The icon of the Nativity explained detail by detail

A painting of the Nativity usually stops one moment: the stable, the Virgin bent over the Child, the shepherds kneeling. An icon holds the message to the shepherds, the journey of the magi, the bathing of the Child and the doubt of Joseph together. You read it from the centre to the edges, like a story.

At the centre there is always the Child in the manger, and I start reading the icon from there.

The scheme took shape in the first centuries and has changed little since. It joins the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, the ancient accounts of the birth of Jesus and the hymns of the Christmas liturgy. The best known is the kontakion of Romanos the Melodist, from the sixth century: «Today the Virgin gives birth to Him who is above all being, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable. Angels with shepherds give glory, and the magi journey with a star.» On the panel you find the figures of the hymn one by one.

The icon on this page was painted by a Cretan painter whose name we do not know, in the second half of the fifteenth century. Crete was Venetian then, and the painters of Candia worked both for Orthodox believers and for Venetian patrons: El Greco came out of that school too. At the top you read the Greek inscription Η ΧΥ ΓΕΝΝΗΣΙΣ, the Nativity of Christ. The image is in the public domain.

Luke speaks of a manger and does not say where it was. The cave comes from a very old tradition: Justin Martyr mentions it in the second century, and in Bethlehem it was shown to pilgrims even before Constantine built the basilica over it. That is why in icons Christ is born inside a mountain that opens, and the stable of the cribs never appears.

The black of the cave is the darkness of the world, and the Child is born inside it.

The back of the cave is black, solid, with no shading: it is the one place in the icon the light does not reach. The Fathers of the Church see in it the world in darkness that Isaiah speaks of: the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. The same black opening returns in the icon of the Resurrection, where Christ goes down into hell and breaks its gates. Put side by side, the two icons show the same shape.

The mountain around it is the earth that, in the hymn of Romanos, offers a cave. The rocks rise towards the sky and bend towards the manger, as if creation were bowing.

Look at the manger on this panel: it is a box of white stone, squared, like a sarcophagus. The Child is wrapped in tight white bands from head to foot. They are the same bands in which icons show Lazarus coming out of the tomb, and the same white as the shroud of Good Friday.

Cradle and tomb are in the same stone: at Christmas the icon already shows Easter.

Luke writes that Mary wrapped the Child in swaddling bands and laid him in a manger, and the painter takes these words literally. Then he adds what the believer knows about the end of the story. On Christmas night Easter is already there: birth and burial, cradle and tomb, in the same stone.

First you see a swaddled newborn, tiny in the middle of the mountain, and then you understand why he came.

They are not in the Gospels. They come from the first chapter of Isaiah: the ox knows its owner and the ass its master's manger, but Israel does not know. The Fathers of the Church read this line as a prophecy of the night in Bethlehem, and the two animals appear beside the manger already on Roman sarcophagi of the fourth century.

The animals recognise their Lord before people do.

The animals recognise their Lord and people find it harder: in Isaiah it is a reproach. On this panel their heads are almost inside the manger, next to the Child's face, as if they were warming him with their breath.

From this image the ox and the ass passed into the Italian cribs. At Greccio, in 1223, Saint Francis wanted to see the night of Bethlehem with his own eyes and had a manger brought, with hay, an ox and an ass.

Mary is lying down because she has just given birth. In the icon this matters: Christ was born of a woman, with a real body, as every person is born. In the first centuries some denied that God had become flesh. Against them the icon shows this tired Mother, lying on the red mattress.

Mary looks away because she keeps in her heart what has just happened.

Often Mary does not look at the Child. She looks ahead, towards Joseph or towards whoever stands before the icon. Luke writes that she kept all these things, pondering them in her heart, and the icon paints that silence: a mother who has just lived the greatest thing in her life and is thinking about it.

On this panel Mary is the largest figure of all. In an icon size tells importance, and after the Child the most important person in the scene is she, the Mother of God.

Joseph sits below, outside the cave, his head resting on his hand. He sits apart on purpose: this is how the icon shows that he is not the Child's father. His face is thoughtful, almost sad. God asks him to believe something reason does not explain.

Joseph's doubt is painted on the same panel as the miracle.

In front of him stands an old man dressed in skins, leaning on a staff. There are two readings. For some he is a shepherd talking to Joseph. For others, and this reading is widespread in the Orthodox tradition, he is the tempter in disguise, whispering that a child cannot be born of a virgin. He has no horns and no mark of the devil. He is an ordinary old man, talking to him with common sense.

If you look at the icon and find it hard to believe, your place is below, next to Joseph, on the same panel as the miracle.

They are two midwives. The Gospels do not name them: they come from the Protoevangelium of James, a second-century account that did not enter the Bible but gave Christian art many images, among them the names of Mary's parents, Joachim and Anne. In the ancient accounts the midwives have names too, Zelomi and Salome.

God became a child, and a child is washed in a basin.

The scene says the same thing as Mary lying down: the Child is a real child, washed in a basin and held in a woman's arms. One pours water from a jug, the other holds him on her knees and tests the water with her hand, as every mother does.

Look at the basin on this panel: it has the foot and the cup of a chalice. Several Orthodox writers read in it a sign of the baptismal font and of the altar chalice.

At the top there is a dark semicircle: it is heaven, the world of God, opening. From it a straight ray comes down to the manger. It is the star of Bethlehem, painted as a light that points to one exact place. In many icons the ray splits into three, for the Trinity.

The ray of the star comes down from heaven straight onto the manger.

The angels are two choirs. Those on the left look up and sing glory to God in the highest; those on the right bend towards the earth and carry the news. On this panel the lowest angel leans towards the shepherds, who listen with their staffs in hand. The shepherds are the first to know: simple people, working at night.

From the other side come the magi, on horseback, and one of them points to the star. They come from far away, from peoples who did not know the prophecies. They are often painted at three ages, young, grown and old: every age of life comes to see. Before the same Child stand the shepherds, who were near, and the magi, who came from afar.

Yes. I paint the Nativity according to the canon, with the composition you have seen here, on a wooden panel and with real gold. It is a subject with many figures, and each extra figure lengthens the work.

On a small panel I paint the heart of the scene; the full composition needs a larger size.

On a 20×25 cm panel the full composition does not sit well: the figures would become tiny. There I propose the central part, the Mother, the Child in the manger, the ox and the ass, the star. The full composition needs a larger size, and we choose it together. You can also start from the configurator.

For Christmas I ship by 15 December, before deliveries slow down. The Nativity takes more work than a single saint, so it is best to write to me early: my first reply already tells you whether there is time. For Orthodox Christmas, on 7 January, there are one or two weeks more.