Original subtitles

This is a series about an artistic era that is looked down on,

and never gets the respect it deserves.

It is a shadowy era so shadowy, people even disagree about its name.

So I'm going to use the old one,

the one that best sums up its dilemmas.

I'm going to call it the Dark Ages.

The Dark Ages go roughly from the fourth century to roughly the 11th.

They begin when the Roman Empire starts to crumble,

and they end

when William the Conqueror invades England.

Now in this shadowy slab of time, everything changed.

The greatest empire the world has seen

melted back into the cultural shadows.

Various powerful artistic forces

stepped up to take its place.

Later in the series, we'll be examining those much

misunderstood creatives

the Barbarians.

What wondrous bling they brought into the world.

What fabulous things they achieved.

I will also be looking at that joyous and inventive religion,

Islam, which did so much to light up the Dark Ages.

But we begin with a group of people

whose achievements were enormous.

They started with nothing

and ended up with so much.

I'm thinking, of course, of those

thoroughly underestimated Dark Age creatives,

those intrepid voyagers into the unknown.

The Christians.

Art never lies.

And the story that art tells us of these exciting times

is that this was never

an age of darkness.

This was an age of light.

These are the famous ruins of Pompeii.

As I am sure you know, Mount Vesuvius erupted here in 79 AD,

and all of this was covered in ashes

and preserved for posterity in perfect conditions.

Now, one of the things they found here, which really surprised them,

was proof that there were already Christians here by 79 AD.

The thing they found that proved it...

..was this.

It's what they call a Rotas square

and these Rotas squares

are deeply mysterious.

They have been found all over the Roman Empire, in Syria, in Gaul,

even in England, in Cirencester, they found one of these.

They are usually inscribed on the walls of houses,

or sometimes on the columns outside the house,

but, of course, when they found them,

they didn't have a clue what these were.

Just mysterious word games,

plastered outside houses.

What it is is a letter square,

made up of five Latin words

Rotas,

Opera,

Tenet,

Arepo

and Sator.

Rotas at the top

is Sator backwards.

And you can see Rotas down this side, as well.

And Sator down that side.

And here in the middle, Arepo,

is Opera, "work", backwards.

The actual words mean something like

"As ye sow, so shall ye reap."

But only if you ignore Latin grammar.

Various code-breakers twisted it

this way and that for decades,

but it still didn't mean much.

But then, a eureka moment.

One of these code-breakers realised that the important

thing about the Rotas square

was not the words,

but the letters.

Because these letters of the Rotas square

can be rearranged

to form a cross,

which reads the same

both ways,

up and down.

It says Paternoster,

which is Latin for "Our Father,"

the opening words of the Lord's prayer.

What's more, these two letters that are left over,

Alpha and Omega,

are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.

Alpha and Omega in their Roman form.

You can see them down in the Roman catacombs popping up everywhere.

Alpha and Omega

the beginning and the end.

Popular Christian code

for the one true God.

So these mysterious word squares

were put outside houses to signify

that the occupants were Christians,

and also as a kind of lucky charm to ward off evil.

Of course, this isn't art yet,

this is an inscription,

but it has artistic implications.

What you see in here,

this appetite for signs and symbols

and secret meanings,

that Christian appetite

is something that transferred to Christian art.

The Christian art of the dark ages

is an art of mystery and magic.

Of suggestions and miracles.

Transcendence and light.

The Rotas square isn't art yet,

but it is an excellent pointer

to a new artistic direction.

One of the reasons early Christian art is so exciting is

because you find it in exciting places.

Rome is wild enough on the surface,

but when you descend into its underground

look how scary and fascinating it becomes.

People often imagine the catacombs

were hiding places, underground

shelters in which persecuted

Christians hid from the Romans.

But you can't hide an underground city as huge as this

under anyone's nose.

The Romans knew these were here, all right.

What they didn't know,

is what one Christian was saying to another down here.

Because the first Christian art

was filled with secret signs

and hidden meanings.

That's why the fish became

a ubiquitous Christian symbol.

When two Christians met on the road

it is said that one of them

would draw this shape in the sand.

The other one would draw this shape

and two of them

knew immediately that they were Christians together.

