La Nativité

Robert Campin painted this Nativity around 1420 in the city of Tournai, and it's one of the first pictures where the holy story is set in a plain, believable world you could almost walk into. The stable is a real broken-down shed with a hole in the thatch. Joseph is a bald old man shielding a lit candle with his hand. Beyond the walls a road winds off past a lake to distant hills catching the early light. The odd figures on the left come from an old legend outside the Bible: two midwives, and the one named Salome, who doubted the virgin birth and whose hand withered until she touched the child. Angels hold ribbons of text that spell the exchange out. Campin, sometimes called the Master of Flémalle, was working at the very moment northern painters were learning to render cloth, wood and skin with this almost startling closeness, and here you can watch that new realism arriving in a scene everyone already knew by heart.