"This is the Egyptian desert of the Pharaohs - 200,000 sq km of rock and sand." "It's a barren, austere landscape, the kind of place where you might expect to find a time-ravaged pyramid or two, a fragment of papyrus, or uncover some ancient tombs." "But I'm in search of a different kind of buried treasure." "Some of the great masterpieces of early Christian painting, obscured by centuries of neglect, have recently been rediscovered here." "And they truly are among the artistic wonders of the world." "Can I go in?" "Yes, please." "It's incredible!" "Protected by soot and grime for over 700 years, this exceptionally powerful image of the Apocalypse - the Day of Judgment - has a transfixing, dreamlike quality." "It's like nothing else - certainly nothing in the more familiar medieval or Renaissance traditions of art." "Yet it's evidently a work of genius, a masterpiece of mystic surrealism." "But as I have discovered during my odyssey around the Mediterranean, these dazzling but barely known examples of the artistic accomplishments of early Christendom are far from unique." "In churches, temples and holy places, there are other outstanding works or early Christian art that deserve to be more fully appreciated - paintings, mosaics and painted glass produced during 1,000 years and more from the classical period to the Renaissance," "that still suffer from an unfair degree of neglect." "Many were created by men whose names have been lost or were never recorded, and so have never acquired the cult of celebrity of later artists like Michelangelo or Van Gogh." "In this series, I want to look at these ancient works anew." "I want to celebrate early Christian art in its own right, to explore what was itself a golden age." "BELLS PEAL" "This is Old Cairo, a city built on the site of the ancient Roman Fortress of Babylon." "It's home to the Copts, one of the most ancient Christian communities in the world, and one that's still very much thriving." "Today is the feast of St George, celebrated, like many saints' days here, by a special Mass and procession." "It reminds me a bit of the Catholic festivals of southern Italy, but with even more incense and the volume turned up." "I think what's really striking about the procession is not just the fervency of the faith that it seems to express, but the friendliness and the festivity of the whole event." "I'm very struck by this amazing ululatory wailing that goes on." "I'll have to try and get someone to teach me how to do that!" "So it expresses joy?" "Yes." "I was curious, cos it sounded almost like it might be wailing - that you were still lamenting the martyrdom of George." "How do you do it?" "Can you show me?" "Yes, I can." "Do you mind?" "No, no, no." "I never mind that." "OK, go on." "I'll count to three. .." "I'll try!" "One, two, three...go!" "Wow!" "That..." "that's the expression of joy!" "Yes!" "Thank you very much." "Not at all." "During times of persecution, the extreme joy offered by their faith was often all they had." "A people only five million strong, the Copts never inherited or built an empire, unlike the Christians of Byzantium or Rome." "While most of the time they've been tolerated, and often flourished, under first Byzantine and then Islamic rulers, they've never felt completely safe, even today." "And so their churches, including this one - the famous Hanging Church of Coptic Cairo - are nothing like grand basilicas or cathedrals, but are hidden and veiled, intimate, almost homely." "They feel like sanctuaries, hiding places, where you can truly feel the spirit of the saints - saints who are as real today to the Copts as when they lived hundreds of years ago." "The best place to see the art that this intense spirituality has produced is the Coptic Museum." "Its sprawling collection reflects nearly 2,000 years of Coptic history, going all the way back to the founding of the Church in Egypt in the first century, traditionally by St Mark himself." "And pride of place goes to this 4th-century version of the Psalms of David in the Coptic language, the earliest and only complete manuscript of the Psalms." "I think this battered book looks like an object that's survived from a fire." "It's a symbol not just of how the Egyptians still treasure the relics of early Coptic Christianity, but it's also a symbol for me of the Coptic art tradition as a whole, because it is a battered tradition," "a tradition that's had to live through persecution, through the migration of populations." "It's amazing, in a way, that anything survives at all." "But here in the Coptic Museum, we can experience that tradition, albeit only in fragments, rather like the pages of this battered book." "But we can see just what an extraordinary art tradition resulted from it." "To the Copts, just as precious as the word is the image." "In another room, I found the earliest surviving wall paintings from the 6th century." "Coptic art is a reminder of just how much can be achieved within a simplified style." "What strikes me about them, apart from just these very vivid faces, is...the intimacy of the scale." "These really are images designed for one-to-one contemplation, images that I think were in the monastic cells." "And although you couldn't describe them as masterpieces, they have got this tremendously vivid " "Picasso would have called it, I suppose, primitive power - and in fact this scene of the Madonna suckling the infant Christ has got something of a Picasso about it." "It's such a primal image of the basic act of a woman suckling her child, but also an image of the way in which the Christian faith is nourishing the people who sustain it." "Perhaps the most striking thing about Coptic art is the way in which the artists represent these eyes - these extraordinary staring eyes, often with the white that you can see all the way round them." "And there's something peculiarly transfixing about their gaze." "It's...it's not a gaze that addresses you." "It doesn't look AT you, it seems to look THROUGH you." "And you have this very strong sense that these people, perhaps like those who worshipped before them, are...fixed... on the idea and the image not of this life, but of the life to come." "The Coptic art tradition is essentially mysterious." "So much has been lost during centuries of persecution and destruction that it's all but impossible to piece together the different stages of its development." "But there is some intriguing evidence to suggest where its earliest origins lie." "But for that, I have to leave Old Cairo and travel across town to the modern city." "Left!" "Left!" "'I've been granted an appointment 'by the art historian who is in charge of all the museums and antiquities in Egypt." "'I definitely didn't want to be late." "'But the driver seemed to have other ideas.'" "I'm not sure we're still in Cairo." "We want the Museum!" "'Eventually, we arrived." "We'd arranged to meet 'at the Egyptian Museum, one of the great museums of the world.'" "Thank you very much." "We're here." "It's famous for its grand collection of the funerary art of Ancient Egypt, which, with its own cult of the afterlife, suggests why Christianity found fertile ground here." "There's even evidence to suggest a direct connection between the art of Ancient Egypt and the art of Coptic Christian Egypt." "In the rather neglected Room 14, there are some extraordinary works of art, which seem to hint at just such a missing link." "Discovered near the oasis town of Fayoum, these portraits date from the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD, and the Roman occupation of Egypt." "They were originally pasted to the faces of mummies - a late expression of the Pharaonic belief in resurrection of the soul." "Yet their style anticipates the vivid Coptic depiction of Christ and his Apostles." "It's almost certain that these paintings were done by Greeks." "Now, throughout ancient literature, we read about the great Greek tradition of painting, but because painting is so fragile, none of the great pictures of Apelles or Pausanias or any of the famous Greek artists mentioned by Pliny in his Natural History," "none of those works survive." "And until the early 20th century, when most of these were discovered, it was thought that in effect the entire Graeco-Roman tradition of painting was lost." "But here, in the bastard rump of empire, in Egypt, at the end of the Pharaonic period, you've got Greek artists who are still using the techniques of the great Ancient Greek painters." "I wonder if it wasn't the community of Greek artists in Egypt who were given the responsibility of creating early Christian art." "And I wonder if, in effect, Coptic Christian art's great legacy for Christian art as a whole is that it preserves intact that line of connection from the Ancient Greek painting traditions into the modern Christian traditions of painting." "'I wanted to try out my theory on the man I'd come to meet " "'Egypt's most eminent art historian, Dr Zahi Hawass." "'But first, he had to greet his fans." "'He's a celebrity over here - a cross between curator and pop star.'" "It was always on time!" "It's true!" "'Eventually, I was given a ten-minute slot in his busy schedule." "'I soon found he was just as enthusiastic about the Fayoum portraits as I was.'" "Look at the calm eyes." "It's the search for the afterlife." "Look at the nose - it's like Mona Lisa." "We have a treasure - it's hidden." "No-one knows anything about it." "'But even the expertise of Dr Hawass had its limits." "'Virtually all of the Fayoum portraits have been removed from the mummies they were stuck onto." "'But I had noticed that there were one or two still intact in the corner of the room." "'I asked him a leading question, in the hope that he'd lead me over to look at them.'" "Do you have any mummies with the Fayoum portraits on them?" "No, we don't." "What about those?" "I don't know." "I haven't seen." "If you can show me one..." "'So I did.' I haven't seen this." "This is a surprise to me." "This is a Fayoum portrait." "So that gives us a picture of how..." "Of how it looks like." "How they were taken out of the ground?" "It's mummified and they have the face above them." "I haven't seen this before." "You give me some, er, discovery at the museum!" "It's a big museum!" "DR HAWASS LAUGHS" "'And with that, my ten minutes were over.'" "Well, it's been fascinating." "Thank you so much." "I know you're a very busy man." "Take your mic off." "He's got to go and talk to the Discovery Channel!" "'I never did have the chance to ask him whether he thought the artists who painted the Fayoum portraits 'founded the Coptic art tradition." "'But to me, the visual evidence seemed pretty overwhelming." "'Anyway, Zahi wasn't the only one with an appointment elsewhere." "'I had a rendezvous too - not in Cairo, but in the desert.'" "I'm on the pilgrim trail of St Anthony - all 1,000 steps of it." "Anthony was born in Fayoum, as it happens, about the middle of the 3rd century." "The son of well-to-do Christian parents, he gave up all his worldly possessions to emulate the lives of the Apostles." "He never married, and practised self-denial, fasting and prayer." "And then, at the age of 35, he withdrew from civilisation completely, and resolved to live in complete solitude." "St Anthony came here, to the windswept deserts of south-eastern Egypt, to flee the world, to escape the temptations of the flesh and to commune with his God." "He spent 20 years living in this wilderness." "But if he had just stayed here, we might never have heard of his name." "It was because of what he did next that he forever left his mark." "Anthony gathered around him other hermits, and with them developed a new way of life - one in which each individual would live and pray apart from the rest, but all would meet once a week for a shared meal and Mass." "In this way, he became one of the founding fathers of monasticism, a movement that would have an immense influence, not just on the practice of Christianity, but also on its art and culture." "The monasteries are crucial to understanding the Copts and their art." "They built them on the edge of the desert to provide the Church with a reservoir of spirituality from which the faithful could come and draw succour." "Once, there were hundreds of monasteries." "Most now are in ruins, but the 6th century Red Monastery, 300 miles south of Cairo, has found a restorer." "SINGING" "While the abbot still says daily Mass in a side chapel," "Professor Betsy Bolman from Temple University in Philadelphia is supervising the renovation." "We're now in the centre of this remarkable architectural structure, which is referred to as a trilobate space, which is to say that it's like a three-leaved clover in plan." "And rising up, we have two levels of architectural sculpture, a semi-dome and then levels above that with painting between windows." "What I notice most is the explosion of colour - the Coptic colours of the earth." "These tempera paintings are very early - 6th and 7th century." "So as well as expressing Christian faith, they give us a new perspective on the whole world of late antiquity - a world full of vivid colour, which has now been almost completely lost." "Here, though, it has miraculously survived." "This one we've only just started conserving." "The one on the other side we finished last year, and you can see on that side the bright colours and the vividness of the figures and their outlines." "Here, most of what you have is blackness or darkness, and when you see something that looks like a brighter window, that's an area where we've already conserved the paintings." "And what paintings they are." "These were created by masters of their art, the equal of any in the Byzantine Christian empire at the time." "What's characteristic about these, as far as late antique art goes, and certainly Coptic art, is their frontality, the outlines, the strong colours, the, um, intense gaze of the figures." "The painters here were not at all interested in creating a window into space on this surface." "So we tend to think that great art is art that takes that flat surface and gives us the illusion of the natural world around us." "And here we see none of that whatsoever, not because they couldn't do it, but because they didn't want to." "It will take at least another three years for the restoration to be completed." "The grime of centuries has to be removed particle by particle, and where the colour has disappeared, the gaps have to be filled in with greyish-brown paint, designed to be unobtrusive." "But Betsy's team of Italian art restorers are among the best in the world, and when they're finished, she's sure that Sohag Red Monastery will be recognised as one of the miracles of early Christian art." "I think it's fantastic." "I think it has enormous force." "When I first walked into the church after we'd moved the scaffolding from that side to this side, and I saw that entire expanse for the first time, it was as if a force hit me." "I almost fell back on the floor, it was so intense." "I think there's something magnificent about this expanse of paint from floor to ceiling." "The experience of Sohag made me wonder what other works of Christian art might be hidden in these deserts." "I decided to travel to one of the very sources of Egyptian monasticism, the monastery founded by the followers of St Anthony himself, towards the Red Sea." "I was expecting another ruin, but what I found was a monastic settlement the size of a village, complete with a charismatic monk, proud of the place that's been his home for half a lifetime and determined to show me its treasures." "This is my way in!" "Exactly, just to sit like