In Our Time: Culture Folgen

Melvyn Bragg discusses 'Lives of the Artists' - the great biographer Giorgio Vasari's study of Renaissance painters, sculptors and architects. In 1550 a little known Italian artist, Giorgio Vasari, published a revolutionary book entitled 'Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times'. In it he chronicled the evolution of Italian art from the early pioneer Giotto to the perfection of Michelangelo.For the first time, Vasari set out to record artists' eccentricities and foibles as well as their artistic triumphs. We learn that the painter Piero di Cosimo was scared of the sound of bells, and witness Donatello shouting at his statues. But amongst these beguiling stories of human achievement, Vasari also explained his own theory of what made great art.In more recent decades, Vasari has been criticised for not allowing factual accuracy to get in the way of a good story. Nonetheless, the influence of his work has been unparalleled. It has formed and defined the way we think about Renaissance art to this day and some credit him with being the founder of the discipline of the history of art. Few artists that Vasari criticised have been comprehensively rehabilitated and Vasari's semi-divine trio of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo are still seen as the apotheosis of artistic perfection. With:Evelyn WelchProfessor of Renaissance Studies and Academic Dean for Arts at Queen Mary, University of LondonDavid EkserdjianProfessor of History of Art and Film at the University of LeicesterMartin KempEmeritus Professor in the History of Art at the University of OxfordProducer: Thomas Morris.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Roman Satire. Much of Roman culture was a development of their rich inheritance from the Greeks. But satire was a form the Romans could claim to have invented. The grandfather of Roman satire, Ennius, was also an important figure in early Roman literature more generally. Strikingly, he pioneered both epic and the satirical mockery of epic.But the father of the genre, Lucilius, is the writer credited with taking satire decisively towards what we now understand by the word: incisive invective aimed at particular personalities and their wrongs.All this happened under the Roman Republic, in which there was a large measure of free speech. But then the Republic was overthrown and Augustus established the Empire.The great satirist Horace had fought to save the Republic, but now reinvented himself as a loyal citizen of the Imperium. His satirical work explores the strains and hypocrisies of trying to maintain an independent sense of self at the heart of an autocracy.This struggle was deepened in the work of Persius, whose Stoicism-inflected writing was a quietist attempt to endure under the regime without challenging it.The work of the last great Roman satirist, Juvenal, was famously savage - yet his targets were either generic or long dead. So was satire a conservative or a radical genre? Was it cynical or did it aim to 'improve' people? Did it have any real impact? And was it actually funny?With:Mary BeardProfessor of Classics at Cambridge UniversityDenis FeeneyProfessor of Classics and Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton UniversityDuncan KennedyProfessor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of BristolProducer: Phil Tinline.

Melvyn Bragg and guests David Jackson, Dorothy Rowe and Alastair Wright discuss the work of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, focusing on his most famous painting, The Scream.First exhibited in 1893 in Berlin, The Scream was the culmination of Munch's magnum opus, a series of paintings called The Frieze of Life. This depicted the course of human existence through burgeoning love and sexual passion to suffering, despair and death, in Munch's highly original, proto-expressionist style. His titles, from Death in the Sickroom, through Madonna to The Vampire, suggest just how directly and unironically he sought to depict the anxieties of late-19th century Europe.But against all Munch's images, it is The Scream which stands out as the work which has seared itself into the Western imagination. It remains widely celebrated for capturing the torment of existence in what appeared to many in Munch's time to be a frightening, godless world.Munch himself endured a childhood beset by illness, madness and bereavement. At 13, he was told by his father that his tuberculosis was fatal. But he survived and went on to become a major figure first in the Norwegian, then the European, avant-garde. He became involved with two of the great playwrights of the period. He collaborated with his fellow countryman Henrik Ibsen and became a close friend of the tempestuous Swede August Strindberg. He admired the work of Post-Impressionist painters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom influenced his art. Munch's own influence resonated through the 20th century, from German Expressionism to Andy Warhol and beyond. His work, particularly The Scream, remains powerful today.David Jackson is Professor of Russian and Scandinavian Art Histories at the University of Leeds; Dorothy Rowe is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol; Alastair Wright is University Lecturer in the History of Art at St John's College, University of Oxford.