The Long Shadow Treasures of Ancient Greece

The art of the Ancient Greeks has dazzled the world.

With their mastery of technique and their fascination with the

human form, they reached new heights of beauty and sophistication.

But the story of Ancient Greek art didn't die with the Ancient Greeks.

Their legacy has shaped the art and culture,

the history and politics of the Western world.

But I believe that the influence of Greek art can be summed up

in the story of just a handful of masterpieces.

And in this programme, I will be travelling across Europe to

reveal the extraordinary afterlives of five key works of art.

The Aphrodite of Knidos,

the first naked woman in Western art and the mother of a million nudes.

The Laocoon, a dramatic study in suffering that inspired

Michelangelo and helped shape the Renaissance.

The Hamilton vases,

whose discovery created a new style for domestic design in Britain.

The bronze horses of St Mark's in Venice,

which became pawns in an imperial game.

And the naked discus thrower, the Discobolus,

bought by Adolf Hitler,

paraded as an emblem of Aryan supremacy.

Together they tell a fascinating story,

how succeeding generations rediscovered and reinterpreted

Greek art for themselves,

finding in it inspiration for their own ambitions.

And how it continued to shape Western civilisation

long after Ancient Greece was no more than a memory.

Early in the second century AD, the Emperor Hadrian built himself

a pleasure palace at Tivoli, outside Rome.

This ambitious Roman wanted his palace to be

the epicentre of sophistication in his empire.

He looked to his greatest predecessors,

the Ancient Greeks, for inspiration.

And he filled this vast site with hundreds of copies

of Greek masterpieces.

One work in particular was more infamous than any other.

When it was created in the fourth century BC, it sparked a sensation

because it was so provocative and also ground-breaking.

It marked a real sea change in the history of art,

inspiring some 60 scandalous direct copies,

as well as countless titillating variations.

It was Western art's first full-sized female nude.

She is known as the Aphrodite of Knidos.

She was created by the great sculptor Praxiteles

for the Greek island of Knidos in the fourth century BC.

Aphrodite appears startled,

as though she has been surprised before or after bathing.

With her left hand, she is dropping her robe onto a water jar

or perhaps grabbing it to cover herself up.

The ambiguity is deliberate.

With her other hand, she would have been attempting at least to

shield and protect her modesty.

That gesture is a real coup, it is

a watershed moment in art history

because this goddess isn't static and timeless,

idealised or otherworldly but instead,

caught unawares in a particular moment

as though we have just chanced upon a bashful girlfriend.

So, this sculpture isn't just irreverent, it is also sexy,

and it has its own particular narrative that involves us,

the viewer, by casting us provocatively as the voyeur.

With this nude, Praxiteles created a highly sexualised

template of female beauty.

Most cities in Ancient Greece, women were fairly covered up,

they did wear veils out in public and they certainly didn't

run around topless or without any clothes at all.

However, I think

there's something about Praxiteles' statue that went

way beyond just being a nude, it wasn't a matter of a woman who just

had no clothes on or a goddess who just had no clothes on.

It was a woman that you could really fantasise about

because she is actually in the act of taking something off

or putting something on and you don't know quite what she's doing.

The position of this modern,

horribly weather-beaten copy at Tivoli preserves

one of the original statue's most innovative aspects, its setting.

The Aphrodite was displayed right in the middle of a special

circular temple.

It seems that Hadrian wanted to recreate the whole enclosure

for the notorious cult statue back on Knidos.

And that setting was a real innovation at the time,

because it invited you to consider the sculpture in the round

and admire the goddess's sensuous curves from every angle.

Aphrodite's allure made her the must-see statue

of the ancient world.

The Roman author Lucian recorded a particularly scandalous

event in her history.

One night,

an amorous young man snuck in to Aphrodite's holy temple and hid.

The crowds dispersed, finally he was alone with her.

Lucian goes on to describe the aftermath of what

he calls this "unspeakable night of bravado".

"Traces of the clinches of lust were spotted when daylight returned.

"The goddess had the stain to prove the traumas

"that she had been through."

It is a remarkably salacious and gossipy little story

but, at the very least, it suggests that Praxiteles' sexy statue

was so intoxicating she could incite actual palpable desire

within her infatuated young beholders.

