BROADCASTS.com

The art in Rome’s churches and museums includes many characters with halos and many without clothes, but these two groups rarely overlap. This pod first encourages visitors to Rome to observe when and where we see halos on the one hand and nudes on the other. It then draws on examples from the Galleria Borghese and Sistine Chapel to suggest that in the Renaissance, we see many fewer halos and many more nudes. This raises a difficult and interesting question: “Why?”