All language subtitles for Art of Eternity [3of3] [When East Meets West]

From its beginnings, Christianity
was a dynamic faith taken from place

to place, by believers who travelled
to spread the word of their god.

And Christian art reflects
that spirit of wanderlust,

from the mosaics of early Christian
Rome to the glittering masterpieces
of the empire in the east.

I have always been fascinated by
one particular example
of this crossover.

The cause
of one of the greatest sea changes
in the history of Western art.

This is the story of how art
and ideas from the Byzantine world

sparked a revolution in Italy
between the 11th and 14th centuries.

One that would transform
Christianity itself

and produce some of the greatest
painters of all time -

Cimabue,

Duccio,

Giotto.

Men whose legacy would even
touch future masters like Picasso.

My journey starts in Sicily,
which has always been a melting
pot of different civilisations.

Sicily was very much the jewel
in the crown of the Mediterranean.

Not only was it a rich and fertile
land but it was strategically
crucial, at the crossroads

of the Mediterranean, with Africa to
the south and Europe to the north.

For centuries, different
civilisations had fought for

control of Sicily and at various
times it had been ruled

by Romans, Greeks
and North African Saracens.

In 1060, just about the same time as
they were going to invade England,
the Normans arrived here.

They seized control and what
followed was to be a great
explosion of art and architecture.

Sicily was one of the
wealthiest kingdoms in Europe.

It was on the north of the island,
around Palermo, that the
Norman kings based their court.

Perched high on a hillside
on the outskirts of the city
is the Abbey Church of Monreale.

Founded by King William II 1174,
it's one of the most magnificent
buildings on the island.

And as soon as it was built,
it became known as one of the

architectural wonders
of the Middle Ages

to rival even the splendours of
the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

The building's an exotic mix
of styles and influences,

a place where you can see and touch
the layers of Sicily's rich history.

When the Normans invaded England
they ruthlessly imposed

their own preferred styles
of art and architecture.

But here in Sicily, because they
found such a rich mix of existing

traditions they were happy
to work with that. The result was
a fascinating hybrid of styles.

The cloister at Monreale
is a wonderful example.

The pointed arches are
reminiscent of Islam and perhaps
also of Saracenic Africa.

The capitals of the columns were
carved by Provencal craftsmen with
this wonderful naturalistic detail.

And the columns themselves
are inlaid with mosaic
in the Byzantine style.

The whole thing is a foretaste
of the splendours of
the cathedral itself.

The magnificent decoration
inside this space was created
by artists from the East,

master mosaicists whose names
are lost in the mists of time, who

travelled to Sicily from Byzantium
to carry out this ambitious project.

They transformed what was already
a grand and imposing building
into a golden story box,

a series of glittering mosaic scenes

that unfold as you move towards
the east end of the church.

As you reach the end of the knave,
you also reached the climax of this

great cathedral's pattern
of meanings,

as you come under the gaze
of this awe inspiring figure

of Christ in majesty bearing in his
left hand the text that says,
"I am the light of the world.

"He that followeth me shall
not walk in darkness
but shall have the light of life."

On the left that text is
written in Latin, on the right
it's written in Greek,

a symbol of the fact that here
in this great golden cathedral

at this golden moment in Sicily,
two traditions, east and west,
have come together.

Throughout the cathedral,
Christ, the Virgin and saints
all hover overhead,

keeping an almost menacing watchful
eye on the congregation below.

I've never been to Monreale before.
Nothing prepares you for the scale.

As I look up into the eyes of that
great figure of Christ, very much

Christ the God, not Christ the man,
those eyes seem to pierce you.

You feel very small.

And it's a brilliant image
of the idea of divine omniscience.

You have the sense those eyes
will indeed pierce every corner
of the world and they will see if

you don't follow the path of light,
then you will be cast into darkness.

But this cathedral
doesn't exist only to proclaim
the magnificence of God.

It also proclaims the magnificence
of the Norman dynasty
that created it.

At the entrance to the presbytery,
King William II is shown

on the right-hand side of Christ,
symbolising the king's God-given
right to rule here on Earth.

Angels bear the symbols
of his kingship.

With an inscription
above his head proclaiming,
"For my hand shall aid him".

William is shown
in the dalmatic robes, like those

worn by the Byzantine emperors,
emphasising his imperial status.

This was royal propaganda
on a massive scale.

The statistics are positively
mind-boggling. 1.5 acres of mosaic.

More than 100 million individual
tesserae which would have taken

a small army of craftsmen
over 10 years to complete.

And the result?