The famous statue stimulated dozens

of variations on the theme.

The Knidian Aphrodite proved enormously influential.

Where Praxiteles had dared to tread, other sculptors quickly followed,

each trying to outdo the master in terms of sexiness and provocation.

This sculpture of another bathing goddess,

Aphrodite, crouching by a water jar, is a very good example.

It takes the principal elements of the Knidian Aphrodite,

the sense of surprise, the storytelling setting,

the implication of the viewer as a Peeping Tom and of course,

lots of voluptuous naked flesh.

And then, amps them up with several titillating flourishes.

So this figure appears much more alarmed

and defensive than her predecessor.

That heightens the general sense of trespass

and so ups the erotic charge.

Aphrodite spawned a multitude

of paintings and sculptures of the naked female body.

This was the beginning of a staple of great Western art.

The ideal form of the female that we were given from antiquity

is a sexualised one.

It makes it difficult for us to conceive of female beauty,

or female excellence, divorced from erotic appeal.

However, the Ancient Greeks believed in excellence

in whatever was your department.

So men's department of excellence

had to do with athletics and fighting.

The idealised man in art gets to do athletics or wave spears.

Women's department of excellence had to do with beauty.

So, you see women being naked and very, very beautiful.

That is just about being an excellent female.

We may find this sexist, we may find this disturbing,

but we're misunderstanding the Ancient Greek cult of excellence

in the aesthetic sphere.

CHORAL SINGING

By commissioning copies of the Aphrodite of Knidos,

as well as other Greek masterpieces,

Hadrian bought himself his very own slice of Greek sophistication.

And in doing so, he cemented the idea of Ancient Greek art

as a touchstone of excellence.

It's a tradition that would live on for a further 2,000 years.

It's the Romans we have to thank for our knowledge of Greek art.

Ancient Greece may have succumbed to the armies of Rome,

but her art left the rough-and-ready Romans awestruck.

As the Roman poet Horace put it,

"The conquered Greeks in turn conquered their savage victor."

Ancient Roman collectors energetically plundered and copied

Greek masterpieces.

But their empire, too, would crumble

and Rome would become a graveyard of Greek genius...

..until the city was rebuilt for a new age of wealthy patrons

and ambitious popes.

In January, 1506, one messenger from the Greek world

made a dramatic reappearance.

It was a chilly winter's day more than five centuries ago

when workmen scrabbling around here on the Esquiline Hill in Rome

chanced upon a piece of white marble poking out of the soil.

As they dug deeper, excavating layer by layer,

they uncovered something magnificent.

And although the marble was still partially covered with dirt,

one of them realised that this was a spectacular work of art.

A breathtaking masterpiece from antiquity

known as the Laocoon.

This was a sculpture of high drama,

action, tragedy and pathos.

The Trojan priest and his two sons

are under attack from a pair of vicious gigantic sea serpents,

whose thick, writhing coils grip and constrict

the agonised forms of their bodies.

And in the process, accelerate our eyes all around the composition,

as we follow those snaking, lightning-quick lines.

And there's tremendous chutzpah, even in attempting

to represent slippery, constantly mobile serpents

in a material as stiff and unyielding as stone.

The whole sculpture then was a bravura, elaborate showpiece.

It allowed its maker to demonstrate his skill

at mastering such a complex tangle of thrusting limbs.

And the representation of the muscles under this immense

stress and strain, is breathtaking.

As are the woeful expressions of anguish,

frozen for ever.

As an image of intense suffering,

the Laocoon has never been surpassed.

BELLS CHIME

The Laocoon fuelled a passion for the ancient world

that spread throughout 16th century Rome.

The Papal city was being remodelled in the classical style.

Learning of the Laocoon's discovery, Pope Julius II

sent his favourite artist, Michelangelo,

to witness its excavation.

The sculpture was brought here to the Papal Palace.

The Laocoon was to be the centrepiece of Julius'

growing collection of classical art.

And the art of Christendom would be transformed.

The Church, and the artists it employed,

were at the forefront of the most powerful cultural

revolution in history - the Renaissance.

The Renaissance saw Greek art rediscovered, celebrated,

and reborn for a new generation.

The Laocoon was at the heart of that rediscovery.

