基督诞生

Ghirlandaio painted this in 1492, the year we remember for Columbus and the fall of Granada. In Florence that spring something closer to home had happened. Lorenzo de' Medici, called the Magnificent, the man whose city had made Ghirlandaio the most sought-after painter in town, died in April. Ghirlandaio ran a large, busy workshop, the one where a teenage Michelangelo had learned to handle a brush. This Nativity, though, looks like his own hand: fine, fresh, unhurried. Mary kneels in prayer over the newborn on the bare ground, an aging Joseph sits behind, and the ox and ass lean in from their stall. Ghirlandaio himself had only two years left to live.