A great wave of mosaic moving
around the walls of the cathedral,

telling the stories
of the Old and New Testament.

The figures look as though
they are suspended in space,
dancing in a gold sky.

They're distant visionary beings
far removed from the real world.

Although these images
are also full of little flashes
of drama and realism.

I was particularly struck
by this figure of a plague-spotted
leper asking Christ to to cure him.

Awe inspiring as it is, Monreale

is just one example of how
Byzantine craftsmanship shaped
the art of the West.

They migrated not just
to Sicily but also to centres
like Venice and Florence,

passing on the skills and the
storytelling techniques embodied in

these mosaics to Italian artists who
flocked to study in their workshops.

To explore the most
explosively brilliant

results of this East-West fusion,
I travelled to the Italian mainland.

From the 12th century on, Italy was
suffused with Byzantine influence,
flooded with artists from the East.

It was no passive receptacle
to such skills and visual ideas.

It was a crucible
in which Christian faith
and art would be altered forever.

And the primary cause of this
revolution was a social upheaval.

Towards the end of the 12th century,
the first stirrings of an industrial
revolution were felt across Italy.

The textile trade suddenly
expanded, bringing with it
vast movements in population.

People moved to the new towns,

particularly Florence and Siena,
in search of work

and a new art would evolve to meet
the needs of this urban population,

an art that was capable of speaking

much more directly and immediately
to their emotions.

CHURCH BELLS TOLL

All across Italy,
this was a time of misery,
poverty, sickness and death.

But help was at hand.

Two new orders of brother friars,
the Dominicans and the Franciscans
answered the call.

These men and their followers
reached out to the poor
and to the outsiders.

The epicentre of this social crisis
was Tuscany.

Part of its story
is still written into the very
stones of the hilltop town of Siena.

In the great
new centres of the textile industry,

Florence and Siena, thousands
of people come work but
there's nowhere for them to live.

They are in these shantytowns
outside the city walls.

They're living difficult,
in many way miserable lives and the
Word of God is not reaching them.

The cathedral is not
dealing with this social emergency.

And the mendicant orders, the
Franciscans and the Dominicans, they
recognised the urgency of the social

problem posed by these people,
and that's why their churches are
always on the periphery of town.

There is San Domenico. It is just
a stone's throw from the cathedral.

But it needs to be there,
outside the city walls because

that's where the people that they're
reaching out to are be found.

One man above all others
responded to their desperation.

A man who gave up all his
worldly possessions to help them.

He was so pious, so dedicated to
the poor, they even called him Alter
Christus - another Christ.

That man's name was San Francesco.

St Francis of Assisi.

The basilica of San Francesco
still dominates the hill town
of Assisi in Umbria.

A monument to the impact
Francis had on his world.

The saint's immortalised in the
frescoes of the basilica, a place
dedicated to his spirituality.

These pictures
tell the story of his life.

One image in particular
takes us to the heart of his legend.

Central to Francis's
his teaching was his belief

in the part of visualisation,
the power of the image.

He felt if you could summon up in
your mind's eye a picture of Christ

suffering that was sufficiently
vivid, you might yourself be
transformed in the process.

And that is encapsulated
by this vivid image

which tells the story
of Francis receiving the stigmata.

It's said the saint
went up to Mount La Verna

to be close to God and there
he meditated on Christ's life

with such intensity and focus that

he was actually imprinted
in his body

with the wounds of Christ by
the vision that was granted to him.

When I look at this tremendous image

of a man being transfixed
by a vision, being struck by

lightning as a result of something
he sees in his mind's eye, I think

this is what Francis's teachings
did also to art in the West.

It was like a lightning strike.

Nothing would ever be
quite the same again.

These dramatic images were
influenced by Byzantine models.

In a sense, this great space

is another version of the great
Byzantine cathedral at Monreale.

But there's a vital difference too.

These images were created
in fresco not mosaic.

Mosaics were too splendid for the
humble tastes of the Franciscans.

They wanted an art of
poverty and simplicity.

Largely thanks to them,
fresco became the dominant
medium of Italian painting.

I met up with a modern-day
Franciscan, Brother Pasquale Magro,

to try to get a deeper understanding

of why the Franciscans transformed
their churches

into illustrated
salvation books for the common man.

We can say (SPEAKS LATIN),
you know?

The words fly

of sermons, of preachings,
while the paintings remain.

So paintings were

permanent preaching.

Permanent memorandums.

Manuscripts, handwritten books
were the monopoly of some monks,

of only few people, while paintings

were public.

No other Christian brought the figure
of Christ so near to his generation.

