How Art Made the World

- Season 1

(2005)

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In our time, the use of visual advertising in political campaigns is blatantly obvious and professionalized, but in essence the techniques to use the power of images date back to political propaganda since Antiquity. In the prehistory, everybody knew the leader of the small community physically, but soon that changed, creating a political vocation for art. Next to Stonehenge was found a Bronze age grave, 2000 years before the Romans, extremely rich, belonging to a Central European prince, who may well have ordered the monument build, the first known to use gold ...

In essence, the use of images to tell stories, as in movies, TV or cartoons, relies upon the same powerful techniques since Antiquity. Cuneiform, the world's oldest writing, sets in the world oldest and long greatest city, Uruk in early Mesopotamia (southern Iraq), the oldest recorded story, the still told Gilgamesh epic. As every great story it has a hero, defined by the events and his spiritual and moral ability to respond to them. The Assyrian (northern Iraq) king Assurbanipal had it transposed from -then no longer legible- cuneiform to images, only starring ...

Like death is a major theme in stories, images of the death are of all time. Even the 9,000 year old site at Jericho contains nine artistically decorated human skulls, like many other cultures still produce, even today in tribal New Guinea. While some are meant to reconcile the audience with mortality by showing the afterlife, in other cultures human sacrifices and cruel warfare give rise to morbid images, specifically designed to frighten. Starting with the Etruscans, a same work of art may refer both to afterlife and death.