In the 17th-century medieval court of Cosimo de Medici III, a group of players perform a production outlining an apparent virgin birth in the French town of Mâcon and the people who exploit this ‘miracle’ for their own gain. What follows is a damning indictment of corruption in all strata of society, particularly the Church. Greenaway said that he wanted to present the difficult and graphic scenes in the film with ‘nothing glamorised and nothing safe’ – a response to what he saw as the more sanitised, safe representations of sex and violence elsewhere. As always, the artistic beauty of the piece is breathtaking, despite its difficult and deeply disturbing subject matter.