Original subtitles

In the National Gallery in London, one image seems better than any other to embody the spirit

of Christmas. It is a scene of joy and celebration, of earthly and heavenly delight.

There's a reason why the angels dancing so gracefully at the top of the picture have

been on a million Christmas cards. They're beautiful. They're startlingly beautiful.

But look a little more closely at the painting itself, and all is not what it seems.

We see some very strange things going on. We see angels embracing people, and behind them,

we see devils being attacked. It screams out as saying, this is a different painting.

The picture was created half a millennium ago, and at the top of the canvas, the artist added

his name, Sandro Botticelli. But the rest of his words are cryptic and troubling.

There's something about this picture that's not only just personal, but secret or confidential.

So it's, you know, a special message to you stuck in a bottle and arrived 500 years later.

The painting emerged from the city of Florence, in a time of enormous upheaval.

Foreign troops flooded the streets, works of art were burned on bonfires, and a fanatical preacher

held the city in his grip. In its day, this was a dangerous object to own. And for the first three

centuries of its life, it was hidden from view. Since then, though, the painting has inspired

writers, painters, and performers. And in an age full of new anxieties, its power to comfort has grown.

I find it a wonderfully peaceful painting. It's more peaceful almost than any other painting I can think of.

Created by one of the most famous artists of all time, this is the story of a

picture of deep hidden meanings, and of the discoveries that unlocked its secrets.

The city of Florence in the 1480s, the hub of the Italian Renaissance and the most artistically vibrant city on earth.

In a workshop in the heart of the city, the most famous and groundbreaking of all Florence's

artists is at work, Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli was born in Florence in 1445.

Art did not run in his family. His father was a struggling leather worker.

Sandro initially trained as a goldsmith, his elder brother's respectable profession.

But in his mid-teens, he changed tack, and began to study painting.

By his mid-twenties, Botticelli found his art increasingly in demand.

Soon, he began to paint for the city's wealthiest and most liberal patrons.

Working at the cutting edge of art, he created the first large-scale pagan paintings since Roman times.

He was the leading artist in a city overflowing with creative energy.

I think it's almost impossible to imagine the cultural richness and power of Florence in the 1480s.

This is a city that has been at the centre of a kind of cultural revolution.

It's not just gorgeous art, it's also philosophically and intellectually a revolutionary city.

And to be part of it, to be part of the inner circle, which Botticelli certainly was from quite a young age,

is almost unimaginable.

But within a decade, the city of Florence would be turned on its head, and Botticelli's art along with it.

The artist famed for painting Roman gods and goddesses would instead paint one of the most devout,

intricate, and beautiful Christian pictures of all time, the mystic nativity.

It's really a very remarkable piece.

It's almost unique.

Ostensibly, it seems to be a relatively simple image.

I mean, it contains, after all, the virgin and child, Joseph, the ox and the ass, and so on.

But then you start looking, and more and more peculiar elements emerge within it,

more and more layers, if you like.

The mystic nativity is no towering altarpiece.

It's little more than three feet high by two feet wide.

But it's packed full of detail that delights the eye and challenges the mind.

It is a very personal, intimate work.

It's painted with amazing grace, and it draws you in.

It fascinates you.

It's a painting that reveals its secrets slowly over time.

At the center of the painting is an enchanting scene of the birth of Christ.

Mary, her hair glinting with gold, kneels over the newborn child, who reaches out to her,

while the elderly Joseph dozes in his traditional pose.

What I love about the painting is the relationship of Mary to the baby.

He's flinging up his arms in joy, looking at his mother, and she is looking down at him with such quiet, fulfilled grace.

The joy, the sheer physical and emotional overwhelming joy, of looking at your own child, and your own child responding to you.

Amid the joy, though, there are dark premonitions.

The helpless child rests on a sheet that evokes the shroud in which his body will one day be wrapped.

On the ass's back is the cross of his crucifixion, while the cave in which the scene is set calls to mind his tomb.

Even the traditional figures of the three kings are not as we might expect.

The figures on the left, if they are the kings, they've left their presence at home.

Their only gifts seem to be their prayers.

They're moved spiritually, and they're not giving worldly goods to Christ as tribute, but their own devotion.

They're much simpler.

They're much more us than any king could ever be.

At the top of the painting is one of the most rapturous scenes in all of Western art.

