From countless depictions of the Nativity I have chosen this one by Fra Filippo Lippi (mid 1400's), because paradoxically it says something the artist intended but not in the way it now appears.
What do I mean? Mary's robe was originally painted in blue, a tradition of honouring Mary by sparing no expense in portraying her purity, beauty and sanctity. On this painting the blue was a thin coat on dry plaster, rather than blue pigment mixed into the plaster in a true fresco. Over the centuries the colour has degraded into grey. This cost-cutting device has the unintentional irony of portraying Mary as she saw herself, a poor handmaiden unworthy of honour. Thus an upmarket depiction of the Nativity now shows Mary in a flaked and entirely faded cloak. "He was rich yet became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich". So many Renaissance paintings of the Nativity are all but perfect; their codes and symbols, narrative drive and cultural context, theology and piety, their execution and technique - the finest art the world has ever seen.
Perhaps especially at Christmas, we are helped to see the scandal and the loss, the cost and the consequence, the trust and the terror, the extraordinary ordinariness of the Word made flesh, and the frightened courage of the Mother of the Son of God sharing that poverty as an act of self impoverishing faith in a God who somtimes asks the impossible, and then by divine grace enables and embraces human trust, so winning the response of the human heart.
Perhaps. A happy and thoughtful Christmas to all who come by here regularly. Because for Christians Christmas is a time when joy should be unconfined, and thought too!
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