历史上 有一个艺术纪元一直广遭误读 This is a series about an artistic era that is looked down on,
从未得到其应得的尊重 and never gets the respect it deserves.
这个阴暗的纪元黑影森森 连它的名字都得不到大众的认可 It is a shadowy era so shadowy, people even disagree about its name.
所以 我权且用老名字称呼它好了 So I'm going to use the old one,
此名最能概括它进退维谷的窘境 the one that best sums up its dilemmas.
它叫 黑暗纪元 I'm going to call it the Dark Ages.
黑暗纪元始于4世纪 终于11世纪 The Dark Ages go roughly from the fourth century to roughly the 11th.
罗马帝国分崩离析之际标志着它的诞生 They begin when the Roman Empire starts to crumble,
威廉一世 and they end
入侵英格兰标志着它的结束 when William the Conqueror invades England.
在那段暗无天日的岁月里 万物发生了翻天覆地的变化 Now in this shadowy slab of time, everything changed.
史上最伟大的帝国 The greatest empire the world has seen
被文化的阴影笼罩 melted back into the cultural shadows.
取代它的 是各路强壮有力的 Various powerful artistic forces
艺术生力军 stepped up to take its place.
稍后 我将向大家讲述 Later in the series, we'll be examining those much
那些被误读的创造 misunderstood creatives
大家将见证 the Barbarians.
侵占罗马的野蛮人为全世界做出的贡献 What wondrous bling they brought into the world.
以及他们的惊天成就 What fabulous things they achieved.
大家还将见证 伊斯兰教 这个快乐的善于发明创造的宗教 I will also be looking at that joyous and inventive religion,
为黑暗纪元带来的点点亮光 Islam, which did so much to light up the Dark Ages.
但还是让我们从一群 But we begin with a group of people
功勋卓著的人们开始讲起 whose achievements were enormous.
这群人白手起家 They started with nothing
却创造了惊天的成就 and ended up with so much.
我要讲的 当然是 I'm thinking, of course, of those
那些被低估的黑暗纪元文化新物 thoroughly underestimated Dark Age creatives,
那些勇敢无畏的未知世界探索者 those intrepid voyagers into the unknown.
基督教徒 The Christians.
艺术从不撒谎 Art never lies.
这些艺术品向人们彰显的是一个激动人心的历史纪元 And the story that art tells us of these exciting times
它们言之凿凿 is that this was never
那段岁月不仅不是黑暗纪元 an age of darkness.
反而是段光辉岁月 This was an age of light.
这里是赫赫有名的庞贝古城遗址 These are the famous ruins of Pompeii.
众所周知 公元前79年 维苏威火山在这里喷发 As I am sure you know, Mount Vesuvius erupted here in 79 AD,
火山灰淹没了全城 and all of this was covered in ashes
留给后代一座毫发未动的古代城池 and preserved for posterity in perfect conditions.
众多发现中 让人们惊得目瞪口呆的是 Now, one of the things they found here, which really surprised them,
有个东西证实 公元前79年 这里已经有基督教了 was proof that there were already Christians here by 79 AD.
证据便是…… The thing they found that proved it...
……这个家伙 .was this.
它叫Rotas方块 It's what they call a Rotas square
Rotas方块 and these Rotas squares
很是神秘 are deeply mysterious.
罗马帝国时期的叙利亚 高卢 处处得见其踪迹 They have been found all over the Roman Empire, in Syria, in Gaul,
它甚至还出现在了英格兰的赛伦赛斯特 even in England, in Cirencester, they found one of these.
这些离合诗通常刻在房子的墙壁上 They are usually inscribed on the walls of houses,
有时也刻在房外的石柱上 or sometimes on the columns outside the house,
可是 当然了 人们发现这些东西时 but, of course, when they found them,
完全摸不着头脑 不知此物为何 they didn't have a clue what these were.
可能只是些房外泥灰上 Just mysterious word games,
神秘的文字游戏吧 plastered outside houses.
它其实是一个排满字母的正方形 What it is is a letter square,
由5个拉丁字母构成 made up of five Latin words
Rotas Rotas,
Opera Opera,
Tenet Tenet,
Arepo Arepo
还有Sator and Sator.
顶部的Rotas倒着写 Rotas at the top
就是底部的Sator is Sator backwards.