Twelve angels, dressed in the colours of faith, hope, and charity,

dance in a circle, holding olive branches and crowns.

And above them, heaven opens in a great golden dome.

It is truly wondrous.

There are degrees of ecstasy in their faces, which is marvellous to behold.

And then I'm very, very fond of their feet, which are, again, all different.

And it's as though they really are performing a dance.

You get this wonderful sense of harmony, and it is the harmony of the spheres, really.

It's quite a magical part of the painting.

At the bottom of the painting, three angels embrace three men,

seeming to raise them up from the ground.

These angels, too, hold scrolls, proclaiming in Latin,

peace on earth to men of goodwill.

Behind them, seven devils flee to the underworld,

some impaled on their own weapons.

You see these angels embracing people,

bent halfway over, these awkward poses.

And then behind them, you see devils being pierced.

It's very, very bizarre.

There's no other nativity like that.

Where would you see devils and people embracing angels?

One type of painting, probably the most familiar one to viewers then and today,

would be Last Judgment.

In Renaissance times, Last Judgment paintings showed viewers the reckoning of the damned and the saved

at the time of Christ's second coming.

So in echoing this kind of painting, the mystic nativity is asking us to think not only of Christ's birth,

but of his return.

This is a mystic double nativity.

At the very top of the painting is perhaps the strangest feature of all,

an inscription in Biblical Greek.

Even when deciphered, this is a mysterious and unsettling message from an artist painting over five centuries ago.

This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I Alessandro painted,

in the half-time after the time, during the fulfilment of the 11th chapter of St. John,

in the second woe of the Apocalypse.

Behind it all lies the very, very troubling and complex text of the Book of Revelation,

which, in a sense, piles together present, past and future in a bewildering way.

And what is promised in the Book of Revelation is perhaps about to come to its completion.

The sense that perhaps the end of time is near,

so the story begun at Christmas is coming to its conclusion, perhaps.

With its combination of visionary words and unsettling images,

the mystic nativity's ultimate meaning perplexed scholars for centuries.

Many aspects remained unexplained.

What was the meaning of the messages on the angels' ribbons?

And why did the artist mention two specific chapters of the Book of Revelation in his inscription?

The answer lay in the story of one man.

The charismatic preacher whose words set Florence ablaze,

and directly inspired the mystic nativity.

Girolamo Sabonarola.

Sabonarola's an extraordinary figure,

from the point of view of the Renaissance and for us today.

There's really no one else like him.

He was a lousy preacher to begin with.

And then he found his voice.

He captivated the attention of the Florentines.

He became a very charismatic leader, feared by all, beloved by some.

Sabonarola arrived in Florence in 1490,

and he found himself at the vibrant heart of the Italian Renaissance.

But he was repelled by the artistic glory and enormous wealth that so impressed the world.

To those who would listen, he preached that this was a corrupt and vice-ridden place.

A great scourge, he warned, was approaching.

And then his words assumed a terrifying reality.

In 1494, a huge French army invaded Italy,

and 10,000 troops entered Florence.

This picture, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, painted.

Florence had never been, in all its history, occupied by such a large army.

And the Florentines were terrified that the King of France, with his army, meant to sack the city.

No political leader can help the Florentines out of their sort of terrible situation.

There's a vacuum of leadership.

Into that vacuum stepped Savonarola.

He met the French king, and persuaded him to leave Florence peacefully.

In their gratitude and relief, the traumatized Florentines increasingly saw the friar as a prophet.

And his preaching attracted huge crowds to the spiritual heart of the city.

Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, is an enormous church.

When it was completed in the 15th century,

it was the largest covered space in the known world.

For Girolamo Savonarola to preach in this church gave an additional authoritativeness

to everything that he said.

It also required an unbelievable set of lungs,

because as many as 10,000 people could have jammed in to hear him preach.

There is a famous contemporary woodcut that shows him as from a pulpit that must have been mounted

on this very pilaster in the cathedral.

He preaches up a storm.

You can see him gesticulate in an absolutely mesmeric way.

It was just such a sermon preached by Savonarola in this cathedral that would ultimately inspire the mystic nativity.

The preacher's rhetoric could be fiery, but his message was not one of damnation.

Florence, he claimed, could become the new Jerusalem,

Christ's kingdom on earth, if only its citizens would repent and abandon their sinful luxuries.

And that included much of their art.

Savonarola had very clear ideas about what was wrong in society and what was wrong in art.