It had an immense impact on artists.

Why?

Because the idea of depicting,

erm, an extreme expression,

which completely distorts all the features and, in fact,

somehow or other feeds itself into the wild hair

could be immediately read as a certain type of emotion -

fear, anxiety, terror, horror -

all these little distinctions between all these things.

All that goes back to the Laocoon.

I can't think of this type of expression existing

really very much in European painting before that date.

It represented an ideal in itself,

people were interested in imitating it,

interested in copying it and so on,

but the really important influence of Laocoon is in the fact it set

a kind of standard,

it was something you wanted to try and do if you were a great artist.

It was Michelangelo who had been present at the rebirth

of the statue who was most inspired by Laocoon's tragic beauty.

Just imagine how thrilled Michelangelo must have felt

when he saw the Laocoon emerging from the ground.

Admiring its grandeur, its pathos,

its vigorous expression,

he began sketching the sculpture immediately,

he just couldn't help himself.

And in that moment of discovery,

the torch of antiquity was being passed to the modern world.

Renaissance artists throughout Europe

strove to achieve a new sense of humanity in their work.

For Michelangelo, the image of the naked body,

long excluded from Christian art, fired his imagination.

It wasn't just the grandeur of ancient statues that appealed

to Michelangelo,

he also became obsessed with the animation,

the plasticity of their anatomy,

and by studying the agitated plains

and surfaces of Laocoon's straining chest,

he could unleash in his own work a forceful new sense of energy

and expression.

The work Michelangelo went on to create

was imbued with profound emotion...

Celebrating the human form in all its glory.

His paintings and sculptures paid homage to the Greeks and to God

in equal measure.

And sculptures like his Rebellious Slave

owe much to Laocoon's writhing form.

The curious thing about art history is that sometimes the afterlife

of a work of art can be as important as the moment of its creation.

When an artist with Michelangelo's reputation

expressed admiration for the sculptures unearthed in Rome,

then the fame of those statues was actually enhanced.

His enthusiasm helped to shape European culture.

It was an overwhelming factor

in the consecration of Greek sculpture as the pinnacle of art.

Two centuries after the Renaissance,

it was the turn of British aristocrats and gentlemen

to fall under the spell of Ancient Greece.

On the Grand Tour,

they travelled to see these legendary works for themselves.

When they returned to Britain,

their country retreats were overhauled in the classical style.

The antique became the height of 18th-century fashion.

But one discovery would take Greek art in a surprising new direction.

It was made by the diplomat, antiquarian and doyen of taste,

Sir William Hamilton.

From ancient classical burial sites, he had unearthed an enormous

horde of Greek vases and he sold them to the British Museum.

The finest vase in Hamilton's collection was this.

It's an imposing water jar by the fifth-century-BC potter, Meidias.

It's decorated with this highly complex composition,

divided into two different scenes.

The top half of the vase depicts a violent scene from Greek mythology.

The twins, Castor and Pollux, assault the daughters of Leukippos.

At the bottom, Heracles undergoes his final trial,

stealing the famous golden apples,

fiercely guarded by the Hesperides nymphs.

But thanks to the really delicate draughtsmanship,

the general mood isn't tumultuous, or frenzied,

but rather refined and sophisticated.

Everything here feels peaceful, almost courtly.

The daughters look more like models participating in a fashion parade

while Heracles, sitting on his lion skin

and holding his hefty club,

he's more of a pretty boy in this scene

that his usual bearded, burly self.

While those guardian nymphs, well,

they seem more than willing to let their golden apples go.

Hamilton loved the vase so much that he had it by his side

when he sat for the great portrait painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds.

But it was a very different 18th-century figure who would make

the Hamilton vases truly famous.

A Stoke potter called Josiah Wedgwood.

Wedgwood was a hugely successful businessman.

He'd made his fortune creating imitation porcelain tea sets

for Britain's new self-made men.

Not super-rich, though far from poor,

the middling sort of merchants and administrators

who wanted all the trappings of the upper classes,

at a fraction of the price.

From that point on,

Wedgwood dedicated his every waking moment to creating

a range of wares inspired by Ancient Greece,

calling himself Vase-Maker General to the Universe.

