The Essay: Letters to Artists

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The Essay: Letters to Artists: Dear Caravaggio

Letters to Artists

Dear Caravaggio

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Letters to Artists, Dear Caravaggio

Ian Sansom corresponds with Caravaggio on the links between fine art and violence.

In his series of imaginary correspondences with some of history's most celebrated artists, Ian Sansom asks Caravaggio about his penchant for violence, blood and severed heads.

'Dear Albrecht, Everyone had hair like that - did they? I'll take your word for it. You were very good at hair, can I just say?'

In a series of imaginary correspondences, Ian Sansom is writing letters to five of history's most celebrated artists and interrogating them about, well, just about everything.

'Dear Caravaggio, you're the sort of man who might know: what is wrong with us?' 

As the missives fly much is revealed about their lives as well as about Ian's current state of mind.  Albrecht Durer is looking for an App developer.  When Caravaggio asks for help finding a patron Ian suggests a crowd funding website.  Meanwhile, how did Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron get hold of Ian's address? Did her great niece Virginia Woolf pass on his details?  And should he really be telling the Tate Modern that Picasso was having a mid-life crisis in 1932?

In his on-going quest to write more epistles than St Paul, it seems Ian is receiving surprising replies from some of our best-loved artists.

Producer - Mark McCleary for BBC Northern Ireland

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Ian Sansom's inimitable imagined correspondences with some of history's greatest artists.

Hot on the heels of his Letters to Writers, Ian Sansom is back with more of his inimitable imagined correspondences - this time with some of history's greatest artists.

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