(jazzy music)
Male: I am there.
I'm sitting on the cool marble.
I'm listening.
I'm rapt.
Female: I want to be there!
Male: (chuckles) So do I!
Female: Alma-Tadema has captured the beautiful light
and the sea and this fabulously cool marble
on this lovely summer day.
Who doesn't want to be there?
Male: What an incredible fantasy.
Look at that marble, the way the light
moves through that stone.
If you look under the seat you can actually
see the intense sunlight warming that marble
and you can feel its crispness, you can feel
the edge as you're sitting there.
Female: Alma-Tadema, and we're looking
at his painting, A Reading from Homer
from 1885, was a master at capturing textures;
not just the marble but also the fur
that the figure wears in the foreground.
Male: Or the flesh.
Look at his feet.
Female: He could really paint.
The figure on the right, who's crowned
with laurel leaves much like an ancient
Greek god, is reading from Homer.
He's clearly acting it out in a dramatic way
that has his listeners transported to
mythic, Homeric Greece.
Male: As the young orator is recalling
mythic Greece and transporting his listeners,
Alma-Tadema, the artist, is transporting his viewers,
is transporting us,
and transporting the Victorians
for whom this was made.
Female: They've put down their musical instruments.
They look as though they're seeing past him
and they're in their own imaginations.
Male: Look at the way that
the young couples' hands intertwine.
It's so delicate and so graceful.
Female: Their hands were clasped, but they're
so taken with the story that's being told that they're
almost forgetting that their hands are entwined.
Male: Here's an academic artist
that is truly a brilliant technician,
that is truly a brilliant craftsman.
Here's an artist who was enormously
successful professionally,
and whose paintings won not only numerous awards
but fetched very high prices.
Yet this is also an artist who
the 20th century looked down on.
Female: An art historian said that Alma-Tadema
was, in the highest sense, a superficial artist.
That's because I think Alma-Tadema was very much
giving the Victorians an art which flattered them,
which made them feel good.
In the 20th century, we value art that
challenges us, not that flatters us.
It's interesting to think about how this
flattered the Victorian audience that it was made for.
Male: I would imagine that the Victorians
themselves looked back to ancient Greece
as a source of their greatness;
that they were, in some ways, an inheritor
of the way in which the Greeks had
privileged culture, had privileged the arts.
Female: That's right, and I would add
ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
Any Victorian looking at this painting
would have identified with watching a reading
or a theater performance and thinking about
their own appreciation for the arts.
Male: This was a moment in history when
Britain is an empire and it is collecting
works of art and works of culture from around the world,
and especially from Greece.
The Elgan marbles, the great sculptures of the Parthenon
are brought to London and put on display.
In a sense, what Alma-Tadema is doing
is bringing those marbles back to life.
Female: Instead of showing us the ancient
Athenians involved in some kind of heroic battle,
we see them at a moment of leisure
appreciating the arts.
Everyone wants to be the heir
to ancient Greece and ancient Rome,
and the Victorian empire was no different.
Male: It's naturalism, it's realism
is so high pitched that it is absolutely believable,
and yet it is in so many ways much more
a reflection of the 19th century
than it is of the 5th century B.C.
(jazzy music)