Simon Schama looks at the formative role art and the creative imagination have played in the forging of humanity itself. Simon 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.

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 us now?

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 is a projection of dreams and idylls, as well as of escapes and refuges from human turmoil, the elusive paradise on earth.

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 the divine 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.

Simon Schama examines how traditions developed in the years following the Renaissances. 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 did not unfold in separate artistic universes - they were acutely conscious of, and in competition with, each other and mutually open to influences.

David Olusoga shows how art was always on the frontline when distant cultures met. In the 15th and 16th centuries disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. Each cultural contact left a mark on both sides.

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 coloring.

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.

Simon Schama explores the fate of art in the machine and profit-driven world, looking at the rise of art as a tradeable commodity. 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?