that..." "Oh, look!" "It attaches." "They pull up everybody from here." "I can pull up you." "Father Maximous is letting me into his monastery on this rather extraordinary..." "That's fantastic!" "So that was how you used to enter the monastery?" "This was how they entered." "Not very dignified!" "Yeah!" "Father Maximous then took me to another part of the monastery to show me the recently rediscovered cells of the first monks - the world's earliest monastic architecture." "So I'm actually in the very first cells?" "You really are sort of touching history." "You really feel like you are hidden away from the world." "Exactly." "You are hidden and safe at the same time." "After a long period of decline since its heyday in the 13th century," "St Anthony's monastery is now clearly thriving, a sign of the great revival of the Coptic religion and Coptic art which has taken place in the last decade." "Father Maximous has spearheaded a renovation campaign here, rebuilding and restoring the most complete tempera cycle in all Coptic Egypt." "I'd heard the results were impressive, but nothing had prepared me for the experience itself." "It's absolutely incredible." "The thing for me that's so extraordinary is that I've spent my life, you know, studying art and art history and it's so strange to come across something that is... the iconography is in a way familiar," "but the style is like nothing I've ever seen before." "In this, the original monastery church, the restoration has revealed these unique and utterly fascinating 13th-century wall paintings." "When you first look, you think it's quite primitive, but then you look again, and you begin to see that it's actually fantastic abstract pattern-making - these horses that are paired with each other, and this beautiful attendant." "If you go to the Egyptian Museum and look at the bed of Tutankhamen, it's carried by two cows, and we have exactly the same motif." "Just how that Ancient Egyptian motif found its way onto the walls of a Coptic monastery, we'll never know." "But I liked Father Maximous's idea that there might be an aesthetic connection between Ancient Egypt and Coptic Egypt." "I thought it was true at many other levels - the sense of line, symmetry and design all integral to the stark brilliance of these pictures." "The Ancient Egyptians were famous for their understanding of maths and geometry." "Perhaps there's evidence of the continuation of that tradition here too." "I've never seen a Madonna..." "like that." "To me, I can't..." "I mean, it's an extraordinary face." "It's like some of the faces painted by Picasso." "Exactly." "It's very powerful." "Everything is the circle - her face is a circle, Christ is in a mandorla, her hands make a circle." "Her knees - even her knees are like circles." "Some people might look at that and say, "Oh, this is primitive art." Uh-huh." "But they wouldn't perhaps understand..." "Yes. ..that this is really actually very sophisticated, very subtle, very clever use of symbolism." "Exactly." "But also, she's full of joy." "She is." "Cos often in the Western tradition, we find this Madonna who's...you have the sense that she is sad for the knowledge that her son will be sacrificed." "Exactly." "But here there is no sense of that." "There's just the sense of joy..." "She is happy because she is the mother of the Saviour." "CHANTING" "We have a very beautiful chanting for Mary in the Coptic Church." "For example, if I..." "This is from the night prayer." "In the Coptic language, we have many songs for Mary, every day." "With this one, if we start it, we say..." "HE CHANTS THE PRAYER" "That's better than any art criticism you can write." "Yeah." "Cos it has the same..." "I don't know, the same sense of a pattern that expresses the idea of transcendence, but it's a musical pattern..." "Exactly. ..that's the same as the visual pattern." "'In the apse itself, I saw vivid representations of stories from the Old and New Testaments." "'And in the centre 'was a picture of Christ the Judge." "'But Maximous saved the best until last, 'in the shape of the Chapel of Four Living Creatures.'" "Can I go in?" "Yes, please go in." "It's incredible!" "Yes." "In this depiction of the Apocalypse, the master artist has given free rein to his imagination, producing an image of the end of all things that seems infused with a mystical, other-worldly, visionary power." "The chapel is a riot of symbol, colour, and intense spiritual feeling." "None of these forms are merely descriptive." "All are charged with meaning." "Even the sun and moon have faces, almost like illustrations to a modern children's story book, but containing a warning, too, of what might happen to those who don't merit a place in paradise." "You look into those eyes, and there is nowhere else to go." "What's going to happen in the end?" "What's going to happen after the Judgment?" "But the colours are so fantastic in here." "Beautiful, in this masterpiece..." "I've never seen anything like it." "It's a masterpiece, yeah." "It's like religious surrealism." "It reminds me of the fantasy painting of the 20th century." "There's total freedom." "'Coptic painting - little known, 'but full of its own fiercely expressive sense of divine mystery, 'seems to me to be a microcosm of the entire world of early Christian art." "'It's a vital tradition, capable of assuming 'radically different shapes and forms at different times 'and in different places, yet always connected to a central core - 'the life of Christ, and the teachings of the New Testament." "'But for a deeper understanding of the many facets and manifestations 'of early Christian art," "'I think it's essential to go back to its earliest roots." "'I had to say goodbye to Father Maximous, 'and travel to the ancient city of Rome.'" "Rome in the first century AD was still the centre of a great pagan empire." "But away from the public gaze, small Christian communities were springing up." "Their activities were sometimes tolerated by the polytheistic Roman emperors, although there were also frequent backlashes leading to persecution and death." "Perhaps it's because they want to set themselves apart from the pagans, perhaps it's because they don't want to call attention to themselves, but it seems that for the first 200 years, the early Christians produce no visual art whatsoever." "But then, something happens." "Down among the catacombs of Rome, there appear the very first Christian images, or at least the very first we know about." "They are simple and symbolic - a letter I from Ixthus, the Greek word for Lord of the World, a fish, symbolising belief in Christ..." "..a bird of paradise, symbolising the promise of life ever after." "Perhaps it's no surprise that the images were found here." "The catacombs were burial grounds, and the Christians celebrated death, especially the death of martyrdom, because their God promised a resurrection of the body." "Now, this is one of the very earliest painted Christian chapels." "And although no-one could say that it's great art," "I think it shows us exactly what the Christians wanted their art to do, which was to deliver a very straightforward message in a very straightforward way." "What's happening here is the artist is celebrating and remembering a group of martyrs - here we see them being apprehended, and on this side, we see them being executed." "To the early Christian, this is saying that in our faith, as opposed to our pagan Roman contemporaries' faith, these people will live on forever in paradise." "But if this was the only message Christians used art to communicate," "Christianity would have long died out." "What the Christians also had, which most of the competing sects from 3rd-century Rome couldn't match, was a coherent source for their images." "As I'd discovered in Coptic Cairo, they had a book." "So when the early Christian artists expanded their repertoire, they drew pictures of scenes from what became known as the Old and New Testaments." "Abraham sparing his son, Isaac." "Jonah, saved from the whale." "Lazarus, rising from his tomb." "And in painting these images, they began to evolve a revolutionary and magical approach to artistic representation - a method that would remain in use for 1,000 years." "It was something I had also seen in Egypt - an emphasis on essentials, to the point where the expressive centre of the image, the sign or symbol, is far more important than its placing in pictorial space." "In the 3rd century," "Rome developed a rich mixture of architectural and artistic styles, many traces of which can still be seen on the city's streets today." "One particularly impressive survivor is the 2nd-century column of Marcus Aurelius." "The column and its intricately carved figures show that, like the artists of Ancient Greece," "Roman sculptors had mastered perspective to produce the illusion of deep space." "So why did the early Christians abandon this long-established artistic tradition, and take what superficially might appear a backward step in creating their own perspective-free art?" "Some say they were primitive, unsophisticated - they'd forgotten all the old skills." "I don't think that's true." "They were faced with a different set of problems." "How do you represent the image of a man who is also a god?" "Perhaps you pay rather less attention to perspective - perhaps you place more emphasis on the beautiful light that you see in the world." "If you want to represent the image of a man who is also a god, there is in addition the question of just how useful perspective is to you - how much DO you want to represent the real world?" "You might, for example, want to lose all this - it's far too mundane." "You might want to replace it with a glittering, gold ground that makes the figure look as though they're floating against the sky of paradise, the vault of Heaven." "And so these early Christian artists unwittingly invented a tradition that would thrive for a millennium..." "..an art that rejects natural space, to suggest the supernatural..." "..an art that conveyed a spirituality so powerful, that it would captivate a Roman emperor, Constantine, the most powerful man in the world." "This arch was constructed in AD 315 to celebrate Constantine's triumphal march into Rome." "The Roman Senate built it to commemorate the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and to reassure Romans that Constantine, the Christian sympathiser, would stay true to the traditions of the greatest emperors of the past." "I've come to see it with Heather Robbins, a young Canadian academic who's going to show me how the arch was made, like a sculptural collage or assemblage, from recycled fragments of far older statues." "What they've done is to resculpt and recut the faces of those emperors with the features of Constantine." "So he's reappropriating the imagery of the good emperors of the past?" "That's exactly it, to make an equation between him and his predecessors." "So he's the new Marcus Aurelius, the new Trajan - everything will be OK." "You might have heard he's a Christian, but you can relax." "Yes!" "But then Heather escorted me to the other face of the arch, where there's another fascinating layer of meaning - messages hinting not at continuity, but at a radical break with the past." "The panels on the top of the arch are typically Roman, naturalistic, with a strong background full of perspective." "But the panel beneath, with Constantine, whose head is now missing, at a meeting of the Senate, is entirely different." "It's pictured in a very..." "a completely flat manner." "So it's not that they can't do perspective, or naturalism - it's that they don't want to." "They have other priorities." "That's precisely it, yes." "Raphael, the great Renaissance artist and archaeologist, wrote a letter, I think, to the Pope, in which he expressed the idea that on the Arch of Constantine you can visibly see how the great glory of Roman art" "fell into a terrible decline in the time of Constantine, because this work is so barbaric and so primitive." "'The truth is that the art of post-Christian Rome was anything but barbaric 'or primitive." "I'd soon be looking at clinching evidence for this." "'I needed to come here - 'the Mausoleum of Constanza - 'built as the last resting place of Constantine's daughter." "'This beautiful but starkly simple circular structure 'is one of the very few 4th-century buildings to have survived in Rome." "'But most beautiful of all are the mosaics that adorn the ceiling and the walls." "'Constanza was a committed believer, 'and these are the first truly sophisticated images of a still embryonic Christian art.'" "The fascinating part about these mosaics here is that we are on, um..." "on the fringe, sort of." "We're at that pivotal moment in time when Christian iconography is developing." "And it hasn't quite become distinctive unto itself." "So it's still borrowing from Roman tradition, from the Graeco-Roman iconographic repertoire, and we have this mix and this ambiguity that will eventually work itself out into the purely Christian." "Before your eyes, it's the invention of Christian art." "That's right." "'Like a kind of antique billboard, 'the mosaics in the apse advertise the Christian message to the faithful." "'And the central figure, the essence of the brand, 'is, of course, Christ himself.'" "Is this a result of Christianity - having been, if you like, almost a refugee religion - has now become the religion of the state?" "It's acquired this imperial power, so now it acquires imperial grandeur and scale." "In the reign of Constantine, Christianity is of course made legal, and so now they are free to make public Christian imagery, whereas before, it had always been private, in a private realm." "These mosaics represent now the freedom of the Christian faith, of the Church, to create art on a grand scale." "And art on a grand scale starts to picture its god differently." "The artists have borrowed from the pagan tradition to give Jesus a resemblance to the Roman god Apollo." "And looking at it, I feel as though I'm a world away from that image of Christ that I saw in the catacombs." "In the catacomb, he is dressed as a common shepherd." "And here, he's been given divine, regal vestments." "It's interesting that right at the beginning of Christianity, it seems to me that this is almost the perpetual tension in the representation of Christ." "Do we represent him as the King of Kings, or do we represent him as the God who became man and suffered with us?" "There's this constant pushing and pulling, in all Christian traditions, between those two images." "And here it is right at the start." "Here, in this mausoleum, there are the first stirrings of a fundamental doctrinal schism that would divide Christian teaching for centuries." "Is Christianity to be considered a faith of humility and poverty, or one of power and magnificence?" "On the other side of the mausoleum, there's another mosaic of Christ." "But this one's even grander." "This is COMPLETELY different." "Was this done at the same time as the other mosaic?" "Yes, it would have been done at the same time." "And, as you were saying with your surprised expression, it's the complete difference in the aspect of Christ here." "Gone now is any sense of informality." "For the first time Jesus is pictured as a venerable bearded figure." "The central figure within Christianity is no longer humble." "Here, he's powerful and magnificent." "Christ is rendered as an omnipotent Jupiter - ruler of all he surveys." "And a ruler needs great buildings." "I'd said goodbye to Heather and come across town to Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the earliest and grandest churches in Rome, built in the middle of the fifth century." "Christianity was, at the time, the official religion of the Empire and this church shows how their artists and architects strove to find ways of expressing Christ's glory." "They rejected the pagan blueprint of the temple and chose to model the church instead on the basilica - the Roman form used for courts of law." "And at the far end, or apse - where Roman justice would be meted out - we now find the image of Christ, the ultimate law-giver, here, in a series of splendid mosaics telling the story of his early life." "And there's another borrowing from pagan Rome here." "The structure on which the mosaics have been arranged resembles a triumphal arch, all to emphasise Christ's power and justice in terms that the Romans would have understood." "This has been the model for most Christian churches ever since." "This mosaic represents Christ as a child, dressed in the robes of an emperor." "Another pictures Christ as the triumphant Lamb of God." "And another represents the souls of the faithful as sheep." "Not round Christ's neck but meekly looking up to him." "The lack of perspective now no longer shows simplicity, other-worldliness - it shows power." "RESOUNDING CHORAL MUSIC" "Here, in the church and the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore, we can see very clearly how Christ came to occupy absolute centre stage in the Roman world." "He'd become the King of Kings, the Emperor of Emperors." "On my journey so far," "I've been struck by how quickly early Christian art spread across so much of the known world." "In Rome it produced an art of glory and power, blazing forth the messages of the new religion." "To the south, Egypt's Coptic tradition produced an art of interior vision and mystic power." "But, meanwhile, to the north," "Christians, over many centuries, set about creating an art to balance the different dimensions of Christian spirituality - creating works on a very different scale and of a very different order." "I've decided to come to Bourges where, at exactly the same time as they were decorating that beautiful monastery church of St Anthony's in Egypt, here in France they were building a great cathedral to the glory of God." "BELLS PEAL" "Bourges today is a typically, well, bourgeois town." "It's a quiet, provincial backwater - prosperous, comfortable." "Yet 800 years ago it produced THIS wonderful work of art." "'I was staying in the same lodging house as the French novelist Stendhal 'when he came to Bourges almost 200 years ago." "'He, too, was stunned by the cathedral's scale and beauty 'like so many visitors ever since." "'Showing me around is a longstanding resident of Bourges 'who's been studying the cathedral for more than 20 years.'" "Barbara?" "Yes." "Hi." "Nice to meet you." "Nice to meet you." "American lecturer Barbara Thomas Richard took me past the famously high flying buttresses which have been supporting the walls of this cathedral for 800 years." "You can almost feel the human time..." "Yes." "..that went into the creation of it." "Well, Henry James said it was like a huge hull of a ship dominating a solitary swimmer." "Stendhal said you could feel the nothingness of man... in the Bourges church." "Well..." "Balzac said that it was hard to be irreligious in a city such as Bourges when you had this huge building right in the centre of town." "But he tried his best nonetheless." "Well, perhaps he was just pretending." "But nobody can pretend that this isn't one of the masterpieces of world sculpture." "Above the entrance for the common folk is a writhing mass of naked bodies rising from the dead." "It's the Last Judgment, as you can see." "You always read it from bottom to top." "You make your spirit rise towards Heaven." "And you can see there are the three acts of the Last Judgment." "The lower register is the awakening of the souls - people pushing up their coffin lids coming out of their tombs." "You really don't want to wake up and find yourself on God's left hand, do you?" "Cos you know it's bad news." "It's the devils, as so often in medieval art, that draw the eye." "They must have been truly terrifying in the Middle Ages when this cathedral was built." "A vision and a warning of what might happen to the godless and the sinful." "And originally all this was in living colour, now worn away." "You are punished where you've sinned, so one is getting his ear torn off - he probably listened to evil." "It's always the woman's fault." "She's the universal symbol of the sins of the flesh." "And she has a toad hanging from her breast, you see?" "Condemned for all eternity to nourish evil." "See?" "You shouldn't have worn that low-cut dress." "You shouldn't have done it." "BELLS PEAL" "That was by no means the only message the cathedral was intended to deliver." "It's a while since I've been here." "That is so beautiful, isn't it?" "The architecture of infinity." "Yes." "Don't you get the feeling that you're just a tiny... nano-particle in the middle of all of this?" "And part of the reason is that - unlike many great churches - this cathedral hasn't been compartmentalised." "Nothing cuts the Gothic church in two." "It's one huge oval - a heavenly city in stone and space." "The medieval mind thought that the aisle - the main aisle, the main central corridor of these Gothic churches - was like the huge upturned hull of a ship and we were all in the same boat making this voyage to infinity." "Well, the earliest grand church that I visited in this the journey, for this particular programme, was the great basilica church in Rome called Santa Maria Maggiore." "And you can see the early Christians thinking," ""Well, what kind of a building will be appropriate to gather a huge congregation?"" "And they think, "Well, a law building." Exactly." "And here we have I suppose, a huge upturned boat but it still has a basilical feel to it." "It does." "Especially the absence of transept." "The early basilical churches were five aisles." "That's what we have here." "We have a central nave and two collaterals on either side and we have this row, this arcade, of columns, so that's where the court of justice would have been - right there in the choir - and that's where, of course, the bishop sat." "Yeah, so you've still got even, you know, a thousand years later, you still have this very strong sense of the architecture of somehow justice and of law also being the architecture of Christianity." "The whole central nave of the church seems to be bathed in a diffuse glow of light." "And it's this light - this "lux continua" as it was known - that stays in the mind." "And it's light, directed and channelled, that makes the beauty of the stained-glass windows." "What I love about Bourges is that you're so close to the stained glass, you're so intimate with it, you can see what's going on." "Yeah, it's right at eye level." "There's no way of missing the stories and of course that was designed..." "This was the where the faithful circled through and masses were said in the little radiating chapels." "And so they stopped and they learned as they listened to the sermons." "And, of course, what better sermon than the Revelation that we see here?" "It is an image from St John's Apocalypse of Christ the Judge carrying a sword, the flashing blade of truth, in his mouth." "He's the alpha and omega." "It's wonderful." "I love the way the image is also..." "It's made of light." "Well, yes." "That's what the stained glass is, isn't it?" "It's light transformed by the message of God." "Naked light would never be able to do that but stained glass can do that because it can change the trajectory of the light according to the colours and change your faith." "There are a dozen or so of the original 13th-century windows left - all created by a group of medieval craftsmen under the direction of an architect and the strict theological supervision of the clergy and bishop." "But these masons, stone-cutters, sculptors, and glass painters were confident men." "They allowed themselves plenty of room for artistic interpretation, as in this vision of Salome." "Here, the nemesis of John the Baptist indulges in erotic games, standing in an intriguing juxtaposition to the dourly respectable baker's wife nearby." "Many of the windows are straightforward Biblical narratives." "The tale of the Good Samaritan for example, or the stories of Lazarus the leper who made it to Heaven... and the rich man who didn't." "'Every window could be read.'" "In effect, these were illuminated books for the people at large." "You could read them for their stories." "But if you half close your eyes and simply bathe in their colours, you can see them as a beautiful metaphor for that fundamental human search - the quest for illumination." "Probably on a bright, sunny day, they didn't, they couldn't have seen the actual stories." "They were just in a state of trance." "It has a very strong effect." "I remember Matisse the French painter, 20th-century painter, wrote in his notebooks that a small piece of blue is a small piece of blue." "But a large field of blue takes you somewhere else." "It has actually an effect on your central nervous system." "Some of these windows when you get a lot of blue you..." "Paradise." "You are in paradise." "You are in paradise." "Paradise had become a recurring theme uniting all of the art I'd seen - the early Christian art in Rome, the wonderful flowering of Coptic art in Egypt and the majestic splendour of the stained glass in Gothic Bourges." "All of these artists had dispensed with the illusions of perspective to reveal deeper truths." "They'd avoided representing the material world to paint paradise, to find the divine." "During the course of this journey, I have visited some places that were very unfamiliar to me - the great early Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore, the Coptic monasteries and churches of Egypt." "So coming to this great Northern European Gothic cathedral... feels a bit like coming home." "I'm familiar with this type of building." "And yet seeing it after having seen those other spaces, those other buildings," "I suddenly have the sense that I'm REALLY seeing it... for the unique thing that it is and seeing it in a way that I never have done quite before." "I see how the structure of this grand cathedral has its roots in the grand basilicas and arches of early Christian Rome." "The dazzling light from the stained glass reaches back to the mosaics in the Mausoleum of Constanza, framing, in colour and light, the life of Jesus." "And in the great frieze of the saved and damned over the entrance," "I think we can even see how these medieval artists had begun to recapture the sophistication of antique friezes like those on the Column of Marcus Aurelius and put it to a Christian purpose." "But I suppose what all this has taught me, in the most graphic and immediate way, is that Christianity has these two..." "..almost opposing and yet reconcilable tendencies within it." "On the one hand, this immense grandeur, this sense of Christ's majesty, God's omnipotence which is conjured up by these great tree-like pillars of stone, the play of light in here." "And yet, on the other hand, this very intimate one-to-one - the way in which Christianity tries to speak to the individual." "You get THAT here in the windows." "The way in which you can almost eat that sense of light and colour that you can internalise God's light - like you eat the wafer at Communion." "And this space... seems to me to bring everything together - the high, the majestic but also the intimate." "That's the great achievement of Gothic." "As I was leaving," "I had a quick look at the archbishop's portico and I suddenly had the feeling that there might even be a trace of Coptic influence in the great synthesis that is Bourges Cathedral." "These eyes and faces, these stark upright figures, reminded me very strongly of the saints and prophets I'd seen in the monasteries of Egypt." "All the artworks I had seen on my journey seemed to be coming together in one place." "I was in for one last surprise, as well." "I'd learned that just 25 miles away from Bourges Cathedral, there's a church with some of the very few examples of Coptic painting outside Egypt." "It took a while to find it - but eventually I did - tucked away in a village far off the beaten track." "How amazing!" "It really is... a little piece of Coptic Egypt in the middle of France." "Incredible." "The Coptic images date from when the church was built in the 12th century but they've only been recently recovered after centuries under whitewash." "It's like St Anthony." "It's like the image of St Anthony in the monastery." "Really, really, er... almost spookily strange, to find this here and so close to Bourges." "I suppose it just shows that Christian art really is this sort of continuum, this conversation, taking place across centuries, across continents." "You know, you can..." "You think you can't possibly prove it but the evidence turns up and there it is." "It's breathtaking." "It really was." "I wonder what Father Maximous would have made of it?" "Well, for me, one of the great pleasures of...of looking at art, thinking about art, trying to work things out, making these programmes." "One of the great pleasures is when you get a surprise like this." "This really does, um... take the Coptic biscuit!" "It's incredible." "It's incredible." "MUSIC: "I Won't Forget My Roots" by Souad Massi" "SHIP'S HORN" "The very first art historian" "Giorgio Vasari gave the art of the Byzantine east a lousy press." "It was crude, unsophisticated, primitive and I sometimes wonder although he wrote 500 years ago," "I wonder if we haven't taken him too much at his word." "I've never seen a TV programme about the art of the Byzantium." "The subject is abbreviated to a few simplifications in most histories of world art and yet the art that was produced in the East was amongst the most vibrant, colourful and energetic that the world's ever seen." "I want to explore that tradition, to tell its story, and it's a story that begins here, in a city called Istanbul that was once called Constantinople." "This modern, chaotic port city was once the centre of a dynasty so powerful it seemed immune to change and decay, but nothing lasts forever and the story of how a once great Christian empire grew and spread," "how it reached its zenith, faded and died, all that is reflected in the radiant, shape shifting forms of its art." "It was Emperor Constantine, the earliest Christian emperor, who first came here in 324 AD, when this place was known as Byzantium." "Strategically situated on the banks of the Bosphorus, the city straddles Europe and Asia." "Emperor Constantine changed its name to Constantinople." "In this mosaic of the 6th century, he's seen offering the new capital to God, and by the same token seeking God's protection for his new empire in the East." "The 1,000 year period that followed would be known as the Byzantine era, with Constantinople its centre of political and cultural thought." "As well as establishing a whole new Roman headquarters," "Constantine brought with him the new religion known as Christianity." "The marriage between Christianity and the folk of the Byzantine world would create some outstanding works of art and architecture, buildings and images designed to convince those who experienced them that the Christian faith was the one true path to salvation." "It's an irony of fate and history that many great churches such as the Hagia Sophia were later transformed into mosques." "But their origins are very definitely Christian." "There's no greater monument