BBC - Seeing Salvation (2000) Part 2 The Baby

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 2: The Baby

As Christmas approaches we are bombarded with images of the baby Jesus in the manger, one of the quintessential expressions of the Christmas story. Seeing Salvation Part 2 “The Baby” - shows the developing symbolism of portraying the Christ Child, the Magi, and The Nativity throughout Christian art. Neil Macgregor travels from England to Italy, Germany & Peru to see how various artists over the past 2000 years have used the symbolism of this innocent scene to convey a variety of messages and how in the hands of the rich and powerful it could be manipulated for their own advantage.

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