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Moving Pictures

Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian

Duration: 28 minutes

First broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 LWLatest broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 FM

Available for over a year

Cathy FitzGerald invites you to discover new details in old masterpieces, using your phone, tablet or computer.

Each thirty-minute episode of Moving Pictures is devoted to a single artwork - and you're invited to look as well as listen, by following a link to a high-resolution image made by Google Arts & Culture. Zoom in and you can see the pores of the canvas, the sweep of individual brushstrokes, the shimmer of pointillist dots.

This episode takes us to a Greek island at sunrise, where Ariadne has been abandoned on the shore. But then the god, Bacchus, appears and everything changes.
Titian captures their exchange of glances in his extraordinary painting, now viewed as one of the greatest depictions of love at first sight in art-history. Take a closer look at this intensely sensual and intimate masterpiece, with its invitation to us, as viewers, to join the bacchanal.

To see the high-resolution image, visit www.bbc.co.uk/movingpictures and follow the link to explore Bacchus and Ariadne.

Interviewees: Matthias Wivel, Carol Plazzotta, Leah Kharibian, Anne-Marie Eze.

Producer and Presenter: Cathy FitzGerald

Art history consultant: Leah Kharibian
Exec producer: Sarah Cuddon
Engineer: Mike Woolley

A White Stiletto production for BBC Radio 4.

NG35: Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-3, (c) The National Gallery, London. Show less

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