Original subtitles

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

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 2007

E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk