Kenneth Clark

Clark's television series Civilisation, broadcast by the BBC in 1969, walked viewers through buildings and paintings and showed them where to look, at a carved capital or a gesture in a fresco, in a way no one had done on screen before. Its confident view of a Western canon now looks narrow, and the BBC answered it with Civilisations in 2018. His short book Looking at Pictures is the better guide for a reader: each chapter spends a long time with one painting, Velázquez's Las Meninas among them, and models how to stand in front of it.