Moving Pictures

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

A long, slow look at great artworks, photographed in extraordinary detail.

Series that offers listeners the chance to take a long, slow look at great artworks, photographed in incredible detail.

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Moving Pictures: Mystic Nativity by Sandro Botticelli

Mystic Nativity by Sandro Botticelli

BBC Radio 4 - Moving Pictures, Mystic Nativity by Sandro Botticelli

Cathy FitzGerald takes a closer look at one of the most beautiful and deeply mysterious paintings in the National Gallery's collection - 'Mystic Nativity' by Sandro Botticelli.

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

Each 30-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.

Botticelli's 'Mystic Nativity' is a Christmas card favourite... which is strange, because it's a painting about the end of the world. In the 1490s, Florence was in the grip of the puritanical preacher Girolamo Savonarola, who called on its citizens to throw their 'decadent' belongings on the Bonfire of the Vanities.  Botticelli may well have seen his own paintings burn. Yet this cryptic Renaissance masterpiece contains clues that suggest the artist found hope in the friar's apocalyptic visions.  A closer look at one of the most beautiful and deeply mysterious paintings in the National Gallery's collection. 

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

Interviewees: Jennifer Sliwka, Caroline Campbell, Leslie Primo and Jonathan Nelson. 

Producer and presenter: Cathy FitzGerald

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

A White Stiletto production for BBC Radio 4.

Picture credit: NG1034: Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Nativity, about 1445–1510 (detail). © The National Gallery, London.

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