Survey the history of art, from antiquity to the present, on a global scale. Programs reveal the role art and creative imagination have played in forging humanity, and introduce viewers to works of beauty, ingenuity and illumination across cultures. Civilizations, a nine-part series, premieres Tuesday, April 17 at 8/7c. Join the conversation with #CivilizationsPBS

The Conquistadors attempted to eradicate all traces of indigenous Mexican culture and religion. But some glimmers of its past artistic and creative impulses remained.

Today, especially in the West, art has found new ways to engage with our spiritual impulses, even when the audience is often secular.

One of the most spectacular places where the symbolism of the sacred mountain has been turned into a work of art is found deep in the jungle interior of Cambodia.

Though it may have been an unintended consequence, Athenian vase painters recorded and then re-enforced ideas of what wives were meant to do.

Host Simon Schama argues this 25,000 year-old sculpture found in France represents the dawn of the idea of beauty.

Cave paintings in Castillo Spain represent some of the first paintings made by humans.

ISIS destroyed ancient artifacts in the city of Palmyra, Syria, and museum curator sacrificed his life trying to save them.

Albrecht Altdorfer sidesteps religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics by using nature.

In Li Cheng’s hands, landscape art became not a depiction of the natural world, but a kind of official ideology, promoting order.

At the Church of San Agostino in Rome, Caravaggio breaks the social and aesthetic rules of his generation.

In what’s regarded as Maruyama Okyo’s greatest work, “Cracked Ice” combines everything Okyo knew from both Eastern and Western traditions.

Through illustration, Maria Sibylla explained and painted their life cycle, their metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis, to butterfly.

Thomas Cole regarded the American landscape as being what he called the undefiled work of Gods.

Our compulsion to create images of ourselves is one of the most intimate and defining statements on who we think we are.

The cognitive revolution stirred early humanity from its creative slumber, and the images it produced continue to humble even our greatest modern artists, including Pablo Picasso.

In what’s considered his last great work, Edouard Manet created a masterpiece famed as a masterclass in visual subversion.

In December 1942, a Jewish teacher brings art supplies to children held by Nazis. They created art that would give them a momentary escape, if only in their imaginations.

For Renaissance art theorists, drawing always came before color. But Venetians see art and the world quite differently.

In Islamic architecture, landscapes reflect a mastery over the natural world.

Rebelling against any notion that women shouldn’t speak until spoken to, Artemisia refuses to shut her portrait up.

As the Spanish met the Aztecs in Central America, the riches intended to buy off the Spanish only intensified their lust for gold and conquest.

Otto Dix and his generation had borne witness to the horrors of World War I. They’d also been witness to the death of the nineteenth century faith in an inevitable, unstoppable progress.

Catlin was by no means indifferent to the suffering of the people whose faces appear in these paintings. But he didn’t produce them in order to take part in some campaign to save the native Americans, instead he said they must perish.