WINCHESTER’S City Museum will take centre stage in Civilisations Stories: Art, Us and the Truth, a BBC South art history documentary accompanying the highly-acclaimed BBC Arts Civilisations series.

Filming for the series took place at the museum, which is run by Hampshire Cultural Trust, in March and the programme will be broadcast on BBC One South and BBC One HD at 7:30pm on Monday April 30.

Civilisations Stories: Art, Us and the Truth takes a chronological tour of some of the south’s museums and galleries and is presented by weatherman, Tomasz Schafernaker, a keen portrait artist who grew up in Portsmouth.

The programme reveals his passion and talent for the art of portraiture, and through the examination of significant art works and artefacts that portray people from the age of the Romans onwards, Schafernaker discovers that our modern obsession with image is, in fact, nothing new.

He uncovers how artists down the ages have subtly shaped and manipulated our opinions of people and the times in which they lived by enhancing some features in their work and erasing others.

City Museum opens Civilisations Stories: Art, Us and the Truth with a focus on the portrayal of people in Roman times, in particular looking at one of the museum’s most important artefacts, the Silkstead Head.

Originating from the 1st or 2nd century AD and found in a sandpit in Otterbourne near Winchester, the head is a bronze likeness of a Romano British girl.

Some of her features were made to look deliberately more Roman so that she conformed to the look of the Roman ruling class.

However, the artist still retained a number of Celtic traits in the sculpture, including her hair style and using pebbles for her eyes, a characteristic trait of Celtic art.