to the might and splendour of the glorious Byzantine civilisation than this great cathedral, Hagia Sophia." "Walking in is a sense stunning experience, this great dome raised up above you into the vault of heaven." "Almost as extraordinary as the sheer physical presence of the place is the fact that it was all built in just five years." "In the past, this place was the most prestigious of the Byzantine empire and the centre of what came to be known as Orthodox Christianity." "This building dates from the early 6th century and is a testament to one of the most important figures of the Byzantine empire " "Emperor Justinian I." "His rule coincided with what might be described as the golden age of Byzantium, a time of unparalleled peace and prosperity which made possible the very creation of the Hagia Sophia." "The original scheme was very simple on the evidence of what survived - basic crosses and almost nothing figurative." "Whether this was a planned effect of sobriety and restraint, or merely a way of getting the building finished on time, we'll never know." "What is certain is that the building of the Hagia Sophia changed the course of world architecture." "Its massive dome seemingly suspended in mid air appears to defy gravity, having no obvious means of support." "The dome of this building is 32 metres across." "We do, of course, have the dome of the Pantheon in Rome which is larger, but this is a much more daring architectural construction." "I was thinking about that, wondering what someone from Rome would think coming here." "They would have had the Pantheon in their mind." "What I assume would have struck them is yes, there's a dome as big as the Pantheon's dome but it's been sort of vertically propelled and it's surrounded by this other huge architectural fabric." "Absolutely, and if you think about the Pantheon in particular the dome is supported on a continuous wall, on a drum." "Here, we've got something quite different." "When you go into the church, it's very difficult to see just how the dome is supported, because everything is veiled behind colonnade, so the main piers don't stand out when you're looking at the interior." "That's a very interesting point." "Do you think it might have struck your ordinary Byzantine bloke as a kind of feat of divine, miraculous engineering as visible, tangible evidence that this guy must have God on his side, otherwise how could he float something like that?" "I'm sure." "Yes, I'm sure." "In Byzantine imperial philosophy, the emperor was God's representative on earth." "By building a cathedral like this on such a massive scale," "Justinian was making the point that his power was supported by God." "The church of the Hagia Sophia is an architectural marvel that became THE great church of the Byzantine empire, which at the time of Emperor Justinian I stretched from modern-day Turkey in the east to Spain in the west." "The work created in Constantinople was the alpha and omega of Byzantine art, but tragically, many of its very earliest masterpieces have been lost." "For centuries, the traditions forged in Constantinople shaped European art." "You can see the extent of its impact in the satellite cities of the empire." "GREEK ORTHODOX CHORAL SINGING" "One of the key Byzantine centres was Thessaloniki in modern-day northern Greece," "Nestling beside the sea in a natural harbour, it was a crucial outpost of the empire." "A thriving port today, as it was in the 5th and 6th centuries, its prosperity was built on maritime trade." "Such was its strategic importance," "Emperor Constantine almost chose it as his first city over Constantinople." "He was probably right not to as this was a city under constant threat of invasion, but it's the fact that it was almost under permanent siege that lends the art that developed here its particularly intense quality." "This part of town is built up now, a honeycomb of streets and houses, but 1,500 years ago, these were fields perched above the city and standing alone at the summit of the hill was a monastery dedicated to Saint David." "Inside is the church of Osios David which contains a stunning 6th century mosaic in near pristine condition, a fascinating glimpse of the forces shaping Christian art in the early Byzantine world." "It's a work of art that shows us very clearly, how strong the Greco-Roman tradition, the Hellenistic tradition of culture and art was in this city, but it doesn't really look like a Byzantine mosaic." "One thinks of Byzantium as having lots of gold and glitter." "The colours are very low, these beautiful muted blues, reds and greens, and the modelling of the figures is very sculptural" "and if you look at that central figure of Christ, you can really sense the way in which the artist is taking the powers of the old gods, the pagan gods and giving them to the new Christian god." "The subject's taken from the Book of Revelation." "It's the vision of Ezekiel." "You can see Ezekiel on the left-hand side, this urgent crouching figure with his hand to his ear, experiencing this great vision of Christ and we see him surrounded by the attributes of his evangelists." "There's Mark the lion," "Matthew the angel," "John the eagle, and Luke the ox." "It was actually quite a new subject for an artist to be taking on in the Byzantine empire in the 6th century because the Book of Revelations had only relatively recently been accepted into the canon of Christian text." "But the message of the image was unambiguous." "The end of the world is nigh." "Pray and repent." "Get your spiritual house in order or you won't be saved." "Now, this image acquired even more potency later in the city's history because by the 9th century, this monastery was in a relative state of disrepair and the image had long been covered over and forgotten about." "Now, the story goes that an old monk was in here one day sheltering from a storm, when suddenly, an earthquake struck." "There was a shattering noise behind him." "All the covering fell away, and this image suddenly appeared." "The monk was so devastated that he actually died on the spot." "As a result of this act of divine intervention, this place became a site of pilgrimage." "Thousands would come here to look at this image which they believed had actually been created by God Himself in the belief that they might almost touch divinity by looking at it." "CHORAL SINGING" "The character who came to dominate the imagination of Thessalonians in the Byzantine era, perhaps even more than Christ himself, was their Patron Saint - the spiritual protector, Saint Demetrios, as can be seen in the church dedicated to him." "The church dates back to the 5th century, and although it was extensively renovated following a fire in 1917, some of the 6th and 7th century mosaics that can still be seen here are among the best surviving examples of early Byzantine art." "What's most interesting about them is the emphasis they place on Demetrios himself." "A warrior saint whose life and legends are enshrouded in myth, but who came to seem as present and actual as a real father or brother to the people who lived here." "In Byzantine culture, the emperor himself was so closely associated with Jesus, but the people at large didn't feel they had the right to approach Christ directly." "Their emperor was the only mortal with a direct hotline to God." "So they had to approach a figure rather lower down the divine hierarchy." "And in Thessaloniki, that was Saint Demetrios." "They prayed to him in the hope that he'd pass the message upstairs, and their wishes would be granted - a pattern of belief touchingly reflected in this image of him sheltering the children of the city." "These mosaics show the devotion of Byzantine communities to their chosen saints." "And because Thessaloniki was so regularly besieged, this was a city that needed a never-ending supply of miracles." "Reading through annals of the city, it seems that Saint Demetrios was forever saving the people of Thessaloniki from one disaster or another." "In times of plague, they'd pray to him and be miraculously cured." "Or if the city was being invaded, he'd come to there aid." "On one occasion, the Slavs attacked by knights and suddenly, this church burst into flames, waking up all the people." "They put out the fire, realised they were being attacked, and repelled the invaders." "Once again, Saint Demetrios had come to their aid." "But my favourite story concerns a particularly mischievous deacon called Onesiphorus who was in the habit of sneaking into the sacristy at night, and stealing the candles, which were worth a lot of money in those days." "Then one night, while he was about this dastardly deed, the voice of Saint Demetrios boomed out," ""Onesiphorus, you're at it again!"" "The moral of the story being, as ever, that Saint Demetrios has his eye on you at all times." "And this is where Saint Demetrios lies." "Local people come each day to worship in the shrine that is said to contain his body and to ask for their prayers to be answered." "Thessalonians still look to Saint Demetrios for their health, protection and spiritual well-being." "Even today, a high percentage of boys born in the city are christened Demetrios." "Thessaloniki's geographical position made is vulnerable to attacks by land or sea." "But another of the Byzantine empire's great centres proved to be a more robust stronghold." "However, even here, the tensions of the time are subtly reflected in the character of its art." "For 200 years, the Italian town of Ravenna was the capital of the western half of the Byzantine empire." "From the year 479, one of the Germanic tribes, the Ostrogoths, controlled the town until Justinian I recaptured it for the empire in 540." "In Ravenna's great monuments, we can sense the pendulums swings of Byzantine art as a whole - an art born out of struggle and suffering, but also capable of unparalleled magnificence." "San Apollinare-Nouvo is famous for its great frieze of mosaic imagery, a grand procession of Christian martyrs bearing palms." "They seem to step in slow march around the walls of the church." "The procession culminates on the northern side of the church with this wonderfully vivid representation of the three magi - the wise men from the East, fantastically dressed and offering their gifts to the infant Christ, just as the martyrs who accompany them have offered to God" "the gift of their lives." "For all the splendour of the decoration, you can feel that what lies behind it is a very strong sense of the human cost of defending and sustaining Christianity - a faith that's implied here steeped in the blood of its martyrs," "encircled by enemies on all sides." "I love the stark simplicity of the basilica church." "It's almost just a light box for the shimmering message of the mosaics." "San Apollinare-Nouvo is one of no fewer than eight World Heritage sites in Ravenna." "Most magnificent of all is the church of San Vitale, its greatest treasure being the cycle of mosaics in the apse of its church." "Here, we'll see not a Christian art of supplication as at Thessaloniki, nor a Christian art of martyrdom as at San Apollinare." "Instead, we'll see a resoundingly confident assertion of imperial might confident that God is on its side." "It's a great mosaic decoration which shows us Justinian himself surrounded by his retinue and opposite him, his empress with her ladies of the court." "Above them, Christ is seated on a great globe." "Now, all of this was created nearly 1,500 years ago by a team of artists from the East, and it took them 20 years to complete." "For my money, it represents the absolute high watermark of Christian art in the early Byzantine period." "But to really appreciate how extraordinary it is, you need to get up close and personal." "CHORAL SINGING" "You enter the space through an arch containing the image of Christ and his disciples and here in the presbytery, we have a series of Biblical scenes that establish the two themes of this great chapel which are the theme of making an offering" "and the theme of receiving divine wisdom from God himself." "Here we have Abel and Melchisedec making a sacrifice." "On the other side, it's the story of Abraham and Isaac." "Both stories involve making an offering, which after all, this whole church is, that's what it does." "It makes an offering to God." "Now, you have to imagine a kind of invisible membrane separating the presbytery from the apse because suddenly if you move from those scenes to these scenes which contain the kingdom of Heaven paradise itself, with depictions of the empress here and the emperor here," "you are actually moving..." "I'm stepping literally from the realm of the world, of the mundane, of the finite, into a space that represents the infinite." "And all the materials in this part of the mosaic decoration are suddenly different, much more gold, mother-of-pearl, silver, these extraordinary representations of the emperor, seen with his great general Belisarius, who would re-conquer the empire under his command." "He's facing the empress Theodora." "What's fascinating about her is that she has sewn into her cloak, an image of the three magi, the Three Wise Men, processing towards Christ." "What's that's expressing is the idea that these courtiers, the elite of the Byzantine world, they are another set of magi processing towards God." "They are in direct touch with divinity." "That's why they are allowed to have their representations in this space." "Quite apart from anything else, these two panels on either side are really the only surviving portraits, and they are portraits, that we have of the Byzantine imperial court in the time of Justinian." "What's wonderful about this is the sheer actuality of it." "It's a Byzantine 6th century fashion parade." "They're dressed up to the nines." "They've got the Byzantine equivalent of bling in the form of bracelets that look almost like gold Rolex watches." "And yet there's also a tremendous solemnity because these are images of the emperor and the empress transfigured." "What these images predict is their future." "They will be absorbed into paradise, into the kingdom of Heaven." "They will sit in majesty with the greatest emperor of them all, Christ." "In these extraordinary colours, these colours like fire, we have a great offering, a great kind of fire of colour and images perpetually burning to the glory of God." "And it's a fire that's been lit by the emperor and the empress and it continues burning to this day bringing good fortune onto the people of Ravenna and by extension, the people of the whole Eastern empire." "I met an art historian who spent her life studying these mosaics, but who still can't fully explain their magic." "The centuries after Justinian and Theodora's golden age, were marked by war and internal strife." "In 751, Ravenna was seized by Lombard invaders from Northern Italy." "This coincided with a huge theological split over the production of religious images known in the Church as the "iconoclast controversy"." "Those who believed it was right to depict God, Jesus and the saints clashed with those who considered it heresy." "These iconoclasts considered the second commandment" ""Thou shalt not bow down and worship any graven image", to be sacrosanct." "The struggle was violent and destructive." "All over the empire, precious works of art were obliterated." "The controversy lasted for 120 years until it was finally resolved in 843 when the empire authorised the use and production of icons once and for all." "The decision to allow religious art is commemorated in a special service in the Orthodox church on the first Sunday in Lent." "Having won the battle, the