Just around the corner from here, in 1857,
Britain's biggest ever art exhibition was put on show.
Manchester Cricket Club had obligingly vacated their ground
and in place of the stumps and the nets,
vast halls of iron and glass were erected
to hold more than 16,000 works of art.
Very many of them
were originally crafted or painted or sculpted in Europe
and further afield.
But the vast majority were lent by their now British owners
and collectors.
From queens and dukes to the ordinary Mr Neville of Essex,
who lent his collection of silver rings.
It's true, there was a certain sniffiness
on the part of a few of the metropolitan elite
who wondered if all this really belonged in Manchester,
and shouldn't they be sticking to their cotton spinning?
But it was hard to be sniffy
in the face of such an array of international art.
And the treasures on display were just the tip of the iceberg.
By the mid 19th century,
you didn't have to go to India, Egypt or Italy
to experience the art of the world.
You could see it here in Britain.
Brought by adventurers and collectors -
and let's be honest, a few thieves -
it's had an enormous influence on British culture...
..changed our landscape...
It's shaken up our artistic traditions.
It has even helped shape our idea of what civilisation is.
We now take it for granted
that we can see the civilisations of the world here,
but that raises all kinds of questions.
How did it all get here?
Why was it brought here?
Were we civilising others
or civilising ourselves?
And just as important -
what does it tell us about who we are?
Founded in the sixth century by St Augustine,
sent by the Pope to bring Christianity north
to the Germanic Anglo-Saxons,
and later rebuilt by the invading Normans,
Canterbury Cathedral is a grand emblem
of this island's long and complicated relationship
with the foreign, from the Romans on.
And it's also where you can find a surprising piece of evidence
of our modern fascination with bringing the art and artefacts
of the outside world back home.
This is one of the few cabinets of curiosities
to survive from the 17th century -
assembled by an ever-so-curious clergyman, Dr John Bargrave.
I've never actually got inside
a real 17th-century cabinet of curiosities before.
All these drawers saying, "Open me."
It's rosary beads.
Up here...
..is...
Well, it's an animal of some sort.
Underneath is a miniature picture of Dr Bargrave himself.
Between 1645 and 1662, Bargrave went several times to Europe -
in particular to France and Italy -
recording his journeys, drawing his discoveries
and bringing whatever caught his eye back home.
This ranged from exotic curios given to him as gifts from far-off lands
to bizarre objects that had piqued his curiosity far closer to home.
And this one, a strange object,
which looks a bit like a brown finger.
Can't quite be certain.
Happily, Dr Bargrave left a catalogue of his collection
and this, indeed, is a mummified finger
which he picked up in Toulouse.
He was offered, apparently, a mummified baby,
but he decided the mummified baby would be a bit too big,
so he took the finger as being more portable instead.
And behind it, as if that's not enough,
there's something which I believe is a hippopotamus's tooth.
Bargrave was also quite keen on hacking off little bits
from ancient monuments and bringing them back home.
This is a bit he's got from one of the obelisks in Rome
and he's had it all polished up and made into the shape of a heart.
But others, he's just left as they were.
Wrapped them up in paper.
Here is a tiny little bit of the Colosseum.
And...
..this one, he names them here...
This is a piece of the ruins
of the Triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus in Rome.
And there's a whole box full
of things he's picked off other monuments.
We'd call this vandalism now, I think,
and it's definitely not allowed.
Poking around Dr Bargrave's drawers
gives us a wonderful glimpse into the 17th-century mind,
informed as much by religious faith as scientific enquiry.
And if they already show the beginnings of an interest
skewed towards Italy and Rome,
there is no hierarchy here
in the display of the civilisations of the world,
and that was precisely the point.
What Bargrave is doing in assembling this here,
in bringing it home,
is representing, in miniature,
the wonders of God's world.
The ordinary, the extraordinary,
the man-made, the natural,
the fakes and the forgeries.
And at the same time, with all his objects
and his own personal stories,
he's asking an even bigger question,
which is, "Where do I fit into all this?"
Only a few decades later, this was one answer to that question.
This is Castle Howard in Yorkshire,
home, from the early 18th century,
to the very well-heeled Earls of Carlisle.
