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In Our Time
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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PAGANISM IN THE RENAISSANCE
Use our research page to find out more about this subject.
For hundreds of years in the Middle Ages, the only way to read Ovid was through the prism of a Christian moralising text. Ovid's sensual tales of metamorphosis and pagan gods were presented as veiled allegories, and the famous story of Zeus descending to Danae in a shower of gold was explained as the soul receiving divine illumination. But in 1478 Botticelli finished Primavera, the first major project on a mythological theme for a thousand years, and by 1554 Titian completed a very different version of Danae - commissioned by a Cardinal, no less - where she expectantly awaits her union with Zeus in what is a nakedly sexual pose.
What happened to bring the myths and eroticism of antiquity back into the culture of Europe? And how was it possible for a Church that was prosecuting for heresy to exalt in pagan imagery, even in the Vatican itself?
Contributors
Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London
Charles Hope, Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London
Evelyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London and author of Art in Renaissance Italy, 1350-1500
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RELATED LINKS
Botticelli - Primavera
Botticelli - Birth of Venus
Titian - Sacred and the Profane
Titian - Danae and the Shower of Gold
Michelangelo's Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
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