Home > Authors Index > John Ruskin > Giotto and his works in Padua > This page
Giotto and his works in Padua, a non-fiction book by John Ruskin |
||
16. The Nativity |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ XVI. THE NATIVITY I am not sure whether I shall do well or kindly in telling the reader anything about this beautiful design. Perhaps the less he knows about early art or early traditions, the more deeply he will feel its purity and truth; for there is scarcely an incident here, or anything in the manner of representing the incidents, which is not mentioned or justified in Scripture. The bold, hilly background reminds us that Bethlehem was in the hill-country of Judah. But it may seem to have two purposes besides this literal one: the first, that it increases the idea of _exposure_ and loneliness in the birth of Christ; the second that the masses of the great hills, with the angels floating round them in the horizontal clouds, may in some sort represent to our thoughts the power and space of that heaven and earth whose Lord is being laid in the manger-cradle. There is an exquisite truth and sweetness in the way the Virgin turns upon the couch, in order herself to assist in laying the Child down. Giotto is in this exactly faithful to the scriptural words: "_She_ wrapped the Child in swaddling-clothes, and _laid_ Him in a manger." Joseph sits beneath in meditation; above, the angels, all exulting, and, as it were, confused with joy, flutter and circle in the air like birds,--three looking up to the Father's throne with praise and thankfulness, one stooping to adore the Prince of Peace, one flying to tell the shepherds. There is something to me peculiarly affecting in this disorder of theirs; even angels, as it were, breaking their ranks with wonder, and not knowing how to utter their gladness and passion of praise. There is noticeable here, as in all works of this early time, a certain confidence in the way in which the angels trust to their wings, very characteristic of a period of bold and simple conception. Modern science has taught us that a wing cannot be anatomically joined to a shoulder; and in proportion as painters approach more and more to the scientific, as distinguished from the contemplative state of mind, they put the wings of their angels on more timidly, and dwell with greater emphasis upon the human form, and with less upon the wings, until these last become a species of decorative appendage,--a mere _sign_ of an angel. But in Giotto's time an angel was a complete creature, as much believed in as a bird; and the way in which it would or might cast itself into the air, and lean hither and thither upon its plumes, was as naturally apprehended as the manner of flight of a chough or a starling. Hence Dante's simple and most exquisite synonym for angel, "Bird of God;" and hence also a variety and picturesqueness in the expression of the movements of the heavenly hierarchies by the earlier painters, ill replaced by the powers of foreshortening, and throwing naked limbs into fantastic positions, which appear in the cherubic groups of later times. It is needless to point out the frank association of the two events,--the Nativity, and appearance of the Angel to the Shepherds. They are constantly thus joined; but I do not remember any other example in which they are joined so boldly. Usually the shepherds are seen in the distance, or are introduced in some ornamental border, or other inferior place. The view of painting as a mode of suggesting relative or consecutive thoughts, rather than a realisation of any one scene, is seldom so fearlessly asserted, even by Giotto, as here, in placing the flocks of the shepherds at the foot of the Virgin's bed. This bed, it will be noticed, is on a shelf of rock. This is in compliance with the idea founded on the Protevangelion and the apocryphal book known as the Gospel of Infancy, that our Saviour was born in a cave, associated with the scriptural statement that He was laid in a manger, of which the apocryphal gospels do not speak. The vain endeavour to exalt the awe of the moment of the Saviour's birth has turned, in these gospels, the outhouse of the inn into a species of subterranean chapel, full of incense and candles. "It was after sunset, when the old woman (the midwife), and Joseph with her, reached the cave; and they both went into it. And behold, it was all filled with light, greater than the light of lamps and candles, and greater than the light of the sun itself." (Infancy, i. 9.) "Then a bright cloud overshadowed the cave, and the midwife said: This day my soul is magnified." (Protevangelion, xiv. 10.) The thirteenth chapter of the Protevangelion is, however, a little more skilful in this attempt at exaltation. "And leaving her and his sons in the cave, Joseph went forth to seek a Hebrew midwife in the village of Bethlehem. But as I was going, said Joseph, I looked up into the air, and I saw the clouds astonished, and the fowls of the air stopping in the midst of their flight. And I looked down towards the earth and saw a table spread, and working-people sitting around it; but their hands were on the table, and they did not move to eat. But all their faces were fixed upwards." (Protevangelion, xiii. 1-7.) It would, of course, be absurd to endeavour to institute any comparison between the various pictures of this subject, innumerable as they are; but I must at least deprecate Lord Lindsay's characterising this design of Giotto's merely as the "Byzantine composition." It contains, indeed, nothing more than the materials of the Byzantine composition; but I know no Byzantine Nativity which at all resembles it in the grace and life of its action. And, for full a century after Giotto's time, in northern Europe, the Nativity was represented in a far more conventional manner than this; usually only the heads of the ox and ass are seen, and they are arranging, or holding with their mouths, the drapery of the couch of the Child; who is not being laid in it by the Virgin, but raised upon a kind of tablet high above her in the centre of the group. All these early designs, without exception, however, agree in expressing a certain degree of languor in the figure of the Virgin, and in making her recumbent on the bed. It is not till the fifteenth century that she is represented as exempt from suffering, and immediately kneeling in adoration before the Child. _ |
||