Burne Jones’ Nativity: Hesitating Before the Otherworldly

You can find out more about this remarkable painting here. David Goff explains the technique, the composition, and gives some comment on the biblical allusions. There are even several questions at the end, to encourage you to think, while you look at the painting. 

I suspect you love this painting or it does nothing for you. But here's why I think it's an important portrayal of what on earth was going on at the Nativity. It is otherworldly, eerily strange, fantastic like a dream, psychologically potent with symbol. It makes Christmas seem miraculous, unreal in any empirical everyday sense that can be captured by realistic paintings, digital photography or satellite imaging. Trees and angels merge in an archway over the forest; cave and Magi and Joseph arch over the Madonna and child, and the Virgin herself is protectively arched over the baby. All is in shades of blue, ethereal, luminous with presences strange to the earth; the world has never seen anything like this.

What is happening here is unprecedented in the universe, and all the ways of human communication will be strained and refashioned in order to tell the story. Logic and science, poetry and art, words and music, ideas and images, the entire spectrum of human knowing and communicating will only be able to convey some sense of this vast mysterious happening when the story unfolds in the life of the child, and human voices are orchestrated in praise of this tiny, vulnerable gift of Gods self – "the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us,… and we beheld his glory", "wrapped in swaddling cloths, and lying in a manger."

This painting rebukes both our tendencies to sentimentalise and our complacent disinterest; it laughs at our logic and questions our reliance on graphic realism; it pulls us out of our technologically obsessed worldview and ignores our lust for control of knowledge and mastery of the world around us. This is the Nativity as subversive theology, the silvery monochrome medium conveying mystery far more effectively than colour, and the artist choosing a way to bypass our expectations and habits of thought about what on earth God was doing, entering Creation as a mortal child.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence…….