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Seeing Salvation
1. The Face; 2. The Baby; 3. The Cross; 4. The Promise
Date: 2000 - Certificate: UC
Content: 4 x 50 mins
Media Type: VHS
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The life of Jesus Christ, celebrated in art, draws from every experience and every emotion: innocence, rapture, betrayal, loss, despair, hope. His depiction reveals the real history of the times that shaped the artists' work. Seeing Salvation investigates the original purpose of the art and questions images you've known all your life: The Nativity, The Crucifixion, The Last Supper. Expert knowledge from the National Gallery's Neil MacGregor gives us eyes to see beyond the immediate and the familiar - our own personal guided tour. How exactly does an artist attempt to capture the human and divine in one image?
Episode 1: The Face
"The desire to have an authentic likeness of Christ,a portrait of God incarnate, has for centuries aroused the most violent passions and in the process has created some of the greatest works of Western art," explains Neil MacGregor. In the first programme, he traces the evolution of Christ’s image from abstract symbol to lifelike portrait, like that of a familiar friend.
Episode 2: The Body
In the second programme, Neil MacGregor goes from England to Italy, Germany and Peru to show how the image of wise men adoring the newborn Christ was appropriated by the rich and powerful.First pictured in the catacombs of ancient Rome as a symbol of humanity’s hopes of salvation, the wise men were gradually transformed into kings paying tribute to the King of Kings.In splendid 5th-century mosaics in Ravenna, in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes in the
Medici palace in Florence, as in Rubens’ altarpiece in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, the Adoration has been pictured to proclaim a special relationship between rulers and Christ.This relationship is still celebrated today in Britain, when on 6 January every year the sovereign offers royal gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh in the Chapel Royal at St James’s.
Episode 3: The Cross
In this third programme, Neil MacGregor shows how even the seemingly unvarying image of Christ’s cross has meant different things at different times and in different contexts.For the early Christians,it meant Christ’s victory over death: there is no suffering, only triumph,shown in the earliest known narrative depiction of the Crucifixion,on the tiny 5thcentury Roman ivory plaques now in the British Museum. But in the new theology preached by Saints Dominic and Francis – illustrated in Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco in Florence and at the Sacro Monte in Varallo – Christ’s sufferings are the measure of his love for us. In Grünewald’s Crucifixion for the hospital at Isenheim (now in Colmar), Christ’s gruesome injuries resemble those of the patients who suffered from the disfiguring disease, then called Saint Anthony’s Fire.
Episode 4: The Promise
In the final programme, Neil MacGregor explores artists’ responses to Christ’s death, resurrection and promise of Salvation and talks to contemporary artists about how they still draw on Christian imagery.
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