This famous Christian sign,

the Christogram, or Chi-Rho,

represents Jesus himself.

It is made by combining two Greek letters,

Chi and Rho, the first

two letters of the word Christos,

which means "the anointed one."

It is said that the sign had magic powers.

Even today, we still call Christmas, "Xmas", because of this.

Another popular Christian sign was the anchor.

For the simple reason that the

top of it here looked like a cross.

Everywhere you look in these haunting Roman catacombs, the first

Christians are declaring their faith

in such mysterious and cryptic ways.

These symbols and signs

weren't just a secret language,

they were also a different way of seeing things, a different way

of understanding, not just with your eyes, but with your imagination.

What is most interesting about this first Christian art

you find down here

is how few pictures there are in it.

No images of Jesus,

no Marys, no saints.

For the first few centuries of Christianity

there were no Christian images.

It is not until the beginning of our period,

the so-called Dark Ages,

300 years after the birth of Christ

that figures and scenes

begin to pop up at last in Christian art.

Look how puzzling they were.

We are in a third century Christian burial chamber,

in the catacombs of Priscilla.

A rich, Christian family was buried here,

and look what's on the walls.

Over here, some peacocks.

Over there,

three chaps standing in a fire.

And over here,

some kind of sea dragon,

with someone coming out of its mouth.

So, let's decode all of this.

The peacocks are symbols of eternity.

Because peacocks replace their beautiful feathers every year,

the ancients believed their flesh couldn't rot.

It was eternal.

The three young men are described

in the Bible by the prophet, Daniel.

Three young Israelites were set on fire by the Babylonians,

but God protected them

and the Babylonian fires couldn't touch them.

The chap coming out of the sea monster is the prophet, Jonah,

who you may remember was swallowed by a whale

for three whole days.

After three days, the whale spat him out again,

and he returned to dry land, a wiser man.

The thread that unites all these

cryptic images is salvation.

Hope.

"God save the three young men from the fire,

"he saved Jonah from the whale

"and he will save you, too."

Jonah is also the subject of the

earliest surviving masterpieces of Christian sculpture.

Found today in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Jonah, swallowed by the whale,

spat out by the whale

and returned to dry land a wiser man.

Jonah is particularly significant

because the early Christians used him

as a stand-in for Jesus himself.

Jesus, remember,

also rose from the dead after three days.

The reason why Jonah is so popular in the catacombs is

because he is a way of showing Jesus...

..without showing Jesus.

Replacement another code, a symbol.

We've been down here, what, five minutes,

and look how many different ways

we have already seen to represent Jesus

without actually showing him.

He is the Chi-Rho,

the word sign,

he's Jonah in the whale,

he's the fish,

the anchor.

What we haven't seen yet is a Jesus

we can all recognise.

A Jesus who actually looks like Jesus.

The truth is, no-one in early

Christian art had a clue what

he actually looked like.

The Bible doesn't describe him, no-one does.

So art took an extremely long time

to come up with a face for Jesus.

And I think, the search for that face is the greatest artistic

tussle of the Dark Ages.

The proof that no-one actually knew what Jesus looked like is

this controversial relic.

The Shroud of Turin.

It is said to be the cloth in which

Jesus was wrapped at his death.

This haunting likeness is

the true face of Christ,

preserved miraculously in his blood,

or so they say.

The Shroud of Turin doesn't get shown very often, but

when it does, thousands of pilgrims flock to Turin to see it.

Most of them believe they are looking at the true face of Christ.

When I went to see it,

there was such a powerful atmosphere in the church,

so many people,

so certain they were staring at the remains of Jesus.

I am afraid they weren't, because Jesus Christ didn't look like that.

At least, not according to the evidence left behind

by the first Christian artists who described him.

According to these first Christian artists,

Jesus actually looked...

..like this.

Blonde, fresh-faced, boyish,

the earliest images of Jesus looked

nothing like the Jesus we know today.

And nothing like the Jesus on the Turin Shroud.

Jesus at first is a happy-go-lucky character,

curly-haired and handsome.

He is usually shown waving his wand about,

performing remarkable miracles.

