In this episode of Civilisations Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art. 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 us now? In raising these questions Mary explores how the way we look at art can influence our ideas of what it is to be civilised. The colossal prehistoric Olmec heads in Mexico set the scene. In a culture with no written record, all we can do is puzzle about what these images were for, whom they represented, and why they were constructed. Mary Beard moves to other ancient cultures where more evidence has survived. She looks at images that are far more than art objects: from Egyptian statues to the terracotta warriors of ancient China, representations of the human form that actively participate in the social world, that teach men and women how to behave, that assert power and assuage loss. Mary explores what makes a ‘realistic’ image of the human form. She looks at the 'Greek Revolution’, the extraordinary process in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, which saw the sculpture of the human body dramatically change from a series of static formulaic images to what we now take as living naturalism. Mary shows that reverence for Greek ideas of the human form influence the way we look to this day.

In this film 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. How, and at what cost, do you make the unseen, seen? Beneath all works of religious art there always lies conflict and risk. And the result is often iconoclasm – the destruction of works of art – which Mary believes can, paradoxically, lead on to new forms of creativity. Mary Beard visits sacred sites across the world to examine the contested boundaries between religion and art. She goes to the temple of Angkor Wat and to the Tintoretto Crucifixion in Venice, to Buddhist caves of Ajanta and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, as she seeks to break down the conventions that make some religions of the image, while others are seen as hostile to artistic representation. She shows how all faiths (and their artists) face the same fundamental problems of treading a careful line between glorifying god in images and blaspheming by daring to represent the divine. She ends at the Parthenon in Athens. This is a building that has been in turn a pagan temple, a Christian church and a Mosque. Now, as a monument to Western civilisation itself, and tourist pilgrimage site, she asks us to wonder what we now worship – how far we look at civilisation itself with ‘the eye of faith’.

Simon Schama explores one of our deepest artistic urges: the depiction of nature. 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. Simon begins in the 10th century, in Song dynasty China. The Song’s scrolls are never innocent of the values of that world: the landscapes depict immense mountains projecting imperial authority. But as that authority was threatened and overwhelmed, majestic mountains are represented in geological turmoil, writhing and heaving. Imagined paradises in Islamic and Western art are often responses to loss and absence. But paradise could be recovered in the country villas of the Renaissance. Simon goes to the miraculously beautiful Palladian house of Daniele Barbaro in the Veneto, with murals painted by Paolo Veronese to contemplate the world of the cultivated country gentleman. It was in the cooler climate of northern Europe that landscape came into its own as a distinctive type of art. Simon explores the works of the Northern Renaissance in Germany and the Netherlands, where emerging states sought expression of identity through depiction of their natural worlds. Simon ends in America where the landscapes of America are as expansive as the landscapes of Holland were confined, but there too, in the numinous photography of Ansel Adams, a kind of earthly paradise is revealed and a sense of nationhood is expressed in the natural world.

Think Renaissance and you think Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering. The two phenomena did not unfold in separate artistic universes; they were acutely conscious of, and in competition with, each other and mutually open to influences flowing both ways. The fifth film in Civilisations goes east and west with Simon Schama: to Papal Rome but also to Ottoman Istanbul and Mughal Lahore and Agra, exploring those connections and rivalries, and examining how the role of artists from the different traditions of West and East developed in the years that followed the Renaissances. That rivalry unfolds most spectacularly over the creation of domes – in Ottoman Istanbul the great engineer-architect Mimar Sinan builds the light-flooded Süleymaniye mosque, while at the same time in Rome Michelangelo designs the great dome over the St Peter’s Basilica. The fate of the hero-artist, seemingly touched by God, with the gift of making visual miracles, henceforth diverged in east and west. In Europe, as the century turned, artists such as Benvenuto Cellini with his sculpture of Perseus with the Head of Medusa could lay claim to sovereignty over the world of art. The greatest European artists like Caravaggio, Velasquez and Rembrandt shook off decorum and turned muscular, earthy, and theatrical. Meanwhile in the East Mughal art, still capable of acts of breath-taking architectural and painterly beauty, as expressed in mausoleums like the I'timād-ud-Daulah and gorgeous miniature paintings, became ever more refined, poetic and exquisite.

