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Civilisations
Civilisations Episodes
Series 1: 9. The Vital Spark
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 bre ...
11-05-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 8. The Cult Of Progress
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 reactio ...
04-05-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 7. Radiance
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 s ...
27-04-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 6. First Contact
In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. And, as historian of emp ...
20-04-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 5. The Triumph Of Art
Think Renaissance and you think of Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering. The two phenomena ...
13-04-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 4. The Eye Of Faith
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. Y ...
06-04-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 3. Picturing Paradise
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 na ...
30-03-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 2. How Do We Look?
In this episode of Civilisations, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China. Mary seeks answers to fundame ...
23-03-2018
BBC 2
Series 1: 1. Second Moment Of Creation
The first film by Simon Schama looks at the formative role art and the creative imagination have played in the forging of humanity itself.\n\nThe film opens with Simon's passion ...
16-03-2018
BBC 2