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The BBC's "Civilisations: The Triumph of Art," hosted by Simon Schama, is cringeworthy. This is global comparative art history at its worst, as these screen shots from a section on the 17C tomb of the Mughal minister of 'Itimad al-Daula in Agra: 
Mughal art and architecture is cold and distant, with European art, one can sense the "force of individual genius coming at you"...
But the threat of European colonization--um, I mean 'mischief'--looms "out there," ready to "stick...its great bloody, brutal boots right into the paradise garden."
But what will happen to the "Eastern Renaissance"? Will it simply wither away and die?
Everything's OK! Sure, art and culture die in South Asia, but the "Eastern Renaissance" survives...in (and because of) Europe!
The episode is otherwise littered with absurd inaccuracies, like the suggestion that an artist's identity as a Hindu is indicated by his "saffron robe" (FYI: Bichitra was likely Hindu, but the idea that saffron communicated this point in 17C Mughal India is grossly anachronistic)
Or the pat characterization of the Taj Mahal as a "marble monument to love," suggesting that Schama didn't even bother to read decades of scholarship (Ebba Koch and Catherine Asher are two scholars whose work comes to mind) that has argued otherwise.
Or that the tile mosaic decoration at Lahore Fort, dating from Jahangir's reign, is a failure as "public art"--an objective, mind you, that the patron likely never had in mind--because of the wall's verticality.
These Mughals, being "fastidious connoisseurs, could barely have imagined the revolution in looking that was unfolding in"...wait for it...wait for it...[you know what's coming]
Yup, in the 17C, European art is "busy exploding through any kind of containing frame"!
Re Schama on the Ottomans: after the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, "Islamic elements" were "bolted onto the church," yet "somehow, Christianity was always showing through" [camera pans to Byz. mosaics of Virgin in apse, which were covered with plaster till 19C]
Mehmet's attempts to "convert" C'ple clearly did not go far enough. That's why Suleyman I built a new mosque, "unencumbered by Christian leftovers"..."the visible proclamation of Islam's victory." [Here Schama ignores Gülru Necipoğlu's groundbreaking work on the Suleymaniye...]
[...which offers far more nuanced arguments about Suleyman I's patronage. In fact, Gülru Necipoğlu has argued that the construction of the Suleymaniye spoke more so to Ottoman claims vis-a-vis their Safavid Shi'i rivals.]
I assume it passes snuff because everything that Schama said is understood to be authoritative and / or received wisdom. The kicker for me is the number of important scholarship from the past 4-5 decades (much of it by women) that he dismisses outright.
Schama's main "intervention" is to propose that "Renaissance" be pluralized so as to include "the East" (FYI: this idea has been rehashed & critiqued for decades). But these Renaissances are born of _competition_ between "warring cultures...between Muslim & Christian worlds"...
...And so the BBC's "Civilisations: The Triumph of Art" is not only about the superiority of Europe, but also about some long-standing rivalry between Christiandom and Islam, which the viewer is invited (implicitly, of course) to extend into the present. / FIN