Simon Schama starts his meditation on colour and civilisation with the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres. He then moves to 16th century Venice where masterpieces such as Giovanni Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece and Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne contested the assumption that drawing would always be superior to colouring. As the Baroque took hold in enlightenment Europe another Venetian, Giambattista Tiepolo, created a ceiling fresco Apollo and the Four Continents at the Bishop’s palace in Würzburg. In a glorious sequence Simon celebrates this grand opera of light, colour, and dancing line: a dizzying lift-off into 18th century elation. But if light could open the gates of ecstasy it could also drop art into the abyss. Francisco Goya began by working in the Venetian tradition but in the last years of his life his Black Paintings drained colour from the world of light. The art of colour discovered a new mission which somehow sustained the old: how to make life in cities bearable, even beautiful. Simon travels to Japan to where in the 18th and 19th century an urban explosion generated a demand for cheap, mass produced woodblock prints suffused with dazzling colour. These prints by artists such as Hokusai were hugely influential on the impressionists and post- impressionists. Simon ends the film in Matisse’s great chapel at Vence, where colour is used – against a backdrop of the Second World War - once more to enrapture, enlighten and as a path to God.

If David Olusoga’s first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century. David shows the growing ambivalence with which artists reacted to the idea of progress – both intellectual and scientific - that underpinned the imperial mission and followed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Advances in knowledge and technology imbued Europeans in the 19th century with a sense of their civilisation’s superiority. It justified their imperial ideology. But it created among artists a deep fascinations with other civilisations which in turn produced a scepticism about their own. By contrast, as European artists questioned their civilisation’s ‘advance’, in America painters sought to capture an idea of their new nation’s ‘manifest destiny’ in landscapes. And in their representation of the Native Americans they sought to record for posterity the world and the cultures they were violently displacing. But this was not always the case. David show how in New Zealand one artist was coopted by the Māori who used his sills to record their culture and celebrate their ancestors. As the 19th Century came to an end, the certainties of industrial and scientific advance were increasingly questioned; many artists (Gauguin and Picasso amongst them) turned to non-Western art and culture for inspiration. And in the face of the catastrophic conflict of the First World War, the idea that progress, reason and industrial advance were guarantors of higher ‘civilisation’ was rejected. David ends the film with a powerful meditation on Otto Dix’s nightmarish and ironic evocation of the horror of the trenches, the triptych Der Krieg (The War).

Simon Schama begins Civilisations with this premise: that it is in art - the play of the creative imagination - that humanity expresses its most essential self: the power to break the tyranny of the humdrum, the grind of everyday.    Art, then, makes life worth living; it is the great window into human potential.  And societies become civilized to the extent that they take culture as seriously as the prosecution of power, or the accumulation of wealth. But in the century of total war and industrial slaughter was (and is) that enough? The cause of humanity went up in the smoke of the Nazi crematoria. Horror and terror brushed beauty aside and stamped on its pretensions. And in the modern world art has become increasingly commodified. Simon’s last programme explores the fate of art in the machine and profit-driven world. It looks at the rise of art as a tradeable commodity and turns on one central question: should art create a realm separate from the modern world, a place where we can escape and pull the ladder up after us? Or should it plunge headlong into the chaos and cacophony while transforming the way we see it and live in it? Using the works of both dead and contemporary artists of the 20th and 21st Simon seeks answers to these profound questions. His conclusion is imbued with hope: despite all the travails of the present, by engaging with the here-and-now art still offers civilisation an insight into the incomprehensibility of the world and a way to transcend its horrors with the enduring creativity of the human spirit.