Original subtitles

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