
it was also the key to understanding how they could at last represent physical perfection,
Everything had been leading to this,
the moment when ancient Greece created something more human than human,
(SOPRANO SINGS)
They are known as the Riace bronzes,
They are what Stefano Mariottini found on the seabed,
Now displayed in Reggio on the southernmost tip of Italy,
they're relatively unknown to the world at large,
And yet I am not alone in believing
that nowhere on earth can you see sculpture
as astounding as this,
I have seen a lot of statues in my time and from all over the world,
but nothing, nothing quite matches these in terms of skill and execution.
I'm not one to gush, but if you pressed me I'd have to come out with it.
That these are absolutely the best statues ever made.
As many modern sculptors are embarrassed to admit,
this quality of craftsmanship, the subtlety of detail,
is impossible to achieve today,
It is genuinely hard to believe that these were made not just before the Italian Renaissance
but 2,000 years before,
Inspired by the rules of Polyclitus,
the arrangement of the limbs, the direction of the head and chest make them seem alive,
At first glance
they appear to be as realistic a representation of the human body as you could hope to find,
But then, when you look again, you realise that there's something not quite right.
Yes, it resembles a human being, very much so,
but, in fact, it's not anatomically possible for a man, however athletic,
to look like this.
Polyclitus did indeed want to divide the sections of the body clearly
but here it's been taken to extremes,
The division between top and bottom
has been exaggerated by a crest of muscle across the waist
that's more defined than it ever could be on a real human,
The legs have been made artificially long to match perfectly the length of the upper body,
To stress the symmetry and separation of the two sides,
there's an implausibly deep groove running up the centre of the chest,
And while the chest muscles are totally relaxed,
the muscles on the back are tense and impossibly well defined,
The central channel of the spine is deeper than you'd ever see on a real human
and to improve the line of their back
these men had no coccyx bone at the base of their spine,
These are unrealistic bodies,
reality's been exaggerated
and that's why they're so overwhelming,
The instinct to do this had been alive in the brains of early humans
and had now been revived,
The first civilisation capable of realism had used exaggeration to go further
and it's that instinct which still dominates our world today,
This is the answer to our mystery.
This is why the bodies in our modern world looK the way they do.
The reality is we humans don't like reality.
The shared biological instinct to prefer carefully exaggerated images
links us inexorably with our ancient ancestors,
and yet what we choose to exaggerate is whether science gets left behind.
That's where the magic comes in,
The ancient Greeks cared about physical perfection,
So did Michelangelo,
He too created unrealistic bodies that were more than human,
As cultural values changed,
what artists chose to exaggerate about the body changed, too.
The Impressionists exaggerated light and colour rather than shape,
to express more than realism ever could,
As modern society became more culturally diverse,
what we exaggerated changed further,
And the instinct is still alive today,
The art of caricature is fuelled by it,
It's what draws us to the extremes of human form,
Catwalk models possess what our minds register as impossible proportions,
Clothing and marketing images do the same,
capture us by exaggerating qualities that we regard as important,
And in the digital age we feed this desire,
exaggerating shapes and removing features that in earlier societies were themselves exaggerated,
In our own cults of the body beautiful
we even do it to ourselves,
spending billions exaggerating those features we regard as attractive,
The world changes
and in time we may, as the Egyptians did, suppress this desire to exaggerate,
but until then, we'll continue what our ancient ancestors began
30,000 years ago..
There's something we do hundreds of times a day without even noticing it.
It's an ability that we utterly depend on in our lives yet we take it for granted.
Just watch.
We see some lines and can give them meaning.
We can tell one shape from another,
And we understand that an arrangement of colours can represent something,
The ability to read images is an essential part of our lives,
What if we didn't have this ability?
Imagine we couldn't understand images. What would our world be like?
For a start, images would never have been invented,
We'd have lost something,,,we totally rely on,
Life would be impossible,,, and our world would be unrecognisable,
But at some point in our ancient past that's what the world looked like - imageless,
Now, of course, pictures dominate our lives.
This is the extraordinary story of how we humans discovered the power of images
and how they created the world we live in today.
How long has it taken for you to realise that I'm drawing a horse?
A second? A fraction of a second?
We can tell what a two-dimensional image represents almost instantaneously,
without even having to think about it,
I'm not much of an artist,
but even I can arrange a collection of pencil lines on a piece of paper
so you see what I want you to see,
And I don't do Just horses.
I could draw almost anything in the world and you'd probably guess what it was,
But there must have been some point in our human story
when we first got this ability,
some moment in time when we began to create pictures
and to understand what they meant.
So what happened back then?
How did we first get this ability to create images?
To find the answer, we need to go way back in time.
What if we go back 2,000 years?
This is the image of a horse from classical antiquity.
It was made to decorate a Roman household, about 100 years before Christ.
And clearly the artists here had no problems with two-dimensional representation.
We've gone back another 1,000 years to 1200 BC.
This tiny fragment comes from ancient Egypt.
The person who painted it knew perfectly well
how to represent something in the world around them.
We're going to have to go back much, much further,
This is northern Spain, a place called Altamira,
We've come here because, towards the end of the 19th century,
a discovery was made at Altamira that would radically alter
our understanding of when the world's first images were created.
This historic discovery was made by a nine-year-old girl.
Her name was Maria,
She was the daughter of Marcelino de Sautuola,
a local Spanish nobleman who was also an amateur archaeologist,
He'd become intrigued by Altamira, and in autumn 1879,,,
,,Maria and her father paid the cave a visit,
This was a cave that was completely unknown until a few years before,
Even though I was a mere amateur, I was determined to undertake my own investigations,
As a gentleman scholar, de Sautuola took a serious interest
in finding out more about the prehistoric past.
But like other archaeologists of the day,
he assumed that the people who once settled or sheltered in these caves
were little more than savages, uncouth, lowbrow,
hardly better than apes and certainly incapable of any kind of creative achievement.
(SAUTU0LA) I hoped that through these investigations
we would manage to tear away the thick veil that separates us from the origins
and customs of the ancient inhabitants of these mountains,
De Sautuola had come to the cave to excavate the floor,
to poke around for prehistoric relics such as bones and tools.
It was Maria who made the discovery for which Altamira became famous.
(MARIA) Papa...look! Oxen!
(SAUTU0LA) I was overcome with amazement,
What I saw made me so excited I could hardly speak,
Young Maria had caught sight of the first gallery of prehistoric paintings ever to be discovered.
Many more have since come to light in caves all around the world,
but these at Altamira are still considered among the most beautiful.
