(NARRATOR) Images dominate our lives,
They tell us how to behave,
- What to think, - (BLAIR) Yes, Prime Minister.
Even how to feel,
They mould and define us,
But why do these images,
the pictures, symbols and the art we see around us every day,
have such a powerful hold on us?
The answer lies not here in our time
but thousands of years ago.
Because when our ancient ancestors first created
the images that made sense of their world,
they produced a visual legacy which has helped to shape our own.
In this series we'll be travelling around the globe,
discovering the world's most stunning treasures,
We'll see how the struggles of early artists
led to the triumphs of the world's great civilisations.
Our journey will take us through a hundred thousand years of history,
We'll be witnessing some of the extraordinary ceremonies of the world's oldest artistic cultures.
And we'll reveal how they unlock the deepest secrets of ancient art,
We'll be hearing from the people who made these discoveries,
(DAVID ATTENBOROUGH) I have very vivid memories of looking up
and seeing this huge barramundi fish on the ceiling.
It was unforgettable,
(SPIVEY) And we'll be using science to uncover
how thousands of years ago the human mind drove us to create astonishing images,
You'll never look at our world the same way again,
for this is the epic story of how we humans made art
and how art made us human.
These people are looking at something we all see dozens of times a day,
It inspires us
and manipulates us,
it affects what we think of others
and even what we think of ourselves,
It is the human body,
No other image dominates our lives so completely.
Pictures of the body fill our high streets, our magazines, our television screens.
And then there's the art world.
The human form has obsessed some of the world's greatest artists,
The range of bodies they've created is breathtaking,
And yet there's something that all these images have in common,
Whatever their use
and wherever they appear,
the world's most popular and influential images of the human body
share this one thing,
Have you noticed that none of these images resembles a real human being?
I mean, do you Know anyone who actually looKs liKe that?
Just imagine if human bodies
were like the images we created of them,
Imagine if we walked around looking like this,
The fact is, people rarely create images of the body that are realistic,
What's going on?
Why is our world so dominated by images of the body that are unrealistic?
If we can solve this mystery,
we can reveal something not just about our bodies but about ourselves,
something really fundamental about us as human beings.
To do it, we need to start not here in the modern world
but bacK in time,
when our ancient ancestors began creating the very first images of the human body.
It's a journey that starts here in the north east of Austria,
where the great river Danube winds its way through the Wachau Valley,
Today, this land is cultivated by farmers and wine growers,
But there was a time many thousands of years ago
when the people who lived in this valley weren't settled farmers
but hunter-gatherers foraging for what food they could find.
The same was true all over Europe.
What's remarkable about the people who passed through this valley
is something that they left behind them.
Nomadic people lived and hunted in small groups and rarely stayed in one place long,
so knowing where to look for evidence of their lives has always been hard,
But at the start of the last century, excavation began near the little village of Willendorf,
It was led by three Austrian archaeologists,
who knew they could make their reputations with an important find,
They didn't know the half of it,
What was found was more startling than anyone could have imagined.
It happened on 7th August 1908.
The three archaeologists weren't on their site here above the village.
They'd retired to a nearby tavern to sample some of the local vintage.
It was one of their workmen who made the discovery.
He pulled from the mud the figure of a woman, completely intact.
It was a statue and it was 25,000 years old.
The three archaeologists soon started squabbling
over who would get the credit for the find.
Theirs was a feud that was never really settled,
but they did decide one thing, a name.
They called her the Venus of Willendorf.
Now, if you're a little surprised that nomadic people lugged this thing around with them,
then don't worry, this isn't the real statue,
This is.
Just four inches high,
carved of limestone
and quite dinky enough to be carried from place to place by the nomad who created her.
The term ''Venus'' could be applied to just about any female nude from the past,
but there's something particularly special about this little lady.
She's special, in fact, in a way that those three archaeologists could never have predicted.
She's certainly far too grand to live in Willendorf.
That's why she stays here,
in the Natural History Museum in Vienna.