Savonarola thought if we're a Christian society, if you have a Christian home,

you should have Christian subjects.

We shouldn't find portraits, we shouldn't find fancy clothes, we shouldn't find pagan subjects.

As Savonarola tightened his grip on Florence,

his beliefs were made forcefully real on the streets under his command groups of evangelical

youths went out into the city to encourage people to part with their luxuries Florence

had never seen the like the moral power of the boys began to go to their heads they molest people

in the streets there were cases when they actually went into houses asking people to bring out their

vanities their combs and mirrors and and lewd pictures or books if they had any so they could

be disposed of the seized goods probably included paintings of nude figures by Botticelli himself

they were destined for Florence's main piazza to be piled high before being set alight

it was a spectacle that earned a famous name the bonfire of the vanities i think it must have been

utterly terrifying this huge conflagration of wealth of artistic endeavor of decadence of beauty of sin

you can almost smell the luxury burning

Botticelli may well have seen his own paintings being fed to the flames

but in these strangest of times the artist might not have objected

like much of Florence Botticelli had come under the sway of Savonarola and his art had transformed from

the decorative to the deeply devout the mystic nativity bears all the signs of this change

it echoes Savonarola's teachings

from the simple ragged clothes of its shepherds

to the humble crownless kings

but for years nothing in the recorded words of Savonarola could be found fully to explain the

cryptic message of the painting

then a chance discovery revealed the truth

i was sitting here in the manuscript room of the national library of italy here in Florence

it's waiting for a manuscript to come up and there happened to be a catalog lying on the table right

in front of me of woodcuts of Savonarola's sermons and i started thumbing through this thing

and ran across a picture of what looked to me like a chandelier

and i wondered what's a chandelier doing in a Savonarola sermon so i took a more careful look at

the caption and it turned out it was a crown rather than a chandelier and i still didn't know what a

crown was doing in a Savonarola sermon the sermon in question was preached by Savonarola in Florence

cathedral in it he set forth a vision that had come to him in which he saw an extraordinary heavenly crown

at its base were 12 hearts with 12 ribbons wrapped around them

written on these in latin were the unique mystical qualities or privileges of the virgin mary

she is mother of her father daughter of her son bride of god

what rab hatfield realized is that some of these words also occur on the ribbons held by the 12 dancing

angels at the top of the mystic nativity much of the writing is now invisible to the naked eye

but infrared reflectography shows what rab hatfield suspected that the original words on the angels

ribbons correspond exactly to savonarola's 12 privileges of the virgin discoveries like that were

tremendously exciting if i hadn't chanced across that catalog at that particular moment when i happen to

remember what was in those inscriptions i very much doubt that we would ever know that there was a

connection between botticelli's picture and that sermon by savonarola it's a really really long shot

in his sermon preached on assumption day savonarola went on to explore the 11th and 12th chapters of

the book of revelation the precise chapters mentioned in the painting's inscription he connected the glory

of mary with the imminent coming of the power of christ on earth the very scene evoked in botticelli's

picture for years savonarola held florence in his hand but his hard line charismatic rule had made him

powerful political enemies in the city and now they hatched a plot to destroy him savonarola was

challenged to prove his holiness by walking through fire the preacher refused and the tide of opinion in

florence swung violently against him he was arrested and taken to a prison cell high above the main town

square under terrible torture he confessed to being a false prophet

two weeks later on the 23rd of may 1498 in the same square below in front of the city hall he once

commanded he was stripped of his friar's garb and along with two of his leading lieutenants hanged

the three bodies were then burned on the very site of the bonfires of vanities

for fear that they might become sacred relics the ashes were scattered in the river arno

some see the figures of the three men at the bottom of the mystic nativity

as representations of the three executed holy men raised up and restored to grace

but persecution not peace awaited savonarola's followers

and it was in an atmosphere of oppression that botticelli set out to create the mystic nativity

botticelli may have been doing a very courageous thing when he painted this painting

a few years after savonarola's death it was still very very dangerous

to express openly any of his beliefs and we know of savonarola followers who were executed during

during this period that's it's dangerous stuff

the mystic nativity was painted in the workshop where botticelli had created his great pagan masterpieces

for the aging artist creating this complex vision would mean drawing on all of his skill

and experience as art restorers at cambridge university are discovering

it does display i think the combination of 30 40 years probably of work

it's one of these works where it seems that all that's gone before all his previous