Francis is the great rainbow

that puts together heaven and earth,
matter and spirit.

His interpretation of the Gospel,

his conception of God, of Christ,
of man, of the world, of nature,

were very personal.

They were not the official ones.

Traditionally Christ
was represented as a judge,

that for 700 years
Christ was the judge of man.

Francis upset completely 180 degrees
the image of Christ.

No more Christ judge of man,
but Christ judged by man,

crucified.

Nightfall in Assisi,
and I had one more visit to make.

What brother Pasquale had said about
the Byzantine emphasis on Christ
as judge made perfect sense when I

thought back to that great image
of Christ Pontacrator in Monreale.

But how did Francis's big idea
about Christ's humanity
change the face of art?

I wanted to explore that further
by looking at one artist's
work in the basilica.

That artist was called Cheney
di Peppo, or Cimabue by nickname.

He was born in 1240, less than
15 years after St Francis's death

and trained by artists from
the East, from Constantinople.

You can see the Byzantine influence
in some of his work here.

For example, these angels' wings
even look like painted mosaic.

But I was more interested in
how Cimabue began to transform

his Byzantine inheritance
under the influence of Francis.

Cimabue painted this great fresco in
the late 13th century at a time when

Jerome of Ascally was Minister
General of the Franciscan order.

Jerome, like many other Franciscan
friars, had travelled widely
throughout the world of Byzantium.

What he wanted in his great basilica
was images that would be
every bit as splendid

and awe-inspiring as those he'd
seen on his travels in the East.

And that's what Cimabue gave him
in this image of the Madonna and

Child enthroned on a gold throne
and surrounded by angels.

But at the same time,
Cimabue has begun in a subtle way
to change the nature

of this kind of Byzantine image,
because when you look at these sorts

of images in a Byzantine church,
you have this very strong sense that
the figures are far away from you.

They're remote,
in the distant space of heaven.

Here you feel they're in your space.

And it's done very much
through the faces.

The angels' eyes, those solemn eyes
that seem to engage you,
to invite you to look into them.

And above all, I think,
the expression

of this beautiful Madonna,
full of sadness and foreboding.

It is very much
the Madonna the mother,
not the Madonna the Queen of Heaven.

And the explanation for this

deep humanity that you begin to find
in Franciscan art, first in Cimabue

and later in the hands of
other artists, is to be found
in the figure of Francis.

It's one of the earliest images
in Italian art of Francis, there he
stands on the right of the picture.

Very much Francis the simple man
of poverty in his poor robes
with his feet planted

firmly on the ground, and this
wonderfully moving expression

of challenging sadness in his eyes.

And there's also a curious
little detail which is that

Cimabue has painted Francis's left
ear much bigger than his right ear.

It might look like mistake,
but I don't think so.

I think it's a piece
of telling symbolism, because

it's Cimabue's way of saying to us

that Francis allowed the word of God
to enter him through the left side,

the side of the heart, so fully
that it penetrated his very being.

I think
that's the essential meaning
and challenge of this picture.

What it is saying
to us, the viewers,

is are you able
to involve yourselves as fully and

emotionally, and as full-bloodedly

as Francis did in the meaning
of Christ's life and sacrifice?

If you can, you, too, can be saved.

Francis died on 3rd October 1226,
at dusk,

here on the site of the Church
of the Santa Maria degli Angeli,

just outside Assisi.

Every year for more than 750 years
his life's been
celebrated on this date.

There are people from all walks of
life here and many have travelled
great distances to be here tonight.

CHOIR SINGS

I've never experienced this
procession before, and I have
to say I found it very moving.

It is partly the spectacle of
the Friars in their simple habits

walking in solemn order around
the piazza, each holding a light.

Symbol both of the light of Christ
and the illumination of
the Saint's teachings.

But, above all,
I think it's the sense that

these people really are trying to
keep Francis alive in their hearts.

If I had to put my
finger on Francis's

single greatest achievement,
it would have to be the way in

which, as Brother Pasquale said,
he brought the figure of Christ so
close to the people at large.

And this is reflected with great
clarity in Italian art.

You can see it most simply
by comparing the image of
Christ before Francis's time

with the image of Christ afterwards,
transformed by the new spirit
of the mendicant orders.

This is the Church of Santa Chiara
in Assisi, and it contains
a famous crucifixion

painted around the same
time as Francis's birth.

This image of Christ on the cross
was created in the late 12th century

and it is one Francis himself
knew well.

He prayed to it so fervently,
according to his legend,
that the figure even spoke to him.