Not so much a house as a vast cabinet of curiosities,
now with a very one-track mind.
This was no longer a representation of the wonder
and variety of God's world, but of the Imperial landscape of Rome.
In the place of fragments chipped off ruins
into the damp fields of Yorkshire
came full-scale recreations of Roman monuments...
..mausoleums and temples...
..obelisks.
Even pyramids, copied not from Egypt, but from Roman tombs.
At its centre was the great house
whose corridors were stuffed with a huge collection
of Roman statues or marbles, that the Earls of Carlisle
shipped back to Britain at vast expense
from their Italian Grand Tours.
"Unknown Woman."
"Cato The Elder."
However they might look now,
at the time, places like this were mind-blowingly radical
and had been put together with a singular vision
that hadn't been seen since the Romans were actually here.
This entire house has been designed to walk you through
the landscape of Ancient Rome -
not just from the outside, but on the inside, too,
which is loaded with busts of emperors,
statues of gods
and heroes and ancestors,
and any number of Roman worthies,
and, sometimes, not-so-worthies.
It's an extraordinary collection of art
acquired with cash and clout
on a wholly new scale,
but it's also been co-opted to make a very particular point
about Britain's place in history.
You can see it as a massive statement of intent.
It's Britain -
not the tawdry, down-at-heel, slightly louche, modern Italians -
it's Britain that's going to be the rightful inheritor
and the true guardian of the traditions of Ancient Rome.
Its power, its empire,
its virtue, its culture,
and the whole of Roman civilisation.
And Castle Howard wasn't alone.
Aristocrats all over the country
succumbed to what was called Marble Mania -
scrambling to co-opt the legacy of Rome
into the service of their own politics and power.
It was now the classical world,
or at least their reconstruction of it,
that was seen to embody the highest state of civilisation.
Its art was an ideal of beauty
that would determine the British view
of other civilisations for centuries to come.
There's huge self-confidence on display here,
but my feeling is that that's only one side of the story.
Power plays like this are often a bit smoke and mirrors,
and this ostentatious extravaganza
is actually a bit more improvised, a bit messier -
insecure, even - than it tries to make you think.
There are some stunning pieces here.
But there's also plenty of the rough and ready.
There's heads on the wrong bodies.
There's implausible restorations,
plaster casts and fragments.
In fact, it's not quite so far as it might look
from the Cabinet of Dr Bargrave.
It's a projection of power, all right,
and it's a fantastic stage set, but look closer,
and like so many grand displays,
it's built on a ragbag of bits and pieces.
This would be the story of how Britain built its collections
right up to the 20th century.
Not through state sponsorship, like in France,
but through the opportunism and ready cash of individuals,
even at the most ruthless height of Empire.
Nowhere is this clearer than at Powis Castle,
home to a unique collection of Indian treasures,
brought back - some would say "stolen" -
at the end of the 18th century,
by a governor of the East India Company, Sir Edward Clive,
son of Robert, the notorious Clive of India.
Containing around 300 objects,
from exquisitely carved ivory chess pieces and playing cards...
..to ceremonial armour and caches of weapons.
Much of it came here after a single event.
The defeat of Tipu Sultan, the last ruler
to hold out against British dominance in southern India.
After the interception of a letter to the Sultan from Napoleon, in 1799
the East India Company stormed his city and ransacked his palace.
The Clive family got their hand on
quite a bit of the loot of Tipu, and these are just three pieces.
The most notorious is this extraordinary tiger head here.
And the tiger was Tipu Sultan's personal symbol,
and it's got set in it rubies and diamonds and emeralds.
This was one of the attachments to the grand throne of Tipu Sultan
which, when the British discovered it,
they dismembered it and stripped it.
They took off all the gold. They removed all the decorative bits,
and this is just one that survived.
But, for me, the most poignant bit are these slippers of Tipu Sultan.
The fact is that the looting of Tipu Sultan
went right down to his dress and even worse.
There's a really horrible story
about a British soldier coming along with a pen knife,
just after Tipu Sultan had died, and looting his moustache.
It's no coincidence that the very word "loot",
from the Hindustani slang for "to plunder",
was first used in English at this time.
And, in fact, there was so much Tipu loot coming to Britain
that the East India Company set up their own museum
for people to come and see it.
One piece, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London,
was the star attraction.
This is a wonderfully sophisticated curiosity.
It's not just a wooden tiger mauling
a wooden European soldier.
If you turn that handle, the tiger starts to roar
and the soldier raises his hand and starts to scream.
And what's more, if you take the top of the tiger off,
you'll find inside a little portable organ.
It's as if this is a combination of musical instrument,
executive toy and hi-tech 18th-century gadget.
But that wasn't the only reason
why people came to see this in their thousands.
The fact that it had been part
of the interior decoration of Tipu's palace
meant that, for all its sophistication,
it was still proof of Tipu Sultan's savagery.
That played into a wider narrative,
because it was at this period
that the word "civilisation" first entered the English language
and the ancient contrast between civilisation and barbarity
was reinvented and redeployed
to describe modern differences between us and them on the outside.
And that, in turn, served to justify British Imperial takeover, plunder,
or as some people chose to put it, the "civilising mission".
Tipu's story tells us that, from the beginning,
civilisation was a loaded word,
coined with one eye on the Latin word for citizen, "civis",
to express a particular Western version of the world order.
But also at the V&A is another work of art,
this time from Japan, which flips that story
and reminds us that one person's civilisation
can be another's barbarity.
It's an image of an encounter
between a Western European and Japanese prostitute.
Now, the precise mechanics of what's going on
is a bit difficult to work out,
but, basically, they're at it by an open window
and it looks as if it must be rather wintry weather
because they're very wrapped up in all these clothes.
But what's striking for me is how, here, it's the Western European
who's shown as the monstrous barbarian.
He's got shaggy, unkempt hair and beard, these starey eyes.
The hand here - his hand with his very long nails -
is really more like an animal's claw.
and here you've got a bowl of incense smoking away,
which probably hints that the guy might be just a bit pongy.
Now, the image is explained to us, really,
in these almost speech bubbles,
his and hers, down the side of the picture.
Now, his speech bubble just includes gibberish.
And that reminds me of how the Ancient Greeks
looked at the people they called barbarians.
Because what "barbarian" originally meant
was someone who went, "Baa, baa, baa, baa..."
and you couldn't understand a word they said.
Which is exactly what the woman is saying over here.
"I don't know what you're going on about, but get on with it."
What's absolutely clear here
is that this isn't playing to a Western audience.
It's playing to a local, Japanese audience
and the joke, very definitely, is on us.
The word "town hall" doesn't usually conjure up wonder and awe
in most of us, but it should.
By the early 19th century, Britain's engagement with the outside world
helped to transform our city centres,
and some of our civic buildings are becoming just as impressive
as any aristocratic country house.
In order to bring civilisation to their growing cities,
a new class of wealthy industrialists
invested in architecture in the grandest style, like this.
Home to law courts, a concert hall,
all built from the best British stone,
it was part of a great cultural competition
that saw rival towns attempt to outdo each other
in their lavish displays of civic pride.
They, too, looked to the classical world.
This time with their cultural confidence,
self-governance and mercantile wealth
to declare themselves as the new Athens, the new Florence,
the heirs of the independent city states of the past.
The industrial world that once surrounded them has long gone,
but they still stand as monuments to the civic spirit
of those citizens that built them.
And it didn't stop at public buildings, or at Greece and Rome.
Believe it or not, this incredible building in downtown Leeds
was once a flax-spinning factory
built by the Yorkshire mill-owner John Marshall
as a replica of the temple of falcon god Horus
in the Ancient Egyptian town of Edfu.
A marriage of Ancient Egyptian culture and British technology,
its two-acre roof was covered not only with pyramidal skylights
but also, once upon a time, with grass,
grazed monthly by flocks of sheep that kept the factory floor below
at the perfect temperature and humidity to spin the flax.
In 1840, this was the largest single room in the world.
Housing over 2,000 workers,
its debt to Egypt was no coincidence.
Flax was an Ancient Egyptian product
that was now to be spun into linen here
in a new temple to British industry.
THEY MURMUR
That symbolic link between Britain and Egypt
sometimes came out in even more surprising ways.
