You didn't need to be literate to be drawn into the sacred epic

by the blaze of colour.

Included in the story were the people themselves.

The wheelwrights and the water carriers,

the butchers and bakers with their boule of bread.

Now, medieval man believed that jewels, rubies, sapphires,

topazes, had the power not just to concentrate brilliance

but actually emit light, and they had another power too.

They could transport you from your earthly existence

into that extraordinary immaterial world of heaven.

So that all this stained glass were meant to be immense

expanses of jewel-like radiance.

So when you were in here,

you got a glimpse of paradise.

Visions of paradise

through instinctive, joy-giving colour,

easily accessible to everyone,

was not exclusive to the Christian Church.

For centuries, colour as the symbol of the divine

was an idea common to different civilisations across the globe.

But at the birth of the modern age,

when religion began to lose its grip on mass belief,

then a new generation of artists would reinvent

the idea of divine illumination.

But when the smoke of chimneys and the fog of war

threatened to cast everything into the dark,

was it even possible to deliver a glimpse of salvation

in glowing, living colour?