Moving Pictures

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BBC Radio 4 LW

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: The Sherborne Missal

The Sherborne Missal

BBC Radio 4 - Moving Pictures, The Sherborne Missal

Cathy FitzGerald invites you to discover new details in old masterpieces. This episode - the Sherborne Missal.

Each 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 on 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 a closer look at one of the treasures of the British Library collection, the Sherborne Missal. It's a titan of a manuscript, weighing as much as the average five-year-old child and containing more paintings than many art galleries, including numerous tiny portraits of the patrons who commissioned it and the monks who laboured over its decoration. 

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

Interviewees: Kathleen Doyle, Eleanor Jackson, Alixe Bovey, Paul Binski, Patricia Lovett

Producer and presenter: Cathy FitzGerald

Art consultant: Leah Kharibian
Executive producer: Sarah Cuddon
Mix engineer: Mike Woolley

A White Stiletto production for BBC Radio 4. 

Picture credit: a decorated initial ‘R’ containing a scene of the Resurrection of Christ, with a pheasant and the appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene in the border. Detail from the page for Easter Sunday in the Sherborne Missal, British Library, Add. MS 74236, p. 216 © The British Library Board.

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