One of the most beloved exhibits at the Ulster Museum in Belfast
is an Ancient Egyptian mummy.
Another classic piece of British collecting,
it was one of many brought back by enterprising merchants
after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
There's something very moving,
and almost unnerving,
being up quite so close
to the body of this young woman in her mid-20s,
who's very, very far away from her home.
She was acquired in the city of Luxor in Egypt
in a so-called mummy market
by a wealthy local Ulsterman,
whose family had made their cash in the British milling industry
and in the slave plantations of the Americas.
He shipped her back home and gave her to the local museum,
and, in 1835, there was a ceremonial unwrapping of the mummy.
A slightly prurient occasion, it seems to me.
135 men, and only men, had come to watch.
Now, there were experts on hand.
There was the hieroglyphs man,
who explained by looking at the writing on the case
that her name was Kabuti or Takabuti
and that she had been the daughter of a priest of Amun.
Then were the state-of-the-art 19th-century scientists,
who looked very, very carefully at the shape and form of the skull
and tried to deduce from that what her character must have been.
It seems completely mad to us,
but they thought she was an affectionate young person,
slightly risk-averse, not terribly tasteful,
and, for some reason, would have made a good naturalist.
But there were people in the audience who are interested
in something quite different.
What struck them was the staggering quality of the linen
in which the body had been wrapped thousands of years ago.
Now, at this point, Belfast was well on the way
to becoming the linen capital of the British Empire - Linenopolis.
Many people watching had a big stake in that industry.
What Takabuti gave them and Belfast
was a direct connection between their modern city
and the civilisation of Ancient Egypt.
However tenuous they might have been,
these cultural connections were a sign of the confidence
with which 19th-century Britain was writing itself
into the story of civilisation.
But they also betrayed a deep insecurity
about how civilised Britain's cities really were.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in Manchester
and its surrounding towns, which, by now,
had become the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution
and the centre of the global cotton trade, Cottonopolis.
Home to around half a million people,
Manchester had been industrialised so quickly that it was described
not just as the miracle of modern civilisation
from which pure gold flowed,
but also, with its belching factories and overcrowded slums,
as "hell on earth", where civilised man
was turned back almost into a savage.
And so, partly as a riposte to the city's reputation
as a place of profit and exploitation,
Manchester decided to stage what remains to this day
the largest art exhibition ever seen in Britain,
the Manchester Art Treasures of 1857.
But to pull it off,
they first had to convince Britain's private collectors
to lend their precious stashes of art,
in many cases, for the very first time.
We might not be able to visit the buildings
that this exhibition was in,
but we've got tonnes of evidence
for how these rich men put the whole show together.
We've got the minutes of the meetings that they held.
They transcribe the letters that they'd received
offering stuff or refusing,
and then they transcribe it all again into ledgers,
object by object and person by person.
Sometimes they make quite funny reading.
Here, you've got the entry for Lord Lansdowne -
that's no less than three addresses.
He says he wishes the exhibition success,
will contribute pictures, but -
and you can almost hear him saying this -
not without great reluctance, his ancient marbles.
Here's the Earl of Carlisle from Castle Howard in Yorkshire.
He's definitely coming up trumps
because he promises to lend the pictures
named in the list they sent him,
and those are fine portraits of Snyder by Van Dijk, Velazquez,
Jackson, a Mignard by himself,
and it looks as if he's added a bonus ball,
"His Excellency will lend a Zoffany if desired."
But it's at the back that you find the kind of list of shame
of those who decided they weren't going to lend,
even though they are asked.
There's the Duke of Wellington.
He declines "on the ground that it may be used
"as a precedent to borrow on all hands
"and so keep his house empty."
Poor love!
In the end, the call-out was such a success
that the exhibition boasted a staggering 16,000, mostly foreign,
works of art in British hands,
from ceramics and sculpture, to prints and paintings.
Of the 1,173 Old Masters on display,
there were 93 Spanish works,
including Diego Velazquez'
only surviving nude...
..and almost 200 works
of the Italian Renaissance.
One of the biggest hits of the show
was this rare, unfinished painting
by Michelangelo, which had only just been attributed to him,
and which, ever since, has been known as the Manchester Madonna.
