“Civilization”, a book based on the scripts of the television series with the same name, was written by Kenneth Clark in an effort to introduce the audience to Europe of the thirteenth to fifteenth century: the Gothic world. In this excerpt, Clark made use of his creative mind, played around with figurative language, and applied symbolic words such as “extravagance" or “chastity” to give the audience a better insight of the mother land in its golden days.
“The Gothic world is a world of chivalry, courtesy, and romance” said Clark, emphasizing the beauty of Europe at the time: a world in which things were done with a sense of play and architecture reached a stage of extravagance. Gothic’s art, in addition, was mentioned by the author to be…show more content… In the introduction, he described the Gothic world for its “chivalry”, “courtesy”, and “romance”, all being very allegorical words that play with the readers’ emotions and make them feel as if they are in a different world. By doing so, Clark successfully drew out heartfelt curiosity form his audience and made them want to find out more about his whimsical world. Likewise, he kept on praising the complexity of the Gothic world’s architecture with strong symbolic words: “extravagance”, “unequalled” in the first paragraph, which did really good jobs in stressing out how he feels about the Gothic world, making it clear to the audience that Clark really views Europe’s architecture as being the finest in the world with its squandering beauty. Moving through to the second paragraph, the author shifted in style a little with stronger word use. He picked bold words like “lust” and “ferocity” to stress out the two main themes of “The Lady with the Unicorn” painting, and these words were certainly hard not to look at. Similarly, in the forth paragraph, the author described women in the early times as “squat” and bad tempered “viragos”, which really bring out the contrast with the image of the woman mentioned later on in the passage as being tame and
