CHAT 3: Sir John Eliot Gardiner on The Flight into Egypt by Adam Elsheimer
Cedars Hall, Wells
UNTIL Monday 20th December
Sir John Eliot Gardiner on The Flight into Egypt by Adam Elsheimer.
In 1609 Adam Elsheimer created a final painting on a tiny copper sheet portraying a familiar Bible story against an almost infinite vista of the night sky. It may be the first naturalistic depiction of the stars in art.
Remarkably it includes an accurate depiction of the Milky Way which Elsheimer could only have viewed through the newly invented telescope a year before Galileo made his own discoveries.
Musician and polymath Sir John Eliot Gardiner has long been fascinated by the intersection of arts and science at the turn of the 17th century - the time not only of Caravaggio, Galileo and Kepler but also the great naturalistic composer, Monteverdi.
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