Template:POTD/2019-06-02
The Mystical Nativity is an oil-on-canvas painting dated around 1500 to 1501 by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli. It is his only signed work and has an unusual iconography for a painting of the Nativity (the birth of Jesus). The Virgin Mary kneels before the Christ Child in the centre, while Saint Joseph sleeps nearby and angels dance in the heavens above. At the bottom of the painting, three angels embrace three men, seeming to raise them up from the ground, while seven devils behind them flee to the underworld. In Renaissance times, Last Judgement paintings showed viewers the reckoning of the damned and the saved at the time of Christ's Second Coming. According to Jonathan Nelson, in echoing this kind of painting, the work is asking us to think not only of Christ's birth but also of his return.
The Greek inscription at the top of the painting translates as: 'This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three and a half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture'. Botticelli believed himself to be living during the Great Tribulation, possibly due to the upheavals in Europe at the time; he was predicting Christ's millennium as stated in the Book of Revelation. The work is in the collection of the National Gallery in London.Painting credit: Sandro Botticelli