Dominating the ceiling were dozens of paintings of aurochs,
a species of ox that had long been extinct,
They appeared to be standing, sleeping...and running,
As soon as he saw them, de Sautuola was convinced
that the images had been painted by prehistoric people,
But others weren't so sure,
When de Sautuola announced his discovery to the world,
archaeologists immediately began to question its authenticity,
The images were simply too good,
It was unthinkable that they'd been created by prehistoric savages,
Experts claimed that the paintings had been faked
and that de Sautuola was either the victim or perpetrator of a hoax,
He stood by his discovery,
(SAUTU0LA) It's hard to believe that someone would have shut himself away in the dark
to paint extinct animals,
There was no reason to doubt that these paintings came from an ancient period in time,
De Sautuola fought to clear his name but his fellow archaeologists were consistently sceptical.
Within a few years, he'd died, here at his family home not far from Altamira,
a disbelieved and a disillusioned man.
His supporters said that the accusations of dishonesty
had broken his heart and caused his death.
But the time would come when de Sautuola was vindicated.
0ver the decades, discovery after discovery was made,
in France as well as Spain, that proved beyond doubt
that the cave paintings were prehistoric,
Then came an even more exciting find,
in a cave called Lascaux - a gallery of pictures of breathtaking beauty,
As more and more paintings came to light, they revealed
prehistoric artists had painted with a confidence and a skill
that matched almost anything from the modern world,
Pablo Picasso himself said, on first setting eyes on these pictures,
''We have learnt nothing'',
When experts began dating these paintings, there was another surprise,
They found that we'd started creating images comparatively late in our human story,
Let me show you what I mean,
Let's imagine that the entire length of time that modern humans have been on the planet
is represented by these steps.
People like you and me, a species known as Homo sapiens,
we've been around for about 150,000 years.
That's where I am now.
Biologically, from then onwards, human beings didn't change,
We had exactly the same brain as we have today,
Yet for more than 100,000 years we didn't create any images,
It wasn't until here... that's about 35,000 years ago,
that something began to change.
Archaeologists call it ''the creative explosion'',
the moment in time when people first began to create pictures,
So what happened back then?
Why did people suddenly decide to start creating images of the world around them?
Experts began searching for an answer, and their first explanation seemed obvious,
Today, one of the main reasons that we make pictures
is to create representations of things in the world around us,
Surely, the experts said, thousands of years ago prehistoric humans also had painted
to create representations of things around them,
But as more and more cave art was discovered, it became clear that this explanation was wrong,
Today, artists create images of every aspect of the world that they live in,
But back then they created images of mostly one thing,
Prehistoric artists were obsessed,,,by animals,
And not just any animals, but some in particular,
Like horses,,,
Bison,,,and reindeer,
But why? What was it about these animals
that so fixated the minds of our ancient ancestors?
Henri Breuil was a French priest,
He was also the foremost expert on cave art for much of the 20th century,
He believed, perhaps not surprisingly, that the paintings were about hunting,
Prehistoric artists had painted animals because they believed
it would increase their chances of a successful hunt,
The theory made sense,
It certainly explained why only some animals had been painted,
Breuil seemed to have settled the question,
But more recently, when archaeologists began to examine the bones of animals
that had been hunted and then eaten around the caves,
they discovered something puzzling,
If people had created these images to improve the chances of a successful hunt,
you'd expect them to paint pictures of their quarry,
But they didn't,
At Altamira, for instance, prehistoric artists had painted oxen,
But the bones that had been left were those of deer.
At other French sites they were painting woolly mammoths.
But they were eating a wild version of this animal, the goat.
All in all, there's very little correlation between the animals depicted in prehistoric art
and the animals that feature in the prehistoric diet.
So Breuil's hunting theory had also failed to solve the mystery
of why people first started painting,
And there was a bigger problem with these theories,
The pictures would need to be painted in places where people could see them,
Yet something had compelled many prehistoric artists
to paint in the narrowest and deepest parts of the caves,
Like here in Peche-Merle, in France,
Sometimes, images are found in parts of the cave that are almost inaccessible.
It's hard to imagine how the artist got in to paint them,
let alone how anyone else got in to admire them.
I mean, who would have got into a tight spot like this...to decorate the ceiling?
This painting isn't just difficult to reach - when you finally get here -
it's even harder to understand what these artists were painting,
Because, like many other cave images, it doesn't seem to represent anything at all,
They're made up of dots and lines or abstract shapes and patterns,
Nothing in the natural world of the prehistoric artist would have looked like this,
Or this,
And very often these patterns are repeated or scattered across more recognisable images
in a seemingly random way,
Here, the Peche-Merle caves in France,
the prehistoric artist has painted a splendid pair of horses.
But look, he's covered the image with a series of spots.
It really is hard to see what a pattern of spots has got to do with the world of hunting.
Archaeologists realised they were as far away from understanding cave painting
as they had ever been,
The obvious explanations,
like the paintings having been created to represent things in the world, or for hunting,
would never unlock the puzzle of these images,
Because both of these theories missed the point.
Instead of explaining why people were painting images in caves,
they should have been trying to solve the mystery
of how we got the amazing ability to create images in the first place.
To be able to paint a picture of something, you first need to know what a picture is,
And how can you know that if you've never seen one before?
Henri Breuil himself realised that this was at the heart of the problem,
He told the curious story of a Turkish man in the 19th century
who was shown a picture.
It was a picture of a horse.
The man was mystified,
He'd no idea what he was looking at because never in his life had he seen a picture before,
This Turkish man, it seems, was a devout Muslim.
At its strictest, Islam forbids images of living creatures.
So here was someone, apparently, who refused to believe
that you could create an image of an animal in two dimensions.
He said he didn't recognise it was a horse because he couldn't move around it,
For us, looking at a painting as vivid as this one, it's almost impossible to believe.
We can't imagine what it would be like not to understand what a picture was,
that it can represent something in the world.
This is what it might look like for people who've never seen any pictures before.
A collection of lines, colours, markings, without any meaning.
If you can't understand what a picture is unless you've seen one before,
how on earth do you come up with the idea of creating one in the first place?
So how did our ancient ancestors come to realise
that a collection of lines, dots and colours could represent something?
How did the penny drop all those thousands of years ago?
This is one of the great mysteries of human creativity,
It's one that experts have long tried and failed to solve,
But then, a few years ago, a revolutionary idea appeared,
It was an idea that might solve this very problem,
It originated not in Europe but a place thousands of miles away,
It came from South Africa,
Hidden among high crags of these mountains, the Drakensberg,
are images on rock walls uncannily like European cave paintings,
They too feature large animals,
And they also seem to show hunting scenes,
But unlike the European paintings, these pictures aren't thousands of years old,
They were painted just a couple of hundred years ago,
almost within living memory,
They were painted by people called the San,,,the bushmen,
For a long time these paintings were largely ignored,
But one man became fascinated by them,
His name was David Lewis Williams,
(WILLIAMS) When I first started looking at the paintings,
the general opinion was that they were scenes from daily life,
and because they were San people,
they thought they were hunting scenes.
Take this one as an example.
Here we have an eland and a man who appears to be holding the eland's tail.
People thought maybe when eland were hunted by bushmen
they'd pull its tail as a demonstration of being very brave or something like that,
When you look more closely at the paintings, you begin to find point after point
that Just doesn't add up.
For example, this man here has got hooves and not feet.
So had no one noticed these hooves before?
I don't think anybody stuck their head under there to notice it, no.
Then there are things about the man himself - his legs are crossed
and the eland's legs are crossed,
Then you notice other things.
Like that one higher up there, that has a very clear antelope head.
Then you realise that he's also got hairs standing on end, all over his body,
And the eland has hairs standing all over its body,
When you say these are pictures of daily life, it Just doesn't fit.
When I began to notice all these...strange points about the painting, I thought,
''We've got to find some way of cracking the code of what these paintings are, ''
(SPIVEY) But when Lewis Williams began his investigation,
he immediately faced a problem,
Because these are the San today,
Rather than living in mountains, they now live 1,000 miles away
on the Kalaharigrasslands of Namibia,
0ver the centuries, their ancestors were persecuted and driven from the Drakensberg,
Although the San still hunt, today they no longer paint, and there's a good reason for that,
For one thing, there are no rocks in the Kalahari for them to paint on,
Their ancient tradition has disappeared,
The San artists have died out, taking their secrets with them,
So the key to unlocking the mystery of these strange paintings in the mountains
seems to be lost forever,
There seemed no way of getting that because those who made the paintings were extinct.
(SPIVEY) But then, far away from the Drakensberg,
Lewis Williams found the first clue,
It was the start of a trail that would eventually lead him
all the way back to the prehistoric cave paintings of Europe,
Although there are no bushmen today who remember when their people painted on rock,
there were some still alive at the end of the 19th century.
Thankfully, the stories that they had to tell were written down and preserved.
They're kept here, at an archive in Cape Town.
At the end of the 19th century, a German settler, Wilhelm Bleek,
discovered there were still some San bushmen alive who had lived around the Drakensberg,
Bleek realised that they opened a rare window onto the past,
He began to interview them,
This vast archive, 12,000 documents, is their testimony,
It gives a tantalising glimpse of a culture that no longer exists,
Lewis Williams had a hunch that buried among these papers,
which were like a Bible of bushmen belief,
there would be clues as to the original significance of the Drakensberg images.
There was indeed something there,
(WILLIAMS) In reading the Bleek manuscripts,
it became very clear
that their religion was built around a notion of travelling to a spirit world.
(SPIVEY) It seemed the San believed that while you're still alive
your spirit can leave your body and visit the spirit world,
It happens when you enter a trance, or what's called an altered state of consciousness,
This San tradition is still practised today,
I came to a village near Chunkwe, in Namibia, hoping to see it for myself,
Here, I was introduced to the community's healer, or shaman,
I'd been told he was the person who travels to the spirit world,
Doctor, can you tell us why he goes into a trance?
(HE SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE)
(TRANSLATI0N) Any time somebody comes and asks for his family if I can help them,
because I'm their doctor, I go to help them in another world.
When I come back, I find out if it has worked or not.
(SPIVEY) I knew the community was holding a trance dance that evening,
The shaman gave me his permission to stay and watch,
(CHANTING AND RHYTHMIC CLAPPING)
It all began with the women of the village creating a powerful rhythmic chant,
Then the dance began,
and orchestrating it was the shaman himself,
As the dance intensified, something dramatic seemed to happen to him,
He seemed to lose himself in the rhythm and become detached from what was happening,
He did indeed seem to be going into some kind of trance,
Then he fell to the ground, unconscious,
I'd been told that when the shamans enter a trance they sometimes lose consciousness,
and while in this state they say they die and they visit the spirit world,
And from there, they say they can heal people,
Lewis Williams had discovered the vital role that trance played for the San people,
But how could this help to solve the mystery of the haunting rock paintings
created by their ancestors?
(WILLIAMS) Having read the Bleek papers,
and found out about altered state of consciousness or trance on the one hand,
and then knowing the rock paintings on the other hand,
the real crunch is putting those two together.
How do they dovetail? How do the San beliefs explain the paintings?
That was a real puzzle,,,that kept me in the dark for a long, long time,
(SPIVEY) When the answer finally came,
he realised it had been literally staring him in the face,
I used to have copies of the rock paintings that we had made
and I'd take them home and put them on the mantelpiece with ornaments holding them in place,
and sit and contemplate them,
There's one painting that was particularly important to me from a site in Drakensberg,
(SPIVEY) It was a copy of the same rock painting Lewis Williams had shown me in the mountains,
(WILLIAMS) 0ne day, looking at this particular painting, it just clicked,
What was going on here?
0n the left hand side of the painting, there's an eland,
and it suddenly occurred to me that this eland was dying,
We could tell that by the crossed legs, it was stumbling,
its head was lowered, its hair was standing on end,
This is what an eland does when it's dying, particularly from a poisoned arrow.
Next to it and holding its tail was a man, and his legs were also crossed,
He had hooves, beautifully painted, cloven eland hooves,
And he had hair standing on end,
And it was obvious he was dying, the eland was dying,
and so it became clear that the paintings were not pictures of everyday life,
They were about spiritual experience in trance.
(SPIVEY) This was the true meaning behind the San paintings,
The eland is the largest antelope in Africa,
Its grace and power had captured the imaginations of the San
and given the animal a magical potency,
It was what they saw in their trances,
The paintings that the San had made weren't about hunting,
Instead they were recreating their hallucinatory encounters with the animal
by painting them onto the rock surface,
Now an ambitious new idea began to take hold in Lewis William's mind,
He was aware there were other rock paintings which were very similar to those of the San,
These were many thousands of years older, the earliest pictures ever created,
And they were in Europe,
(WILLIAMS) For many years I'd also been interested
in the cave paintings in France and Spain, the palaeolithic paintings,
0ne of the things that is very striking
is the similarity between the rock paintings in Europe
and the Southern African rock art.
(SPIVEY) Just like the San's obsession with the eland,
prehistoric cave artists had also been captivated by a few key animals,
And as with the images in South Africa,
European paintings seem to graft features of animals onto the human body
to create strange, new creatures,
But above all there was one inexplicable feature, shared by both San and European paintings,
which intrigued Lewis Williams,
What we've got here is a tracing of a painting made by the San bushmen,
probably about 200 years ago.
It shows a picture of an eland with some San figures surrounding the animal,
But there's also something else,
The artist has scattered dots across the whole image,
Ring any bells? Take a look at this.
It's a drawing of those two horses that we saw down in the caves at Peche-Merle.
That too has got this strange patterning of spots all over it.