But as a work of art,
it's still rooted in an old
Byzantine convention,

Christ the Emperor,
triumphant even in death.

Christ is on the cross, but there's
no real sense of pain or suffering.

He stares out in glory.

To see how the image of Christ
was revolutionised, I left Assisi

and travelled some 70 miles
through Umbria to Tuscany,
to the quiet town of Arezzo,

because here there is another great
painting by Cimabue, a crucifixion

painted around 1271, almost 50
years after St Francis's death.

It shows a very different vision
of the Saviour on the cross.

Cimabue was trained by artists from
the East, from Byzantium, but when

he painted his great Crucifixion
which is in the church of San
Domenico in Arezzo, he literally

twisted the traditional image of
Christ triumphant on the cross
into something quite different.

This is not the image of Christ
as Emperor or King.

This is very much the image of
Christ the suffering man.

Look at the way his eyes are
closed in agony, look at how
blood pours in these extraordinary

bright red rivulets
from his hands and from his feet.

His body is this livid green colour
intended to suggest the pallor of
death, and look at the way in which

Cimabue has arranged that body
into a kind of diagram of pain,
so much so that it literally

disturbs the geometry of the
beautiful decorations on the cross.

I'd never seen this
Crucifixion before.

It's almost hidden away in one of
Arezzo's least visited churches.

It's only recently been restored
and this was the first time
it had ever been filmed.

Until I saw it,
I don't think I'd ever realised
quite how great Cimabue was.

He uses paint like a shorthand.

So stylised, it's close to modern
cartoons and graphic art.

The style with its distortions and
manipulations of scales is a far cry
from realism, yet the result's

an image that makes Christ's
suffering seem totally real.

When I look at this picture I
can feel my nervous system being
affected, not just my eyes.

This is absolutely the kind of image
designed to inspire sympathy

and identification
with Christ's suffering.

The emotional power of Italian
art in this extraordinary time

was a direct response to the
emotional needs of the people.

Art gave them images filled
with feelings they could
relate to - pain...

..love.

And the new emphasis on Christ's
suffering humanity wasn't

by any means the only way artists
found to touch people's hearts.

They also painted Christ's mother,
Mary, with a new depth of emotion.

CHURCH BELLS TOLL

You can see this in towns
all over Tuscany,
but nowhere more so than Siena.

Here, her cult became so important
that the image of the Virgin was

sometimes given even more prominence
than that of Christ.

This simple but touching Madonna
and Child was painted by an artist

called Coppo di Marcovaldo in 1261
for the Church of the Servites,
an order devoted to the Virgin.

Whereas the new
bleeding crucifixions
were images that appealed very much

to the men of the time, these were
images with which they, as suffering
workers, could themselves identify,

this type of imagery, the image
of the Madonna, was designed to
appeal to the women of the time.

And if you imagine yourself back to
the 13th century, you are yourself

perhaps praying to this image,
you might well be a young mother.

And you might well have a baby,
and, like the Madonna,

you may well feel in your heart
that that baby will not live
very long in this tough world.

And you will pray to her.

She is part of your life. She is
not above you, she is your friend.

And the intimacy with which the
first congregations of people

prayed to this image is reflected
in its physical texture.

There are areas of paint loss,
particularly in the lower half

of the painting, around the area
of the Virgin's knees and feet.

And, according to local tradition,
those areas of paint loss

were caused by people actually
kissing or touching the image.

It's reflected also in the title
of the painting, she's called
the Madonna del Bordone.

Bordone in Italian refers
to a particular kind of melody.

What that tells us is that the
people who prayed to this image,
who looked up to this image,

almost felt they could speak to this
image, well, they also sang to her.

CHOIR BOY SINGS

But to understand just how much Mary
could mean to the long suffering
people of Tuscany and Umbria,

you have to understand
another facet of their lives.

It is easy to sentimentalise
the past, and looking out across
the beautiful landscape of Tuscany

today, it's hard to imagine
that this was ever anything
but a paradise on earth.

But go back to the 13th century,
and the reality was very different.

This was a war-zone.

Throughout the Middle Ages,
the fractured states of the Italian
peninsula competed for territory

and power. Here in Tuscany,
the armies of Florence and Siena

clashed time and again
in battles that killed thousands.

One of the most dramatic conflicts
took place on 4th September 1260,
at Montaperti.

After a furious battle, the Sienese
army of 20,000 defeated the might
of the 35,000 strong Florentines.

Montaperti was a victory
that became legendary
in the Sienese consciousness.

It also became an event that took
the city's cult of the Virgin
to a new level,

because the people attributed
their triumph directly to her.