supporters of icons in the Christian East, embraced art." "Icons were placed at the very centre of Orthodox Christian worship." "And everywhere, churches decked themselves with ever more conspicuous displays of religious imagery." "The victory of the icons allowed painting and mosaic to flourish once again often at the most remote edges of the empire." "Some of the best surviving examples of this new wave of Byzantine art can be found in the monasteries of Greece." "Monastic life was an important aspect of the Byzantine world." "The monks enjoyed the patronage of wealthy Christians and used the money to create rich works of art dedicated to the glory of God." "Clinging to the steep slopes of Mount Helikon in the southwestern corner of Greece, is the ancient monastery of Hosios Loukas, one of the most important Byzantine monuments built in the years after the defeat of the iconoclasts." "In the Byzantine scheme of things, while the emperor was Christ's representative on Earth, the monks were every bit as important because they lived the life of Christ on Earth." "It was their job through their prayers, their acts and their works to create a kind of spiritual ladder by which all might ascend to salvation." "If you want to see what that could mean in practice, this is the place to come." "The church of Hosios Loukas is a compression chamber of spiritual aspiration." "It's a grand space, but the eye is always drawn upwards to a multitude of scenes created in the glittering tessera of the mosaic makers' art." "I think what's really striking about the style of these mosaics is their austerity and solemnity." "But what's also fascinating about the faces of these prophets and saints and angels, is that all the figures have these wide, staring eyes, as if they are literally more open than the rest of us to the light of God." "To me it suggests the idea almost of ecstasy, that state of spiritual contemplation where you literally feel as if you are outside your body." "The names of those who created these 10th and 11th century images are lost in the past." "Sadly because there are lots of brilliantly fresh touches of invention here." "Look at the way Christ's baptism has been depicted, how the water's been rendered as a series of circular rivulets that ripple and coil around the body of Christ." "For the thousand years following their creation, the mosaics of Hosios Loukas have been cared for and revered by generation after generation of monks." "SINGING" "TRANSLATION:" "Yet in the West, there's been a deep-seated prejudice, even contempt, for this art, starting with Giorgio Vasari, but by no means stopping with him." "The French Enlightenment writer Voltaire summed up the whole history of Byzantine civilisation in two sentences..." ""This worthless history is full of nothing but declamations" ""and miracles." "It is a disgrace to the human mind."" "But if he could have come here, he might just have changed his mind." "This monastery is on top of a mountain, and when we look at these fantastic mosaics, we really are seeing the summit of the Byzantine art of mosaic, I think." "They're absolutely wonderful." "The figures are created in this very austere style - austere, severe, geometrical, reticent... and yet they're full of these sort of flashes of passion and engagement with the emotional reality of the story." "There's Christ washing the feet of his disciples." "And in the figures of those disciples, which are wonderfully actual and vivid - they have the same faces you might see of people in the street in Athens today - you can see their mixture of humility and almost shame that he should be doing this for them." "I think this Crucifixion scene is also... extremely impressive and very moving, despite the very severe, upright, geometrical character of the figures." "It seems to me to be almost MORE moving than much later Crucifixions in Western art, where Mary and John are twisted into an agony of sorrow." "Because they seem to be sort of holding their emotions back, those emotions seem all the stronger." "That figure of the crucified Christ is extraordinary, that bent body and blood pouring from hands and feet." "I think this image of St Peter..." "St Peter, the rock on which Christ built his church... his robes have been formed into this extraordinary...crystalline, geometrical pattern." "He's a human monument." "It's an extraordinary, beautiful figure." "But for me, the whole spirit of this place is summed up by this great..." "Christ pantocrator over the door." "And unlike a lot of other Christs, who very much give you the feeling that Big Brother is watching you, this figure seems very benign." "And with brilliant ingenuity, the artist has shaped Christ's body over the door, as if to suggest that his body would continue down and BE the door, so that you enter... you enter this sacred space" "through Christ's body, as you find your salvation through his worship." "I think it's just a beautiful idea." "One enduring enigma of Byzantine art is its apparent lack of spatial depth." "It's hard to believe that the artists who created such powerful and complex imagery didn't know exactly what they were doing." "But there was something about their use of space that I was finding it hard to put my finger on." "To get a better understanding of the subtleties of Byzantine artistic technique," "I thought it might be helpful to talk to a modern-day living and breathing painter of icons." "There are over 2,000 iconographers, as they're called, in Greece, many living and working in the monasteries, but by far the majority are here in Athens." "And over 80% of their work is for the Greek Orthodox Church." "'Giorgos Kordis is one of the biggest names in icon painting." "'He's been working with these images for 20 years 'and recently accepted the commission to paint an entire Orthodox church in Beirut 'with frescos.'" "Is it important...?" "I mean, I assume it's important you are a believer, that you are a Christian..." "Yes." "..to make this art?" "Yes, I think that's...important." "Pretty basic requirement?" "Yes, of course." "OK." "Otherwise, it's going to be very, very difficult to paint things that you don't believe in." "Are there days in your life where you... as it were, just feel like you just don't have the right spiritual energy to make an icon, so you don't paint?" "Um... yes, sometimes... ..I can't paint, so I don't do it." "'I told Giorgos that on my journeys so far," "'I'd met people who'd described the images portrayed in Byzantine art 'as having a mystical sense of reality." "'Both Cetti and Ravenna and Father Mantzouranis 'in Hosios Loukas refer to the icons as being alive.'" "An icon... is living when it has rhythm and when it communicates with the spectator through rhythm, cos this is the most important thing." "So you use the word rhythm a lot..." "Yeah." "Is it possible for you to explain it to me?" "I'm not sure I quite understand what you mean by it." "Um...yeah." "Probably it's better to draw you something in order to show you what exactly I mean." "This is the Byzantine art perspective." "If we want to draw a house..." "..we have to draw it in this way." "You see?" "Mm-hm." "The back side goes up, and the front side down." "And the same thing happens here." "See?" "Back...it's going up." "And the other goes down." "So...this figure comes to us." "It moves towards here." "The perspective brings this figure to us." "So we have two dynamics, two different dynamics." "And in this way, we create rhythm." "You see?" "Rhythm is the balance between these two dynamics." "So, in a sense, the image is... drawing out a cone..." "Exactly." "..into the world." "Exactly." "And I almost enter the space...the space of the image comes out." "The pictorial space is in front of the icon." "And the spectator enters the pictorial space." "And the spectator becomes part of the icon." "Now, that's massively different from the Italian Renaissance..." "It's the opposite. ..type of pictorial space." "It's the opposite." "Exactly the opposite." "So, in the Renaissance, the painting is a window..." "Yes." "..and I want to go through there..." "Yes." "..whereas the Byzantine..." "And what, so to speak, what is the... what's the point?" "Why...why?" "That's a good question." "Why?" "Because, in Byzantine tradition... which is very... influenced by Orthodox theology, knowledge is participation." "If you want to know God, you have to participate in God." "So, if we want to know this iconic reality, we have to have a kind of participation in this reality." "That's why, when we... paint a church, we have to create this kind of communion between the icons and the spectators." "Listening to Giorgos, I really did feel that the penny had finally dropped." "It's not that this art doesn't have perspective, but that it uses perspective in a different way." "I'd responded to Byzantine art instinctively." "But while I'd been walking around and looking at it," "I hadn't quite realised the extent to which it had been choreographing my movement, making me stand in a particular space within the cones shaped by its lines of force emerging from the images." "I realised I had literally as well as emotionally been moved by this art." "98% of the people of Greece are Orthodox Christians." "They take the art and the religion that's central to their faith very seriously." "Most families create dedicated shrines full of images that can encompass photographs, postcards, even outright kitsch." "Iconic art's part of the everyday lived experience here." "For the Orthodox Church icons are fundamental to the faith." "Can you tell me a little bit about the importance of icons, paintings, mosaics, to the Orthodox Church?" "Well, one the most important qualities of an icon is to help you pray." "All right?" "And this has to do with the artistic style of the icon." "With the fact that the icon is a representation of the kingdom of God." "To give an example, a Byzantine icon is filled with light." "There is no single source of light, there is no shadow." "It's the light of the grace of God." "All this affects the soul of the viewer and um... it gives him something of the peace, the joy, the serenity and the calmness that is characteristic of Christian life and of the kingdom." "SHE PRAYS" "CONGREGATION SINGS" "The icon is not venerated in and for itself." "The icon also always points towards a certain person and the person's venerated through the icon." "Icons support prayer, and of course, people have some needs and they pray for them and they somehow relate with the saint through the icon." "SACRED SINGING" "Within the Greek Orthodox faith, icons cement the connection between saints and the people." "It's a process that begins very early in life" "When we baptise a child we give him or her the name of a saint partly in order to establish a relationship between this child and the saint so the saint may act as a kind of a role model to inspire the baptised person to follow in his steps." "The saint followed in the steps of Jesus Christ and Christians feel that they have a certain connection with the saint whose name they bear as well as with many other saints." "Greece still remains a Christian country and people feel very much attached to the saints." "And the saints, for them, are not figures of the past, they are living realities." "When Orthodox Christians go in Western churches what they say is that they find them very cold, whereas they find our own churches spiritually warm with all the icons around, all this decoration, all this representation of the visual representation of the kingdom of God." "It gives us strength to keep going." "The special significance of the icon within the Greek tradition can be traced back to the very origins of the Orthodox Church." "It was effectively created in 1054 when the Pope in Rome sent three cardinals to Constantinople, where they delivered a document severing all links between the Byzantine east and the church of Rome." "This became known as the Great Schism." "In truth, east and west had been becoming strangers to one another for a long period of time." "A key issue was the role of the Pope whose universal supremacy the Byzantines refused to acknowledge" "150 years after the Great Schism, the forces would clash head-on." "In April 1204, Crusaders en-route to the Holy Land diverted to Constantinople." "After a three-day rampage, they took control of the city." "For the first time the Byzantines had yielded to invasion." "It was an event of such magnitude that it's been drawn and painted by artists down the centuries." "A contemporary account describes the blood-curdling events." "'In the streets, in the temples, 'weeping, lamentations, the groaning of men, 'the shrieks of women, wounds, rape, captivity." "'The sacred altar formed of all kinds of precious materials 'and admired by the whole world was broken into bits 'and distributed among the soldiers.'" "With Constantinople now in the hands of the West, the Byzantine empire was doomed to a slow, lingering process of disintegration and decline." "But the people of the city were determined to regain control of their beloved capital and restore some of the empire's earlier greatness." "In 1261, after more than half a century of occupation by Western Christian forces, the city was once more restored as the Byzantine capital." "It was an event that would herald the beginning of a last great artistic resurgence." "And its centre was once more the Hagia Sophia." "To mark the re-taking of the city and the reclaiming of the cathedral, a great series of mosaics was commissioned from the empire's leading craftsmen." "And if you want to have a sense of just how sophisticated, beautiful, subtle mosaic art could be in Constantinople in the second half of the 13th Century, there's no better place to be than here." "This mosaic is called the Deesis." "It's one of the true masterpieces of Byzantine art." "It shows the figures of the Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist pleading with Christ for the salvation of Man." "It's typical of the final flowering of Byzantine art that followed the restoration of the empire in 1261." "It's hard to believe that this degree of subtlety of modelling can be achieved in mosaic." "These faces look forward to the pinnacle of Renaissance art which was indeed hugely influenced by this earlier Byzantine renaissance." "Although the composition of the image and the poses of the figures are reflections of medieval Byzantine tradition, its psychological and emotional realism is quite new." "With hindsight, it's easy to see all kinds of things in art that simply aren't there, but I wonder if there isn't some portent of the end of empire, the end that was to come, in the sad and solemn eyes of these figures." "And they're just a fraction of what was once here." "In looking at the modern fabric of the building, occasionally you come across these little windows, so to speak, that have been cut into its mosaic past, revealing these beautiful fragments." "It leaves you with a strange sense of not just how much has been lost, but how much might still lie beneath." "By far the most complete example of late Byzantine art can be seen in one of the last buildings of the Byzantine empire - the Chora monastery." "It once stood on the very outskirts of Constantinople, but today it's been swallowed up by modern Istanbul." "The Church of the Chora is one of the real jewels of Constantinople because it represents almost the only surviving example of the late style of Byzantine art in the city." "This extraordinary mosaic cycle was created in the second decade of the 14th century, and it shows scenes from the life of the Virgin and the