And the Earl of Carlisle's painting by Carracci also drew the crowds -
partly, some said, because of its heart-rending displays of grief.
Partly, according to others,
because Louis Napoleon of France
had offered 20 grand to get his hands on it.
But the exhibition also bore witness
to the emergence of a new kind of cultural confidence.
For alongside the Old Masters
were 689, mostly British, New Masters,
so called in order to put British art
firmly into the great traditions of the past.
And some of these were as stunning as the old.
This was one of the big highlights of the show.
It's John Everett Millais' Autumn Leaves
and it's a decidedly eerie exercise in nostalgia.
There are four moody girls stoking a bonfire
which hasn't quite caught light yet,
and one of them's got an apple in her hand.
There are more than enough hints here
that we're to think about death and decay,
innocence lost, and the passing of time.
I have to confess that when I was a moody teenager,
this was one of my favourite paintings.
I rather vainly imagined I looked a bit like the central figure.
But in the show at Manchester,
you came upon this in the modern British painting section.
You'd walked through earlier European art
and you experienced that linear development
which takes you to Britain's production now.
And something of that chronological development
was in the mind of the painters, too,
because Millais was a leading member
of the so-called Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of artists
who claimed to be seeking their artistic inspiration
back beyond Raphael, beyond Michelangelo and Leonardo,
at the very earliest wellsprings of the Italian Renaissance.
It's as if they were asserting
that they were rekindling, here in Britain,
the very origins of European art.
Ennobling as all this was, I can't help getting a distinct sniff
of 19th-century paternalism lurking behind the show.
Special trains were laid on by mill-owners,
like Bradford's Titus Salt, to ferry the workers
from their "Satanic mills" directly to the exhibition.
Slightly patronising guidebooks were even printed in local dialect,
perhaps to poke fun at the lower orders,
perhaps to direct them to the works they might enjoy.
The truth is they weren't all at the level of Michelangelo.
Heaven only knows what workers or farmers, or anybody, really,
would have made of this piece of high-brow soft porn.
It's supposed to illustrate a scene from Homer's Odyssey.
The hero, Odysseus, is being restrained on his ship
to prevent him falling into the clutches
of those temptresses on the beach.
The problem was, if you didn't know your Homer,
there were no labels in this exhibition
to explain what anything actually was,
and the official catalogue -
though there were cheaper unofficial ones -
cost a whole shilling,
which was a big chunk of the average weekly wage.
And that detail alone points
to some rather different undercurrents in the show.
To be sure, there were some well-intentioned philanthropists
involved who were keen to democratise art
and to share its treasures with the workers,
but philanthropy always has a flip side.
I think it's worth pausing a moment
and wondering what it might have felt like
to be one of Titus Salt's workers,
who, after a long week at the mill,
were corralled into a stuffy train, bundled off to Manchester
and made to enjoy the kind of art
that their master thought they should.
Five months and over a million visitors later,
the exhibition disappeared as quickly as it was staged.
So, to capitalise on its success,
in the late 1860s, Manchester city fathers
commissioned their own civic monument, with a lasting legacy.
This time, they rejected the classical
for something that felt more British,
although it, too, was foreign.
Seeing themselves as the inheritors
of the medieval textile centres of Europe,
they modelled their civic palace
on the Gothic guildhalls of Flanders and Germany.
To decorate its gobsmacking Central Hall -
and gobsmacking is exactly what it is -
they commissioned a series of murals
from the British painter Ford Madox Brown,
to celebrate the history
of their proudly mercantile industrial civilisation.
The first thing you come to
is the foundation of Manchester by the Romans,
and it's true that the Romans did build a fort here,
but this has been worked up into a very symbolic scene.
Here's the Roman governor and he's got a plan that he's consulting.
We've got a few Roman soldiers here doing some craft bricklaying,
but the guys who are doing the real heavy lifting
are obviously the Brits.
This one, with his splendid tattoos here.
It's as if, right at the very, very beginning
of the history of Manchester,
we have the labouring poor labouring,
but we quickly move on. That's 80 AD.
We quickly move on several centuries to...
..this was a key moment in the history of British Christianity,
the baptism of King Edwin.