They'd prayed to her
and the city had been saved.

And you can still
find tangible evidence for all this

in an image that once stood on
the High Altar of the cathedral.

It's this, strange unsettling
cult painting,

now known as the Madonna degli Occhi
Grossi, the Madonna of the big eyes.

It was to this picture that the
people of Siena had prayed on the
eve of the battle of Montaperti.

For centuries afterwards,
it will be held up in processions
around the cathedral on feast days,

asserting the power
and protection of the Virgin.

So intense was Siena's medieval
devotion to Mary that it even became
known as the City of the Virgin.

And the greatest monument to this
ancient belief that Mary really does

watch over this town,
was created in 1311.

It was another image of the Virgin,

created for
the high altar of the duomo,

a picture of such ambition
and brilliance
that it caused a sensation.

This image, too, was carried in
procession through the
streets to the cathedral.

As a contemporary eye witness wrote,
"A great and devout company of
priests and brothers and the most

"worthy were in order next to
the said panel, with lights lit
in their hands and sounding out

"all the bells in glory
out of devotion for such
a noble panel as this".

The noble panel in question
was the work of Siena's

most prolific artist,
Duccio di Buoninsegna,
who, as well as being a genius,

was also what nowadays you'd call
a bit of a character.

Duccio was a great artist
but he could also be
a rather difficult man.

In fact, he had form
as long as your arm.

We know from the archives here
in Siena that he was arrested

on numerous occasions for failure
to pay his debts, for drunkenness,

for unruly behaviour and twice
for refusing to go to war against
Siena's great enemy, Florence.

But all his sins were expiated when
he completed his great altarpiece.

And, I think, one of the reasons why
the Sienese greeted it with such
universal joy was precisely because

they realised that this was
one in the eye for Florence.

The Florentines did not have
anything nearly as magnificent
as this great painting.

In fact, no one had ever seen
an altarpiece quite like it before.

Duccio's vision of the Court
of Heaven is so delicate

it looks almost as though
it's woven rather than painted.

The artist has put together
decorative influences from the East,
from Africa, from the Moorish world.

And the effects created from
this mesh of pattern and colour,
all these reds and golds

and deep sumptuous blues,
they're sense stunning.

You almost feel drunk looking at it.

I think it was meant to encourage
a kind of spiritual inebriation.

Imagine its impact
on an ordinary citizen of
Siena in the 14th century.

This was an image of
everything their life wasn't.

The eternal peace and tranquillity
awaiting them in the better world
of the hereafter.

Duccio was good, and he knew it.

In the inscription
he's included his own name,

not for him the anonymity
of the Byzantine craftsmen.

As well as being one of the great
masterpieces of sacred art,
Duccio's picture was also

a fantastic advertisement
for Siena's main business,
which was trade in textiles.

What Duccio has done is re-imagined
heaven itself as a great
textile emporium in the sky,

a place overflowing with precisely
the same precious silks and damasks
that the Sienese were importing

from the near and the Far East,
from Moorish Spain
and as far afield as China.

So anybody looking at this picture
would have been reminded

before they left Siena
to go and do a bit of shopping.

The Maesta was one of
the most expensive panel paintings
ever commissioned.

Duccio used the best gold
and the deepest lapis lazuli
that money could buy.

Originally on the back
of the main altarpiece

is a series of panels depicting
the life and passion of Christ.

There's the same beautiful
pattern-making here
as on the main panel.

But in these scenes it's put to
the use of telling stories rather
than creating a vision of paradise.

These figures have
real character, personality.

Look at the disciples in this scene
of Christ washing their feet.

In their faces you can
almost hear their chatter
and feeling of anticipation.

In the scene of the Last Supper,
Duccio has used light and shade to
create a powerful sense of depth.

These look like real people
eating in a real room.

The story of Christ's Passion
is told in a way that anticipates
the modern graphic novel.

For me one of the many wonderful
things about the Maesta is the way
it encapsulates the birth of

an approach to storytelling
that has shaped the imagination
of the world for centuries.

His art is part of a blossoming
narrative that took place in
medieval Italian literature, too,

with writers like
Dante and Boccaccio.

So looking at these pictures,
you're looking at the invention of

a tradition that is still around us
in plays, novels, movies.

It is all about communication,
making a story seem so real

it could almost be your own life
passing before your eyes.

My eyes are always drawn
to this scene of the deposition.

You can see Mary's agony written
on her face and feel the terrible
gravity of the moment of death.

Literal gravity, too.

The feeling of just how heavy
a dead body can be.

The image of Mary really is
everywhere here.