Despite a vast collection of artefacts from around the world,
this Venus is the museum's most prized possession,
It's not every day you get to carry a piece of limestone worth 60 million dollars,
She's an outstanding relic of our ancient past,
but she's also more than that,
This lady is our first clue
as to why the modern world is so dominated by unrealistic images of the body,
The Venus is clearly unrealistic,
Her breasts, stomach, hips and thighs are grotesquely big,
Even her sexual organs are extremely pronounced,
She may have been a symbol of fertility or motherhood,
but that doesn't explain why her arms are almost nonexistent,
why her face isn't shown at all,
She was made with great care and skill,
She doesn't look like this by accident,
This is all deliberate,
For some reason, the people who once hunted and lived in these hills
felt compelled to exaggerate some parts of her body and ignore others completely,
What's more, they were not alone,
It seems that this compulsion continued for many thousands of years,
Let me show you what I mean,
Imagine that this line of trees represents the entire history of us as a species,
modern human beings.
We've been around for something like 150,000 years.
Well, it wasn't till around here,
that's about 80,000 years ago,
that we began to make anything that you would ever call art.
What's more, it wasn't until we got here,
that's about 30,000 years ago,
just before our friend the Venus of Willendorf,
that we started to make statues and images of the human body.
What's really remarkable about this
is that over the next 20,000 years
whenever one person made an image of another
it showed the same exaggerated features
and they cropped up in all sorts of places.
From the Russian steppes to southern Europe,
wherever people made statues of the body,
they exaggerated the same key features and utterly ignored others,
just as they had with the Venus of Willendorf,
But why? What drove early humans to do this?
Why were they more stimulated by images like this?
It's a question that's baffled experts for years,
But now one man believes he's found the answer,
He is not an archaeologist or even an expert in art,
He's a brain scientist,
(SCIENTIST) I think it's fair to say that until about ten years ago I had absolutely no interest in art,
I started asking myself, as a neuroscientist,
''Why are these images so beautiful?''
This raises the question ''What is art? Why is art beautiful? How does it worK?''
''What's going on in the brain of the viewer when you looK at a great work of art?''
(SPIVEY) Professor Ramachandran wondered
if there was something about the brains of ancient humans
that explained why the Venus is the shape she is,
When you look at the Venus figurine,
what strikes you immediately is that certain features are not emphasised,
they are played down or ignored,
such as the face and the arms,
whereas other features such as the breasts and the stomach are grotesquely exaggerated.
The question is, why did the artist do this?
What was going on in the artist's brain when he created this image?
Well, obviously, you can't go back in time and study his brain,
but I realised
that one clue might come from research that was done on seagulls nearly 50 years ago at Oxford.
(SPIVEY) Yes, you heard him,
He did say seagulls,
Professor Ramachandran began to wonder
if a herring-gull colony, like this one on the coast of Spain, could provide an answer.
To be honest with you, I find it hard to believe how seagulls -
seagulls! - can explain the shape of the Venus of Willendorf.
Apparently, it's to do with the behaviour of the gull chicKs.
Professor Ramachandran became interested in scientific research into the chicks of herring-gulls,
As soon as they hatch, they tap the beak of their mother to ask for food
and, sure enough, she obliges,
The researchers discovered the chicks do this not because they recognise their mother
but because they're stimulated by the sight of the red stripe on her beak
and they proved it with a beautifully simple test,
What the scientists did was show the chicks not their mother's beak
but a stick with a red stripe on it.
Let's see what happens.
The chicks are happily tapping away.
It's awfully sweet.
The brain of a gull chick is clearly stimulated by the sight of a red stripe,
Nothing, it seems, gets it more excited or so it was thought,
What the scientists did next was to show the chicks a stick with three red stripes on.
Doesn't look much liKe a beak,
but it was their reaction to this that so intrigued Professor Ramachandran.
Can't get enough of it. Just looK at that.