So here, he is turning water into wine at the wedding

feast at Cana,

and here

he is curing the paralytic,

who couldn't walk until he met the baby-faced Jesus.

And over here,

a blind man is being cured by Jesus again.

And finally, with a wave of that Harry Potter wand of his,

this is Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

You can always tell Lazarus in early Christian art,

because he looks like an Egyptian mummy, all wrapped up.

What you never see in these very first examples of Christian

art is a Jesus who is suffering

in pain,

covered in blood like the one

on the Turin Shroud.

That Jesus doesn't turn up in art for 1,000 years or so,

because the tortured Jesus is a creation of the Middle Ages,

an expression of medieval guilt and terror.

What horrible pains the artistic mind went on to

inflict on the crucified Jesus in the centuries ahead.

How harshly it whipped him

and scourged him

and punctured him.

In the beginning, though, artists didn't do that.

The first Jesuses in art

are young, handsome, curly-haired

and free.

So, either Jesus deliberately

misled his followers about what

he actually looked like

for the first 1,000 years or

so of Christianity,

or the Turin Shroud is a medieval fake.

I know what I think.

The first Christians weren't looking for a god who made them

feel guilty.

That would never have caught on.

They were looking for a God who would save them,

and fill them with hope.

So as their model for the first Jesus, Christian artists

selected the youngest and handsomest of the pagan gods.

They chose Apollo, the god of the sun.

Blond, and un-bearded,

youthful and curly-haired.

Apollo was a God who made you feel good.

So the first Jesuses were curly-haired and pretty,

because they borrowed that look from Apollo.

And it went further than that.

When this mysterious Christian statue was dug up out of the

ground it was thought to represent a woman,

an unknown goddess, a muse.

Only later was it realised that this, too,

was an early Jesus.

In that wonderful museum in Cleveland,

the one with the Jonah marbles,

there is a carving of Apollo

performing a miracle with Nike,

the goddess of victory.

Apollo is the robed figure on the left.

And look how shapely he is.

How easily we might mistake him, too, for a woman.

Pagan gods could be male and female.

They could amalgamate the sexes, represent both genders at once.

Just like this Jesus here.

Extraordinary as it sounds,

the first Jesuses were sometimes

made to look feminine on purpose.

They were given suggestions of breasts,

beautiful faces,

soft bodies and long hair.

"There is neither male nor female,"

wrote Saint Paul to the Galicians.

"You are all one in Jesus."

The pagans had lots of goddesses to worship

Venus,

Isis,

Diana.

But Christianity had none.

Christianity believed in one true God

and he was masculine.

There was an entire feminine side missing.

So the feminisation of Jesus was a deliberate artistic attempt

to cater for both sexes.

It produced some of the Dark Ages' most unexpected imagery.

In Ravenna, in the magnificent Arian Baptistery,

there is an un-bearded Jesus

being baptised in the River Jordan.

He is so soft and feminine.

A podgy and delicate Christ

with childbearing hips.

Before this girlish Jesus could become fully masculine,

grow a beard and turn into a man,

Christianity needed to find a

feminine presence of its own.

The borrowing of Christ's face from Apollo shouldn't really surprise us.

The early Christians borrowed from the pagans

because that's what art does.

It uses what's already there.

It is important to remember, too, that for

most of these early centuries of Christianity,

Christians and pagans lived together

in reasonable harmony.

Those terrible periods of persecution,

when the Romans murdered the Christians in terrible ways,

those were rare, the exception, not the rule.

Later, when the Roman Empire became officially Christian,

under the Emperor Constantine,

aggressive Christian writers,

looking back on these times,

did what the victor always does in a war.

They rewrote history from their point of view.

Dramatised it, exaggerated it.

In most of the Roman Empire, particularly at the borders,

like here, in Roman Syria,

pagans lived next door to Christians,

Christians lived next door to Jews,

and all of them muddled along together.

The earliest known Christian church has been found in the Syrian

border town of Dura-Europos.

It was next to the earliest known synagogue.

And around the corner

was the temple of the bull-god,

Mithras.

All these different religions

swapped each other's converts,

borrowed each other's gods,

and influenced each other's art.