As well as finding her at the town's
religious centre, you'll find her,

too, at the heart of its civic life,
the great town hall.

Inside the building,
they've even given her a seat
in the council chamber.

Here she sits
resplendent on a gothic throne

surrounded by saints and angels,
in a monumental painting of 1316
by the artist Simoni Martini.

In this room, the Council of 300
Sienese citizens would meet

each week with the Virgin
as honorary chairperson.

I wonder how often the bored
councillors talking taxes,

death duties, new parking
arrangements for horse and cart,
would look up into her eyes.

The Virgin takes many forms
in this town and here she is less
Christ's mother than the guardian

of the whole community,
throwing her energies around Siena
like a kind of holy force-field.

Leaving Siena, I'd set the compass
direction north to the fertile

and ever prosperous Veneto, where
700 years ago, it's wealth would

allow perhaps the very greatest
painter of this age to create
the greatest of all his works.

Although he was originally
a boy from Tuscany.

Italy's very first art historian,
Giorgio Vasari, tells the story
that one day the great painter

Cimabue was going for a walk in
the landscape outside Florence when

he stumbled across a young peasant
boy drawing with a stone on a rock.

So impressed was Cimabue
by this primitive sketch

that he offered the boy,
whose name was Giotto di Bondone,
a place in his workshop.

Whether it quite happened like
that, we will never know for sure.

But we do know is Cimabue
certainly did teach Giotto.

He passed on to him all the
techniques that he'd learned

from the Byzantine artists who'd
come to Italy from Constantinople.

And we also know that Giotto was
certainly a prodigy, for within
a few short years of serving

his apprenticeship he'd become
Italy's first superstar artist,
a man who took religious painting

to a whole new level,
a whole new depth of emotion.

At the start of the 14th century,
at the height of his powers,

Giotto came to Padua at the
invitation of one of the most
powerful families in northern Italy.

Home to one of Italy's
oldest universities,
this was a buzzing town,

then as now, with its thriving
markets full of inviting produce.

I'm sure that even for the great
Giotto this was a
once-in-a-lifetime job.

He'd been commissioned to paint
the Chapel of the Scrovegni family,

the most notorious loan sharks
of their age, people you
messed with at your peril.

And the result was like no other
work of art before or since,

although its glory is inseparable

from the rather dirty history
of the men who paid for it.

The Arena Chapel's one of the great
creations of Western European art.

But it wouldn't even exist if it
hadn't been for the tremendous
sense of guilt of one man.

In the Middle Ages, usury
money-lending was regarded as such

a great sin that usurers were cast
into hell together with prostitutes.

What they did was regarded almost
as a form of sexual perversion,

using money to breed more money.

Enrico Scrovegni, who paid
for all this, was the son of

a money lender
so famous that he gets
a starring role in Dante's Hell.

We see Enrico on at the far wall
offering up this whole chapel
to the Madonna of charity.

I think it makes sense to see
Giotto's great creation

as a great painted offering to God,

all done in the hope of
sending Enrico to heaven.

What did this
commission mean for Giotto?

Well, Scrovegni's ill-gotten gains
were so great that he could do
more or less what he liked.

It's pretty certain that as well
as decorating this great space,

he actually designed it,
it's very much a painter's design.

The walls are extraordinarily
bare, there are no columns,

no pilasters, architraves,
it's just a wonderful viewing box
for pictures.

There are only six windows in
the entire place and they've been

put on the south side, to create
the perfect viewing conditions.

The result is a kind of early 14th
century precursor of the cinema.

A great fresco cycle that
unfolds all of Giotto's genius.

Three tiers of narrative scenes
depict the life of the Virgin

and the childhood
and passion of Christ.

There's a tremendous sculptural
solidity to Giotto's figures here,

and his spaces have real depth like
stage settings for sacred drama.

He's got a rough and ready
sense of perspective, too.

Realism, but not too much because
he needs the expressive freedom
to depart from true scale.

For example, to make Christ
so monumental that if he stood up,
he'd be taller than a tree.

To me,
the Massacre of the Innocents

is one of the most
powerful of all his works.

It's another of Giotto's
master strokes of originality.

A new and horrific variation
on the theme of human bodies

that touch and embrace.

A theme seen in so much
painting of the time.

Here, too, the bodies are touching.

But this time
most of them are corpses, inert,

piled up like so much detritus.

Almost seeming to turn blue
and bloodless as you look.

Tears stream down
the mothers' faces.

It's difficult to put into words
the feelings that
you get here, but it's...

For me, it's very much not like
being overawed

by a great masterpiece of art.