The chicks are tapping not only more often
but more enthusiastically than they did with the stick that only had one stripe on it.
Even when I offer them a choice, the chicKs prefer three red stripes to the single one.
It even ignores the single stripe,
But exactly how does all this relate to the shape of the Venus of Willendorf?
When the chick looks at this elongated object with three red stripes,
it responds even more to this strange object than it does to a natural beak.
So, what I'd like to argue is
that if seagulls had an art gallery
they would take this long thin stick with the three red stripes, hang it on the wall,
pay millions of dollars to purchase it,
worship it, call it a Picasso.
This would be a great work of art but they wouldn't understand why.
They would say, ''The damn thing doesn't resemble anything.
''Why am I mesmerised by it?''
I think there's an analogy here in that what's going on in the brains of our ancestors,
the artists who created these Venus figurines,
were producing grossly, almost grotesquely exaggerated versions,
the equivalent for their brain of what the stick with the three red stripes is for the chick's brain.
(SPIVEY) So the brains of the hunter-gatherers who made the Venuses
were preprogrammed to exaggerate what mattered most,
They were living in a harsh ice-age environment,
Features of fertility and fatness would have been highly desirable,
so their brains compelled them to exaggerate these features above others,
But can a primeval instinct really explain
why all human beings create unrealistic images of the body?
This herring-gull theory suggests
that the Venus figure looks the way she does
simply because of how the brain of the person who made her was wired up.
Well, if that was true for the nomads, it should also be true for people who came after them.
Let's find out.
After more than 100,000 years of nomadic hunting and gathering,
life for humans across the globe was about to change,
It began with the weather,
Here in North Africa,
the sort of nomadic lifestyle that created the Venus figurines would soon be impossible,
A major change in climate meant that water became scarce.
Lush vegetation began to die away
and with it disappeared all the wildlife on which the hunters depended.
Forced to settle somewhere where there was water,
nomadic people came from far and wide
and gathered along the banks of one major river.
That river was the Nile,
and the civilisation that flourished there is crucial to our story.
By 5000 BC, Egypt had become a fully settled civilisation,
one of the first on earth,
Because the Nile flooded with precise regularity
Egyptians could build a stable agricultural existence,
This in turn produced an organised system of government and a strict social hierarchy,
But Egyptians were also the first settled humans to use images of the body extensively in their art,
So, what we need to find out is
what happened to the herring-gull instinct of exaggeration in this new civilisation?
Where we are now begins to answer that question.
We're several hundred feet underground in the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses VI,
and I am literally surrounded
by thousands of images of the human body.
This place was carved out of solid rock
and decorated by highly skilled artists
as a home for the Pharaoh in the afterlife,
But, unlike the Venus of Willendorf,
these bodies don't have exaggerated features,
They don't have swollen hips or breasts,
In fact, their arms, legs, head and feet
are all just about the right size,
So, the nomadic way of showing the body appears to be dead and gone,
The primeval instinct to exaggerate
clearly didn't survive in this new modern civilisation,
The herring-gull instinct may have led the nomads to exaggerate their images of the body,
but that's not what's happening here.
These images are driven by something altogether different.
But what is it?
To start with, they're hardly realistic,
Could they provide the next clue in our mystery?
After all, they were produced by an organised society much more like ours,
Could they explain why our world is so filled with unrealistic images of the body?
To find out, we need to discover what's behind these distinctive images,
It seems that rather than exaggerating parts of the body,
Egyptian artists chose to show each part from its clearest angle,
To understand exactly what that means,
let's taKe the body parts one by one.
Suppose they want to maKe a painting or a wall carving of me.
Starting with the chest
they'd want to show that front on, to emphasise its characteristic V shape.
But my face would be seen more clearly in profile,
like so,
and to make the image less complicated
they'd want me to be
two-dimensional.
But it doesn't stop there.
Even though my chest is being shown front on,
my arms can still be put together
if it shows more clearly what they're doing.
Showing the left hand is different from the right hand was just unnecessary.