One object above all would give Wedgwood the inspiration he needed...

..the catalogue of Hamilton's discoveries, compiled in 1766.

What was the point for someone like Hamilton to produce these

clearly quite lavish books?

It was noblesse oblige. As a travelling aristocrat,

as a diplomat, he was expected to bring back antiquities

and other artworks that would improve the arts and manufacturers

at home and raise the level of taste in his native England.

It doesn't ostensibly look like, you know...

It's not a cheap Penguin paperback?

It's certainly not that

and this book cost the equivalent of millions for Hamilton to produce.

I mean, it nearly broke him because of its ambition.

It was for connoisseurs who liked to look at such things

but also for manufacturers who liked to make such things.

Here is the best vase as it was thought to be then in

Sir William's collection, the Volute-krater.

Here we see the vase as a diagram.

-And these are actually explicit measurements?

-Oh, yes, exactly.

So, very explicitly this book is aimed at people who might

-want to reproduce this vase?

-Exactly so.

This seems such a lavish thing.

It's not the kind of thing I can imagine being used in a studio.

You wouldn't want to get it dirty. It looks like a collectors' item

in its own sense but yet people like Wedgwood they would have used this?

Yes, you mentioned Wedgwood. Wedgwood is an interesting protege

for Hamilton because he fulfils Hamilton's dream

of transforming the arts at home.

And the rising middle classes had new money with which to buy

new things and Wedgwood served that community of bourgeois collecting

and decorating of the home.

So, he almost... He raided this.

-It became a pattern book for him?

-Yes, exactly.

That's a very good way of describing it.

He quoted the figures from different vessels and made new versions

and it was, for him, a creative exercise.

Just as Hamilton enjoyed seeing these ancient vases laid down on paper,

he enjoyed seeing those paper versions that laid down on ceramic.

Distilled within these pages is the essence of Greek art

and culture, but for manufacturers like Wedgwood,

this was a sort of philosopher's stone that would enable him

to transform the clay of Stoke into something really beautiful.

Back in Stoke, Wedgwood set about turning Hamilton's designs

into something that could be reproduced and sold at a profit.

Wedgwood was a brilliant chemist and craftsmen

and at his factory in Stoke he set to work tirelessly

experimenting with English clay, in search of a more affordable

but still beautiful alternative to the ancient originals

that could also be mass produced.

This vase was handmade by Wedgwood himself,

as a star example of a new range of pottery.

He used traditional shapes and colours

and even copied the figure of Heracles from the Meidias vase.

Unfortunately, it didn't sell.

Wedgwood soon realised why.

Increasingly women were taking care of interior decor

and they wanted something a little more fun.

Wedgwood looked to one of the days leading architects, Robert Adam.

He too had come under the spell of the Ancient Greek style.

His houses were classical, elegant, refined.

And he'd pioneered a feminine

and delicate colour scheme for his interiors.

Wedgwood went back to the drawing board.

For years he experimented with clays, pigments and moulds

until finally he struck upon the perfect concoction.

What he came up with was revolutionary.

This is it, it's known as Jasper

and the idea was that Wedgwood would marry the pale

backgrounds of Adam with some of the designs

that he'd encountered in the folio of Hamilton.

But Wedgwood decided to take his vases one step further

because rather than simply replicating Greek figures

in 2D on the surface of the vase,

he actually wanted to attach them,

modelled in three dimensions like cameos onto the sides.

And he hired some of the great neoclassical sculptors

of the day, people like John Flaxman, to do the modelling.

So, Wedgwood's new range was everything that the discerning

18th-century Greek-obsessed shopper could hope for.

A Stoke potter and an English gent had brought Ancient Greek art

into the shops, homes and minds of 18th-century Britain...

..and transformed Greek art from a cultivated hobby

into a modern commodity.

Do we know much about the relationship between Hamilton

-and Wedgwood?

-It was largely conducted through letters.

But the letters are revealing of a kindness between them, an intimacy.

Because they were people of fellow feeling.

In the 18th century, manufacturers were not just manufacturers,

they were also moral thinkers.

This was the world of ideas, the world of the Enlightenment,

the world of intellectual humanism.

And these people would be sensitive to the idea

of improvements through education.