Just 200 years ago on rock walls in Africa,
the San were creating the same abstract patterns
as those painted tens of thousands of years ago in the caves in Europe,
But why? What made people from completely different parts of the world,
and thousands of years apart, come up with such strikingly similar geometric patterns?
Lewis Williams began to wonder if the answer lay not so much in the art
as in the brains of the people who generated it.
(WILLIAMS) In Southern Africa we knew
that the art came out of trance experience, altered states of consciousness,
It's a simple matter then to turn to people
who have studied altered states of consciousness in laboratory work
and ask them what happens to the brain when people go into an altered state.
It was then that we learnt that when people go into an altered state,
the first thing they see is zigzag lines -
bright, flashing zigzag lines, as in a migraine headache, for example.
0r clouds of dots or grids.
And they see these things because they are wired into the human brain.
(SPIVEY) All our brains work the same way, regardless of who we are or where we're from,
Physically, our brains haven't changed since humans first evolved,
This means that if our brains are stimulated - say, put in a trance,
they'd respond in the same way as the brains of our ancient ancestors,
It's an intriguing explanation for the strange patterns,
But could it be true?
I've come to London, to the Institute of Psychiatry, to find out,
They're going to try to induce a trance-like effect in my brain,
Dominic, can you tell us what's inside this box of yours?
We have an apparatus to stimulate the visual parts of your brain in a very specific way.
(SPIVEY) Dr Dominic ffytche treats people with a rare type of visual disorder,
They don't have a problem with their eyes as such,
but with the part of their brain that deals with vision,
To investigate their condition, he's designed an unusual device,
It's actually very simple. It's a set of goggles with some high-intensity LEDs,
light-emitting diodes, connected up to the computer,
which allows me to control the number of flashes I'm presenting to you per second.
- Just place them over the eyes... - Yeah.
Then you're going to beam things into my eyeballs.
That's right, but you have to keep your eyes closed as the flashes are rather bright.
His patients had reported seeing peculiar shapes and patterns
appearing before their eyes,
The goggles are designed to induce these images in the brain,
- Is it going to hurt? - It's not going to hurt.
- Have your eyes closed. - Got them closed.
- What are you seeing now? - What I've got now is...
sort of throbbing blobs, if that makes any sense,
with a sort of network of very fine black lines,
Right...0K...
Very, very vivid colours... All the colours of the spectrum, it seems to be, popping up here.
Behind all that colour,,, How can I explain it?
It's like a fishing net or,,,
Very fine black lines linking up,,, like a honeycomb effect, I guess is what it's like,
(FFYTCHE) What happens when I Just stimulate one eye?
(SPIVEY) Ah,,, Electric checkboard,
Sorry, chessboard - electric chessboard is what it's like.
Reminds me of a dance floor I was once on.
- Colours in it or black and white? - Black and white, very bright black and white.
This is a new experience for me. I had my eyes closed but I was seeing things.
Tell me why.
There are parts of the visual brain that seem to code or represent
the types of grid patterns and lattices that you've been seeing.
And presumably what's happening is that the light is irritating those areas
and inducing an hallucination in you.
So anyone that's given this type of stimulation will have the same types of experiences.
Paradoxically, you can get exactly the same phenomena
when too little information gets into the visual system
and many subJects when they're blindfolded, after a time,
will start to see those sort of patterns as we induced in you today.
So if I went into a cave, with no sources of light, or blindfold myself,
- I might start seeing Just the same sort of things? - Indeed.
(SPIVEY) This would explain the strange patterns,
Deep within the darkness of the caves,
prehistoric artists experienced sensory deprivation,
This induced hallucinations of abstract shapes and patterns,
which our ancient ancestors then painted,
But Lewis Williams realised abstract shapes was just the beginning,
As people spent longer in trances,
their hallucinations took the form of things of great emotional importance,
As with the San, for our prehistoric ancestors that meant the animals
whose power had captured their imaginations,
(WILLIAMS) We're going to hallucinate an eland if we're a San person,
whereas if we're living in France we're going to hallucinate a bison, shall we say.
0r they will see a horse, so culture plays an enormous role in it,
(SPIVEY) And because these images were hallucinations,
they'd appear and later be remembered as two-dimensional representations -
visions flattened onto the wall of the cave,
(WILLIAMS) People didn't one day invent making pictures,
What happened was that people were familiar with the images that their brains were producing
and being projected onto walls,
And they wanted to nail down and make permanent those images, visions that they saw,
So they weren't making pictures of horses they saw outside the cave,
they were nailing down visions.
(SPIVEY) Lewis Williams had finally found an answer to the mystery
of how people who had never seen a picture before
came to create two-dimensional imagery, all those thousands of years ago,
They weren't copying nature but reproducing visions created inside their heads,
Here, for the first time, we've got a theory
which seems to solve many of the puzzles that have mystified experts in the past.
It's a theory based not Just on an investigation of cave art itself,
but a scientific understanding of what was going on inside the heads of those who had made them.
It explains how we went from a world with no images to one with cave paintings,
But it doesn't explain how we got from there to today,
the modern world where images dominate our lives.
Because, about 12,000 years ago, something strange happened.
People stopped painting in caves.
Archaeologists don't know exactly why it happened,
But throughout Europe, wherever they looked, they found little evidence
of images being created for many thousands of years,
The prehistoric people who discovered how to create images
and then reproduce them for countless generations
seemed to have lost interest in them,
It was almost as if rather than being an essential part of human existence,,,
images had been just an optional extra,
Imagery seemed to have lost its hold over the human mind.
So how did we get from there...
..to today?
How did the power of the picture recapture our imaginations
and lead to a world so full of images we can't imagine life without them?
It was only recently that we've begun to discover the answer.
We've come to southern Turkey, to the foot of a large hill called Göbekli Tepe,
At the top lies something which reveals just what happened to imagery
all those thousands of years ago,
Researchers first visited Göbekli Tepe in the 1960s.
What they found was a hillside that was carpeted with the remains of flint stone working.
Little pieces like this.
But then they assumed that the site itself had no special archaeological significance.
Then, around 10 years ago, German archaeologists began excavating here,
What they found astonished them,
Under their feet were colossal structures,
stone circles built from huge T-shaped megaliths,
The site is vast,
At least 20 stone circles remain buried, containing hundreds of pillars,
In Britain, Stonehenge was built 4,500 years ago,
But this site is almost three times older,
It dates back nearly 12,000 years,
to the time when people stopped painting in caves,
It is pretty obvious that Göbekli Tepe
was some kind of ritual centre, a meeting place in the mountains
with great religious power for the people who created it.
How did this help to explain what happened to our ability to create images?
Well, the best time to see that is at night.
It's what's on these pillars that's essential for our story,
They're not Just megaliths, big stones, they're decorated,
covered with carvings of dozens of wild animals.
You see these best at night-time, by the light of a naked flame.
