Merry Christmas! For this year’s holiday episode we’re looking at this kind of unusual Nativity scene jammed packed with the detail those Northern European Renaissance artists just loved!
We’ll find out how the birth of Christ went from early spring to late December, the story of the arch, and the mystery of the missing gold platter!
If you want to follow along, you can find it here on the Gallery’s site.
SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)
“A Long Look” opening theme is “Easy” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs and the closing music is “Bring a Torch Jeannette Isabella” performed by John Sayles
http://www.jsayles.com/music/torch.mp3
Episode music:
“Away in a Manger” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” performed by John Sayles
http://www.jsayles.com/familypages/holidaymusic.htm
“Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Teller of the Tales” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Artwork information
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.47.html
“Early Netherlandish Painting”
https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/early-netherlandish-painting.pdf
“Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges”
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Petrus_Christus_Renaissance_Master_of_Bruges
“Petrus Christus in Renaissance Bruges : An Interdisciplinary Approach”
https://archive.org/details/petruschristusin0000unse/page/167/mode/1up
How Dec. 25 became Christmas
The Christmas Story in Art
https://www.history.com/news/why-is-christmas-celebrated-on-december-25
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson
Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Join me while I take you thru the experience of what I see and discover while looking at art for minutes instead of seconds. Then I’ll share the history, mystery, or controversy behind it!
Ready? Then let’s head to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC
MUSIC
Today I’m looking at The Nativity by Petrus Christus.
If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/nativity. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around!
This is a gorgeous painting with a lot going on, so make yourself comfortable!
So what do you first notice?
A cool grey stone arch frames a young woman and older man standing in the middle of a run-down wooden building. They’re gazing down at a tiny infant lying on the ground at her feet. They are Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus. Mary’s on our left, Joseph is on our right. They take up about half the height of the space, and angle toward each other with their heads bowed and eyes lowered. Two pairs of angels kneel on either side of Mary and are about half her size.
Mary and the angels have long rippling dark blond hair while Joseph is kind of balding and grey with a bushy beard.
Jesus lies on the hem of Mary’s voluminous cobalt-blue gown spread out beneath him. He looks up at her with his little legs bent like he’s kicking! She’s also wearing a navy-blue cloak that’s trimmed with gold.
Joseph wears a moss-green and orange cloak over a long dark-red robe. He’s kicked off his clogs, they’re lying next to him, so we can see his brown socks. He’s holding a dark, lumpy object in both hands that might be a hood or a floppy hat.
One pair of angels kneels close to us in the lower left while the other is wedged between Mary and Joseph in the middle. The one closest to us is draped with a shimmering gold and dark green brocaded cloak while the others wear loose garments in rose pink, cherry red, white, or straw yellow. Their wings stand straight up and some have bands of red, peach and gold while others are shades of black or pink.
This dilapidated structure they’re in is a stable with a steep roof riddled with holes and held up by rough dark brown beams. The beams form three triangles silhouetted against an azure blue sky. In the shadows behind Mary on the left, I can just make out the heads of a rust orange ox and grey donkey. The ox peers at the group around Jesus while the donkey ignores them and cranes its neck to nibble at hay stored in a rack overhead.
There’s no back wall, just more beams framing the space and just beyond that is a crumbling stone wall with men leaning against it, two on the left and two on the right. They’re dressed in scarlet red or dark blue tunics and soft caps and carry staffs. But they don’t seem too interested in what’s happening. Most of them just look at each other or off to the side.
Beyond them, is a lush landscape in shades of olive green filled with rolling hills, leafy trees, and delicate beds of ferns and flowering plants stretching toward distant blue hills. The tightly packed orange and blue roofs and towers of a town nestle among the hills in the middle distance.
As I looked closer at the landscape, I noticed two shepherds who look like they’re chatting as they amble with their flock down a curving dirt road on the right. And the detail is incredible! You can see every little leaf and window.
Getting back to that arch… It fills the height and width of this large oil painting that’s about 4 ft. tall by 3 ft wide and its cool color really sets off the rich tones of the scene beyond it.
It’s carved into six illustrations from the Book of Genesis and begins at the base of the arch with statues of Adam and Eve on either side who stand facing each other on top of marble columns swirling with blood-red and grey. Adam’s on the left and Eve’s on the right. At the base of each column is a man hunched over with bent knees like he’s supporting its weight on his back.