How much do you think that Hamilton and Wedgwood should be credited

with democratising the art of Ancient Greece?

They had, as far as I understand it,

very much at the fore of their minds a desire to reach a wide audience.

Indeed, so, from... The key to the richest of the Birmingham

New Industrialists, everybody would have a Wedgwood vase

in his household.

And it would serve the same purpose for one and all,

it would be, in a sense, a democratising object.

Wedgwood's innovations gave Greek life an unexpected afterlife.

Thanks to him, it was no longer the preserve of connoisseurs

and the elite. And by the end of the 18th century,

his Greek-inspired pottery could be found in ordinary homes

up and down the country and across the British Empire,

as far afield as America and the West Indies.

The Greek style was now recognisable the world over

as a symbol of elegance and taste.

Over the centuries, people had found cultural cachet,

creative inspiration and commercial profit in the art of Ancient Greece.

But at the start of the 19th century,

a new obsession gripped Europe - the quest for Empire.

And the art of Ancient Greece found itself playing

a very different role.

One summer's day, in late July 1798,

an extraordinary event took place here on the Champs de Mars in Paris.

Thousands of citizens thronged this military parade ground

in anticipation of something spectacular.

A triumphal procession worthy of the emperors of Ancient Rome.

As light glinted on the swords of the cavalry

and a marching band struck up,

this great procession wound its way into view, with caged lions,

four camels, a bear,

and lots of wagons bearing mysterious large packing cases.

But where the Romans had shown off unfortunate foreign captives,

these returning soldiers were bringing very different

victory spoils.

Art looted from the great collections of Europe

by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon had waged a savage campaign.

He conquered territory throughout Europe.

And he had sent his so-called representatives of the people

to bring back as much cultural booty as they could.

Napoleon wanted the people of Paris

to admire their new cultural treasures.

Labels and slogans on the sides of the cases

proclaimed their prestigious contents, boxed-up masterpieces

plundered from Rome, including the world-famous Laocoon.

But the booty that Napoleon prized above all was left

deliberately unpacked to dazzle the crowd.

Four monumental gilded horses.

They had travelled by road, and by water, all the way from Venice.

Napoleon's prized stallions are more commonly known

as the Horses of St Mark's Basilica.

From the moment that his armies arrived here,

Napoleon was determined to possess them.

Ignoring the heartfelt protests of all of the Venetians

massed in St Mark's Square, the French soldiers ripped down

those gilded horses from their parapet.

Full-sized copies now adorn the facade of the basilica.

They are no more Venetian than they are French.

Most likely they are Ancient Greek.

And Napoleon wasn't the first to covet them.

Ever since they were created, they have proved particularly

bewitching for powerful and ambitious men.

The magnificent originals were returned to St Mark's

and they are now kept indoors to protect them from the elements.

These four proud stallions are the only full team of horses

to have survived from antiquity.

A fact that lends them distinction enough.

And they are all powerful horses in their prime.

The glamorous A-Listers of the equine world, if you like.

These well-muscled, manicured specimens with close-cropped manes

and beautifully perky, feathery textured ears.

And they boast all of these lovely details.

From the veins on their muzzles and also on the legs to these

intricate folds around their eyes and the creases at their necks.

And then these crest-like tufts of hair in the centre of their heads.

And they all have this wonderful sense of flickering,

irrepressible animal instinct.

Twitching, champing at the bit,

but at the same time, we can see that they are wearing bridles

as well as these big collars around their necks.

So we know that their rampant spirits are being kept in check.

And that's the point about this sculpture.

As a group, it's a piece of flattery,

flattering whoever was in command, literally holding the reins.

Able to wield the sort of power usually reserved for kings or gods.

Napoleon wasn't the first conqueror who longed to possess these horses.

They were adored by the Emperor Constantine in Constantinople,

copied by succeeding generations,

and finally brought here to Venice during the Fourth Crusade.

Over the centuries, the horses have genuinely become icons of power.

Plundered time and time again.

So, by looting them, Napoleon wanted to make something very plain -

that he belonged in the front rank of history's greatest men.

Napoleon, like many people before him, wanted to see himself

as either Alexander the Great or above all, Julius Caesar.

Those were the great classical models of the military heroes.