They preferred to show them palms outwards
and all the fingers are nice uniform length.
What's more, seen from straight on, legs and feet aren't very distinctive
so they'd be shown sideways, too.
Last, but not least, my head,
because however clear my face might be in profile, my eyes would be seen from straight on.
I think we can safely say that this is an unrealistic image of the body,
but could the reason the Egyptians created bodies like this
explain the unrealistic images of today?
To find out, I wanted to know if this was just a style favoured by certain artists
or something more significant,
The answer couldn't have been clearer,
TaKe this image here.
It's got all the aspects you saw me turn into earlier.
Fix that in your mind, OK?
Now come along with me.
That image is found in the oldest part of the great temple of Carnac,
There are many impressive monuments in Egypt,
but this place is truly awesome,
Carnac wasn't built all at once,
It was added to, bit by bit, by successive Pharaohs
and generations of craftsmen,
Walking through these columns you walk through time,
You can get lost in hundreds of years of Egyptian history,
which is why it's the perfect place to see just how Egyptian art changed over time,
The image of the body I just asked you to fix in your head
was carved in about 1900 B,C,
Where I am now was built a full 700 years later.
0ver 50 million Egyptians had lived and died
and in all that period, just look,
the way they depicted the human body hasn't changed a bit.
And that's just what you see here,
But, in fact, the Egyptian style didn't just last 700 years,
it lasted 3,000
and, in all that time, this was the only image of the body that anyone ever saw,
Just think of that happening today,
TaKe, say, one of those Picasso paintings with the arms and legs and eyes all over the place.
Now imagine that was the only image of the human body you ever saw
throughout your life
and then imagine it was the only image of the human body your children saw
and every generation up to the 41st century.
Something powerful had made the Egyptians preserve this style
for an immense amount of time,
But what was it?
The answer to this lies back underground,
Not far from Carnac is the tomb of a priest called Ramose,
Ramose was connected,
His brother was chief artist to the Pharaoh,
so before his death work began on decorating his tomb
with some exquisite paintings and reliefs,
But before it was finished, the Pharaoh died,
his brother lost the job and work ground to a halt,
Bad news for Ramose, Good news for us,
because on one of the unfinished walls
archaeologists found some telltale signs,
clues to why the Egyptian style never changed,
Traced across the surface of the plaster
are the fine red lines of a grid that covers the entire body,
They analysed this grid, recording numerous details,
The figure was 19 squares tall,
the feet were two and a half squares long,
the pupil of the eye was one square off the centre-line,
They then applied this same grid to other images from all over Egypt,
Sure enough, they fitted,
This is why the style remained unchanged for so long,
Egyptian society clearly didn't want it to change,
Their images were driven by a shared obsession with consistency and order,
precisely the cultural values
on which the entire civilisation had been founded,
And once you've seen this obsession in their paintings of the body,
you start to see it in everything they did,
You see it in their buildings,
The three pyramids at Giza
contain enough stone to lay a wall around Spain,
They're massive embodiments of the hierarchy that ran from the Pharaoh downwards,
Yet they were designed with absolute precision,
symbols of the order that had risen from the desert,
And you can also see this obsession with permanence and order in their statues,
Like their buildings, these were made on a simply astonishing scale,
Where nomads had made statues to carry around with them,
the Egyptians weren't planning on going anywhere,
They wanted their images of the body to last forever
and they developed revolutionary quarrying and masonry skills to do just that,
Again, their obsession with order
made these statues just as formal and rigid as their paintings,
The Egyptians created images of the body this way
not because of how their brains were hard-wired
but because of their culture,
(CAR H0RNS)
Perhaps this could explain the images that dominate our modern world,
It could be that they all reflect or represent a particular aspect of our culture,
So, surely there's the answer to our mystery,
culture is King.
The society that we live in, the values that we create for that society,
these are what dictate how we depict the human body.
Well, actually, our story doesn't end there.