This actually happened in York,
but it's been conscripted to the story of Manchester.
Then we're getting rid of the Danes.
This poor old porker has got caught up
in the feet of a dead or dying Dane.
And at this point, we're into the 14th century,
and the title says,
"The Establishment Of Flemish Weavers In Manchester."
Now, this is really the start of the weaving and the cotton industry
in this tale. And there's a royal visit coming from the Queen,
who very much backed the idea of introducing skills
from the Low Countries.
Painted on both sides of the hall,
the murals divided Manchester's story into two halves.
If, on one side, were the bits of the foreign that the city fathers
wanted to conscript to their story...
..then on the other were the fruits of British civilisation
that these imports had helped create,
with later Mancunians now picking up the baton.
There was science -
the cloth merchant William Crabtree
discovering the transit of Venus above his shop.
Education - the draper Humphrey Chatham's library and school.
And technology - John Kay's invention of the flying shuttle
that revolutionised the weaving industry.
And here, in 1761,
we're at the opening
of one of Manchester's greatest commercial assets,
the Bridgewater Canal,
which brought coal from the Duke of Bridgewater's estates,
his mines on his estates,
into the centre of the city.
And up here at the back,
there's the Duke of Bridgewater enjoying a quick drink
at the opening ceremony.
But, as often with these paintings,
these upper-class heroes are there in the picture,
but they're slightly backgrounded, they're side-lined.
It's as if we're really meant to see
the working people of Manchester centre stage.
Taken as a whole, the Manchester Murals
brought the native and foreign,
the rich and the poor, together,
to create a modern and progressive vision of a city
that traded with the world.
In 1877, around the time these paintings were being commissioned,
John Ruskin, one of Britain's most influential art gurus,
remarked that Manchester could
"produce no good art and no good culture".
In a way, this building and its decoration are a riposte to that.
What the local worthies wanted to see in their town hall
was a history, an identity and a foundation myth for Manchester.
Now, the paintings may seem just a bit cosy to us,
with their little comic details,
their apparently easy interaction between rich and poor,
and their occasionally rather loose grip on history,
but there are big claims being made here.
Whatever Ruskin may have thought,
this was a vision of a civilised Manchester,
and a civilisation based not just on Christianity
or a sense of community or philanthropy,
but on trade, on profit, on scientific progress,
on immigration, internationalism and ingenuity.
They were giving us a new vision of culture.
If the message of the Manchester Murals
was that trade and the profits of trade could lead to art and culture,
then the poster boy for this story
was one of Ford Madox Brown's principal characters.
Manchester's very own Duke of Bridgewater.
Having made his fortune from the Bridgewater Canal,
he put his money into what would become
Britain's most famous collection of art.
The collection has since been split up,
but its most valuable pieces
are now in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.
It included some of the most beautiful paintings
of the Italian Renaissance.
And as luscious as they all are,
it's this one by Titian that has the best story to tell.
This painting now looks completely at home here,
but, actually, this is only its most recent stop
on a much more tortuous journey.
It's one of a series of canvases depicting classical myth
painted by Titian in the 16th century,
for the man who was then effectively the ruler of the Western world,
Philip II of Spain.
They're all of them dripping with luxury,
with female flesh dressed up in classical learning,
and with the power of monarchy.
And as some of the most sought-after paintings anywhere,
they were soon on the move.
Some of the series went into the hands of other European monarchs,
from Queen Christina of Sweden to the Archduke of Austria.
This one was almost bagged by Charles I,
but then it was given by Philip V of Spain to the French ambassador,
who gave it to the Royal Collection of France.
In the late 18th century,
considerably helped by the French Revolution,
Bridgewater managed to acquire it
as part of a job lot of hundreds of other Old Masters.
Traditional aristocracy of Europe was snobbishly outraged
at the idea that some Northern industrialist
could hoover up their art treasures just cos he gotta lot of ready cash!
Well, the complaint was not unlike
what you now sometimes hear about "our treasures" ending up in Doha.
But the basic rule is and always has been
that masterpieces follow power and money.
The men who rule the world
get to own the Titians.
By the end of the 19th century,
you no longer had to go abroad to see the civilisations of the world.
