Civilisations

Simon Schama explores the remote origins of human creativity with the first known marks made some 80,000 years ago in South African caves, marks which were not dictated merely by humanity's physical needs. He marvels at the later caveworks, shapes of hands, in red stencils on the walls of caves, and at the paintings of bison and bulls, and Stone Age carvings.

Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China. Mary seeks answers to fundamental questions at the heart of ideas about civilisations. Why have human beings always made art about themselves? What were these images for? And in what ways do some ancient conventions of representing the body still affect people now?

Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed nature, rather it's a projection of dreams and idylls, as well as of escapes and refuges from human turmoil, the elusive paradise on earth. He begins his exploration in the 10th century, in Song dynasty China.

Professor Mary Beard broaches the controversial, sometimes dangerous, topic of religion and art. For millennia, art has inspired religion as much as religion has inspired art. Yet there are fundamental problems, which all religions share, in making god or gods visible in the human world. Mary Beard visits sacred sites across the world to examine the contested boundaries between religion and art.

Simon Schama goes both east and west, to Papal Rome but also to Ottoman Istanbul and Mughal Lahore and Agra, exploring their connections and rivalries, and examining how the role of artists from the different traditions of West and East developed in the years following the Renaissances. Their rivalry unfolded most spectacularly in the creation of domes: in Ottoman Istanbul Mimar Sinan builds the light-flooded Süleymaniye mosque, while in Rome Michelangelo designs the dome of St Peter's Basilica.

In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. As historian of empire David Olusoga shows, art was always on the frontline. Each cultural contact at this time left a mark on both sides: the magnificent Benin bronzes record the meeting of an ancient West African kingdom and Portuguese voyagers in a spirit of mutual respect and exchange.