Two Religious Art documentaries highlight V-me’s Easter Weekend schedule.

No one knows for certain what Jesus or his mother, Mary actually looked like. But for the past two millennia, artists have been painting and sculpting images of Jesus and Mary in every medium, every imaginable material and on a scale from tiny personal images to gigantic mosaics. Highlighting V-me’s Easter weekend schedule are two visually groundbreaking and stunning art documentaries, The Face: Jesus in Art and Picturing Mary.

Picturing Mary will air at 7:00pm (ET) on Saturday, April 7 and The Face airs on Easter Sunday, April 8 at 7:00pm and 9:00pm (ET). The Face: Jesus in Art, this two-hour global exploration traces the dramatically different ways in which Jesus has been represented in art by people throughout history and around the world. In its global exploration of stunning and incredibly varied representations of Jesus, The Face takes viewers up close to Michelangelo’s “Pieta” and unveils and bathes in beautiful light the revered “Mandylion of Edessa” for the first time on motion picture film; it explores the treasures of the Chartres Cathedral and journeys across the Sinai desert to glimpse the Byzantine icons of St. Catherine’s monastery. Viewers of this program will climb the stairs of St. John of Lateran, and they will descend deep into catacombs beneath Rome to see the earliest images of Jesus, captured by the light of lanterns and candles.

Picturing Mary is a one-hour program taking V-me viewers on an artistic journey through history with visually stunning pieces of art from 12 cities in eight countries. Through depictions of local life and culture PICTURING MARY demonstrates how images of Mary remain part of peoples’ lives today, in Europe, Mexico, Africa, America and Asia, just as they were when they were first created.

Picturing Mary unites art and history as it travels from the Cathedral of Mexico City and its giant paintings of the Assumption of the Coronation of the Virgin by seventeenth-century Mexican painter, Juan Correa to the Basilica of Guadalupe and the masterful featherwork of ecclesiastical garments and rosary beads. The journey moves from the Belgian city of Bruges to observe paintings by van Eyck to the works of the Italian Renaissance sculptors and painters with Titian’s “Assumption” and Michelangelo’s “Madonna of the Steps.”

“These films provide extraordinary, you-are-there opportunities to see artistic masterpieces in their original settings, within the context of history,” said William F. Baker, V-me founding director and executive producer of both films. “Using the latest digital technology and motion control photography, we are delighted to bring the Latino community on this artistic journey to see some of the world’s most personal and important works of art as they were originally intended by the artists.”