life of Jesus." "If you look at the style of these mosaics, they're a world away from the statuesque, solemn monumentality of earlier Byzantine art." "Suddenly, there's this tremendous emphasis on action, emotion, far more figures in the scenes." "Over there we see the rarely depicted Miracle of the Woman with the Issue of Blood, and she flings herself at Christ's feet with this extraordinary sort of energy in her pose." "We just haven't seen this before in Byzantine mosaics." "Over there, there's a very strong emphasis here on Christ and his miracles." "He's healing a blind man, healing a dumb man, healing a leper." "The emphasis is very strongly on salvation." "I wonder if this urgency, this emphasis on salvation isn't partly to be explained by this scene here, because it introduces us to the man who paid for all this." "His name was Theodore Metochites, and here he is, on his knees, offering this splendidly remodelled church to Jesus Christ himself." "Now Theodore Metochites was a man with a distinctly dodgy reputation." "Some even referred to him as the emperor's evil genius, and he was renowned for fleecing the poor to line the imperial coffers." "I wonder if paying for this splendidly remodelled church with its mosaics wasn't his way of putting some of that money back, of offering it to God in the hope of saving his own soul." "But the Chora's masterpiece is in the inner sanctum of the church." "This space is Metochites's own funerary chapel, and he had it decorated, interestingly enough, in the much poorer medium of painting." "We don't know why that was so - could it be that he deliberately chose it as an act of humility, or did he simply run out of money?" "Once again, we see scenes from the Bible, figures of saints, prophets and angels, all in paint, but this time there's much less to detain the eye in these scenes." "All the emphasis is towards this end, and towards this extraordinary image of the Anastasis, the Harrowing of Hell." "It's full of an energy that we've really never seen in Byzantine art before." "Look at that central figure of Christ." "Whereas before drapery might seem almost like a form of abstract geometry, here you really feel that there's a body inside that drapery, pulling its folds apart as Christ, with great physical urgency, pulls Adam and Eve, the forebears of all mankind," "from their tombs." "It's the Resurrection." "He's pulling them into eternity, pulling them into salvation." "And salvation is what this space is all about because salvation is what Metochites dreamed of." "What I really love in this picture as well, is this fantastic detail that Christ is harrowing Hell, what he's done is he's broken the Gates of Hell, and you can see all this bric-a-brac, this debris," "this locksmithery." "Those are all the locks that were used to fasten Hell, but he's broken Hell open and there we see...almost..." "It's quite hard to make out, but it's the figure of Satan trampled beneath Christ's feet." "It's a profoundly powerful, energetic image of salvation." "And I think it's not hard to imagine Metochites contemplating it very much with his own salvation in mind." "Another thing that's interesting about this space and this story is that Metochites's life did not end up being entirely a bed of roses." "In the 1320s he was ousted from the imperial household during a palace coup, he lost all his money, all his power, all his privileges, and he ended up dying here, as a monk." "A simple monk in the monastery church that he'd so richly endowed." "And I don't think, perhaps, that by the time he did reach his end, he cared too much about the loss of all his power and privileges, because his mind was not on the here and now." "It was on eternity, on the image embodied in that extraordinary picture." "Now, this is actually the last great work of Byzantine art in Constantinople, so it's not just one man's last memorial, last monument." "It's also the swan song of an entire empire." "The works of the Chora were indeed the final flourish of a dying civilisation." "The mighty capital of Constantinople finally fell to Turkish invaders in 1453." "Christian art and architecture continued to exist under the new Ottoman empire but over the years the Christian artistic landscape gradually changed into an Islamic one." "Cathedrals became mosques and minarets rose into the sky." "Mosaics were plastered over or whitewashed." "Works of art that had survived since the time of Emperor Constantine were gradually erased from the new Ottoman capital." "And yet." "The Byzantine art tradition might have been battled by centuries of turmoil, religious conflict, imperial decline, but it still survives in a multitude of powerfully direct images, forms, and above all, faces, so intensely eloquent they still seem on the point of speech." "One last thought - unlike virtually every other school of Christian art, the art that began in the Byzantine East, here in Constantinople, is still alive and thriving." "Not bad for a supposedly primitive tradition." "CHORAL SINGING" "From its beginnings, Christianity was a dynamic faith taken from place to place, by believers who travelled to spread the word of their god." "And Christian art reflects that spirit of wanderlust, from the mosaics of early Christian Rome to the glittering masterpieces of the empire in the east." "I have always been fascinated by one particular example of this crossover." "The cause of one of the greatest sea changes in the history of Western art." "This is the story of how art and ideas from the Byzantine world sparked a revolution in Italy between the 11th and 14th centuries." "One that would transform Christianity itself and produce some of the greatest painters of all time " "Cimabue," "Duccio," "Giotto." "Men whose legacy would even touch future masters like Picasso." "My journey starts in Sicily, which has always been a melting pot of different civilisations." "Sicily was very much the jewel in the crown of the Mediterranean." "Not only was it a rich and fertile land but it was strategically crucial, at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, with Africa to the south and Europe to the north." "For centuries, different civilisations had fought for control of Sicily and at various times it had been ruled by Romans, Greeks and North African Saracens." "In 1060, just about the same time as they were going to invade England, the Normans arrived here." "They seized control and what followed was to be a great explosion of art and architecture." "Sicily was one of the wealthiest kingdoms in Europe." "It was on the north of the island, around Palermo, that the Norman kings based their court." "Perched high on a hillside on the outskirts of the city is the Abbey Church of Monreale." "Founded by King William II 1174, it's one of the most magnificent buildings on the island." "And as soon as it was built, it became known as one of the architectural wonders of the Middle Ages to rival even the splendours of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople." "The building's an exotic mix of styles and influences, a place where you can see and touch the layers of Sicily's rich history." "When the Normans invaded England they ruthlessly imposed their own preferred styles of art and architecture." "But here in Sicily, because they found such a rich mix of existing traditions they were happy to work with that." "The result was a fascinating hybrid of styles." "The cloister at Monreale is a wonderful example." "The pointed arches are reminiscent of Islam and perhaps also of Saracenic Africa." "The capitals of the columns were carved by Provencal craftsmen with this wonderful naturalistic detail." "And the columns themselves are inlaid with mosaic in the Byzantine style." "The whole thing is a foretaste of the splendours of the cathedral itself." "The magnificent decoration inside this space was created by artists from the East, master mosaicists whose names are lost in the mists of time, who travelled to Sicily from Byzantium to carry out this ambitious project." "They transformed what was already a grand and imposing building into a golden story box, a series of glittering mosaic scenes that unfold as you move towards the east end of the church." "As you reach the end of the knave, you also reached the climax of this great cathedral's pattern of meanings, as you come under the gaze of this awe inspiring figure of Christ in majesty bearing in his left hand the text that says, "I am the light of the world." ""He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life."" "On the left that text is written in Latin, on the right it's written in Greek, a symbol of the fact that here in this great golden cathedral at this golden moment in Sicily, two traditions, east and west, have come together." "Throughout the cathedral, Christ, the Virgin and saints all hover overhead, keeping an almost menacing watchful eye on the congregation below." "I've never been to Monreale before." "Nothing prepares you for the scale." "As I look up into the eyes of that great figure of Christ, very much" "Christ the God, not Christ the man, those eyes seem to pierce you." "You feel very small." "And it's a brilliant image of the idea of divine omniscience." "You have the sense those eyes will indeed pierce every corner of the world and they will see if you don't follow the path of light, then you will be cast into darkness." "But this cathedral doesn't exist only to proclaim the magnificence of God." "It also proclaims the magnificence of the Norman dynasty that created it." "At the entrance to the presbytery, King William II is shown on the right-hand side of Christ, symbolising the king's God-given right to rule here on Earth." "Angels bear the symbols of his kingship." "With an inscription above his head proclaiming, "For my hand shall aid him"." "William is shown in the dalmatic robes, like those worn by the Byzantine emperors, emphasising his imperial status." "This was royal propaganda on a massive scale." "The statistics are positively mind-boggling. 1.5 acres of mosaic." "More than 100 million individual tesserae which would have taken a small army of craftsmen over 10 years to complete." "And the result?" "A great wave of mosaic moving around the walls of the cathedral, telling the stories of the Old and New Testament." "The figures look as though they are suspended in space, dancing in a gold sky." "They're distant visionary beings far removed from the real world." "Although these images are also full of little flashes of drama and realism." "I was particularly struck by this figure of a plague-spotted leper asking Christ to to cure him." "Awe inspiring as it is, Monreale is just one example of how Byzantine craftsmanship shaped the art of the West." "They migrated not just to Sicily but also to centres like Venice and Florence, passing on the skills and the storytelling techniques embodied in these mosaics to Italian artists who flocked to study in their workshops." "To explore the most explosively brilliant results of this East-West fusion, I travelled to the Italian mainland." "From the 12th century on, Italy was suffused with Byzantine influence, flooded with artists from the East." "It was no passive receptacle to such skills and visual ideas." "It was a crucible in which Christian faith and art would be altered forever." "And the primary cause of this revolution was a social upheaval." "Towards the end of the 12th century, the first stirrings of an industrial revolution were felt across Italy." "The textile trade suddenly expanded, bringing with it vast movements in population." "People moved to the new towns, particularly Florence and Siena, in search of work and a new art would evolve to meet the needs of this urban population, an art that was capable of speaking much more directly and immediately to their emotions." "CHURCH BELLS TOLL" "All across Italy, this was a time of misery, poverty, sickness and death." "But help was at hand." "Two new orders of brother friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans answered the call." "These men and their followers reached out to the poor and to the outsiders." "The epicentre of this social crisis was Tuscany." "Part of its story is still written into the very stones of the hilltop town of Siena." "In the great new centres of the textile industry," "Florence and Siena, thousands of people come work but there's nowhere for them to live." "They are in these shantytowns outside the city walls." "They're living difficult, in many way miserable lives and the Word of God is not reaching them." "The cathedral is not dealing with this social emergency." "And the mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, they recognised the urgency of the social problem posed by these people, and that's why their churches are always on the periphery of town." "There is San Domenico." "It is just a stone's throw from the cathedral." "But it needs to be there, outside the city walls because that's where the people that they're reaching out to are be found." "One man above all others responded to their desperation." "A man who gave up all his worldly possessions to help them." "He was so pious, so dedicated to the poor, they even called him Alter Christus - another Christ." "That man's name was San Francesco." "St Francis of Assisi." "The basilica of San Francesco still dominates the hill town of Assisi in Umbria." "A monument to the impact Francis had on his world." "The saint's immortalised in the frescoes of the basilica, a place dedicated to his spirituality." "These pictures tell the story of his life." "One image in particular takes us to the heart of his legend." "Central to Francis's his teaching was his belief in the part of visualisation, the power of the image." "He felt if you could summon up in your mind's eye a picture of Christ suffering that was sufficiently vivid, you might yourself be transformed in the process." "And that is encapsulated by this vivid image which tells the story of Francis receiving the stigmata." "It's said the saint went up to Mount La Verna to be close to God and there he meditated on Christ's life with such intensity and focus that he was actually imprinted in his body with the wounds of Christ by the vision that was granted to him." "When I look at this tremendous image of a man being transfixed by a vision, being struck by lightning as a result of something he sees in his mind's eye, I think this is what Francis's teachings did also to art in the West." "It was like a lightning strike." "Nothing would ever be quite the same again." "These dramatic images were influenced by Byzantine models." "In a sense, this great space is another version of the great Byzantine cathedral at Monreale." "But there's a vital difference too." "These images were created in fresco not mosaic." "Mosaics were too splendid for the humble tastes of the Franciscans." "They wanted an art of poverty and simplicity." "Largely thanks to them, fresco became the dominant medium of Italian painting." "I met up with a modern-day Franciscan, Brother Pasquale Magro, to try to get a deeper understanding of why the Franciscans transformed their churches into illustrated salvation books for the common man." "We can say (SPEAKS LATIN), you know?" "The words fly of sermons, of preachings, while the paintings remain." "So paintings were permanent preaching." "Permanent memorandums." "Manuscripts, handwritten books were the monopoly of some monks, of only few people, while paintings were public." "No other Christian brought the figure of Christ so near to his generation." "Francis is the great rainbow that puts together heaven and earth, matter and spirit." "His