The recent visit to Edinburgh and the National Galleries I was looking for nothing in particular except the Botticelli mentioned in a previous post. But I came across a couple of other paintings including this one, a work by the enigmatic and mysterious artist (or artists) known as the Master(s) of the Embroidered Foliage.
Close inspection shows why the name has become attached to paintings in this style. The foliage is painted to make it look like embroidery, and the effect gives the work a depth and texture that sets the central figure in what looks like a living landscape, and yet which is so different in style the human figures are made to appear more real, more immediate. The landscape intentionally appears as a human contrivance, embroidered foliage, a conceit that depicts the miracle of natural growth as the natural response of an organic creation to the One who gives life, calls to life, indeed is born as living flesh into the world.
But then, by placing the Virgin and child in the centre, on a bench with a richly embroidered back, and set against a landscape painted also in embroidered patterns, the realism of the mother and child, captured in subtle delicacy of colour and expression, is further emphasised in a way that carries profound incarnational implications. The real natural world is depicted through an artificial conceit, and the supernatural birth is depicted with realism and a degree of artistic sensitivity that it forces a contrast, and thus compels attention to the living centre of the painting.
The child's hand turning the page, pointing to the text, suggests the child and mother in a joint act of reading, interpreting, fulfilling. But it seems it is the child's hand turning the page, an act of precocious, even authoritative guidance – and the mother is looking at the child, not the book. Perhaps to the mother the child is the real text, the subject of whom the book speaks. The developed theology of the incarnation wrestles with immense and complex questions of humanity and divinity coinciding in the birth of Jesus. Nicea and Chalcedon stand as formulaic and historic statements, as the best the tradition could offer in words, reconciled to the limitations of language and vocabulary, and recognising that intellectually construed concepts always fall short of the divine realities expressed in the central doctrines of Christian faith. Incarnation and Christology, the relations of the Triune God, the initiating and inviting grace of God reaching out in a love impassioned purpose, eternal and yet scandalously specific in historic occurence. "The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….God was in christ reconciling the world to himself…but when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son, born of a woman…."
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