It's not that feeling,
it's the sense of being

overwhelmed by a vast
weight of human emotion.

There's an extraordinary
amount of feeling in here.

Whereas Cimabue had brought into
art this new, very powerful sense

of the body that feels,
the body that suffers,

I think what Giotto gave
to art was a new level of emotion.

He didn't just paint the body,
he painted the soul,

he painted the heart.

Every face here is a full
of a particular feeling.

It's obvious, perhaps most obvious,

in the great scenes of Christ's
Passion with which the story

reaches its emotional climax,

that amazing lamentation
where the angels

fill the sky like extraordinary
images of a very human agony.

It's really powerful, but I think
if you want to appreciate Giotto

in his originality,
it is almost better to turn to

some of the
quieter scenes where he's invested

the figures with a subtle level of
emotion that simply haven't been

present in art before in Italy.

For example, this beautiful
nativity where the Virgin
looks at the Christ child.

She's giving him over to the
serving woman for his first bath.

She looks at this swaddled child
with tremendous long, slow gaze

of sadness mixed with love,
mixed with kind of foreboding.

It's as if in this act
of giving away to be bathed,

she's seeing in her mind's eye
the moment when she have to

give him over to be sacrificed,
to be crucified.

Another thing that Giotto does
brilliantly is create parallels

because it's a kind of simultaneous
cinema where you see every frame

of the story at the same time.

You can see these visual parallels.

There's a scene in the right-hand
corner, a beautiful scene

where Joachim and Anna,
the virgin's parents,

embrace by the gate of the city.

They give each other this
beautiful, tender kiss.

The integrity of their
relationship, so to speak,

is established by the
fact that Giotto has placed them

under an arch, the most
architecturally solid of forms.

That kiss
is brilliantly contrasted...

If you come down on the diagonal
you find Judas embracing Christ.

Giotto has plays both of their
heads in profile, just like
the heads of Joachim and Anna.

This is, so to speak,
the evil version of the kiss.

And instead of the arch that
encloses those two blessed figures,

Christ and Judas at this moment
of portrayal are surrounded

by soldiers and the weapons
which form this chaos in the sky.

At the level of formal invention
Giotto's never been surpassed.

This is about as good as it gets.

Giotto wasn't just one of the
greatest artists ever to have lived,

he was also a bit of a player,

a tireless networker
and a canny businessman.

By the end of his life,

this one-time shepherd boy,
if we are to believe Vasari,

had extensive interests
in the textile business in Florence
and a large personal fortune.

He counted the King of Naples
and the Pope among his friends.

And he got Dante, no less,
to do his PR for him.

"Once Cimabue thought to hold the
field in painting," wrote Dante.

"Now Giotto is all the rage,
dimming the lustre of others' fame."

Italian art had reached a pinnacle
as one genius emerged after another.

But all that was
dramatically halted

when Italy was
plunged into darkness.

In 1348, as if in the footsteps of
the craftsmen from Byzantium,

the plague spread
like wildfire across Europe

from the East, via Sicily
and into every city across Italy.

Its impact was dramatic and
unexpected. Its symptoms, gruesome.

Boccaccio described
its effects in the Decameron.

"In men and women alike,
it first betrays itself

"by the emergence of certain
tumours in the groin or armpits,

"some of which
grew to the size of a common apple,
others to the size of an egg.

"These the common
people called gavoccioli."

After that things only got worse.

Black boils appeared
all over the body

and within two or at the
most three days, death ensued.

The effects are almost
impossible to imagine.

When it came to the old rivalries,
the plague did not take sides.

In Siena they had to stop work
on the great cathedral

for which Duccio
had painted his Maesta,
because the builders were dead.

In Florence, half
the population was killed -
one in every two people.

No wonder, to those who remained,
it seemed as if the
end of the world was upon them.

Plague fanned the flames of
superstition and popular devotion

to the Madonna flared up
into a kind of mass hysteria.

I'm on my way - almost the
last stop on my journey -

to a building in Florence which
encapsulates this troubled time.

It's called Orsanmichele,
once the city's grain market -

a stone's throw from the cathedral.

But, in time of plague,

it also became the most popular
site of pilgrimage in Tuscany.

People came here in vast numbers
to light candles
and pray for salvation.

In 1359 alone, a staggering
million candles were sold

and people were drawn here

by the latest painting
of the Virgin

because the rumour was
this painting could work miracles.

In those days, Orsanmichele had
an open arcade, so pilgrims

could have seen the shrine to
the Virgin shimmering within.