The illustrations curve over Adam and Eve, showing their expulsion from Eden, the tough manual work they now had to do, the tragic story of Cain and Abel, and finally Cain’s farewell to his parents as he’s banished.
Two men in circles in the upper corners face off with the guy on the left aiming a spear at the guy on the right who holds a shield and big sword.
Christus managed to pack an amazing amount of detail in these. He painted them to look like they’re deeply carved with dark shadows throwing them into relief and placed on very elaborately carved pedestals. That look like the tops of the pointed doorways of a gothic church
But if this is the Nativity, why is everything all green and leafy, very un-wintery? And what’s with that arch?
MUSIC
The Bible doesn’t actually say when Jesus was born. The only mention is in the Gospel of Luke who says shepherds were watching their flocks at night when they’re visited by angels announcing the birth. Based on this, early Christian writers calculated the nativity happened in early spring. After all that’s when shepherds would be out with their flocks, not in cold December.
This started to change when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and in 313 pronounced it one of the official religions of the empire. A few years later Church leaders decided it would be good to have a holiday as a way for followers to celebrate publicly and maybe sell Christianity to others. So they came up with the idea of celebrating Jesus’s birthday! But what date to use?
At the time, the big Roman holiday was Saturnalia [sa-turn-nah-lia]. This was a weeklong celebration of the winter solstice that ran from Dec 17-24. It was a favorite holiday because it involved gift giving, partying, decorating, even singing carols! So they decided to just graft Jesus’s bday onto the end of it on Dec. 25. This way, Christians and pagans could celebrate at the same time and maybe some pagans would even be convinced to join this new religion. Eventually, so many of them did, Christmas replaced Saturnalia and has been celebrated on Dec. 25 ever since.
Petrus Christus painted this in 1450 in Bruges, a city in Flanders, which we now call Belgium. And he decided to do something different with this story. Instead of having just the usual scene celebrating Christ’s birth, he made it an allegory of sin and redemption.
The arch reminded viewers of the fall of humanity from grace and the problems that led to. The men struggling to hold up the columns represent the burden original sin placed on everyone.
But then past the arch, there’s the joyful birth of Jesus, who came to redeem humanity. Joseph has even taken off his hat and his shoes because he’s knows he’s standing on holy ground.
The town in the background which looks like a typical Flemish town, has two domed buildings. These represent Jerusalem, where Christ’s Passion took place.
And those triangles made by the roof beams are a symbol of the Christian trinity.
MUSIC
As I was researching this, I discovered a mystery! I was looking at a couple of books from the 80s and 90s that showed a version of this where Mary has a halo of thin gold rays and Jesus lies on this kind of gold oval platter shape.
I reached out to the Gallery and got in touch with Andrew Sears, assistant curator of Northern Renaissance paintings. He explained that in 1994, the painting underwent conservation at the Gallery and the conservator, Catherine Metzger, discovered the halo and platter had been painted on later.
One way she knew was the golden platter is just sort of slapped on at an odd angle. It didn’t blend in with the surroundings. Now Northern painters like Christus were super careful to make things look realistic, even if they were supernatural or symbolic, so clearly this wasn’t his work.
Another clue appeared when she used x-radiography to see what’s under the surface. And that showed what we see, Jesus lying on Mary’s robe, not a platter, and no halo on Mary. So the theory is they were added later after the painting reached its buyer in Spain.
In Spain at the time, wealth was considered a sign of godliness, so expensive, gilded symbols like these were used to make an image more religious. The conclusion was the buyer paid another artist to add these to make it more holy.
In the end, the decision was made to cover over these elements. The idea was that it was more important to show Christus’s original concept. But it’s all reversible! If someone decides later on it’s important to show these additions, the overpainting can be safely removed.
OUTRO:
I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.
I’d like to thank Andrew Sears for his help with today’s episode. You can find links to today’s information in the show notes.
Here’s wishing you holidays filled with peace, joy, health, and hope. A Long Look will be taking a break to prepare for the new year, so now’s your chance to catch up back episodes or re-listen to some favorites!
As always, thanks for joining me!