It's a bit like Aladin going on the, you know, the magic carpet.

And the pilot going through all the instruments to make sure that, you know,

do all the pre-flight checks.

And then when you're ready, then you basically take off.

Hello, I'm Neil McGregor.

And in this series of podcasts, I'm looking at objects to see how shared beliefs help shape societies

and how individuals take their place in a larger community. looking at objects to see how shared beliefs help shape societies,

and how individuals take their place in a larger community.

This episode is about the public face of private prayer.

This is the BBC.

Just over 100 years ago, it was one of the most popular pictures in Europe and America.

In a field, in the evening twilight, a man and a woman pours from the back-breaking work of harvesting potatoes and stand in silent prayer.

Mies-Angeles, a celebration of traditional rural piety, was painted in 1857,

and it rapidly became an icon of French Catholic identity,

reproduced in thousands of engravings like this one here in the British Museum.

In the print, you can see clearly the spiral of the village church in the distance,

where the bell has just been

rung to remind everybody to stop their work for a moment and say the angelus prayer the angeles bell didn't

call people to church it called them to stay where they were but to redirect their thoughts away from the

immediate everyday concerns and towards god a public summons to a private act.

But by the time our engraving was produced in 1881,

the tradition of the Angeles,

...