The picture they saw,
framed in an ornate tabernacle,

is a surprisingly
modest piece of work.

The Florentines could have
commissioned for this great shrine
site in the centre of their city

a grand altarpiece such
as Duccio had given to Siena
nearly 50 years before.

But I think that's exactly
what they didn't want.

In this time of plague and
pestilence, they consciously

turned their back on that kind of
sophistication and grandeur

and opted for something
much simpler -

an image that seems to return
to the devotional simplicity of
the art before Duccio and Giotto.

It is by Bernardo Daddi,
and it's a Madonna of tenderness.

Christ reaches out to touch his
mother's cheek and in that gesture,

I think we can sense the
gestures of all the Florentines,

all the pilgrims,
who came to this site in time
of plague to pray before the image.

Almost more to the point than
the image itself is the tabernacle

that's been constructed, like a
huge reliquary box to contain it.

I think what this grand tabernacle
demonstrates very vividly

is that that picture, that
piece of beautifully painted wood

was not regarded as a work of art,

but as a holy object -

a kind of window through which
Divinity might miraculously spread.

It was something that
could change your life.

I've been coming here for
more than 20 years and every time
I walked through that door

I've been disappointed because
there's been scaffolding up.

It has been "in restauro"
for decades but now, finally,

it has been restored.

I can't think of any other place
in Italy

where you can come quite as close,
so close that you can touch it,

to this world of plague,
of fear, of pestilence,

of deep, deep veneration
and superstition.

It's almost like a kind of time
machine that transports you back

to a world
that's vanished for ever.

It might seem incredible,
but within 50 years,
the artists of Florence

had decided that
this type of work was primitive.

They'd taken art to a new level -
or so they thought -

with a radical new technique
of painting, mathematically
calculated perspective,

which enabled them to plan out
pictures that could be
as convincing as photographs.

As accurate as computer graphics.

For them, this was a revolution -
a total break with the past,

spelling the end of
early Christian art -

the end of its
influence and appeal.

But that's not a view of
art history with which I agree.

There's no doubt that
the discovery of mathematically
calculated perspective

suddenly gave artists
a whole new box of tricks.

It enabled them to create a whole
new set of sense-beguiling
optical illusions.

But it would be a mistake to see
it as a great quantum leap forward,

the equivalent in art of, say,
Einstein's theory of relativity.

Because it wasn't like that.

Artists realised, almost as soon
as perspective was invented,

that while it liberated them
in some ways,

in others, it placed limits
on the creative imagination.

For proof of this, you only have to
look at the very greatest artists

working in the aftermath
of the discovery of perspective.

They all find ways to
escape the literalism of
precisely delineated space.

To recover the freedom
that earlier Christian artists
had taken for granted.

Look at how El Greco creates a
space of shifting uncertainty,

filled with elongated figures that
seemed to flicker like flames.

Looking directly back to the
paradise fields of Byzantine art.

Look at how Caravaggio uses
pools of shadow
to lose inessential detail,

to focus the an eye
on the essence of a scene.

Here, the suffering body of Christ.

It's achieved by other means,
but this is the same focus
on the essence of a feeling

that permeates
the art of the Masters of 13th
and 14th century Italy.

One of the reasons for
Christianity's tremendous success

and appeal
down the centuries has been

the fact that so many of
its stories and legends touch

on universal
aspects of human experience.

How does one cope with persecution?

How does one cope in times of war?

Christianity is about death
and it is about love -

a mother's love for her child.

So much in it is part of us.

And I think the reason why
early Christian art really is
an art for eternity,

for all times and places,

is that it expresses
those universal emotions
with total clarity.

Its images are all the more
powerful because they don't

slavishly imitate
actual space and true scale.

And if you think forward
into modern times, to me,

it's clear that in the long run,
it was their approach to art -

not perspective -
that ultimately won out.

Think of the most famous painting
of the 20th century,

by the most
famous of all modern artists.

Picasso's Guernica -

that great scream of
outrage against the horrors of war.

It might not be a
religious work of art.

But it uses a language
of emotion, of compression,

of scale and space distortion

that's got nothing
to do with perspective.

A language that seems to me to be
very close to that of the old
Christian artists.

With its piled bodies and
screaming faces, I see it

as a secular version of
Giotto's Massacre of the Innocents.

In one crucial sense,
I don't think perspective made any
difference at all.

Because while it gave artists
a new way of creating
convincing illusions,

it didn't change the
fundamental challenge,

which isn't to do with how you
represent what's in front
of your eyes,

but how you express what's inside
yourself, what's in your heart,
what's in your soul.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media - 2007