Civilizations summary

When people we love are taken from us, we often turn to photographs to help us remember them. But photography is a recent invention, so what did people do before?

Well, art played a similar role.

Virtually every civilization has built monuments honoring its most important members. But why do they do it? In a word: power.

A spectacular example of this is provided by the army of terracotta warriors in the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi, the first emperor of unified China in the late third century BCE.

Between the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, ancient Greek sculpture took a radical turn. Old ways of depicting humans gave way to a new, more realistic style. Lifelike depictions of muscles, limbs and movement were the order of the day, and the consequences were dramatic.

The Aphrodite of Knidos, a sculpture of the eponymous Greek goddess created by the artist Praxiteles around 330 BCE, is one such example.

In the early twentieth century, British artist Christiana Herringham made it her mission to document the religious paintings in India’s Ajanta caves. Worried that the deteriorating frescoes would soon be beyond repair, she set about copying them down. In 1915, she released a volume containing color plates of her tracings.

Her desire to save these Buddhist works might have been commendable, but by treating them as examples of fine art, she also misinterpreted them.

There’s always a distance between believers and the historical events at the base of their faith’s stories and teachings, and that’s where art comes in. Religious artworks can bridge that gap and bring the past into the present.

Take Jacopo Tintoretto’s mural of the crucifixion.

The Taliban's notorious destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 shocked millions of news viewers around the world. It was widely seen as a callous example of iconoclasm – the religious rejection of supposedly heretical images.

But the Afghan group’s act wasn’t representative of iconoclasm as a whole – it’s usually much harder to pin down than that.

Art representing living creatures is often frowned upon in the Islamic world. Some mistakenly stereotype Islam as artless as a result. But Islam, like other religions, has had plenty of rich debates about aesthetics.

In fact, rejecting images of animals and humans doesn’t mean rejecting art at all – it just means finding different ways to represent the divine.