你看 左列也是Rotas And you can see Rotas down this side, as well.
最右列是Sator And Sator down that side.
中间这里的Arepo And here in the middle, Arepo,
倒着写便是Opera is Opera, "work", backwards.
这的意思大概是 The actual words mean something like
撒种者亚内普(Arepo)小心地拿着轮子 "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."
当然 这种时候就不要纠结拉丁语法啦 But only if you ignore Latin grammar.
众多的解谜者把它转来转去 Various code-breakers twisted it
把玩了几十年 this way and that for decades,
仍不明就里 but it still didn't mean much.
突然 灵光一闪 But then, a eureka moment.
有位解谜者发现 One of these code-breakers realised that the important
Rotas离合诗的重点 thing about the Rotas square
不在单词 was not the words,
而在字母 but the letters.
因为这些字母 Because these letters of the Rotas square
可以重新排列成 can be rearranged
一个十字架 to form a cross,
且横竖正反 which reads the same
读起来 both ways,
都是相同的单词 up and down.
Pater Noster It says Paternoster,
拉丁语的"我主" which is Latin for "Our Father,"
主祷文开首的二字 the opening words of the Lord's prayer.
而且 剩下的两个字母 What's more, these two letters that are left over,
阿尔法和欧米茄 Alpha and Omega,
是希腊语的第一个字母和最后一个字母 are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.
只不过写成了拉丁字母而已 Alpha and Omega in their Roman form.
散落各地的罗马地下墓穴均有其踪影 You can see them down in the Roman catacombs popping up everywhere.
阿尔法和欧米茄 Alpha and Omega
即 开始 和 结束 the beginning and the end.
它们是常见的基督教符号 Popular Christian code
象征着“唯一的神” for the one true God.
所以 这些镌刻在房外的 So these mysterious word squares
神秘离合诗意味着 were put outside houses to signify
房子的主人是基督教徒 that the occupants were Christians,
同时 也是起到了辟邪祈福的作用 and also as a kind of lucky charm to ward off evil.
当然 这还算不上什么艺术品 Of course, this isn't art yet,
仅仅是块铭文而已 this is an inscription,
不过其含义的呈现方式倒颇有艺术气息 but it has artistic implications.
而且由此可见 What you see in here,
基督教很喜欢捣鼓 this appetite for signs and symbols
有神秘象征意义的符号 and secret meanings,
这种倾向 that Christian appetite
自然遗传给了后来的基督教艺术 is something that transferred to Christian art.
中世纪的基督教艺术 The Christian art of the dark ages
呈现出神秘魔幻的气质 is an art of mystery and magic.
像是启示与奇迹啦 Of suggestions and miracles.
超越和顿悟啦 等等 Transcendence and light.
虽称不上艺术品 The Rotas square isn't art yet,
但毋庸置疑的是 Rotas方块 but it is an excellent pointer
为基督教艺术指明了新方向 to a new artistic direction.
基督教艺术品能拨动人神经的原因之一 One of the reasons early Christian art is so exciting is
在于它出现的地点 because you find it in exciting places.
从表面看来 罗马已经够疯狂了吧 Rome is wild enough on the surface,
可你往地下走走试试 but when you descend into its underground
保管让你又是怕来又是欲罢不能 look how scary and fascinating it becomes.
人们想当然的认为 People often imagine the catacombs
地下墓穴 were hiding places, underground
是基督徒躲避罗马人迫害的 shelters in which persecuted
避难所 Christians hid from the Romans.
可在人眼皮子底下隐藏如此巨大的地下城池 But you can't hide an underground city as huge as this
你觉得可能吗 under anyone's nose.
显然 罗马人心里有数并且与之相安无事 The Romans knew these were here, all right.
罗马人不知道的是 What they didn't know,
这里是基督徒们的沟通交流之所 is what one Christian was saying to another down here.
基督教的第一件艺术品 Because the first Christian art
充斥着秘密的符号 was filled with secret signs
隐秘的含义 and hidden meanings.
所以 鱼后来成为了 That's why the fish became
随处可见的基督教符号 a ubiquitous Christian symbol.
据说 如果两名基督徒 When two Christians met on the road
在路上碰到 it is said that one of them
其中一位会在沙上画下这个图案 would draw this shape in the sand.