To do that, you have to have a strong engagement

with classical culture.

Possessing classical culture was the sign of class. Classics - class.

it was the sign of being authoritative and in power.

We want our cities to look like Roman and Greek cities,

we want to decorate our houses with Greek and Roman art,

it becomes the sign of being the big man.

And for Napoleon, that was important.

Napoleon knew just where he wanted his treasures.

All of them were brought here, to the old royal palace

at the heart of the French capital, the Louvre.

Plunder from around the world filled with the palace with treasures

of every conceivable material and form.

And the palace got a new name.

The Musee du Napoleon.

Although much of Napoleon's collection has now been returned,

the Louvre is still one of the greatest repositories

of Greek art anywhere in the world.

As for the horses,

they were displayed in the most exalted position of all.

At the heart of the palace complex.

They have since been replaced with replicas,

but the effect is unchanged.

What better way to proclaim his almighty power

than by erecting a classical arch in the manner of the ancient emperors,

surmounted by one of the most powerful works of art in history?

But deep in the vaults of the Louvre,

there's an object that tells a rather different story.

This statue of Napoleon as an emperor was created

to ride behind the horses.

But Napoleon found it too much.

He demanded the statue be banished from sight.

It seems that even Napoleon's egoism had its limits.

By the 19th century, masterpieces like these had come to be seen

as the wellspring of European civilisation.

A fountain from which artists, aesthetes and statesmen might drink.

But in the 20th century,

the story of Greek art would take its darkest turn.

The setting was the German city of Munich.

The 20th of April, 1938, was a very special day here in Munich.

It was Adolf Hitler's birthday.

Five years after taking power,

things were going well for the Fuhrer

and he decided to celebrate turning 49

with a screening of his favourite film.

TRIUMPHAL MUSIC PLAYS

The film was Olympia,

directed by Hitler's star film-maker Leni Riefenstahl.

And it was a celebration of the recent Olympic Games

held in Germany, which Hitler had used as an occasion to promote

his vision of a strong, healthy, not to say aggressive new nation.

The film opened with a remarkable sequence.

A montage of Ancient Greek sculpture.

The star of the show was a sculpture known as the Discobolus,

the discus thrower,

created in the fifth century BC by the sculptor Myron.

Riefenstahl showed this statue morphing into a real-life

German athlete.

This image, of the perfect classical body reborn,

utterly entranced the Fuhrer.

Scarcely a month after Hitler's birthday screening of Olympia,

the statue itself arrived in Munich,

bought by the Nazis for a record price of 5 million lire.

A cast of the statue can still be found

at the former Nazi headquarters in Munich.

To really understand Myron's discus thrower,

you have to put it in context and compare it with the sort

of statues that were common just a generation or two earlier.

For a century or more,

Greek artists had created thousands of standing nude men.

They had a certain presence.

But they were also fairly stiff and formal and distinctly un-lifelike.

And then, in the fifth century BC,

with his bronze Discobolus, Myron blew all of that apart.

Suddenly, we find this naturalistic athlete mid-flow,

and that spiralling composition is so dynamic,

so fluid, a vortex of compressed, pent-up, soon-to-be-released energy.

Myron wanted here to advertise an ephemeral moment,

an instant that he'd ripped from reality and yet the result

was so satisfying and harmonious

that it felt timeless, all the same.

Munich was the perfect new home for this timeless masterpiece.

Much of the city, its town squares and grand public architecture,

had been remodelled more than a century earlier by Hitler's hero,

Ludwig of Bavaria, as a new Athens.

At its heart was a temple to Greek art called the Glyptothek.

But as the politics of Germany took a dark turn,

so, too, did the symbolism of these masterpieces.

Hitler insisted that the Germans were descended

from the Ancient Greeks.

A pure, Aryan race to whom the Germans could look for inspiration

and he hoped that Greek art could inspire his countrymen to glory.

But to Hitler, Greek art wasn't just about evoking a noble past.

He wanted it to inform Germany's future.

With great pomp and ceremony, on the 9th of July 1938,

he presented the Discobolus as a gift to the German people.

Hitler gave a speech that day,

extolling the "miraculous power and vision", as he put it,

of Myron's discus thrower.