interpretation of the Gospel, his conception of God, of Christ, of man, of the world, of nature, were very personal." "They were not the official ones." "Traditionally Christ was represented as a judge, that for 700 years Christ was the judge of man." "Francis upset completely 180 degrees the image of Christ." "No more Christ judge of man, but Christ judged by man, crucified." "Nightfall in Assisi, and I had one more visit to make." "What brother Pasquale had said about the Byzantine emphasis on Christ as judge made perfect sense when I thought back to that great image of Christ Pontacrator in Monreale." "But how did Francis's big idea about Christ's humanity change the face of art?" "I wanted to explore that further by looking at one artist's work in the basilica." "That artist was called Cheney di Peppo, or Cimabue by nickname." "He was born in 1240, less than 15 years after St Francis's death and trained by artists from the East, from Constantinople." "You can see the Byzantine influence in some of his work here." "For example, these angels' wings even look like painted mosaic." "But I was more interested in how Cimabue began to transform his Byzantine inheritance under the influence of Francis." "Cimabue painted this great fresco in the late 13th century at a time when" "Jerome of Ascally was Minister General of the Franciscan order." "Jerome, like many other Franciscan friars, had travelled widely throughout the world of Byzantium." "What he wanted in his great basilica was images that would be every bit as splendid and awe-inspiring as those he'd seen on his travels in the East." "And that's what Cimabue gave him in this image of the Madonna and" "Child enthroned on a gold throne and surrounded by angels." "But at the same time, Cimabue has begun in a subtle way to change the nature of this kind of Byzantine image, because when you look at these sorts of images in a Byzantine church, you have this very strong sense that the figures are far away from you." "They're remote, in the distant space of heaven." "Here you feel they're in your space." "And it's done very much through the faces." "The angels' eyes, those solemn eyes that seem to engage you, to invite you to look into them." "And above all, I think, the expression of this beautiful Madonna, full of sadness and foreboding." "It is very much the Madonna the mother, not the Madonna the Queen of Heaven." "And the explanation for this deep humanity that you begin to find in Franciscan art, first in Cimabue and later in the hands of other artists, is to be found in the figure of Francis." "It's one of the earliest images in Italian art of Francis, there he stands on the right of the picture." "Very much Francis the simple man of poverty in his poor robes with his feet planted firmly on the ground, and this wonderfully moving expression of challenging sadness in his eyes." "And there's also a curious little detail which is that" "Cimabue has painted Francis's left ear much bigger than his right ear." "It might look like mistake, but I don't think so." "I think it's a piece of telling symbolism, because it's Cimabue's way of saying to us that Francis allowed the word of God to enter him through the left side, the side of the heart, so fully that it penetrated his very being." "I think that's the essential meaning and challenge of this picture." "What it is saying to us, the viewers, is are you able to involve yourselves as fully and emotionally, and as full-bloodedly as Francis did in the meaning of Christ's life and sacrifice?" "If you can, you, too, can be saved." "Francis died on 3rd October 1226, at dusk, here on the site of the Church of the Santa Maria degli Angeli, just outside Assisi." "Every year for more than 750 years his life's been celebrated on this date." "There are people from all walks of life here and many have travelled great distances to be here tonight." "CHOIR SINGS" "I've never experienced this procession before, and I have to say I found it very moving." "It is partly the spectacle of the Friars in their simple habits walking in solemn order around the piazza, each holding a light." "Symbol both of the light of Christ and the illumination of the Saint's teachings." "But, above all, I think it's the sense that these people really are trying to keep Francis alive in their hearts." "If I had to put my finger on Francis's single greatest achievement, it would have to be the way in which, as Brother Pasquale said, he brought the figure of Christ so close to the people at large." "And this is reflected with great clarity in Italian art." "You can see it most simply by comparing the image of Christ before Francis's time with the image of Christ afterwards, transformed by the new spirit of the mendicant orders." "This is the Church of Santa Chiara in Assisi, and it contains a famous crucifixion painted around the same time as Francis's birth." "This image of Christ on the cross was created in the late 12th century and it is one Francis himself knew well." "He prayed to it so fervently, according to his legend, that the figure even spoke to him." "But as a work of art, it's still rooted in an old Byzantine convention," "Christ the Emperor, triumphant even in death." "Christ is on the cross, but there's no real sense of pain or suffering." "He stares out in glory." "To see how the image of Christ was revolutionised, I left Assisi and travelled some 70 miles through Umbria to Tuscany, to the quiet town of Arezzo, because here there is another great painting by Cimabue, a crucifixion" "painted around 1271, almost 50 years after St Francis's death." "It shows a very different vision of the Saviour on the cross." "Cimabue was trained by artists from the East, from Byzantium, but when he painted his great Crucifixion which is in the church of San Domenico in Arezzo, he literally twisted the traditional image of Christ triumphant on the cross into something quite different." "This is not the image of Christ as Emperor or King." "This is very much the image of Christ the suffering man." "Look at the way his eyes are closed in agony, look at how blood pours in these extraordinary bright red rivulets from his hands and from his feet." "His body is this livid green colour intended to suggest the pallor of death, and look at the way in which" "Cimabue has arranged that body into a kind of diagram of pain, so much so that it literally disturbs the geometry of the beautiful decorations on the cross." "I'd never seen this Crucifixion before." "It's almost hidden away in one of Arezzo's least visited churches." "It's only recently been restored and this was the first time it had ever been filmed." "Until I saw it, I don't think I'd ever realised quite how great Cimabue was." "He uses paint like a shorthand." "So stylised, it's close to modern cartoons and graphic art." "The style with its distortions and manipulations of scales is a far cry from realism, yet the result's an image that makes Christ's suffering seem totally real." "When I look at this picture I can feel my nervous system being affected, not just my eyes." "This is absolutely the kind of image designed to inspire sympathy and identification with Christ's suffering." "The emotional power of Italian art in this extraordinary time was a direct response to the emotional needs of the people." "Art gave them images filled with feelings they could relate to - pain... ..love." "And the new emphasis on Christ's suffering humanity wasn't by any means the only way artists found to touch people's hearts." "They also painted Christ's mother, Mary, with a new depth of emotion." "CHURCH BELLS TOLL" "You can see this in towns all over Tuscany, but nowhere more so than Siena." "Here, her cult became so important that the image of the Virgin was sometimes given even more prominence than that of Christ." "This simple but touching Madonna and Child was painted by an artist called Coppo di Marcovaldo in 1261 for the Church of the Servites, an order devoted to the Virgin." "Whereas the new bleeding crucifixions were images that appealed very much to the men of the time, these were images with which they, as suffering workers, could themselves identify, this type of imagery, the image of the Madonna, was designed to appeal to the women of the time." "And if you imagine yourself back to the 13th century, you are yourself perhaps praying to this image, you might well be a young mother." "And you might well have a baby, and, like the Madonna, you may well feel in your heart that that baby will not live very long in this tough world." "And you will pray to her." "She is part of your life." "She is not above you, she is your friend." "And the intimacy with which the first congregations of people prayed to this image is reflected in its physical texture." "There are areas of paint loss, particularly in the lower half of the painting, around the area of the Virgin's knees and feet." "And, according to local tradition, those areas of paint loss were caused by people actually kissing or touching the image." "It's reflected also in the title of the painting, she's called the Madonna del Bordone." "Bordone in Italian refers to a particular kind of melody." "What that tells us is that the people who prayed to this image, who looked up to this image, almost felt they could speak to this image, well, they also sang to her." "CHOIR BOY SINGS" "But to understand just how much Mary could mean to the long suffering people of Tuscany and Umbria, you have to understand another facet of their lives." "It is easy to sentimentalise the past, and looking out across the beautiful landscape of Tuscany today, it's hard to imagine that this was ever anything but a paradise on earth." "But go back to the 13th century, and the reality was very different." "This was a war-zone." "Throughout the Middle Ages, the fractured states of the Italian peninsula competed for territory and power." "Here in Tuscany, the armies of Florence and Siena clashed time and again in battles that killed thousands." "One of the most dramatic conflicts took place on 4th September 1260, at Montaperti." "After a furious battle, the Sienese army of 20,000 defeated the might of the 35,000 strong Florentines." "Montaperti was a victory that became legendary in the Sienese consciousness." "It also became an event that took the city's cult of the Virgin to a new level, because the people attributed their triumph directly to her." "They'd prayed to her and the city had been saved." "And you can still find tangible evidence for all this in an image that once stood on the High Altar of the cathedral." "It's this, strange unsettling cult painting, now known as the Madonna degli Occhi Grossi, the Madonna of the big eyes." "It was to this picture that the people of Siena had prayed on the eve of the battle of Montaperti." "For centuries afterwards, it will be held up in processions around the cathedral on feast days, asserting the power and protection of the Virgin." "So intense was Siena's medieval devotion to Mary that it even became known as the City of the Virgin." "And the greatest monument to this ancient belief that Mary really does watch over this town, was created in 1311." "It was another image of the Virgin, created for the high altar of the duomo, a picture of such ambition and brilliance that it caused a sensation." "This image, too, was carried in procession through the streets to the cathedral." "As a contemporary eye witness wrote, "A great and devout company of priests and brothers and the most" ""worthy were in order next to the said panel, with lights lit in their hands and sounding out" ""all the bells in glory out of devotion for such a noble panel as this"." "The noble panel in question was the work of Siena's most prolific artist, Duccio di Buoninsegna, who, as well as being a genius, was also what nowadays you'd call a bit of a character." "Duccio was a great artist but he could also be a rather difficult man." "In fact, he had form as long as your arm." "We know from the archives here in Siena that he was arrested on numerous occasions for failure to pay his debts, for drunkenness, for unruly behaviour and twice for refusing to go to war against Siena's great enemy, Florence." "But all his sins were expiated when he completed his great altarpiece." "And, I think, one of the reasons why the Sienese greeted it with such universal joy was precisely because they realised that this was one in the eye for Florence." "The Florentines did not have anything nearly as magnificent as this great painting." "In fact, no one had ever seen an altarpiece quite like it before." "Duccio's vision of the Court of Heaven is so delicate it looks almost as though it's woven rather than painted." "The artist has put together decorative influences from the East, from Africa, from the Moorish world." "And the effects created from this mesh of pattern and colour, all these reds and golds and deep sumptuous blues, they're sense stunning." "You almost feel drunk looking at it." "I think it was meant to encourage a kind of spiritual inebriation." "Imagine its impact on an ordinary citizen of Siena in the 14th century." "This was an image of everything their life wasn't." "The eternal peace and tranquillity awaiting them in the better world of the hereafter." "Duccio was good, and he knew it." "In the inscription he's included his own name, not for him the anonymity of the Byzantine craftsmen." "As well as being one of the great masterpieces of sacred art, Duccio's picture was also a fantastic advertisement for Siena's main business, which was trade in textiles." "What Duccio has done is re-imagined heaven itself as a great textile emporium in the sky, a place overflowing with precisely the same precious silks and damasks that the Sienese were importing from the near and the Far East, from Moorish Spain and as far afield as China." "So anybody looking at this picture would have been reminded before they left Siena to go and do a bit of shopping." "The Maesta was one of the most expensive panel paintings ever commissioned." "Duccio used the best gold and the deepest lapis lazuli that money could buy." "Originally on the back of the main altarpiece is a series of panels depicting the life and passion of Christ." "There's the same beautiful pattern-making here as on the main panel." "But in these scenes it's put to the use of telling stories rather than creating a vision of paradise." "These figures have real character, personality." "Look at the disciples in this scene of Christ washing their feet." "In their faces you can almost hear their chatter and feeling of anticipation." "In the scene of the Last Supper, Duccio has used light and shade to create a powerful sense of depth." "These look like real people eating in a real room." "The story of Christ's Passion is told in a way that anticipates the modern graphic novel." "For me one of the many wonderful things about the Maesta is the way it encapsulates the birth of an approach to storytelling that has shaped the imagination of the world for centuries." "His art is part of a blossoming narrative that took place in medieval Italian literature, too, with writers like Dante and Boccaccio." "So looking at these pictures, you're looking at the invention of a tradition that is still around us in plays, novels, movies." "It is all about communication, making a story seem so real it could almost be your own life passing before your eyes." "My eyes are always drawn to this scene of the deposition." "You can see Mary's agony written on her face and feel the terrible gravity of the moment of death." "Literal gravity, too." "The feeling of just how heavy a dead body can be." "The image of Mary really is everywhere