Birth of Christ

Much of this Nativity is bare wood. Where the paint has flaked away, the grain of the spruce board runs straight down the picture, and the scene survives in pieces around it. Mary kneels in a blue-green gown, a long pink mantle spread on the floor behind her. An ox lies in the stable beyond. On the far side a small fire burns under a pot, with a lantern standing in the niche below. Until the 1930s the same board carried the Flagellation of Christ, dated 1491, on its back. It was one of four double-sided wing panels from a Salzburg altar that reached Vienna in 1807. At the Kunsthistorisches Museum they were sawn through and split, a practice long used to show both faces at once, and the four became the eight pictures in the Belvedere today.