Choirs of Angels: The Mystic Nativity

Fun seasonal online lecture from Art History in Focus looking at Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity.

I usually like to go and look at The Mystic Nativity in the National Gallery in the run up to Christmas and was missing the chance to do that this year, so this was a welcome opportunity to spend time with it online instead and to learn a but more about it.

Sian Walters took us though the history of the picture and its symbolism to the time it was painted, 1500. She talk us about how it fitted with the teachings of Savonarola, the charismatic preacher in Florence shortly before this, and how it was quite a radical picture, even if it is quite old fashioned in style.

She also talked briefly about other angels in art and about the pictures later history from disappearing for centuries to its re-emergence in the mid-19th century.

A fun and festive morning.

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