The Nativity

This panel and its companion, the Presentation in the Temple, once belonged to a single painted altar frontal, a row of scenes from the life of Christ. It stood in the church of the Badia Ardenga, a small abbey near Montalcino, south of Siena. A visiting church official recorded it there in 1575, and it was still in place in 1834. Within a few years the scenes had been separated and sold one by one. Today 12 of them are known, divided between Paris, Siena, Altenburg in Germany, Princeton and Utrecht.

The Nativity follows the Byzantine pattern that Sienese painters of the 13th century took over almost unchanged. Mary lies on a red mattress inside a dark cave, the swaddled Child rests in a stone manger with the ox and the ass looking in, and angels lean over the rock above. In the lower corner two midwives bathe the newborn in a basin, an episode that comes from the apocryphal gospels. Joseph sits apart, and on the right a shepherd receives the news.