The First Sunday of Christmas

Sermon

The First Sunday of Christmas

31 December 2023

The Reverend Canon Richard Ames-Lewis 

Reflection on Piero Della Francesca’s Nativity, painted in 1470

Probably not many of us received a Christmas card with this picture. It is titled “Nativity”, and its subject is clearly the birth of our saviour Jesus, based on the Biblical narrative which we have just heard. But to be honest it is not very Christmassy and it has a distant solemnity which we might perhaps find a bit disconcerting and strange.

I would like to talk a bit about this painting and unlock a few mysteries about it to help us in our Christmas celebration today, the seventh day of Christmas, and to prepare for the New Year.

Let me tell you first about the painting. It was painted 550 years ago by the Renaissance artist Piero Della Francesca. He used the newly discovered medium of oil-based paint which he applied to panels of poplar wood. Art historians have suggested that Piero had no patron for this and painted it for himself, to be hung in his own home. This gave him a freedom both from a patron’s requirements and from the usual conventions of paintings commissioned for a church. So it has some unusual features which we will look at in a minute. It is thought it remained in the family for several generations. It was eventually acquired by a 19th century British art collector who died in 1873, at which point it was bought by the National Gallery.

But it was in poor condition. The panels had opened up creating a vertical crack which passed through the child’s body, and the paint was damaged in several places. At some period in its history the painting had been used as an altarpiece and had signs of candle wax and soot. So it was never thought of as one of the nation’s best paintings. Rather unsuccessful cleaning was attempted several times. Then in 2019 the National Gallery decided to carry out extensive restoration which took three years. The cracked panels were opened up and repositioned, the paint was cleaned and original colour as far as possible recovered. The restoration was finished in time for Christmas last year, and the Gallery presented it as a Christmas present for the Nation, placing it by itself in a special room with just a few chairs, inviting people in for contemplation, a kind of chapel in the gallery. Needless to say, there was a huge row in the art world and an argument between those who thought Piero’s original intentions had been ruined, and people, like me, who thought it was a huge improvement.

The artist, Piero Della Francesca, was an all-round Renaissance man, artist, mathematician, architect, musician. He lived all his life in the town of Borgo San Sepolchro in Umbria, where his finest painting, The Resurrection, is to be seen. His paintings experiment with geometry and perspective, but also with ideas. He reinterprets conventional religious themes, and uses traditional subjects, like the Baptism of Christ, or the Virgin and Child, or in this case, the Nativity, as opportunities to explore new ways of thinking theologically. 

So here in this depiction of the Nativity we have the usual elements of the story – the virgin and child in the foreground, Joseph over on the right, shepherds at the back, ox and ass and stable behind them – but with some entirely original features.

·         The stable is set in a garden outside Borgo San Sepolchro – you can see the buildings of the town on the right and the Umbrian fields on the left.

·         But the choir of angels has come down to earth – all five of them – and are singing and playing their lutes to the Christ child.

·         Then where is the manger? It is not there. Instead, the child is laid on a blue cloak, which appears to be the extension of the virgin’s gown, physically connecting him to his mother.

·         Joseph is seated, curiously, on a saddle.

·         Most remarkably, one of the shepherds at the back is raising his hand and pointing at the roof. His gesture, placed just above the virgin’s head, is visually significant – it is almost as if he were the conductor of the whole scene. What is he doing? He appears to be pointing at the roof where there is a hole in the roof tiles.

We can go on exploring this painting to discover more new ideas about the story, and we can go on speculating about the artist and why he presented these ideas as he did.

·         Why are the angels right at the heart of the scene? Is it because Piero was especially interested in music?

·         Why is the baby connected to the virgin with the beautiful blue cloak? Is it because the artist had a special concern for the mother-child relationship?

·         Why is Joseph seated on a saddle? Is it because of his role in guiding the Holy Family to this place, and his future role leading them to safety in Egypt?

·         Why is the shepherd pointing at the hole in the roof? One interpretation of this is that the artist has deliberately painted this hole to suggest that here, right above the virgin’s head, the light of the Holy Spirit penetrated the scene. It was of course to the shepherds that the news of the Christ’s birth was first revealed.

There are of course many ways to present the Nativity, and in these sad days when the city of Bethlehem is in darkness we may look at our own crib figures here in this church.  These were carved in olive wood by Palestinian Christian craftsmen and purchased from a craft co-operative in Bethlehem which in these days of emergency in closed. We know, too, that the usual nativity scene put up outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem has been replaced this year by the figure of a baby surrounded by rubble.

So what I would like to suggest for a New Year’s resolution is for us to do two things.

·         First, to carry out an exercise in imagination. Looking at this picture of the Nativity, what elements are really important to our faith? If we were an artist how would we foreground them?  

·         And second, to wonder, and perhaps to decide, how this exercise in imagination might affect the reality of our life in 2024?