They were here. It was thanks to the success of exhibitions
like the Manchester Art Treasures
that museums and galleries were opened or enlarged
right across the country.
And with a substantial injection of cash to help them acquire art,
Britain's collections began to change hands for the first time
from the private to the public.
Collecting and displaying the world's treasures
had now become central to Britain's public sense
of what it meant to be civilised.
But this would soon lead to questions...
..kicked off by one painting in particular,
one of the stars of the Manchester exhibition, The Rokeby Venus.
So called because it once graced the walls of Rokeby Park
in County Durham,
it was acquired for the nation in 1906
for the vast sum of £45,000 -
what would now be a multi-million-pound price tag -
and it's been on display in the National Gallery ever since.
At first sight, the composition is very simple.
There's Venus, the goddess of love,
with her back to us here, and her little son Cupid, with his wings,
is holding up a mirror for his mum.
But it isn't at all as simple as it might at first appear.
One question is, who's Venus looking at?
Is it the viewer, us, outside the painting?
Or is she completely wrapped up in herself?
It really is a "who's looking at who?" kind of painting
and it's been one of the star attractions
of the gallery since it arrived.
People used to call it Our Venus,
but it's also become famous for another reason.
In March 1914, Mary Richardson,
a militant suffragette,
smuggled a meat cleaver into the gallery,
came up to this Venus,
and repeatedly slashed it.
Over the next four months,
a further 13 works of art were attacked by nine different women.
But it was the attack on "Our Venus"
by "Slasher Mary", as she was called,
that caused the most public outrage,
and which, as she herself later explained,
had the most pointed message.
The question is, why did she do it?
Modern viewers tend to assume
that she was attacking the objectification of female flesh,
but that is not what she said at the time,
which was much more fundamentally political.
She was attacking the celebrity status of this painting,
the veneration that was lavished upon it,
and the enormous cost that it had taken to acquire it
when real-life women and children
were being oppressed, exploited and excluded.
Richardson was raising the question that we must still face.
What is the value of the painted body
versus the living human body?
Ultimately, she was challenging conventional assumptions
about what civilised society was all about.
It wasn't just the financial and moral value of art
that was called into question. So, too, were the cultural assumptions
that underpinned its display.
The Pitt Rivers in Oxford
is one of the most eccentric, eclectic, wonderful,
but also slightly unsettling museums in the country.
Founded in 1884 by the British Army officer, General Pitt Rivers,
and added to ever since,
the collection now includes objects from all over the world,
from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
First curated when, on the back of Empire,
Britain's confidence in its own civilisation was at its highest,
here, objects were organised not by geography
but by type, so as to demonstrate
the development of artefacts from the simple to the complex,
and of world cultures from the primitive
to the civilised.
Even children's toys are part of this vision of culture.
There is an amazing one here which is from Borneo,
and it's actually a little monkey skull which has been painted.
The eyes have been filled in
and there is a cord on the top so you could swing it around.
It was apparently taken from a child in Borneo
who was using it to pretend to be a head-hunter,
and the old label says that that headhunting
was "an occupation followed in grim earnest by adult warriors" there.
Now, I'm sure the label writer is trying to warn us
about the dangers of headhunting.
For us, it's hard not to feel sorry for the child
who's had his toy taken away.
It's very different, of course, today,
but the founders of this museum
used the emerging science of anthropology
to put different cultures on a sliding scale of evolution.
They created a narrative
to put the "civilised" West at the top,
and those they would have called "savages",
trapped in a state of arrested development, below.
This is just part of the collection of model boats
and there's a very splendid one in front of me.
Written on it, it says that it was from New Guinea
and it was collected by Beatrice Blackwood,
who was one of the curators here,
who travelled far and wide to collect this material.
There's a story of her when she goes to the Solomon Islands
also looking for model boats
and she rejects one that's offered to her,
because she discovers that it had been made using European tools
and European paint,
and she wanted something that was,
in her head, absolutely native.
But the natives didn't have quite the same idea.
One thing that story shows is how, back then,
some museums, at least, were actively editing their collections
to suit a very particular imperial world view,
but others built theirs along very different lines.