(OPERATIC SINGING)
In 1972, an Italian on vacation made a discovery
which at first sight appeared to confirm that culture is indeed king,
That day, 16th August 1972,
is the day that changed my life.
(SPIVEY) On the last day of his summer holiday on the south coast of Italy,
Stefano Mariottini went spearfishing alone,
(MARIOTTINI) I was looking from the surface
when suddenly I,,,I saw a human arm,
The first moment, I thought it was a corpse,
When I went closer, then I recognised that the material was bronze,
(SPIVEY) Returning again and again to the seabed, 30 feet below the surface,
Stefano would gradually clear the sand
to reveal the body of an apparently realistic statue,
(MARIOTTINI) I was astonished, The face was wonderful,
I wanted to continue to remove sand,
I want to never finish,
to see again those details
so...so wonderful, so beautiful.
(SPIVEY) In fact, over the next two hours of exhausting diving and digging,
Stefano went on to uncover not one but two ancient statues,
When brought to the surface they would bring Stefano considerable financial reward,,,
,,and they would also solve our mystery,
They had been created by one of the most influential cultures in history,
They came from ancient Greece,
Greece may seem a little different today,
but 2,500 years ago it had very particular cultural values,
Ancient Greeks were preoccupied with philosophy and mathematics,
They believed in many different gods and goddesses, but there was something else -
something that in their culture was the equivalent of Egypt's fixation with order and precision,
Ancient Greeks were fixated with the body
and they had very firm ideas about what a body should look like,
To the ancient GreeKs, the perfect body was an athletic body.
So men took an obsessive shameless pride in their physiques,
to an extent that would strike us today as somewhat bizarre.
Imagine if men today behaved like they did in ancient Greece,
They'd display their bodies without hesitation or shame,
If you had a fine torso
you flaunted it,
But back then they had a special reason for all this,
They believed their gods took human form
and had beautiful bodies,
So the more impressive you could make your own,
the more like a god you were perceived to be,
It really was the case that if you looked good you were good,
But the belief that gods took human form
affected more than just their vanity,
This cult of the body beautiful
occupied the centre of life throughout the Greek world, from here in Athens
to here, Agrigento, on the coast of modern Sicily.
Right across the Mediterranean, wherever Greeks settled they built temples,
And it was here their belief that gods had human bodies was focused,
Here, they wanted to see images of their gods that were realistic,
Greek worshippers would have come to a temple liKe this not merely to contemplate their faith.
They came expecting to find their gods in residence,
actually to meet them face to face.
In order for that to happen, they needed statues.
But there was a technical problem.
Greek sculptors were mostly confined to things like this,
figurines on a small scale.
As late as 700 B.C.,
figurines were as close to lifelike and life-size as the Greeks could get.
And yet within just a few generations
the Greeks would realise their dream,
Temples like this would come to be filled with wonderful large statues,
And these statues would be so lifelike
that Greek worshippers would believe they actually were the gods in person,
watching them in the temple,
hearing their prayers,
What's even more extraordinary
is this transformation from small figurine to living god
happened in an amazingly short period of time,
In fact, it was the most rapid artistic revolution
in the history of mankind,
What happened?
How was it that after several centuries of effort
Greek sculptors suddenly acquired the necessary skills
to create lifesize, life-like images?
Well, the answer to that lies in a somewhat surprising place.
I'll give you a clue. Shh.
In the St John's College Library at Cambridge University,
there are over 32,000 books,
Buried in the pages of one of them is a small detail
which at first glance seems almost irrelevant,
This is an antique copy of the world's oldest surviving history book
by the great historian Herodotus.
It's in ancient Greek and I was never top of the class for ancient Greek
but I'm gonna give it a go.
The section we're interested in covers Egyptian history,
Here's the passage we're looking for.
Here it talks about an Egyptian called Psammeticus
around the time of the 25th Dynasty.
It's about 660 B.C.
This Psammeticus, we're told, swore to seize control of all of Egypt.
