The Mystical Nativity is a painting in oil on canvas dated c. 1500–1501 by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, in the National Gallery in London.[1][2] It is his only signed work and has an unusual iconography for a painting of the Nativity.[3]
The Greek inscription at the top translates as: 'This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three and a half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture'.[4] Botticelli believed himself to be living during the Great Tribulation, possibly due to the upheavals in Europe at the time, and was predicting Christ's millennium as stated in the Book of Revelation.[citation needed]
The painting is connected with the influence of Girolamo Savonarola, whose influence appears in a number of late paintings by Botticelli,[5][6] though the contents of the image may have been specified by the person commissioning it. The painting uses the medieval convention of showing the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus larger both than other figures, and their surroundings; this was certainly done deliberately for effect, as earlier works by Botticelli use correct graphical perspective.
It is not to be confused with the Mystical Nativity or Adoration in the Forest by Filippo Lippi, now in Berlin.
^Mystic Nativity, National Gallery
^Rupert Featherstone, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge, speaking on The Private Life of a Christmas Masterpiece, BBC 2009
^Sandro Botticelli (2015). "Complete Works of Sandro Botticelli (Delphi Classics)". Delphi Classics. p. 165.
^National Gallery
^"Botticelli's Mystic Nativity, Savonarola and the Millennium" by Rab Hatfield in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 58, 1995 (subscription required)
^The Private Life of a Masterpiece
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