In the early 20th century,
the World Museum in Liverpool
was assembling Britain's most extensive collection of African art,
much of it coming here thanks to one man, Arnold Ridyard.
A chief engineer of the Elder Dempster shipping line,
between 1895 and 1916,
Ridyard made 77 voyages to the West Coast of Africa,
each time bringing back hundreds of artefacts for the museum.
But what made his collections different
was that many of the objects were given by African donors,
whose names were meticulously inscribed in the museum's records.
From tribal chiefs and traders, to lawyers and local governors,
these donors were Creoles,
Christian descendants of freed slaves
who had been resettled in West Africa.
And their donations reflected the realities of that world,
influenced by both European and African civilisation.
These donors were the successful products of Empire
and they wanted to leave their mark
on the way people in Britain saw the cultures of Africa
in their museums and galleries.
They wanted to change the then dominant image
of innocence or primitivism or even savagery,
and they wanted to leave the mark of a modern Africa.
In short, they wanted to change our narrative.
And it wasn't just a narrative of the civilised and the savage
that these donors wanted to challenge,
but also the aesthetic value of African art.
Up to then, objects like these
were considered curios
of colonised cultures, not art.
And if the Manchester Art Treasures had made a gesture to India
and the Middle East with an Oriental court,
nothing at all from Africa had been included.
One of Ridyard's major donors was the London-trained barrister
from Freetown in Sierra Leone, Claudius Dionysius Hotobah During.
Why did he donate?
It was the height of the Empire, it was a colonial world,
and maybe he wanted to show the world that Africa could produce
something aesthetic and of value,
when perhaps it wasn't deemed possible at the time
that there was anything of great artistic value
coming out from Africa - that's what I suspect may have been the reason
that he donated. He chose, I think, the pieces very carefully.
They're beautifully carved in wood.
And he thought it was a worthwhile thing to do, as a young student,
maybe to give something to the country he was studying in.
I think, certainly, culturally,
he thought it was a good way of sharing
the art of Africa with England.
As a Christian Creole,
Hotobah During may also have been trying to show
that the art of non-Christian African cultures
had as much sophistication and aesthetic power
as any other piece of art in our national collections.
That's a good way of bringing it home,
that Africa's NOT so different.
And yet, it's difficult in a good way, in a positive way.
You have strong cultures and strong traditions
which perhaps had been misunderstood.
Perhaps by bringing it to England,
people will be able to understand them better.
It's a world culture, as well. There's only one world.
And, perhaps, the museums are a melting pot of that culture.
For me, that story sums up the many complex ways
in which Britain has become a repository
of the art and artefacts of the world.
The products of Empire, once here,
have become ambassadors for their cultures.
They've opened British eyes to other civilisations
and created new ways of seeing,
that continue to amaze and educate the millions of us
who will never have the chance to travel the globe.
They also force us to ask more difficult questions
about how they got here,
about the cultural assumptions - even exploitation -
that lay beneath their appropriation into our world.
And, ultimately, about what British civilisation is.
The answers will, I'm sure, continue to change,
but the questions do point to one universal truth about civilisation,
best summed up in the story of what was once
one of our most famous national monuments.
First built by the Romans, by the late 19th century,
London Bridge had become the gateway to what many people here assume
to be the centre of the civilised world.
Yet, in 1967, it was put up for auction,
bought by an American oil tycoon for $2.5 million
and shipped, granite piece by granite piece, to Arizona,
where it was rebuilt by the developer of Disneyland
to bring a bit of civilisation to the American desert.
Inaugurated in 1971,
at an event attended by the Lord Mayor of London himself,
it offers a final twist
to the story of OUR civilisation.
We had now become the "other",
and just as we had done to other great civilisations,
Britain had now been commodified, shipped off
and repackaged on the other side of the world.
# London Bridge was taken down
# Piece by piece and shipped away
# London Bridge has now gone up
# In the USA! #
I guess what this tells us is that civilisation's always on the move.
It's always going...somewhere else.
# It's not just like anywhere
# Everyone will pass by there
# And if you go there and enquire
# You'll get your wish, your heart's desire
# For London Bridge was taken down
# Piece by piece and shipped away
# London Bridge has now gone up
# In the USA! #