"May none of you fail to visit the Glyptothek,"

he told the crowds, "for there you will see how splendid man used to be

"in the beauty of his body.

"And you will realise that we can speak of progress only when

"we have not only attained such beauty but surpassed it."

Hundreds of miles, and thousands of years from home,

Myron's great discus thrower became the ultimate symbol

of Hitler's evil race politics.

How much can we see any sort of links

between the classical tradition

and the ideology of the Nazis?

I think without the classical tradition,

the Nazi visual ideology would have been rather different.

Well, let's talk about the Discobolus specifically.

What do you think Hitler really admired about this sculpture?

As all hunters...

They...hunted for a priceless object.

And as the object could not argue against it,

the statue cannot say no.

Yeah?

They could use it for their perverse ideologies.

This is the crux of the story about the Discobolus and the Nazis.

How did they use this statue for these perverse ideologies?

The perfect Arian body.

The athletic habitus.

The beautiful, you see...

ideal, white male.

And if you like, a kind of...

not very suitable image to me of the Herrenrasse

the "race of masters",

that is what the Nazis called themselves and the Germans.

"Herren" means simply "master".

Herrenrasse, to put it very bluntly.

So, they weren't interested in understanding the history

-of Ancient Greece, particularly, setting the art in context?

-No. No.

They were very much interested to set them in their own context.

And for example, when they talked about the Greek Olympic Games,

they definitely understood something completely different

as we understood today when we talk about Greek Olympic Games.

-Just to give you one example.

-What did they understand?

I think they compared it very much to their own understanding

of Olympic Games, showing the world that Germany is on top.

The Discobolus became the unwitting pin-up boy of Nazi supremacist.

And Hitler encouraged artists of the day to use the statue's optimism

and life force to help him in his battle against

what he called "degenerate art".

This so-called degenerate art is today accepted as

the most pioneering artistic movement of the 20th century.

Modernism.

The great modernists of the early 20th century,

they wanted to turn away from the sort of beauty which had been

perfected by the Ancient Greeks.

Instead of naturalism, they wanted to explore abstract

or expressionistic images evoking thoughts and feelings.

But for Hitler, their revolutionary art was inferior,

it was Jewish and, he said, corrupted

with rootless intellectualism.

He ridiculed it, before setting out systematically to destroy it.

In its place, he commissioned state-sponsored Greek style art.

Most has now been destroyed, but a few statues remain,

abandoned in the forest on the outskirts of Munich.

When Hitler unveiled the Discobolus,

he compared Myron to the state-sponsored sculptor,

Josef Thorak, who created these two monumental reliefs.

And in a sense, the comparison wasn't entirely ridiculous

because like his Greek predecessors,

Thorak was interested in idealising the human body.

But unlike the sculptors of classical Greece,

he unleashed a race of super men who are neither dazzlingly beautiful

nor graceful, but instead surprisingly awkward, blocky,

overmuscled and squat.

Semi obscured by moss,

and abandoned out here in the elements,

these reliefs offer a potent, melancholic reminder

of the way that Greek art and its tradition

became corrupted under the Nazis.

2,000 years after the fall of Ancient Greece,

its great art had suffered the ultimate indignity.

Wedded to a fascist ideology,

pitted against artistic progress

and reduced to a malignant caricature.

After the war, the Discobolus was returned to Italy.

The state-sponsored art of the Third Reich was torn down and disowned.

For some, Greek art seemed irredeemably tainted.

Ancient Greek art seemed emblematic of an outdated, imperial world view.

It was the go-to official style of the Establishment

and, consequently, irrelevant for younger artists.

And as the century wore on,

witnessing one calamity after another,

the idealising art of the Ancient Greeks

felt completely inappropriate for a barbarous and chaotic New Age.

Those in the vanguard of the modernist revolution

wanted a new kind of art.

All over Europe, the great collections of casts

that had inspired so many were hidden away or pulverised.

Yet the taste of the public has proved less volatile.

The beauty and power of Ancient Greek art has never stopped

amazing the millions who throng the great museums of Europe.

Struck time and again by its enduring perfection.

For centuries,

the art of Ancient Greece has been held up as a kind of gold standard.

An ideal against which the Western world has understood itself...

..revealing who we are...

..and where we come from.