paintings of um the nativity or the virgin and child

the images of the angels it's coming together into a single amalgamation

one strikingly curious feature of the composition is the way the figures differ in size

normal perspective is lacking but while this may look strange it was far from accidental

it is a very symbolic painting it's allegorical it's very much i think a sort of pattern

rather than a composition of figures that could possibly inhabit a space it may well been deliberate

absolutely deliberate to represent this sort of subject in this sort of way he didn't want to

represent anything that could be mistaken for a real space or a real event

the painting is small and intricate and it's likely that all of it was painted by botticelli's own hand

despite his advancing years the artist began the process of creating the picture with a radical decision

this is one of the rare pictures by botticelli which is in on canvas it's a little bit of a mystery in

fact why he did use canvas for this painting normally he'd have been using and very typical for the time

wood panel the texture is different it would have had a different feel when you paint on it it certainly

would have been a newfangled thing for a painting with a dangerous message canvas might have had one other

major advantage it could be rolled up and hidden

with his canvas prepared botticelli's first step in creating the mystic nativity would have been to

sketch a detailed design on paper he would then have transferred this to the canvas

he drew on many sources the dancing angels echo the three graces of his own primavera

the scurrying devil meanwhile was inspired by a german woodcut

x-rays show that even in such a complex painting as this the mature master was sure of his touch

very little of his original design changed only an angel's wing was adjusted

and trees added over the roof of the stable

botticelli was now ready to build up the image using oil paint like canvas a new experimental medium

his greatest challenge was to realize the most visionary part of the painting

the angels dance around the golden dome of heaven

the top third of the painting is where if you like he pulls out all the stops it draws the eye

it's the area that the painting stands by in effect you've got the gilding to define the the heavenly

the opening into heaven you've got the intricate drapery of the angels where he's had to create the

illusion of weightlessness although you can look at each individual form and say that can't possibly work

the overall effect is is is quite stunning

botticelli's unique golden vault has a specific origin

it's likely that the aging artist is recalling here an extraordinary scene he had witnessed in the

florence of his youth we are in a church on the south bank of the arno a bit out of the mainstream of

florentine life a church called san felice in piazza and it is in this church that one of the most

spectacular theater events in early modern history took place filippo brunelleschi using technology

that spun off the things he'd invented to build the colossal dome of the cathedral created the most

elaborate piece of special effects stage scenery ever seen up to that point he had to create a heaven and

then an earth the architect had been called in to help stage an annunciation play and his scheme was

spectacular high up beneath the church rafters he suspended an enormous dome

around the edge of the dome he stationed children dressed as angels

while above them oil lamps glittered like stars behind cotton wool clouds

operated by winches the dome revolved as the children linked hands in a heavenly dance

and finally from the center of the dome a child dressed as the angel gabriel descended to speak to the

virgin mary the overall impression from below must have been absolutely unforgettable

we can easily imagine botticelli thinking of that extraordinary visual experience of heaven that

he as a child had seen in this church what he creates in the painting certainly has its closest parallel

in the stage machinery to recreate the heavenly dome seen in his youth botticelli called on the goldsmith's

craft he had learned as a boy the symbolism of the gold is to do with the unchanging untarnished nature

of heaven gold doesn't decay it doesn't darken like silver botticelli would have used an adhesive layer

made of oil mixed with resin you apply that where you want the gold to stick you don't burnish you

just pat the the gold down onto the surface and it follows the surface irregularities of the canvas

so you've got a glitter off it you'd have had this rather more intricate feel to the gilding and that

would have drawn the eye upwards from the nativity into heaven it certainly would have helped the jewel-like quality of this painting

Botticelli was now ready for the most intricate part of the job

he painted his angels each one different using the small delicate brush strokes typical of artists trained before the advent of oil paints

the angels were robed in the colors of faith hope and charity white green and red

but the copper-based green pigment has discolored with time to bronze originally it would have been vibrant

it would probably have taken some months to to finish a painting like this the intricacy of all the

the wreaths and the hanging crowns and the scrolls the whole thing is a

virtuoso display of paint as well as design as well as thought

Botticelli completed his late masterpiece at the start of 1501

the last thing he did was to add the inscription

its message alluding to savonarola's teachings

was disguised in cryptic words written in an obscure language

even so the inscription might have been too dangerous to be publicly visible

i think it's possible that the inscription was originally covered up by the frame

