Birth of Christ

Around 1400, painters north of the Alps often still showed the Nativity the older way, with the mother lying in bed after the birth. In the decades that followed another image took over, Mary kneeling in prayer before the Child, spread in part by the visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden. This panel by an unknown Salzburg painter keeps to the older tradition. She reclines on a wicker bed piled with red cushions, in a deep blue mantle. One young woman holds up the naked Child, while another kneels to pour water from a jug into a wooden tub for his first bath. Joseph sits apart under the shed roof, resting his head on his hand. The panel came from Kremsmünster, the Benedictine abbey in Upper Austria, and was given to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1935.