Take the halo, that miraculous circle of light which you

see around the heads of holy figures in Christian art.

At first, there were no halos,

Jesus was the magician with

the wand, and that was enough to differentiate him.

But as Christian art grew busier,

and more and more characters popped up in it,

Jesus needed to look more obviously divine.

So Christian artists did what the pagans did,

they gave him a halo,

borrowed once again from Apollo.

Long before Jesus acquired

his miraculous nimbus of light,

Apollo already had one.

A circle of symbolic sunshine

emanating from his head to

signify his solar divinity.

Another crucial borrowing from pagans was the image of the angel.

If you look at a typical Roman sarcophagus from the early

Christian era, you will usually see a pair of winged figures

carrying a portrait of the deceased upwards in glory.

They look exactly like angels,

but they're not.

They're Roman figures of victory.

Nikes, pagan transporters of the soul.

But the most significant of these pagan borrowings was a female

figure adapted from Egyptian art.

She became very popular in Christianity.

Indeed, she was central to it.

But that is not how she began.

The Egyptian earth mother, Isis,

was one of the most revered of all pagan gods.

She was the goddess of fertility,

the mother goddess,

from whom all life originally sprang.

When you wanted babies,

you prayed to Isis.

When you wanted your crops to grow,

you prayed to Isis.

Whoever you were, slave, servant,

outcast, you prayed to Isis,

because Isis would protect you.

To emphasise her caring nature,

Isis was often shown with

a baby on her knee

whom she breastfeeds regally.

He is Horus, son of Isis.

Horus was the god of the sky,

the Egyptian Apollo,

and his birthday

fell at the winter solstice,

sometime around December 25.

When Christian art grew hungry for a distinct female

presence to worship,

a mother goddess who nurtured you and

protected you.

Isis, the mother of Horus,

was an obvious model, and the

two of them were soon successfully

transported into Christian art.

This is the first known image of Mary,

holding the baby Jesus on her lap.

It was found in the Roman catacombs of Priscilla,

a touching fragment of a mother and her child.

Mary, caring for the baby Jesus, became one of the most

popular of all the Christian images

of the Dark Ages.

With such glorious results.

This great artistic discovery, the Virgin Mary,

had an important by-product

because it did away with the need to feminise or soften Jesus.

When Mary emerged as a powerful divine presence,

Jesus no longer needed to be girlish.

His image was free to become fully masculine.

But where to put all this powerful new art

that Christianity was inventing.

It's all very well finding a new image for Jesus and Mary,

but what also needed to be invented

was the Christian church.

The Roman Empire was huge.

It stretched from the Middle East at one end

to this primitive cultural backwater at the other.

The place we now call Britain.

When you're imagining the Roman Empire,

you need to stop thinking about countries

because there weren't any.

No clear divisions, either, between Asia and Africa or Europe.

All of them...

..were part of this massive collar of power

surrounding the entire Mediterranean.

The mightiest empire the world has seen.

Christianity got to Britain quite early,

all the way from over here

right up to here.

And just about there,

in a village in Dorset called Hinton St Mary,

they've dug up one of the earliest mosaic images of Jesus.

He looks stately, doesn't he?

More like a Roman senator than a Christian God.

Except for the large Chi-Rho that surrounds his head,

the sign of Christ.

This is Lullingstone in Kent.

And we're here because I wanted you to see what's left

of one of the earliest known Christian churches.

If you're thinking to yourself that this looks more like

the remains of a big house, not a church,

you'd be absolutely right.

The first churches were ordinary houses

adapted for Christian use.

Some Christians were richer and more active in the community than others.

And their house became the neighbourhood house church.

The house church they found in Dura-Europos,

the one next door to the Jewish Synagogue,

was just a small town house in which the Christians had done some DIY,

knocked down a wall, roofed over a courtyard

to create more space for their meetings.

On the walls of this makeshift church,

the Dura Christians painted Christ walking on water.

And there he is again, healing a cripple,

making him walk, too.

Here in Lullingstone,

the house church was on the first floor of this elegant Roman villa.

It was just above

that pagan shrine there.

Basically, it was a simple room

with painted walls.

