Nativity

This is a small thing, a panel about the size of a sheet of paper, meant to be held close and prayed over rather than hung on a wall. Memling made it in Bruges around 1470, as he was becoming the city's leading painter, and he gives the Nativity the quiet, orderly calm that made his work so sought after by the merchants and bankers of that wealthy port. Mary kneels before the child on the bare ground, Joseph a little apart, the stable opening onto a still Flemish landscape. There is no drama in it. Everything is small, clean and exact, made for one person's eyes at close range. It now belongs to the Museum of Applied Arts in Cologne.