La Natividad mística

Along the top of this Nativity runs a line of Greek that Botticelli wrote himself, and it turns a gentle Christmas scene into something far more anxious. In it the painter dates the work to the end of 1500, names himself, and speaks of the troubles of Italy and of the devil loosed for a time before he is bound again. Botticelli was reading the Book of Revelation through the sermons of Savonarola, the fierce Dominican friar who had ruled Florence, preached against its luxuries, and been burned in its main square just two years before. The invasions and civil strife of those years felt to him like the end of the world foretold. So angels dance in a ring across a gold sky, and at the bottom more angels embrace small human figures while little devils flee into cracks in the ground. It is the only picture Botticelli ever signed.