Decorating it was a procession of praying Christians

with crosses on their robes.

There was also a Chi-Rho.

And around this Chi-Rho,

the two momentous letters of the Greek alphabet again.

Alpha and omega,

the beginning and the end.

If you put all those four letters together,

alpha, rho, chi and omega,

you get the word "arco",

which means "I rule".

From the outside, you wouldn't have known

the Lullingstone house church was there.

It was a modest Christian conversion

and almost invisible.

And for the first 300 years,

all churches were like this.

Humble spaces in people's houses,

wonky bits of DIY

where Christians could worship and celebrate.

And then...

..in 313 AD,

..Constantine the Great converted to Christianity,

and everything changed.

Suddenly, this cryptic and secretive religion,

with its instinctive fondness for codes and clues,

became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

And modesty was no longer an option.

Ooh, he's a big one, isn't he?!

Constantine the Great -

Roman Emperor, mighty warrior

and defender of the faith.

Constantine's mother, St Helena, was a Christian

and he probably inherited the faith from her.

In 313 AD,

Constantine's famous Edict of Milan

made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire.

And from then on, its power grew

and grew...

..and grew.

Constantine was a builder by instinct.

Look at this magnificent triumphal arch

he plonked in front of the Coliseum.

But his greatest achievement as a builder

was the unexpected invention

of the Christian church.

Until Constantine,

Christian churches were small and makeshift,

often hidden away,

but when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Emperor,

everything changed.

Suddenly, all the building resources

of the mightiest empire the world has seen

began to be lavished on Christian architecture.

And a religion which hitherto had made do with wonky house churches

found itself having to invent

a grand new style of worship.

These huge Christian basilicas that Constantine began building

were another Christian achievement for which there was no precedent.

The little house churches were useless as an example

for these giant halls of worship.

This was a completely new kind of architecture.

This is Santa Sabina in Rome,

the best preserved of the first Christian basilicas.

It's a new type of religious space.

No-one in any religion had worshipped like this before.

Pagan temples worked very differently from a Christian church.

Pagan temples were spaces for worshipping outdoors.

In a pagan temple, the congregation stayed outside.

Only the priests of the cult could enter the holy sanctuary

in which the sacred idol was kept.

Christian churches were the opposite.

A Christian church was a huge assembly hall with a roof

where people could worship indoors.

And the style of worship was different, too.

Nowadays, churches have these neat rows of pews

where everybody sits quietly and piously.

But in the first Christian churches, there were no pews.

In the beginning, Christian churches were huge open spaces

in which an ecstatic Christian crowd

would heave and circulate.

This was a space for moving

and chanting and talking.

At the start of the ceremony,

the priests would enter

in a magnificent procession

that went all the way up to the front.

You see them illustrated sometimes, high up on Christian walls.

An ornate and stately priesthood

progressing through these new naves

in a magnificent wave of finery and colour.

So these were spaces full of constant movement

and chaotic crowding.

And the only precedent for such a building

was a useful Roman construction

called a basilica.

Basilicas were public meeting halls

built to house big crowds.

There was nothing religious about them.

Every sizable Roman settlement had a basilica.

Roman basilicas were entered from the side, somewhere about here.

But when the Christians took over the shape...

..they swivelled it around and put the entrance over here.

So the entire building...

..pointed that way.

One of the most common uses of a Roman basilica

was as a law court.

The populace would mill about down here

while the magistrate would sit up at the end,

raised on a magisterial throne,

sitting in a special rounded apse

that signalled his importance.

The Christians took over the magistrates apse as well.

It's where they put their sacrificial altar,

and above it, a great apse mosaic,

the climactic moment of this magnificent religious journey.

But you're looking up at this glorious apse mosaic

and you're thinking,

"Hmm, there's Jesus with a big beard.

"hat happened to the curly-haired boy?"

Well, he just wasn't grand enough

for Constantine's new basilicas.

So the early Christians wanted a god they could look up to,

a God who was a match for all the other gods.

And when the time came for a more imposing Jesus to emerge,

Jesus the adult...

.the Christians turned once again to that reliable source

of raw materials that lay all around them.

The art of the pagans.