cover that up and the painting becomes more

standard more acceptable it doesn't bring attention to yourself

visually what happens if you cover up the inscription

the proportions of the painting look just fine

nothing's lost and you even have a gain the head of the version appears in the exact center of the work

i don't think that's a coincidence

the mystic nativity was one of Botticelli's last great works

his reputation was in decline and he was increasingly overlooked for major commissions in florence

in 1510 sandro Botticelli died the mystic nativity would remain hidden for another three centuries

rome at the end of the 18th century was a very different place from renaissance florence

but one thing was familiar the presence of french invaders

napoleon and his republican forces were occupying the city driving out aristocratic families and

creating an unexpected boom in the art market

it was obviously a frightening time a state of destruction italian families were beginning to uproot

and so some of these old families who'd never sold the picture for generations were quite happy to

to take money and so a lot of arts was just literally up for grabs and if you had an eye for it

it was there to be taken amid the chaos in rome many foreigners had fled the city but one man had stayed

he was the wealthy young englishman who was to start the mystic nativity on its journey to fame

william young otley

otley was one of the most unusual and important of english art lovers a pioneer in taste and judgment

the plentiful money in his pocket came from his slave plantations in the caribbean

william young otley arrived in italy when he was just 20 years old to study and copy italian art

he made an immediate impression there's a great contemporary description of otley on the strada

felice in rome prancing down the street on a horse with a saber at his side and all of the children and

old women in the street being astonished he's kind of masterly turned the horse i think he cut quite a

dashing figure in his youth otley found himself in rome when its noble families were in what he

described as the acutest stage of their misery and if the italian nobility needed hard cash the english

had funds otley set about buying up on the cheap an amazing collection of paintings and drawings to

take back to england with him one place that he visited on his spree was the grand home of a noble

roman family the villa aldobrandini and it was here that a small unknown work by a highly unfashionable

painter caught his eye botticelli's mystic nativity

otley was a couple of generations ahead of his time in his appreciation of early italian art many of

these artists that he appreciated collected when he was in italy so in his twenties didn't become

popular or of interest to the english art-loving public until way into the middle of the 19th century

so otley's contribution is enormous to the rediscovery and appreciation of botticelli

such was botticelli's obscurity that otley would have acquired the mystic nativity for just a few pounds

so it was that without fanfare the first botticelli painting arrived in britain and was taken to william

young otley's house in central london the house became in effect a private museum bursting with italian

masterpieces hanging at eye level in pride of place was the mystic nativity though few beyond otley himself

appreciated it otley's life like botticelli's had a dying fall when slavery was abolished he refused

government compensation apparently for ethical reasons instead ill and in his 60s he took for the

first time in his life a job when he died three years later the mystic nativity was still hanging

uncelebrated on his wall what nobody knew was that in little more than two decades the picture would

find itself in front of an audience of millions manchester was really the boom city or the shock

city of the early 19th century rather like mumbai or shanghai today it was a city of extraordinary

economic growth and extraordinary social divisions the life expectancy in 1840s manchester was around 29

30 years and that's the lowest life expectancy since the black death so the social cost of

industrialization is absolutely phenomenal manchester's business leaders began an urgent campaign to

improve their city

one model for them was another city famed for its banks and textile trade renaissance florence

but while manchester's wealth matched florence's its cultural life was pitifully stunted

and so an amazing idea was born that would propel the mystic nativity to stardom

to hold the biggest art exhibition ever seen anywhere in the world

there was one small problem though manchester didn't have any art almost all of the important

artworks in britain were in private collections often belonging to the aristocracy even viewing this

art was limited to a social elite undaunted the organizers of the exhibition began to write to

the aristocratic owners asking to take their paintings on loan

many members of the aristocracy had a perception of manchester as being a rather uncultured place so this

letter arriving on their you know their doorstep to be picked up by the butler and you put on the

the tray in the hall i mean that would have come as quite a surprise i think so the organizers wrote

to prince albert the husband of queen victoria elicited his support and once they had gained royal

patronage effectively the the project had a life to it against all the odds the art treasures exhibition

was on an enormous glass and iron structure the size of a cathedral began to go up in old trafford

a new railway line was constructed to take no fewer than 16 000 artworks directly to it

among these was a small obscure painting loaned by a well-to-do collector living in stansted

