CIVILISATIONS, BBC2, THURSDAY 9PM

The depiction of sacred subjects in art has always been contentious, as Mary Beard discovers in this episode of the cultural history series. One person’s icon can be sacrilege to another, and the historian traces the battles that have erupted over religious art as she visits sacred sites across the globe, from Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and the Parthenon in Athens, once a holy temple but now a shrine to philosophy and humanism.