Imagination: The Art Of Eternity BBC

BBC guide. 2008年06月15日 0900 Imagination: The Art Of Eternity ...

rt Of Eternity

In this three-part series, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon sets out to unravel the mysteries of art from the pre-perspective era.

Episode One: Painting Paradise

Andrew traces the beginnings of Christian art in the declining Roman Empire, Egypt and medieval France, and reveals the ideas which lay behind the transition from classical art to the first icons.

---

Showing on Saturday 14th June at 0810. Repeating at 1710 and on Sunday 15th at 0110 and 1410 GMT.

Episode Two: The Glory Of Byzantium

Andrew travels to Istanbul to immerse himself in the tumultuous world of the Byzantine Empire. He decodes the iconography of the art of the period and explains its continuing relevance.

---

Showing on Saturday 21st June at 0810. Repeating at 1710 and on Sunday 22nd at 0110 and 1410 GMT.

Episode Three: When East Meets West

Andrew examines early Christian art and the reasons for its evolution during the Renaissance. He also reveals just how far modern artists have been influenced by the pre-perspective view of the world.

Columbia Encyclopedia: Coptic art,

Christian art in the upper Nile valley of Egypt. Reaching its mature phase in the late 5th and 6th cent., the development of Coptic art was interrupted by the Arab conquest of Egypt between 640 and 642. Its subsequent course was marked by the influence of Islamic art and a repetition of earlier forms. In contrast with the aristocratic taste prevailing in cosmopolitan Alexandria, which was in close touch with the leading artistic centers of the Roman Empire, older and deeply ingrained traditions remained in force in the upper Nile valley, where an intensely religious culture drew its following chiefly from the lower classes.

Coptic art is characterized by a high degree of stylization verging on abstraction. Forms are flattened out, and individual motifs acquire bold simplicity and decorative character. Subject matter represents both Christian and Roman sources. Remains of wall paintings reveal scenes from the Old and New Testaments and images of the Mother and Child. Some of the archaeological sites are El-Bagawat, Oxyrhynchus, Sakkara, Bawit, and Antinoë. Representative examples of Coptic art are in sculpture, textiles, ivory, and illumination. Coptic architecture, as shown in the 5th-century White and Red monasteries near Sohag, showed traces of local Egyptian traditions.

Bibliography

See K. Wessel, Coptic Art: The Early Christian Art of Egypt (1965) and D. L. Carroll, Looms and Textiles of the Copts (1988).