Shortly after foreign soldiers arrived on Egypt's shores.
Psammeticus seized his chance.
He hired these soldiers as mercenaries
and with their help soon won the throne of all Egypt.
Well, good for him.
What matters for us is where these mercenaries came from,
and it tells us here that they came from Ionia and Caria,
what we would Know as part of ancient Greece.
This was enough to spark an artistic revolution,
Up until now, Greece and Egypt had been virtually isolated from each other,
Now they began to trade as never before,
exchanging ideas and know-how,
The outstanding masonry skills the Egyptians had developed for their statues
crossed the Mediterranean,
Now Greek artists could put their tiny figurines behind them
and create statues as tall as a man,
But Egypt's rigid style wasn't good enough for the Greeks,
Their culture still demanded realistic statues,
So they did something that no artists had done before,
They used their eyes,
They studied every detail of the human body,
Bit by bit, they strived to understand exactly how to reproduce it in their art,
Ears started to look like ears, real torsos began to appear,
each artist building on the progress of others,
And this explosive period, within just a few generations,
produced what no civilisation on earth had ever produced before,
This is Kritian Boy
and he's a milestone in the history of art,
He's carved from marble
and yet his skin appears to be taut over muscles,
his thighs look like they're bearing weight,
his back undulates over his spine,
which curves down perfectly in a relaxed stance,
Greek artists had created precisely what their society had urged them to,
a truly realistic human body,
And yet this is the final clue in our story
not because it's realistic
but because of the effect this realism had on the Greeks,
This exquisite statue gives us an absolutely historic moment.
For the very first time man creates an image of himself
that's fully nude and truly lifelike.
So, for the Greeks this was like the pinnacle of artistic achievement.
They'd reached their goal, art as the perfect imitation of life.
Now they could carry on producing gorgeous statues liKe this forever.
But that's just it, they didn't.
Within a generation, the Greeks stopped making realistic statues like this,
But why?
Why, when their culture had made them strive for reality,
did they almost immediately abandon it?
The answer reveals something fundamental about us as human beings,
When it comes to images of the body, we're driven not just by culture
but also by something we thought existed only in the earliest humans,
It's that primeval instinct to exaggerate,
as observed by Professor Ramachandran in the Venus of Willendorf,
The instinct, he argues, is hard-wired into the brains of all humans,
even if in some cultures it was suppressed,
(RAMACHANDRAN) The principle of exaggeration must be something that is hard-wired
in the neural machinery of the visual pathways in the brains of every human being,
When you speak of universals,
you have to realise that what's universal is the propensity to do this,
but this can be overridden by culture.
If you look at Egyptian art,
the pictures of anything are highly rigid, highly schematic
and they lacK the energy and movement and vigour
that you could convey using the principle of exaggeration.
(SPIVEY) Professor Ramachandran is convinced that Greek culture now had the right ingredients
to reawaken this ancient instinct
and it was this that made them reject the realism that they'd created,
(RAMACHANDRAN) The problem with the Kritian Boy is it was too realistic. That makes it boring,
If art's about realism, why do you need art?
They realised that this was boring,
that they had to do interesting things with the image, distort it in specific ways,
not randomly distort it but lawfully distort it,
to exaggerate the brain's aesthetic response to that body.
So the Greeks' dissatisfaction with reality was perfectly natural.
They couldn't know it, but they were preprogrammed to want more.
Like the nomads thousands of years before them,
they were hankering after something more human than human.
The question now was,
how could they adapt a real body into something that would satisfy them,
into statues worthy of their temples?