Just as their creators once saw them.
Lions,,, Cranes,,,
Boars,,, Foxes,,,
12,000 years ago, at exactly the time images were abandoned in the caves of Europe,
here on a Turkish hillside they completely gripped people's imaginations,
It means images were never an optional extra,
0nce humans discovered how to create them, they didn't stop,
They've been engraved onto the human mind,
But this place may contain an even bigger secret
because, remarkably, it seems to reveal that it was images
which created the world we live in today,
It's all down to the immense effort that lies behind these images,
0n one side of the hill, archaeologists discovered
an area that had been used as a quarry,
This is where the huge pillars that dominated Göbekli Tepe
were cut from the limestone bedrock,
Here's a pillar that never made it.
This is the oblong of the head and here it narrows to the shaft.
For some reason we'll never know, it was abandoned while still half finished in the bedrock.
Here we have the space where another pillar was successfully extracted.
It really is amazing to think that these stones were cut out of the rock
and carved with images using only flint tools - metal didn't exist.
And what's also remarkable is their size.
Each one of them is about 20 feet long and weighs an estimated 50 tons.
That means it would have taken about 500 people Just to shift them up the hill.
Even the hill itself is man made,
But what's so important about this huge effort
is the effect it had on the society that built Göbekli Tepe,
12,000 years ago, hundreds of people travelled long distances
to work and worship here,
And they all had to eat,
Back then, people throughout the world led the lives of hunter-gatherers -
hunting wild animals, gathering wild plants,
This way of life had successfully supported small groups of people
since humans first evolved,
Today though, we feed large numbers of people by farming,
We grow crops and keep domesticated animals,
Agriculture is the cornerstone of our modern world,
Archaeologists had always wondered what made us give up our hunter-gatherer existence,
What caused the agricultural revolution, the greatest change in human history?
Göbekli Tepe got them thinking,
Because it was in this area that farming first started,
and it happened at the same time as this place was being built,
Could it have been the need to feed all the people building Göbekli Tepe
and worshipping there that first compelled people to start farming?
There is some convincing evidence.
Scientists recently sought to discover where our modern cultivated wheat came from,
They began by analysing the strain of farmed wheat that goes into our food
and extracting its DNA,
They did the same to several varieties of wild wheat,
Then they compared their genetic make-up,
What they discovered is that the closest wild relative to our cultivated wheat
grows in those mountains over there,
the Karacadag, about 20 miles from Göbekli Tepe.
The theory is that wild wheat was brought from the mountains
and farmed here to feed the thousands of people frequenting the site.
So there's the momentous conclusion,
that imagery had become so powerful in the minds of human beings
that it brought about the greatest transformation in human history.
Today, our modern world is dominated by pictures
in ways our ancient ancestors could never have begun to imagine,
What would they have made of images that moved,,,
,,that are beamed across the globe and are seen by millions?
Yet none of this could have happened without people thousands of years ago
having had a revelation,
the revelation that with lines, shapes and colours, they could capture the world,
New York, September 2004,
The race for the White House was reaching a dramatic climax,
The candidates were neck and neck in the polls,
Both were now desperate to seize any advantage over the other,
President Bush was heading for his party's convention at Madison Square Garden,
This was effectively his last opportunity to get ahead,
His advisors knew that everything depended on how he was presented,
They needed an iconic image to convince the American electorate that he was their man,
And that would mean exploiting the power of art,
Although they didn't know it,
the techniques that they turned to weren't of the modern day.
The methods they would use had been invented thousands of years ago.
The political power of art was discovered by kings and emperors in the ancient world,
It was these leaders who first used imagery to manipulate their subjects,
And today our modern politicians are exploiting those same visual strategies,
This is the story of how those ancient leaders created techniques of visual persuasion
so powerful they've still got a hold on us today.
Inside Madison Square Garden, the delegates eagerly awaited the high point of the convention,
the President's speech,
His advisors knew they needed something memorable and dramatic,
They decided to exploit the most potent political images of his presidency,
his presence at Ground Zero,
Among the ruins of the World Trade Centre, he'd looked strong and commanding,
And yet he still appeared caring and warm,
These were the pictures that defined his presidency,
If his advisors could only tap into the power of these iconic images,
they'd give their man a huge advantage,
With just 12 hours to go, they ordered the original stage to be ripped out
and a brand-new one built in its place,
What they came up with was a modern masterpiece.
(CHANTING)
The President's team drew on a set of visual techniques
that leaders had been using for thousands of years,
(CHEERING)
He walked to the stage alone, a commanding leader, confident and in control,
The set was simple but dominated by the symbols of his power,
He was raised slightly above the crowd, but still stood amongst them,
And they ensured the cameras captured the conviction on his face,
(CHANT: ''F0UR M0RE YEARS!'')
The effect was electrifying,
Here was a man who was strong but caring, a powerful leader, close to his people,
The compassionate head of a family at war,
(BUSH) Thank you all, (SPIVEY) His advisors had succeeded,
The scene recreated those iconic images so familiar to every American,
(BUSH) I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you,
(SPIVEY) The strategy worked,
George Bush shot ahead in the polls and he stayed ahead until the election was won,
(CHANT: ''F0UR M0RE YEARS!'')
But why did it work?
How do politicians use images to persuade us, often without us even knowing it?
The only way of understanding this is to uncover how these powerful visual techniques
were invented by leaders thousands of years ago.
There was a time when our ancestors lived in small communities,
Leaders were the heads of families or clans, Everyone knew them,
They had little need of any artistic devices to communicate their power,
So, what happened?
How did imagery come to be used as a political tool?
It's a process that happens at different times in various parts of the world.
But in one of those parts, Britain,
archaeologists believe that they've recently hit upon the time and the place.
It's new light on one of the country's oldest and best-known monuments, Stonehenge.
This is the biggest prehistoric monument in Europe,
Something extraordinary must have happened here for a structure of this size
to be built by people living in small isolated communities,
This was one of the great mysteries of the ancient world,
Now, through our understanding of the persuasive power of art,
we may have found an answer,
It all began with the chance discovery of a burial site near Stonehenge,
Archaeologists expected to find a Roman burial ground,
common in this part of the world,
What none of them knew at the time was that they had stumbled
into one of the most momentous archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain,
(NEWSPEAKER) We knew that the grave wasn't Roman
because it had pottery that dates to the beginning of the Bronze Age,
so it was almost 2,000 years older than the Roman graves; we had something very different.
(SPIVEY) Andrew Fitzpatrick and his team
had uncovered the skeleton of a man dating back nearly 4,500 years,
And next to it, dozens of objects,
It was the sheer scale of the find that suggested this was no ordinary grave,
and no ordinary man,
(DR FITZPATRICK) It's normal in a burial of this age to find just one or two objects,
And we would have called a grave with maybe 10 things in it rich,
but as the numbers mounted, it was clear that this grave was of exceptional importance,
and as the numbers got to almost 100,
we realised it was the richest grave not Just in Britain but in continental Europe as well.
