BBC - Seeing Salvation (2000) Part 1 The Face

Christianity has produced some of the greatest works of art of all time, in which believers and non-believers alike can explore the great themes of life and death. It is the language in which Leonardo and Michelangelo, Dali and Rembrandt speak to us all about love and suffering, loss and hope. To mark the year 2000, these four programmes, written and presented by Neil MacGregor, Director of the National Gallery, London, consider how artists over two millennia have tackled the extraordinarily difficult task of representing Christ. Without contemporary accounts of Jesus' appearance, artists through the ages have been free to create many images of him - images that sometimes reflect the spiritual world of the artist and other times the desires of the patron or the needs of the spectator. Seeing Salvation is a four part series surveying the historical representations of Jesus Christ in Western European art and sculpture over the centuries since Roman Times.

Part 1: The Face

Neil MacGregor, Director of the National Gallery, London, hosts this detailed account of the changing faces of Christ in Christian art from its archaic representations in the Catacombs of 2nd Century Rome to its modern expressionist forms in the new English Architecture of the late 20th Century. Along the way MacGregor describes the shifting theologies and historical influences which have effected the changing face of Christian art.

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