This month’s picture, the Nativity of Christ, is by Piero della Francesca (1415 – 1492), a Tuscan painter of monumentally serene and tranquil works, imbued with deep faith and humanist sensibility.  His paintings are filled with a clear, rational light which illuminates an apparently effortless mastery of form and composition which sprang from his interest in mathematics and geometry.  This picture and his earlier Baptism of Christ are to be seen in London’s National Gallery.

Unlike the wintry scenes with which we are so familiar, this Holy Child appears to have been born on a warm summer's day in Italy, in a landscape reminiscent of that in which the artist’s birthplace of Borgo Sansepolcro is set.  In the warm sunshine, we see Mary kneeling in fervent worship of God-with-us, the newly-born babe lying on her cloak. This is not the maternal adoration of a new baby we might expect on a human level but the devout adoration of a worshipper, wholly wrapped up in a spiritual experience. Mary’s contemplative, reverent beauty embodies St Luke’s insight “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2.19). Her beautiful hands are delicately steepled in prayer while her eyes are fixed upon the babe who stretches out his hands in an embrace that will one day surround all redeemed humanity. One cannot help but remember that when his redemptive work is done, he will again lie naked before his mother, perhaps on her cloak, dead and awaiting his burial.

The atmosphere is dream-like, rapt, frozen –almost - in time. The stillness of the moment is enhanced by the silent music emanating from five young people, two of them singing and two playing the lute. Are they angels, one wonders? They have no wings but their feet seem to float effortlessly above, rather than touching, the ground. Their faces are very human and echo those carved by his older contemporary Lucca della Robbia on the singing gallery in the Duomo in Florence. Is their solemn music mocked by the braying ass or does all creation strain to join in their act of praise? 

Behind Mary, Joseph sits on the donkey’s saddle and engages in conversation with two shepherds one of whom animatedly reveals from whence the angels came who announced to them the wondrous birth. Joseph clasps his hands and rests his weary foot – a marvel of foreshortening and skilled perspective. In the half-ruined byre, the donkey brays and the ox bows its head in worship.

A moment’s careful study reveals that the picture is subtly divided into distinct areas by compositional diagonals. Notice first that the angels and the Christ-child occupy an island of lush vegetation while Mary kneels on bare earth. Follow the sloping line of the roof and the shadow it casts and see the main structural line of the picture – it divides the zone of stillness from that occupied by the chatting shepherds and Joseph.  The donkey’s braying mouth is to the right of this diagonal, on the noisy side but directly on the horizontal provided by the angels’ mouths – perhaps a little joke at the very centre of the picture.