Starting around the year 1400, a new kind of Nativity Scene began to grace European art – and Italian Renaissance art, particularly. Before, Nativity scenes often featured Mary holding a swaddled baby Jesus and surrounded by animals and worshippers in a stable. The new formula, however, showed the baby Jesus lying naked on the ground, his mother and father at a distance. Sometimes, the customary animals and shepherds were not present at all.
This new visual schema, so captivating to the Renaissance imagination, came from St. Bridget of Sweden, a redoubtable nun and mother of eight who had died in 1373. (After raising their children, both Bridget and her husband retired to religious orders.) On a pilgrimage to Bethlehem, it is said, Bridget saw an apparition of the vulnerable infant Jesus on the dirt. Afterward, some historians believe, she relayed her vision directly to the Italian painter Niccolo di Tommaso, who made the first painted version of this strange Nativity.
St Bridget and the Vision of the Nativity by NICCOLÒ DI TOMMASO
Soon the new Christmas formula became wildly popular, and it changed, for a time, the way Renaissance Europeans thought about the birth of Christ. Famous versions of Bridget’s vision can be found in great churches and museums all over the world, including in London’s National Gallery, where generations have admired Piero della Francesca’s celebrated Nativity of 1475. Here, with his characteristic austerity and dignity, the celebrated Tuscan artist depicts a wriggling child on rocky scrub; though it seems Piero couldn’t bear to place Jesus directly on the hard ground. In this oil painting, therefore, the Child lies on an opportune blue cloak. Still, the baby Jesus feels bereft and desperate, and one can’t help but reach for Him, at least in spirit. His vulnerability beckons us to a new tenderness and intimacy.
The Nativity (Piero della Francesca) – Wikipedia
At the time of Bridget of Sweden’s vision, imagery was a central part of the Christian religious experience. Biblical figures were engaged through the imagination, as living presences and personalities with whom the faithful could emotionally relate. Piero della Francesa, in fact, painted his Holy Family on a central Italian plateau, with recognizable landmarks in the background. Even the buildings to the right are thought to evoke his hometown of Sansepolcro.
By translating Mary, Joseph, and Jesus to an Italian context, Piero meant no disrespect – and he had no concept of what we might term “historical accuracy.” Factual scrupulosity is one thing, and emotional resonance is another. Sometimes, the former can get in the way of the latter (if, for example, certain forms and idioms feel unrelatable across space and time). By placing the Holy Family in central Italy, Piero made the Holy Family living and available to his viewers. He flowed with the intense, imaginative, intimate character of a Renaissance faith that wanted contact with the divine.
It’s hard to know what Jesus’ birth actually looked like, back in the first century. Maybe Jesus lay on the ground at one point, maybe not. Regardless, when Bridget of Sweden “saw” the baby Jesus lying on the dirt of Bethlehem, and then related her vision to an artist, she helped Renaissance audiences have a new kind of contact with the holy. Within the imaginations of the faithful, in fact, Bridget summoned an “icon” of unprecedented, aching vulnerability that helped viewers internalize some paradoxical things: the absurd generosity of the Incarnation, the preposterous recklessness of God’s salvation plan, and the heart-melting softness of Jesus’s vulnerability – a vulnerability not only of the flesh, but of the spirit. (Jesus, after all, had no “hardness of heart” and felt every sting of evil to the core.)
Indeed, in the written account of her vision, Bridget related how the baby “crying and, as it were, trembling from the cold and the hardness of the pavement where he lay, rolled a little and extended his limbs, seeking to find refreshment and his Mother’s favor.”1 From his very birth, according to Bridget, Jesus felt the coldness and alienation of our fallen world.
A curious and moving version of Bridget’s Nativity can be found at the convent of San Marco in Florence. Here, the Dominican monk Fra Angelico painted a Nativity scene on the wall of a brother’s cell.
Nativity, 1440 – 1441 – Fra Angelico – WikiArt.org
An artist noted for his enigmatic mysticism, Fra Angelico shows a scene of high spiritual engagement coupled with almost painful physical detachment. Mary, Joseph, and two saints kneel in reverent absorption before the reaching child, and even as they do, their respect highlights the isolation of the One they honor. The ground beneath Jesus is bare, and His devotees (including the two animals in the background) are arrayed in dignified symmetry. There is a somberness here, perhaps, that is prophetic of the Crucifixion; so many Crucifixion images, in fact, showed symmetrical figures with heads bowed, watching their Savior die.
Many years ago, when I first saw these curious Nativities of Renaissance Italy, I was perplexed and maybe slightly offended by their inconsistency with biblical accounts. But quickly the Child in the dirt began to call to me. Now, each Christmas, I relish these tender scenes that celebrate a grounded God, fully present and down in the “muck,” open to pain for my sake and reaching for me with desperate love.
Editor’s Note: The Christ-Animating Learning Blog will be taking a break for the Christmas holiday. We will resume publishing on January 6th.
A brilliant essay as usual, Katie! I can’t help but wonder, however, whether placing the Infant Jesus on the ground, naked and vulnerable, had something to do with the geopolitical situation in the 14th and 15th century. The last of the so-called Crusader States in the Holy Land fell in 1291, and thereafter the Holy Land was in the control of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and, after 1516, of the Ottoman Empire. Might the dramatic shift in the iconography of the Nativity, though perhaps triggered by Bridget’s vision, also reflected Christian fears of resurgent Islam and the relative inaccessibility of the Holy Land to European pilgrims?