Civilisation: Kenneth Clark's Grand Tour of Western Art
In 1969 the BBC gave Kenneth Clark thirteen hours of colour television and asked him to explain Western civilisation. He did it by walking through it: standing in cathedrals, palaces and libraries, and telling the story through the buildings, paintings and sculpture that people left behind. Civilisation is the book of that series, and it remains one of the most readable single-volume journeys through European art and ideas.
Author: Kenneth Clark
Title: Civilisation
Format: Kindle eBook, available on Amazon.es
Scope: Thirteen chapters following the 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View, from the aftermath of Rome's fall to the industrial age
Amazon: amzn.to/4yYAkI7 (ASIN B00T39BMEW)
A Personal View, Stated Plainly
Clark never pretends to be neutral. The subtitle of the television series was A Personal View, and the book keeps that voice: confident, conversational and openly selective. He moves from the monasteries that kept learning alive after the collapse of Rome to the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the courts of Renaissance Italy, the Reformation, the Baroque, the Enlightenment and the Romantic age, asking at each stop what made a period creative and what threatened it. The answers come through objects, and the reader learns to look at a façade or a painting as evidence of how people thought.
Why It Belongs Beside Gombrich and Berger
Gombrich's The Story of Art gives the map; Clark's Civilisation gives the grand tour, with a guide who has opinions. John Berger's Ways of Seeing, broadcast only a few years later, was in part a direct answer to Clark, questioning who art was made for and who it left out. Reading the two side by side is the best short course there is in how to argue about art history, and both sharpen the eye for the paintings commented on this site and sold in the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
Why Read It Now
Some of Clark's judgements have aged, and he would expect to be argued with. But the book's central idea still holds: that a civilisation can be read in what it builds and paints, and that it can be lost. The chapters are short enough to take one at a time, and each one sends you back to the pictures with better questions.
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