The most powerful and important of all the Roman gods was Jupiter,

or in his Greek incarnation,

Zeus, King Of the Gods.

Zeus, or Jupiter, was grand and bearded.

In the great Temple of Zeus at Olympia,

the most famous sculptor of the classical age, Phidias,

had shown the King Of the Gods enthroned in Majesty,

an image the Christians were determined to match.

They took it all - the beard, the hair, the throne,

that sense of omnipotent power.

It was all borrowed from Zeus.

And the curly-haired youth with the girlish body

who'd buzzed around performing all those miracles

was replaced by this manly, mature Jesus

who sits in judgment on his flock,

stern and unsmiling,

wise and infallible.

Meanwhile,

back down in the Roman catacombs,

darker Christian forces were also stirring.

When I said the persecution of the Christians has been exaggerated,

I didn't mean it never happened. Of course it did.

Particularly under Constantine's predecessor, Diocletian.

Though not perhaps in the numbers we've been led to believe.

Some estimates say that only about 2,000 Christians

were killed in the Roman persecutions.

I think there must have been more than that.

But the modern age is definitely better at killing Christians

than the Romans ever were.

In the Spanish Civil War,

7,000 priests, monks

and nuns were murdered.

And you'd never hear about them.

But for the early Christians, death had a special significance.

The idea took hold in their imaginations

that suffering was a necessary part of redemption.

It was crucial.

And this belief in death

had a profound influence on their art and their architecture.

These are the catacombs of St Agnes of Rome.

She's the patron saint of chastity -

of teenage girls, engaged couples,

rape victims and virgins.

Agnes was a 13-year-old girl

murdered in the reign of Diocletian.

The story goes that a Roman prefect wanted her to marry his son

but Agnes was a Christian.

She refused...

..so the Roman prefect...

..condemned her to death.

Roman law didn't permit the execution of virgins,

so Agnes was stripped, paraded naked through the streets,

and dragged to a brothel.

Afterwards they tried to burn her, but the flames wouldn't touch her

and everyone who looked at her naked body was blinded.

In the end, a Roman soldier beheaded her,

and her body - decapitated - was kept here in this church.

But her skull... That's in Sant'Agnese in Piazza Navona,

where the faithful come to kneel before it and worship it.

Martyrs like Agnes were believed to offer special protection for the early Christians.

They were baptised in blood and sat next to God in the next world.

If a martyr favoured you, you too were guaranteed a place in heaven.

To improve their chances of salvation

every Christian wanted to be buried

as close to a martyr as possible.

And so the catacombs became a very desirable piece of real estate.

Directly above Agnes's tomb are the ruins of a giant funeral basilica.

All this was once covered in Christian graves.

But the building I really want to show you is this one.

The one next door to the basilica.

This is Santa Constanza.

It's a Christian church now.

But, originally, this was a Roman mausoleum.

It was it was built by Constantine's own daughter, Constanza.

This...is where she was buried.

In this big sarcophagus here.

The story goes that when Constanza was a little girl,

she contracted leprosy.

So she prayed to Saint Agnes, and Agnes saved her.

That was the power that martyrs had.

Their miracles could change history.

That's why Constanza wanted to buried here as close to St Agnes as she could be.

These Roman mausoleums, as you can see,

were a completely different shape from the basilicas.

Mausoleums were round.

They weren't places for the crowds to charge up and down,

these were places of burial and contemplation.

Sacred spaces that enfold you.

And these round Roman mausoleums were to have a profound effect

on the Christian church.

See this famous book.

It's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.

The history of Rome in 12 mighty volumes.

This is the Roman Empire at the time of Constantine.

Now, according to Gibbon here,

Rome collapsed because the Romans grew decadent and soft,

but I think you can see from this map here, what the real problem was.

The empire was just too big.

This way it went all the way to Scotland.

And the other way - deep into the Middle East.

There was just too much empire to govern efficiently.

And when Constantine came along,

he made the momentous decision to divide the empire in two -

with a western empire over here,

and an eastern empire over there.

To govern this new eastern empire,

which came to be called Byzantium,

Constantine founded a new Christian capital on the Bosphorus.