而另一位则画下这个图案 The other one would draw this shape
这样 and two of them
便即刻心知肚明对方是教友 knew immediately that they were Christians together.
这个著名的基督教符号 This famous Christian sign,
叫基督符号 也叫Chi-Rho the Christogram, or Chi-Rho,
代表耶稣本人 represents Jesus himself.
它由两个希腊字母组成 It is made by combining two Greek letters,
Χ和Ρ Chi and Rho, the first
是希腊语"基督"开头的两个字母 two letters of the word Christos,
代表“被施以涂油礼的人” which means "the anointed one."
（注释：曾作为基督教基本的入教礼仪，后作为教皇或主教的任教礼）
据说 该符号拥有无穷的神力 It is said that the sign had magic powers.
这也是为什么 如今的圣诞节也称作"Xmas" Even today, we still call Christmas, "Xmas", because of this.
锚是另一个常见的基督教符号 Another popular Christian sign was the anchor.
原因很简单 For the simple reason that the
锚的上部长得像十字架 top of it here looked like a cross.
各类符号遍布阴森的地下墓室 Everywhere you look in these haunting Roman catacombs, the first
首位基督徒便是用这种加密的方式 Christians are declaring their faith
完成了自己的入教礼 in such mysterious and cryptic ways.
这些符号 These symbols and signs
不仅是种密语 weren't just a secret language,
也是另一种 既用眼也用想象力 they were also a different way of seeing things, a different way
来看待跟理解世事的方式 of understanding, not just with your eyes, but with your imagination.
此地有关基督教艺术的 What is most interesting about this first Christian art
有趣之处在于 you find down here
画作何方 遍寻不着 is how few pictures there are in it.
看不见耶稣的圣象 No images of Jesus,
更遑论圣母玛利亚还有各路圣徒 no Marys, no saints.
基督教诞生的前几个世纪里 For the first few centuries of Christianity
各类基督教图画尚在茧中 there were no Christian images.
直到耶稣诞生 It is not until the beginning of our period,
300年后的 the so-called Dark Ages,
中世纪 300 years after the birth of Christ
它们才破茧而出 that figures and scenes
逐渐成为了后来的基督教艺术作品 begin to pop up at last in Christian art.
瞧这些神秘的家伙们 Look how puzzling they were.
这里是Priscilla地下墓室里 We are in a third century Christian burial chamber,
三世纪的一间基督墓室 in the catacombs of Priscilla.
一个殷实的基督教家庭安葬于此 A rich, Christian family was buried here,
看看墙上有什么 and look what's on the walls.
这里有几只孔雀 Over here, some peacocks.
那儿 Over there,
是站在火中的三个小伙子 three chaps standing in a fire.
这里 And over here,
是种类似海龙的动物 some kind of sea dragon,
从嘴里吐出个人 with someone coming out of its mouth.
好 我们来解密看看 So, let's decode all of this.
孔雀象征着永恒 The peacocks are symbols of eternity.
因为它们每年都会换上崭新的美丽羽毛 Because peacocks replace their beautiful feathers every year,
古人认为 孔雀是不朽的 the ancients believed their flesh couldn't rot.
是永生的 It was eternal.
先知达尼尔曾在圣经中 The three young men are described
提到过这三位小伙子 in the Bible by the prophet, Daniel.
他们被巴比伦人施以火刑 Three young Israelites were set on fire by the Babylonians,
但在上帝的庇佑下 but God protected them
巴比伦人的火也动不了他们半根汗毛 and the Babylonian fires couldn't touch them.
从怪物嘴里脱口而出的这位小伙子就是先知约拿 The chap coming out of the sea monster is the prophet, Jonah,
你可能听说过 他曾被鲸一口吞下 who you may remember was swallowed by a whale
困于其腹中三日 for three whole days.
三日后 鲸将其吐出 After three days, the whale spat him out again,
回到陆地后的他 便成为了先知 and he returned to dry land, a wiser man.
这些图画拥有相同的密语 The thread that unites all these
"救赎" cryptic images is salvation.
“希望” Hope.
"上帝从火中救了这三位小伙子 "God save the three young men from the fire,
”从鲸的口中救下了约拿 "he saved Jonah from the whale
"你也会得到上帝的救赎." "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