here." "As well as finding her at the town's religious centre, you'll find her, too, at the heart of its civic life, the great town hall." "Inside the building, they've even given her a seat in the council chamber." "Here she sits resplendent on a gothic throne surrounded by saints and angels, in a monumental painting of 1316 by the artist Simoni Martini." "In this room, the Council of 300 Sienese citizens would meet each week with the Virgin as honorary chairperson." "I wonder how often the bored councillors talking taxes, death duties, new parking arrangements for horse and cart, would look up into her eyes." "The Virgin takes many forms in this town and here she is less Christ's mother than the guardian of the whole community, throwing her energies around Siena like a kind of holy force-field." "Leaving Siena, I'd set the compass direction north to the fertile and ever prosperous Veneto, where 700 years ago, it's wealth would allow perhaps the very greatest painter of this age to create the greatest of all his works." "Although he was originally a boy from Tuscany." "Italy's very first art historian, Giorgio Vasari, tells the story that one day the great painter" "Cimabue was going for a walk in the landscape outside Florence when he stumbled across a young peasant boy drawing with a stone on a rock." "So impressed was Cimabue by this primitive sketch that he offered the boy, whose name was Giotto di Bondone, a place in his workshop." "Whether it quite happened like that, we will never know for sure." "But we do know is Cimabue certainly did teach Giotto." "He passed on to him all the techniques that he'd learned from the Byzantine artists who'd come to Italy from Constantinople." "And we also know that Giotto was certainly a prodigy, for within a few short years of serving his apprenticeship he'd become Italy's first superstar artist, a man who took religious painting to a whole new level, a whole new depth of emotion." "At the start of the 14th century, at the height of his powers," "Giotto came to Padua at the invitation of one of the most powerful families in northern Italy." "Home to one of Italy's oldest universities, this was a buzzing town, then as now, with its thriving markets full of inviting produce." "I'm sure that even for the great Giotto this was a once-in-a-lifetime job." "He'd been commissioned to paint the Chapel of the Scrovegni family, the most notorious loan sharks of their age, people you messed with at your peril." "And the result was like no other work of art before or since, although its glory is inseparable from the rather dirty history of the men who paid for it." "The Arena Chapel's one of the great creations of Western European art." "But it wouldn't even exist if it hadn't been for the tremendous sense of guilt of one man." "In the Middle Ages, usury money-lending was regarded as such a great sin that usurers were cast into hell together with prostitutes." "What they did was regarded almost as a form of sexual perversion, using money to breed more money." "Enrico Scrovegni, who paid for all this, was the son of a money lender so famous that he gets a starring role in Dante's Hell." "We see Enrico on at the far wall offering up this whole chapel to the Madonna of charity." "I think it makes sense to see Giotto's great creation as a great painted offering to God, all done in the hope of sending Enrico to heaven." "What did this commission mean for Giotto?" "Well, Scrovegni's ill-gotten gains were so great that he could do more or less what he liked." "It's pretty certain that as well as decorating this great space, he actually designed it, it's very much a painter's design." "The walls are extraordinarily bare, there are no columns, no pilasters, architraves, it's just a wonderful viewing box for pictures." "There are only six windows in the entire place and they've been put on the south side, to create the perfect viewing conditions." "The result is a kind of early 14th century precursor of the cinema." "A great fresco cycle that unfolds all of Giotto's genius." "Three tiers of narrative scenes depict the life of the Virgin and the childhood and passion of Christ." "There's a tremendous sculptural solidity to Giotto's figures here, and his spaces have real depth like stage settings for sacred drama." "He's got a rough and ready sense of perspective, too." "Realism, but not too much because he needs the expressive freedom to depart from true scale." "For example, to make Christ so monumental that if he stood up, he'd be taller than a tree." "To me, the Massacre of the Innocents is one of the most powerful of all his works." "It's another of Giotto's master strokes of originality." "A new and horrific variation on the theme of human bodies that touch and embrace." "A theme seen in so much painting of the time." "Here, too, the bodies are touching." "But this time most of them are corpses, inert, piled up like so much detritus." "Almost seeming to turn blue and bloodless as you look." "Tears stream down the mothers' faces." "It's difficult to put into words the feelings that you get here, but it's..." "For me, it's very much not like being overawed by a great masterpiece of art." "It's not that feeling, it's the sense of being overwhelmed by a vast weight of human emotion." "There's an extraordinary amount of feeling in here." "Whereas Cimabue had brought into art this new, very powerful sense of the body that feels, the body that suffers," "I think what Giotto gave to art was a new level of emotion." "He didn't just paint the body, he painted the soul, he painted the heart." "Every face here is a full of a particular feeling." "It's obvious, perhaps most obvious, in the great scenes of Christ's Passion with which the story reaches its emotional climax, that amazing lamentation where the angels fill the sky like extraordinary images of a very human agony." "It's really powerful, but I think if you want to appreciate Giotto in his originality, it is almost better to turn to some of the quieter scenes where he's invested the figures with a subtle level of emotion that simply haven't been" "present in art before in Italy." "For example, this beautiful nativity where the Virgin looks at the Christ child." "She's giving him over to the serving woman for his first bath." "She looks at this swaddled child with tremendous long, slow gaze of sadness mixed with love, mixed with kind of foreboding." "It's as if in this act of giving away to be bathed, she's seeing in her mind's eye the moment when she have to give him over to be sacrificed, to be crucified." "Another thing that Giotto does brilliantly is create parallels because it's a kind of simultaneous cinema where you see every frame of the story at the same time." "You can see these visual parallels." "There's a scene in the right-hand corner, a beautiful scene where Joachim and Anna, the virgin's parents, embrace by the gate of the city." "They give each other this beautiful, tender kiss." "The integrity of their relationship, so to speak, is established by the fact that Giotto has placed them under an arch, the most architecturally solid of forms." "That kiss is brilliantly contrasted..." "If you come down on the diagonal you find Judas embracing Christ." "Giotto has plays both of their heads in profile, just like the heads of Joachim and Anna." "This is, so to speak, the evil version of the kiss." "And instead of the arch that encloses those two blessed figures," "Christ and Judas at this moment of portrayal are surrounded by soldiers and the weapons which form this chaos in the sky." "At the level of formal invention Giotto's never been surpassed." "This is about as good as it gets." "Giotto wasn't just one of the greatest artists ever to have lived, he was also a bit of a player, a tireless networker and a canny businessman." "By the end of his life, this one-time shepherd boy, if we are to believe Vasari, had extensive interests in the textile business in Florence and a large personal fortune." "He counted the King of Naples and the Pope among his friends." "And he got Dante, no less, to do his PR for him." ""Once Cimabue thought to hold the field in painting," wrote Dante." ""Now Giotto is all the rage, dimming the lustre of others' fame."" "Italian art had reached a pinnacle as one genius emerged after another." "But all that was dramatically halted when Italy was plunged into darkness." "In 1348, as if in the footsteps of the craftsmen from Byzantium, the plague spread like wildfire across Europe from the East, via Sicily and into every city across Italy." "Its impact was dramatic and unexpected." "Its symptoms, gruesome." "Boccaccio described its effects in the Decameron." ""In men and women alike, it first betrays itself" ""by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or armpits," ""some of which grew to the size of a common apple, others to the size of an egg." ""These the common people called gavoccioli."" "After that things only got worse." "Black boils appeared all over the body and within two or at the most three days, death ensued." "The effects are almost impossible to imagine." "When it came to the old rivalries, the plague did not take sides." "In Siena they had to stop work on the great cathedral for which Duccio had painted his Maesta, because the builders were dead." "In Florence, half the population was killed - one in every two people." "No wonder, to those who remained, it seemed as if the end of the world was upon them." "Plague fanned the flames of superstition and popular devotion to the Madonna flared up into a kind of mass hysteria." "I'm on my way - almost the last stop on my journey - to a building in Florence which encapsulates this troubled time." "It's called Orsanmichele, once the city's grain market - a stone's throw from the cathedral." "But, in time of plague, it also became the most popular site of pilgrimage in Tuscany." "People came here in vast numbers to light candles and pray for salvation." "In 1359 alone, a staggering million candles were sold and people were drawn here by the latest painting of the Virgin because the rumour was this painting could work miracles." "In those days, Orsanmichele had an open arcade, so pilgrims could have seen the shrine to the Virgin shimmering within." "The picture they saw, framed in an ornate tabernacle, is a surprisingly modest piece of work." "The Florentines could have commissioned for this great shrine site in the centre of their city a grand altarpiece such as Duccio had given to Siena nearly 50 years before." "But I think that's exactly what they didn't want." "In this time of plague and pestilence, they consciously turned their back on that kind of sophistication and grandeur and opted for something much simpler - an image that seems to return to the devotional simplicity of the art before Duccio and Giotto." "It is by Bernardo Daddi, and it's a Madonna of tenderness." "Christ reaches out to touch his mother's cheek and in that gesture," "I think we can sense the gestures of all the Florentines, all the pilgrims, who came to this site in time of plague to pray before the image." "Almost more to the point than the image itself is the tabernacle that's been constructed, like a huge reliquary box to contain it." "I think what this grand tabernacle demonstrates very vividly is that that picture, that piece of beautifully painted wood was not regarded as a work of art, but as a holy object - a kind of window through which Divinity might miraculously spread." "It was something that could change your life." "I've been coming here for more than 20 years and every time I walked through that door" "I've been disappointed because there's been scaffolding up." "It has been "in restauro" for decades but now, finally, it has been restored." "I can't think of any other place in Italy where you can come quite as close, so close that you can touch it, to this world of plague, of fear, of pestilence, of deep, deep veneration and superstition." "It's almost like a kind of time machine that transports you back to a world that's vanished for ever." "It might seem incredible, but within 50 years, the artists of Florence had decided that this type of work was primitive." "They'd taken art to a new level - or so they thought - with a radical new technique of painting, mathematically calculated perspective, which enabled them to plan out pictures that could be as convincing as photographs." "As accurate as computer graphics." "For them, this was a revolution - a total break with the past, spelling the end of early Christian art - the end of its influence and appeal." "But that's not a view of art history with which I agree." "There's no doubt that the discovery of mathematically calculated perspective suddenly gave artists a whole new box of tricks." "It enabled them to create a whole new set of sense-beguiling optical illusions." "But it would be a mistake to see it as a great quantum leap forward, the equivalent in art of, say, Einstein's theory of relativity." "Because it wasn't like that." "Artists realised, almost as soon as perspective was invented, that while it liberated them in some ways, in others, it placed limits on the creative imagination." "For proof of this, you only have to look at the very greatest artists working in the aftermath of the discovery of perspective." "They all find ways to escape the literalism of precisely delineated space." "To recover the freedom that earlier Christian artists had taken for granted." "Look at how El Greco creates a space of shifting uncertainty, filled with elongated figures that seemed to flicker like flames." "Looking directly back to the paradise fields of Byzantine art." "Look at how Caravaggio uses pools of shadow to lose inessential detail, to focus the an eye on the essence of a scene." "Here, the suffering body of Christ." "It's achieved by other means, but this is the same focus on the essence of a feeling that permeates the art of the Masters of 13th and 14th century Italy." "One of the reasons for Christianity's tremendous success and appeal down the centuries has been the fact that so many of its stories and legends touch on universal aspects of human experience." "How does one cope with persecution?" "How does one cope in times of war?" "Christianity is about death and it is about love - a mother's love for her child." "So much in it is part of us." "And I think the reason why early Christian art really is an art for eternity, for all times and places, is that it expresses those universal emotions with total clarity." "Its images are all the more powerful because they don't slavishly imitate actual space and true scale." "And if you think forward into modern times, to me, it's clear that in the long run, it was their approach to art - not perspective - that ultimately won out." "Think of the most famous painting of the 20th century, by the most famous of all modern artists." "Picasso's Guernica - that great scream of outrage against the horrors of war." "It might not be a religious work of art." "But it uses a language of emotion, of compression, of scale and space distortion that's got nothing to do with perspective." "A language that seems to me to be very close to that of the old Christian artists." "With its piled bodies and screaming faces, I see it as a secular version of Giotto's Massacre of the Innocents." "In one crucial sense, I don't think perspective made any difference at all." "Because while it gave artists a new way of creating convincing illusions, it didn't change the fundamental challenge, which isn't to do with how you represent what's in front of your eyes, but how you express what's inside yourself, what's in your heart, what's in your soul."