A grand ruling city designed from scratch,

which he named after himself - Constantinople.

Though these days we call it Istanbul.

Here in the western half of the empire,

Rome was no longer cut out to be the capital either.

It was living on former glories. A pretty collection of ruins.

The empire needed somewhere more vigorous to be ruled from.

Somewhere better-placed.

Somewhere near the sea, perhaps, with good connections to the east.

Somewhere about here.

Ravenna.

The mosaic lovers among you will know Ravenna already.

You'll know that it's mosaic heaven.

Where the Christian mosaic excelled itself.

How could anyone ever have thought any of this constituted a Dark Age?

This is the church of San Vitale.

It's one of the group of churches in Ravenna

that's filled with these stunning mosaics.

But the reason I brought you to this particular church,

is because of its shape.

As you can see, it's round.

Like a mausoleum.

Not long and thin like a basilica.

These round churches of early Christianity

have a particular effect on the visitor.

They offer a 360 degree experience.

A sense of enclosure and centring.

The early Christians used round architecture,

particularly for churches devoted to the martyrs.

Like San Vitale up there.

Who'd stood up to Diocletian and died for his faith.

The basilicas were action spaces, where you met and assembled,

and paraded.

But these round churches -

these are thinking spaces.

They're like a protective bell jar

dropped onto an important location, protecting it,

and sanctifying it.

You still get a sense here of a transcendental space,

built around a precious relic.

And that mysterious, magical effect of an interior sculpted from light.

HEAVY CREAKING DOOR OPENS

HEAVY DOOR CLOSES

And it wasn't just the burial sites of the martyrs

that had special power.

Bits of their bodies had it, too.

Their hair. Their bones.

And to house these precious relics,

the Christians began to create marvellous jewelled containers.

Relic boxes

made from the finest materials

with astonishing delicacy and beauty.

Because these relics had the power too,

every Christian altar had to have a relic inside it to validate it.

Make it sacred.

Relics were like pieces of portable magic

that could be transported from church to church.

And wherever they were placed, they made that space holy.

BELL TOLLS

DOOR CREAKS

So by the time we get to this glorious Byzantine cathedral

of Monreale in Sicily...

DOOR CREAKS

all the ingredients of Christian worship are in place.

Just look at it.

By the time Monreale was finished, the Dark Ages were over.

But all this was shaped by Dark Age achievements.

At this end, the nave is like a basilica -

long and thick,

a space for assemblies and parades.

At this end of the church, the east end,

where the main altar is filled

with precious relics,

the magisterial apse

has grown huge and enveloping.

So at this end...

this is like a round church,

a special place filled with light and a golden magical air.

But over here, it's like a basilica.

A space for assemblies,

and processions.

So up there, a thinking space,

and down here, an action space.

All brought together in one magnificent piece of architecture.

High up on the walls,

scenes from Christ's miracles.

There he is again, raising Lazarus from the dead.

And over there, he's curing the paraplegic, making him walk again.

And look what's above the altar -

the Virgin and Child, borrowed from the Egyptian Isis.

And on either side of her two angels borrowed from pagan victories.

And above that, trumping them all,

in size and magnificence,

sitting so proudly in his golden apse,

an enormous Byzantine Jesus -

Zeus-like, and bearded - unmistakably divine.

This is a proper divinity.

A Byzantine ruler-god you can look up to, magnificent, all-powerful.

And look also, on either side of Jesus,

you can see his name spelled out in Greek letters.

On the left, iota and sigma, J and S

the first and last letters of Jesus.

And on the right, chi and sigma, C and S -

the first and last letters of Christos.

It's that Christian word code again. Look at his fingers, too.

Christ the ruler is spelling out this own name with his hands.

There's iota and sigma, J and S, for Jesus.

And chi and sigma for Christ.

My fingers are a bit too stubby for it, but he's doing it perfectly.

It's that secret religious language again

that Christianity had employed from the beginning.

Even in this giant Jesus, larger than any Roman emperor,

Christianity couldn't resist a final moment of mystery.

In the next film, I'll be looking at the artistic achievements

of the so-called barbarians,

and asking what the barbarians did for us.

The answer is, plenty.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd