Civilisation EP1#4

Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation" - The Skin of our teeth.
The Dark Ages, the six centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Byzantine Ravenna to the Celtic Hebrides, Charlenagnes chapel at Aachen, he unravels the extraordinary story of how European thought and art were saved by 'the skin of our teeth'.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Civilisation
• Kenneth Clark
• Rome
• Skellig
• Michael
• Iona
• Charlemagne
• Cross of Lothar
• Norsemen

[GordonMorrice]

Hail Charlemagne! A truly great leader.

[Thorheld]

@frellthat

If you watch the first few episdodes of the series you realize that the driving narrative is post-Roman, it's about the emergence of Western Christendom out of its ashes, a 'new civilisation facing the Atlantic', not the Mediterranean.

[bjankuloski]

@GordonMorrice

A man of colossal genious. Suffered from epilepsy a lot, poor man. But then, they say it is not surprising with such people.

[thejustnosy]

The full title is "Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark". You can disagree (good, disagreements make history interesting) but it is one man's view, based on what he knew about and the things most important to him. I am sure so intelligent a man would have admitted that there were other possible views of the world. (For further information look up the story about the 6 blind men and the elephant)

[ApexBozo]

the choice of title is interesting for a number of reasons; one being that it's only concerned with with european post antiquity, and another being that it's not really a general historical essay as much as it is an indtroduction to art history.

[RPenta]

@Thorheld

Interesting that the series is just called "Civilization" though.

[frellthat]

Yes, but even then, the Western Renaissance did not occur until cultural contact with the East via the Crusades, and especially the sack of Constantinople, which was the basis for almost the entire High Medieval economy of Western Europe.

[frellthat]

Western civilization was based on the east. Not only in a material sense, as it was the wealth of the east upon which the Roman Empire depended (and the fact that the empire became divided between east and west is the chief reason for the west's downfall), but in an intellectual and cultural sense as well.

[Thorheld]

Well he's just as cynical about the North, the 'mud-huts' of the barbarians and the monotony of the Dark Ages. And besides, the series is about Western art and civilisation, not the East.