Original subtitles

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