(SPIVEY) An examination of the objects revealed further surprises,
There were a number of fine objects designed for personal display,
like a stone belt buckle,,,
,,a wrist guard used by an archer and some tiny copper knives,
In amongst all of these there was something very special -
two identical pieces of gold,
As they examined these more closely, they realised they were in fact ornaments,
probably hair clasps, and both beautifully crafted,
They may not look very much now,
tiny, with Just a very simple pattern round the edge,
but at the time when these were created and worn - that's nearly 4,500 years ago -
these were probably the greatest treasures
that anyone possessed in the British Isles.
For the first time, gold had been melted and shaped
and then transformed into an ornament,
This was a new kind of art and the first of its kind in Britain,
The big question then was whose was it?
Archaeologists needed to examine the skeleton in more detail,
and what they discovered was that this man was not from the Stonehenge area,
he'd come from central Europe,
He was a foreigner who'd made an epic journey to get to Britain,
(DR FITZPATRICK) It's a journey without compare at this time,
To cross the sea he would only have had a dug-out canoe or a coracle.
It's a long and very dangerous Journey.
(SPIVEY) How was it that a stranger from hundreds of miles away
had come to be buried with all the trappings of a great and revered leader?
He'd have been known as an exotic, important person.
He had something that nobody else had
and he had the skills to transform raw metal into these finished obJects.
He had knowledge and he had power.
(SPIVEY) It was the gold, so exquisite and rare, that had created the image of a leader,
These would have been like the crown jewels,
strictly reserved for a leader of great importance.
Art fit for a king.
Just imagine how he would once have appeared to his subJects.
0ur king would have looked magnificent,
Dressed in a splendid leather tunic,
his body and face lit up by shiny metals never before seen,
The people living around Stonehenge would have worn nothing but simple animal skins,
This man's appearance alone must have mesmerised them,
What this individual had discovered was something that we today take for granted:
art as personal adornment enhances your status.
It lifts you above your peers.
0ur king was the first leader in Britain
to exploit what would become a universal human trait.
And it's something that leaders from the time of Stonehenge
to the present day have exploited,
The adornments of office enhance your power,
This power of art may now finally explain how such a colossal monument came to be built,
It must have taken a leader of great power to organise the hundreds of people
needed for such an undertaking,
0ur foreigner arrived with his gold around the time that Stonehenge was built,
It's likely that it was he who organised its construction,
What's more, he may well have intended Stonehenge as the ultimate symbol of his power,
If our king did indeed build this,
the most impressive prehistoric temple in Europe,
then adornment had played a crucial role in his achievement.
Art had become a political tool. It was the dawn of a new era.
And it wasn't just in ancient Britain,
In other parts of the world, from Egypt to Mesopotamia,
leaders were also discovering the power of art,
Kings competed to wear ever more dazzling adornments
and to build ever more fabulous structures,
The images had a magical effect on those who saw them,
But there was a catch,
Kingdoms were growing in size,
But the bigger they became, the harder it was for leaders to communicate their power,
Their new subjects simply couldn't see them,
Around 500 BC, this problem was particularly acute for one king above all,
He'd taken control of a kingdom so large, it was the world's first empire,
He needed to find a new way to impose his power across all of this vast territory,
He was Darius the Great, the king of the Persians.
His capital was Persepolis.
Persepolis is in Iran, one of the wonders of the ancient world,
2,500 years ago, it stood at the heart of Darius's vast empire,
an empire that stretched thousands of miles,
from the Mediterranean in the west to India in the east,
From here, Darius ruled over millions of people, across more than 20 nations,
He carved the names of the most far-flung nations on a block of solid gold,
and buried it under Persepolis for posterity,
But how could he rule over so many diverse peoples?
Darius came up with a plan,
a new kind of political leadership, which he outlined in a series of inscriptions,
Their message was radical,
Rather than war and brutality, Darius offered peace and co-operation,
''In a war between two nations, I intervene to protect the weak,
''I am justice and have been asked by God to promote happiness, ''
It's visionary stuff.
The challenge to Darius however was how to communicate this to everyone else.
His empire was one in which very few people could read.
Also one in which there were dozens of different languages.
So how was he going to spread the word?
Darius's brainwave was the beginning of nothing less than an artistic revolution,
The walls of Persepolis are covered with awe-inspiring images,
But there was something unusual about them,
These stone reliefs are not just from one artistic style,
but combined elements from all over the empire,
The most spectacular reliefs of all are those decorating the staircase
that leads to the great hall of Darius.
0nce a year, Darius would invite ambassadors from every nation within his empire
to Join him here,
and as they arrived, all the ambassadors would pass up this staircase
to their audience with the king.
So this was their approach to one of the most imposing monuments in the ancient world.
The ambassadors' eyes would have been drawn to these figures -
the conquered peoples of the empire,
All are shown in their national costumes, bringing tributes to the king,
No scenes of war and retribution, they're happy to honour Darius,
Darius had found an inspired solution to his problem,,,
,,a way of communicating his political vision through art,
the international language of images,
The ambassadors would have left here and travelled home
with one message clearly etched in their mind -
that King Darius valued and respected them.
A new benevolent political era had dawned.
The ambassadors would have grasped Darius's message,
but of course there were still millions of ordinary subjects across his empire
who would never glimpse the vision of peace and prosperity inside the palace,
So how could he communicate this message to them?
0nce again, Darius found his solution in art,
Towering above the desert, just off the main highway to Persepolis,
is a huge political billboard,
Carved on it, for all the passers-by to see, is Darius's vision of his new leadership style,
It looks very impressive, but it's rather weathered now, not easy to make out the details.
Let's get closer.
(GENERAL INSTRUCTI0NS IN 0WN LANGUAGE)
(SPIVEY) All right, I got it. Yeah.
(INSTRUCTI0NS C0NTINUE)
That's better... 200 feet above the desert, face to face with the tomb of Darius.
There's a lengthy inscription describing his benevolent rule,
But it's the depiction of Darius himself that's so intriguing,
There's one thing you can see from up here
which you Just couldn't spot from down below.
It's that Darius is carrying a bow.
The bowman would have been an image familiar to all Persians,
They'd have known precisely what it meant,
which is why Darius chose it as the symbol of his kingship,
To the Persians, the archer was symbolic not Just of military prowess
but of wisdom...leadership.
The good archer had a sense of balance and control,
qualities that were central to the concept of kingship developed by Darius.
''Darius the archer'', there you have it, the first-ever political logo.
And having invented the political logo, Darius went one better,
He discovered a new way to communicate it to his subjects,
Leaders throughout history would profit from his genius,
Darius had unified a disparate empire,
one of the world's great civilisations,
For 150 years after his death, his successors continued to use his logo
and to build on his achievements,
But it was destined not to last,
because someone on the western fringes of the empire had his sights on Persepolis.
He was...Alexander the Great.
Alexander was a brilliant military strategist,
In just a few short years, he defeated the Persian armies and captured the city,
But that was just the start of his ambitions,
Alexander wanted much more than to simply conquer,
He needed a way of uniting the Persian Empire behind him,
But how, as a foreign invader, would he ever win the hearts and minds of his new subjects?
Alexander understood the power of the visual techniques used by Darius,
But he had to come up with an image all of his own,
Archaeologists had always known how Alexander had won the war,
But what still remained a mystery was how he had planned to win the peace,
Where did his image come from,
the image he would use to win hearts and minds,
The obvious place to start the search was where he had planned his campaign,
his homeland, Macedonia,
Macedonia is now part of modern Greece, but back in the 4th century BC
it was an independent kingdom with a warlike reputation,
The problem for the archaeologists was that little remained of Alexander's palaces,
They'd already been destroyed,
So they turned to the royal tombs underground,
Here again it was a similar story of destruction,
Tomb after tomb was discovered, but each one had already been ransacked by raiders.
Then, in 1978, a team of Greek archaeologists at last found one that was intact.
It was one of the great archaeological discoveries of our time.
They came across a tunnel leading deep underground,
It revealed the face of a tomb,,,still intact,
(TRANSLATI0N) The moment the tomb opened it was like a dream.
I had no idea of the significance of our discovery. It was Just a miracle.
They had discovered the secret tomb of Philip of Macedon, Alexander's father.
Its walls were still covered with the traces of magnificent paintings,
And what awaited them inside
was a huge treasure trove.
The centrepiece was a gold sarcophagus with the symbol of the Macedonian king,
(DR K0TTARIDI SPEAKS GREEK)
(TRANSLATI0N) He was surrounded by incredible riches, the riches of a king,
They showed he was a man of exquisite taste.
These are really the most beautiful obJects of their kind we have ever discovered.
(SPIVEY) These were rich trappings
but perhaps what you'd expect from a great dynasty.
Lots of gold, but what light did it shed upon the secrets of Alexander's success?
Well, then, amid the dust and debris on the tomb floor,
the archaeologists picked up something which at first sight looked rather inconspicuous.
It was a delicately crafted ivory carving,
As they dug deeper, they found more,
They were tiny fragments, most less than an inch long,
Pieced together, they formed a hunting scene,
As they examined them more closely, one of the faces stood out,
This was the face that would appear on busts and paintings for hundreds of years
throughout the Mediterranean,
(DR K0TTARIDI SPEAKS GREEK)
(TRANSLATI0N) Suddenly a face emerged of someone we recognised.
It was the face of a real person.
We had discovered the image of the man who was at the centre of ultimate power,
(SPIVEY) They were looking at the face of Alexander the Great,
This was the earliest image of him ever discovered,
It was also the first lifelike representation of a king,
Until now, kings had been portrayed by characterless depictions created to a formula,
But this marked the moment of another artistic revolution -
the birth of the political portrait,
(SPEAKING GREEK)
(TRANSLATI0N) As a portrait, it really captures his political power and strength.
It marks the very moment a new artistic ideal was born.
(SPIVEY) But the most significant aspect
of this little ivory head was when it was made.
It was placed in this tomb.
That means it was made before Philip died and before Alexander became king.
In other words, archaeologists realised for the first time
that Alexander's image had been designed for him
before he fought a single battle against the Persians.
Between them, Philip and Alexander had already come up with a winning image,
an image to take on the world.
But how exactly would Alexander exploit the power of this image
and portray himself as a leader strong enough to unite an empire?
The answer to that was found buried under tons of lava at the foot of a volcano,
the volcano that buried the Roman town of Pompeii - Mount Vesuvius,
The Romans loved Greek art, and in one of the villas in Pompeii
was a mosaic, the copy of an original Macedonian painting from Alexander's time,
It's now in the Archaeological Museum at Naples,
The mosaic depicts a famous battle in which Alexander finally defeated the Persian armies,
This is Alexander,
charging full tilt into the thick of the battle.
His eyes are fixed on his mortal enemy, the Persian king.
Alexander is shown in the heat of action, leading his troops, spear in hand,
He wears no helmet, his hair flying back, a fearless hero leading from the front,
The impact of this image is even greater when you look across to the other side of the mosaic,
Look at the face of the great Persian king - it's a study of panic and fear,
He can't get away quick enough.
The whole of this political poster offers us a clear choice.
Do you go for the brave heart or the coward?
The hero or the villain?
It's a collision of values in which Alexander is predestined for victory.
Alexander had discovered he could use his portrait to persuade his new subjects
that he was invincible,
It was an image to inspire admiration and respect,
Here was a man who could unite the empire and was worthy of replacing the king of Persia,
While Darius had discovered the power of the logo,
Alexander had gone one better and replaced this image with that of the face,
No king before him had exploited a charismatic portrait of his face in that way,
Today, the power of the human face may seem obvious,
How can it be such a powerful tool
in the hands of politicians?
For the answer, we have to turn to modern science.
We asked a psychologist to design an experiment
to test which is the more effective image - the logo or the face?
What he came up with was an election,
He began by inventing two different political candidates,
0ne was publicised using my face,
The other, fictional candidate, was publicised using a logo,
Both had identical manifestos,
Their message, ''Art's for all'',
The question now was would the face or the logo have more appeal?
(GIRL) Will you vote for him?
(ELECTI0NEERING C0NTINUES)
Promoters of these two images then descended on the students of Imperial College, London,
(GIRL) Vote Bowman!
- He's for all. - Vote for us.
(GIRL) We have someone who will make art accessible to everyone.
That's what Nigel is about, making art for everyone.
(SPIVEY) At the end of the campaign, the vote was held,
Identical candidates,,, Identical manifestos,
Distinguished only by their two very different images,
Which would win? The face,,,or the logo?
(M0UTHING)
0f the 100 voters, 40 opted for the logo but 60 went for the face,
The experiment confirms what Alexander had instinctively understood,
Humans have evolved to be influenced by what they see in a face,
So effective was his discovery that throughout his rule he continued to refine it,
Hundreds of statues were made of his heroic physical presence,
Alexander may have had the perfect image,
but it was useless unless he could get it circulated to the people who mattered most,
his new subjects,
Today, we take it for granted
Just how easy it is to distribute an image.
At the press of a button you can send a picture
to vast numbers of people almost anywhere in the world.
But for Alexander, things weren't so simple.
He needed to find a way of giving his subJects a daily reminder of who was in charge.
His solution was, quite literally, to put his face in the palm of their hands.
This is what he came up with - a face on a coin.
He established 30 mints, producing thousands of these throughout his empire.
0n each one, it had a head closely resembling his own.
Alexander had found a powerful way to spread his image throughout the empire,
For generations, Alexander's successors would produce coins with his face on them,
Any association with Alexander would also give them authority,
It was a brilliant idea and one which leaders ever since have used
as a daily reminder to us all of who's in charge,
And, of course, the power of the human face continues to shape our political landscape
today,
(CHEERING)
(CLAPPING)
(CHEERING)
By Alexander's time, leaders in the ancient world understood
just how susceptible the human mind was to the persuasive power of art,
And they'd used images to promote themselves and their message,
But there's a more ruthless type of leader in the modern world
who aims to wield the power of images in another way.
It's something more ambitious than Just self-promotion,
something far darker, much more sinister.
It's the power to persuade us to think what they want us to think,
and to see things the way they do,
And even to deceive us,
So how did art go from being a tool of political promotion
to being an instrument of mass deception?
To find out, we need to discover Just how and why imagery was first used
to tell a political lie.
That weapon was invented here, in Rome,
40 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Rome was on the point of collapse,
For decades a civil war had divided the city,
And the city was split not just politically but culturally too,
A split that manifested itself even in people's appearance,
It seems hard to imagine today...
but it was as if you could tell everyone's political allegiance...
simply by seeing how they were dressed.
(FEMALE SINGING ITALIAN 0PERA)
It would be as if, today, Rome were divided into two camps,
each with their own distinctive uniforms,
Suppose one group dressed in an old-fashioned and conservative way,
They were the republicans,
They believed that the great traditional Roman families should rule Rome
as they had for centuries,
They dressed in traditional or austere clothes,
(INAUDIBLE)
And suppose the other group were more like today's trendies,
Although it seems strange, this group were monarchists,
They wanted to replace the traditional families with a powerful and ostentatious king,
They wore more flamboyant clothes to parade these exotic sympathies,
(CHATTER AND UP-BEATMUSIC)
(0PERATIC SINGING)
These two groups were locked in a struggle for the control of ancient Rome,
Neither side was prepared to compromise,
It looked like the two tribes would be forever divided,
That was, until a new contender appeared on the scene.
He was young and had no great political or military experience.
But he was wise to the political potential of images.
He would unite Rome, not by the force of an army, but by the power of art.
His name, 0ctavian... or as he would become known, Augustus.
Augustus came from the monarchist camp,
Although half of Rome supported him, the republicans remained deeply suspicious,
To win them over, Augustus needed to persuade the republicans
he posed no threat to the power of the traditional families,
He had a problem,
This was his image -
the typical trendy, big-haired look that the monarchists favoured
and the republicans hated,
To get their support, Augustus would need to reinvent himself,
This is what his artists and sculptors came up with,
Something far more humble, Hair flattened, the face more gentle and mature,
All a lot less threatening,
This was the look Augustus finally approved.
Frowning, serious, humble. A man of the people.
A look that was calculated not to antagonise the republicans.
And having created this image, Augustus had it copied.
Hundreds and hundreds of copies went out all around the empire.
His strategy began to work,
The empire prospered and with it his own power and fame,
But Rome itself remained tense,
The republicans were still suspicious
that he was accumulating power for his own personal ends,
They believed he had plans to sweep the traditional ruling families aside
and grab all the power for himself,
Augustus feared assassination,
To win over his enemies, he needed to come up with an image
that would persuade the republicans, once and for all,
This is the Vatican City.
Not only the centre of the Catholic Church
but also home to one of the greatest collections of Roman art anywhere in the world.
Within that collection, one piece is outstanding,
as the most complete example of how Augustus used art as a political tool.
It was a very subtle work of art,
something which would eventually bring peace to Rome,
But its success would have sinister consequences,
And here he is.
I think, even if you knew nothing about Augustus,
you'd instinctively recognise this as a powerful image of authority.
It's this image that would finally win over the republicans,
Here, Augustus meets their fears head on,
While it shows him as a powerful general, there's much more to it than that,
Although he's wearing a military breastplate,
there's no actual suggestion that he's ready for action,
If this were just a military statue,
the outstretched arm would be brandishing a spear,
But here it's more like a gesture of statesman-like command,
You'd expect military boots on the feet, but here they're bare,
More like a sign of humility than power,
This is the ultimate in political art - something in it for everyone,
whatever the political persuasion,
With this statue, Augustus found a way of making military power attractive
to those who feared it most, the republicans.
But that wasn't all.
Emblazoned across the centre of his breastplate
was a scene that was designed to quell any lingering doubts.
The images are of Augustus
accepting the surrender of Rome's sworn enemy, the Parthians,
It was his greatest triumph,
And the gods are shown looking on with approval,
The message is clear - Augustus was simply fulfilling the will of the gods,
Now the war that divided Rome was over,
The statue offers emphatic reassurance.
Augustus is strong but he's not threatening.
He's the leader who guarantees his people a new golden age.
It's the pax Augusta, the Augustan peace.
And even the gods approved.
Augustus had achieved his greatest ambition,
He'd unified the two camps of Rome,
And he'd done it using the power of art,
0ne story tells how, as an old man in his seventies,
Augustus took a boat Journey out of Rome. It was to be the last trip of his life.
0n his way he was spotted by a group of foreign traders,
who spontaneously burst into applause and cheered their leader.
They shouted out that it was to him they owed their lives, their freedom and prosperity.
Augustus was overwhelmed.
To him it came like final proof that he'd succeeded.
He was the unifier of Rome and the saviour of his people.
Augustus was the hero sent by the gods to save Rome,
It did seem like the beginning of a new golden age,
But all of this was built on a lie. The people had been duped.
While portraying himself as a peacemaker, Augustus was eradicating all opposition,
While preaching humility, he and his family lived and behaved like corrupt royalty,
And while boasting that he was handing back power to the people,
Augustus was a king in all but name,
In reality, he had founded a system of dictatorship that would last for 400 years,
Augustus had used images to manipulate people into believing one thing
when in fact the very opposite was true.
He discovered how to use art to tell a political lie.
It was a technique that would be embraced by dictators down the ages.
They too would turn to art to deceive their people,
Through art they would persuade their people to hate,
to turn on their foreign enemies and even on their own neighbours,
And worse,,,to persuade them to believe that some people were less than human,
0ver thousands of years, leaders in the ancient world
discovered the extraordinary power of art to persuade,
They realised its potential to promote themselves and their ideas,
And with Augustus they learned to exploit art for more sinister purposes,
Today's politicians are using techniques
very similar to those invented by leaders thousands of years ago.
Both exploit the same universal human traits.
The leaders of the past used paint and marble, and today's politicians digital technology.
We humans remain as vulnerable now as we ever were
to the persuasive power of art.