william fuller maitland after otley's death he had picked it up at auction for just 80 pounds

the picture was the mystic nativity

in may 1857 the exhibition opened and the mystic nativity a painting until now seen only by a select

handful of people went on display to well over a million

the art treasures exhibition in 1857 really becomes almost a society uh event of course queen

victoria goes to have a look at it charles dickens goes up there tennyson goes there uh the novelist

elizabeth gasgill is there and friedrich engels writes to uh to karl mark saying everyone here is

talking about the pictures you you must come up and see him the exhibition was rather an unlikely setting

for botticelli's small devout masterpiece while visitors puzzled over its meaning a specially

composed polka played and crowds bustled past peering through rented opera glasses

whatever the difficulties though the exhibition was effectively the mystic nativities coming out party

the event's own newspaper the art treasures examiner published a new engraving of it

while national newspapers praised its gypsy abandon and lavish loving conceit

botticelli finally was becoming fashionable from the moment the botticelli's are shown in manchester there's a real

change in um in opinion about about his work and certainly by the 1870s late 1870s 1880s you get um

a sense that botticelli becomes you know a real cult figure somebody that artists who are aspiring to be

on the cutting edge of the art world are looking to the mystic nativity worked a particular magic on members of the

pre-raphaelite circle the artists edward burn jones and dante gabriel rossetti both adapted elements of it for their own work

rossetti is very interested in figures in locked in an embrace and i think you can see a sort of a

resonance there with the embracing figures at the bottom of the mystic nativity

burne jones thinks of heaven and earth is extremely close to one another he writes to some friends that

um heaven is only six inches above our heads and he sees that in botticelli's paintings even something

like the golden stairs all those little toes that are climbing down the stairs you can see there's

the fascination with the patterns of the toes that are circling and the angels in in the mystic nativity

fittingly it was a supporter of the pre-raphaelites who helped give the painting its name

after seeing it in london the writer and artist john ruskin referred to botticelli's mystic symbolism

and the adjective at least stuck

botticelli's popularity coincided with the growth of britain's public art collections

the national gallery in particular was keen to acquire earlier italian art

so when william fuller maitland died the gallery stepped in

the national gallery was acquiring absolutely magnificently and very very imaginatively

and it was very concerned to buy buy works from the earlier renaissance really rather than what

previously been its top priority which was to buy masterpieces which there would be no controversy

about at all so there was a sort of element of avant-garde excitement about buying pictures like this i

think in the 19th century the national gallery had to find 1500 pounds to acquire the mystic nativity

nearly 20 times what it had fetched just 30 years earlier

with the coming of the age of mass media botticelli's fame only grew

his great pagan paintings acquired a worldwide celebrity artistic icons to rival those of leonardo and michelangelo

and increasingly devout late works like the mystic nativity have come to be seen as masterpieces

in their own right the point about botticelli throughout his life was that he painted beautiful

pictures um and although they become differently beautiful at the end of his career they still

contain those those key notes of of grace and of elegance this wonderful meandering line of which

he's such a master i think that the point of the beauty changes in other words whereas the beauty of his

pictures at the beginning of his career was about pure pleasure the beauty at the end of his career is

about inducing a mood is into about taking you somewhere else and to a spiritual realm if you like

rather than the world of flesh and goddesses

like all great art the painting has inspired other artists some have manipulated its elements on canvas

and others have moved the work into three dimensions

in london the performance director elizabeth klanger has worked for years to make a living reality of the

dancing embracing and flying figures

i've been working on the nativity for many years now and i grew fascinated by the angels garments as

their folds billow upwards it's very sensuous how the the fabric falls and forms around the body

i was very interested in the angel's awkward embraces the subtlety of their touch breaking that down into live

forms brings the painting to life and the audience become very much part of the drama

it is now over half a millennium since botticelli created the mystic nativity

but its relevance seems to increase not diminish with the passing of the centuries

unexpectedly a small delicate religious masterpiece

has become an image for our times the painting originates at a time of great crisis and it's not

as if we've forgotten what times of dislocation and crisis are like the sense of being at the mercy of

some of those characters disappearing into holes at the bottom of the picture is always going to be

there for human beings in a changeable environment one of the things that this painting does is simply to

say violence is not the default setting the default setting for the universe is the angels in their dance

and to have that image which tells us violence is not where it stops or starts

that's bound to be extremely powerful

for the beauty of being in it

i

was