Quick Take
- Narration: Self-narrated by Mary Beard, whose donnish, dry authority is perfectly suited to this material, you’re in the hands of a classicist who knows exactly what she’s arguing.
- Themes: Gaze and power in art history, religious imagery across cultures, challenging the Western canon
- Mood: Intellectually brisk and quietly subversive, best absorbed in a single sitting
- Verdict: A tight, elegant challenge to the Western art historical canon from one of the sharpest classical scholars working today, short but not superficial.
I first encountered Mary Beard through SPQR, her history of Rome that managed to be genuinely scholarly and completely readable at the same time, a combination that sounds straightforward until you try to achieve it. How Do We Look is shorter and in some ways more polemical, born out of the Civilizations television series on PBS and conceived as a companion to rather than a summary of those programs. I came to it on a weekday afternoon when I had a few hours free, intending to dip in and instead finishing the entire two hours and fifty-one minutes before I’d thought to stop.
The book is divided into two parts that address related but distinct questions. The first focuses on the human body in art, Olmec heads from early Mesoamerica, the colossal statues of Amenhotep III, the nudes of classical Greece, and uses these examples to examine what art reveals about power, hierarchy, and gender politics in the ancient world, explaining how it came to define the so-called civilized world. The second part moves into religious imagery, from Angkor Wat to Ravenna to Venice to Jewish and Islamic calligraphy, to ask what happens when art attempts to picture the divine across traditions that have very different theological positions on whether that pictorial attempt is even permissible.
Rewriting Gombrich and Kenneth Clark
Beard’s ambition here is openly stated and genuinely substantial: she wants to redefine what she calls the “Western- and male-centric legacies” of Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Both of those are landmark texts that shaped how several generations of Anglophone readers understood art history, and both center Western European production as the default story while treating everything else as peripheral or contextual. Beard’s challenge is to ask what art history looks like if you start from the Olmec heads rather than the Parthenon, if you approach the ancient world’s visual production without the assumption that Greece is the origin point and everything else is a variant.
This is not a novel argument in academic art history, where postcolonial scholarship has been making versions of it since the 1980s. What Beard does that is valuable is make it accessible and vivid for a general educated audience. Her discussion of the colossal statues of Amenhotep III as an exercise in scale as political assertion, the body inflated to demonstrate power rather than to represent a human figure, offers a reading frame that applies across ancient cultures and immediately reshapes how you look at such objects.
The Paradox of Picturing the Divine
Part II is in some ways more philosophically interesting than Part I, because it addresses a genuinely irresolvable problem. Every major religious tradition has had to decide whether God, or whatever the divine is in that tradition, can be pictured, and whether pictures of sacred figures are aids to worship or acts of idolatry. The answers across traditions are not just different but structurally incompatible, and Beard shows how that incompatibility has produced some of the most extraordinary visual objects in human history, precisely because the makers were working against the tension rather than resolving it.
Reviewer Timothy Haugh notes aptly that “art always says more about the viewer than it does ‘objectively,’” which is close to Beard’s own argument. The point of the two-part structure is not just to broaden the canon geographically but to demonstrate that looking at art is always an act embedded in a specific viewer’s assumptions, training, and cultural position, which is exactly why looking carefully matters, and why the Western canon’s self-presentation as universal deserves the skepticism Beard brings to it.
Short, Not Slight
At two hours and fifty-one minutes, this is a brief listen, and the reviews note both the shortness and the accompanying photography in the book edition. Reviewer Jack Ratcliffe praises the photos as “terrific,” and in the audio context, that visual layer is absent, something to bear in mind if you want the full experience Beard intended. The essays themselves are short, as Ratcliffe notes, but Beard’s thinking is dense enough that you get genuine substance even within tight constraints. Reviewer James Sprinkle, a clear Mary Beard fan who considers SPQR her best work, finds this new book offers “many multi-dimensional observations about world art not often thought or spoken by a single author.”
Self-narration here is a clear advantage. Beard’s academic voice carries the authority her arguments need, you feel, listening to her, that these observations come from decades of looking at ancient objects and teaching people to look at them differently. The dry intelligence in the delivery matches the dry intelligence in the prose.
Who Should Listen / Who Should Skip
Listen if you have a background in art history and want a sharp, accessible critique of the Western canon’s self-positioning, if you’re coming to the PBS Civilizations series and want a more discursive companion than a standard guide provides, or if you appreciate scholarly writing that makes a genuinely subversive argument in a completely collected voice. Skip if you need extended scholarly apparatus and citations rather than elegant intellectual essays, if you want deep coverage of specific artists rather than a broad cross-cultural argument, or if you need the visual elements of the book, the photography, to fully engage with art history writing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to have seen the PBS Civilizations series to follow this book?
No, Beard designed the book as a companion that works independently. It engages with the same material but stands alone as an argument about art history and the limits of the Western canon.
How does Mary Beard’s approach here compare to SPQR?
SPQR is a full-length history of Rome with deep chronological and archival coverage. How Do We Look is shorter and more essayistic, a pair of arguments rather than a comprehensive history. Readers who loved SPQR should expect a different format here: tighter, more polemical, less encyclopedic.
The reviews mention that the photos are excellent, but does the audio version lose too much without the visual element?
The audio version loses the visual accompaniment that book readers have access to, which is a real limitation for art history writing. The arguments are constructed to work in prose, but listeners who want the full experience Beard intended should consider the print edition alongside the audio.
Is this a good introduction to non-Western art history for someone who primarily knows the Western canon?
It is a good polemical entry point, Beard frames the argument for why a broader perspective matters and gives vivid examples from Mesoamerican, Egyptian, and Asian art. It is not a comprehensive survey of non-Western traditions, but it provides a strong conceptual framework for approaching them.