The race was on, This was the new challenge facing Greek artists,
Merely exaggerating muscles wasn't enough,
They had to discover their equivalent of the red-striped stick,
And in about 450 B,C,
a sculptor and mathematician called Polyclitus
made the breakthrough that would help them achieve just that,
Polyclitus wanted to find a way of showing the physical potential of an athlete,
He wanted a body that was both relaxed
and yet appeared ready to move,
He created a series of theoretical rods
passing through key points of the body,
He also divided the body down the centre
and across the middle,
With these four quarters marked out,
he began to move his figure in specific ways,
He bent one knee
and moved the same foot to ensure that it bore little or none of the body's weight,
He bent one arm
and left the other relaxed,
He rotated the body so the hips and head faced one way and the chest the other,
Now the body was divided into clear quarters,
top and bottom mirrored each other,
One side in motion, the other at rest,
The angles of the body which were once horizontal
now opposed and also complemented each other,
So Polyclitus captured an athlete poised for action...
..but for other artists
it was also the key to understanding how they could at last represent physical perfection,
Everything had been leading to this,
the moment when ancient Greece created something more human than human,
(SOPRANO SINGS)
They are known as the Riace bronzes,
They are what Stefano Mariottini found on the seabed,
Now displayed in Reggio on the southernmost tip of Italy,
they're relatively unknown to the world at large,
And yet I am not alone in believing
that nowhere on earth can you see sculpture
as astounding as this,
I have seen a lot of statues in my time and from all over the world,
but nothing, nothing quite matches these in terms of skill and execution.
I'm not one to gush, but if you pressed me I'd have to come out with it.
That these are absolutely the best statues ever made.
As many modern sculptors are embarrassed to admit,
this quality of craftsmanship, the subtlety of detail,
is impossible to achieve today,
It is genuinely hard to believe that these were made not just before the Italian Renaissance
but 2,000 years before,
Inspired by the rules of Polyclitus,
the arrangement of the limbs, the direction of the head and chest make them seem alive,
At first glance
they appear to be as realistic a representation of the human body as you could hope to find,
But then, when you look again, you realise that there's something not quite right.
Yes, it resembles a human being, very much so,
but, in fact, it's not anatomically possible for a man, however athletic,
to look like this.
Polyclitus did indeed want to divide the sections of the body clearly
but here it's been taken to extremes,
The division between top and bottom
has been exaggerated by a crest of muscle across the waist
that's more defined than it ever could be on a real human,
The legs have been made artificially long to match perfectly the length of the upper body,
To stress the symmetry and separation of the two sides,
there's an implausibly deep groove running up the centre of the chest,
And while the chest muscles are totally relaxed,
the muscles on the back are tense and impossibly well defined,
The central channel of the spine is deeper than you'd ever see on a real human
and to improve the line of their back
these men had no coccyx bone at the base of their spine,
These are unrealistic bodies,
reality's been exaggerated
and that's why they're so overwhelming,
The instinct to do this had been alive in the brains of early humans
and had now been revived,
The first civilisation capable of realism had used exaggeration to go further
and it's that instinct which still dominates our world today,
This is the answer to our mystery.
This is why the bodies in our modern world looK the way they do.
The reality is we humans don't like reality.
The shared biological instinct to prefer carefully exaggerated images
links us inexorably with our ancient ancestors,
and yet what we choose to exaggerate is whether science gets left behind.
That's where the magic comes in,
The ancient Greeks cared about physical perfection,
So did Michelangelo,
He too created unrealistic bodies that were more than human,
As cultural values changed,
what artists chose to exaggerate about the body changed, too.
The Impressionists exaggerated light and colour rather than shape,
to express more than realism ever could,
As modern society became more culturally diverse,
what we exaggerated changed further,
And the instinct is still alive today,
The art of caricature is fuelled by it,
It's what draws us to the extremes of human form,
Catwalk models possess what our minds register as impossible proportions,
Clothing and marketing images do the same,
capture us by exaggerating qualities that we regard as important,
And in the digital age we feed this desire,
exaggerating shapes and removing features that in earlier societies were themselves exaggerated,
In our own cults of the body beautiful
we even do it to ourselves,
spending billions exaggerating those features we regard as attractive,
The world changes
and in time we may, as the Egyptians did, suppress this desire to exaggerate,
but until then, we'll continue what our ancient ancestors began
30,000 years ago..