All language subtitles for Art of Eternity [1of3] [Painting Paradise]

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

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd, 2007

E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk