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001 Nativity and Crucifixion in Art.pptx

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Crucifixion scenes have a long and distinguished history in Western art, from the earliest Byzantine and Gothic works to late-Renaissance masterpieces by Michelangelo and El Greco. We've put together some of our favourites in this gallery.

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Crucifixion scenes have a long and distinguished history in Western art, from the earliest Byzantine and Gothic works to late-Renaissance masterpieces by Michelangelo and El Greco. We've put together some of our favourites in this gallery.

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This page from a 13th century illuminated manuscript compresses the story into a severe, architectural design with strong primary colours. For all the apparent naivety, such images have a power and a directness missing from many later, more elaborate interpretations.

3. Giotto, Scenes from the Life of Christ: 1. Nativity: Birth of Jesus 1304-06, Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua

Giotto's fresco gives the Christmas story unprecedented drama and realism, through forms as monumental as the Tuscan mountain landscape. Yet there's enormous tenderness and pathos in the attitudes of the Madonna and the apparently exhausted Joseph.

4. Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi 1423, Tempera on wood, 300 x 282 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Just when Giotto had stripped painting back to narrative essentials, the Gothic spirit struck back with Gentile's fabulous, near oriental opulence. The childlike euphoria of the patterning and gilding echoes our desire for a moment of richness and plenty amid the starkness of winter.

5. Pero della Francesca, Nativity 1470-75, Oil on poplar panel, 124 x 123 cm, National Gallery, London

The ultimate in the cool, lucid Tuscan Madonna, with everything arranged with a musical clarity and serenity that is made explicit by the radiant singers and musicians. An intellectual, near mathematical approach that is at the same time superbly joyous.

6. Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Nativity, at Night 1484-90. Oil on oak, 34 x 25 cm. National Gallery, London

The Babe spits out a near radioactive radiance in this startling painting from a little known Dutch primitive. The stark clarity of the lighting, the mixture of naive provincialism and intense reverence make for an unforgettably moving image.

7. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Adoration of the Kings 1564, Oil on wood, 111 x 84 cm. National Gallery, London

A wonderfully grotesque Flemish Madonna that is full of warmth and humour. The intention may be satirical: the crowd ogling the wise men's presents from whose opulence the Child recoils.

8. Caravaggio, Adoration of the Shepherds 1609, Museo Nazionale, Messina

The original dirty realist, Caravaggio cast a prostitute and street characters in this earthy, peasant Nativity in which God becomes man as one of the destitute. Months after its completion, the artist had died of malaria while on the run from a murder charge.

9. Studio of Rembrandt 'The Adoration of the Shepherds' 1646, National Gallery

The sense of the womblike warmth of the stable, surrounded by massive, enclosing night has never been better captured than in Rembrandt's profoundly humanist vision. The glow of the Christ Child represents hope amid the depths of a northern European winter.

10. Mat Collishaw 'Nativity' 1999, Tate

Brit-Art bad boy Collishaw's Nativity is at once ironic and surprisingly traditional. The sleeping bag of a rough sleeper echoes the poverty of Caravaggio's characters, while the dazzling electric glare is something every Renaissance artist would have killed for.

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Top ten nativities in art: triumph of light

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This page from a 13th century illuminated manuscript compresses the story into a severe, architectural design with strong primary colours. For all the apparent naivety, such images have a power and a directness missing from many later, more elaborate interpretations. 3. Giotto, Scenes from the Life of Christ: 1.

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Nativity scenes are the art we see at Christmas, often on cards that put a masterpiece on the mantelpiece. Baby it's cold outside, so let's warm our hearts with a bit of Piero della Francesca or Bruegel.

Yet we close our eyes to the reality of this art. We turn Renaissance and baroque paintings into empty kitsch when we appropriate them as part of modern Christmas celebrations, which in truth have little in common with the much more religious world that created these images.

Look a bit harder and the great paintings of the nativity story that we sentimentalise at Christmas are full of death and decay. Some are are literally apocalyptic. Far from soppy, painted equivalents of a modern school nativity play, these paintings are premonitory visions of suffering that invite the most serious of meditations.

The world is ending. It is in ruins. A civilisation is collapsing around us. That is the setting of Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi and many more depictions of the infancy of Christ. In Leonardo's unfinished Adoration, the enigmatic ruins of wondrous buildings stand behind Mary and her child. Staircases lead to nowhere. Trees grow out of the crumbling structure. These ruins represent the decay of the classical pagan world. With Christ's coming, the pagan age is over; its achievements - which Renaissance artists revered - must all fall into ruin. Leonardo goes further. He also depicts a distant cavalry battle to suggest the violence of history from which Christ has come to promise deliverance.

Other paintings show the ruins of Rome in a way that is eerie and bleak, suggesting that as well as hope, the nativity also brings a painful ending of old ways. As TS Eliot puts it in his poem Journey of the Magi, "this Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death".

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Caravaggio'a Adoration of the Shepherds (1609). Photograph: Dea Picture Library/Getty Images/DeAgostini

Eliot's great, uneasy poem, about the pain as well as hope the Magi feel in seeing a revelation that leaves them uncomfortable in the "old dispensation", is very close to the true spirit of Renaissance paintings. In Pieter Bruegel the Elder's harsh portrayal of the three kings, they are exhausted old men, withered stumps of time, their myopic and senile faces unable to truly understand what they have seen.

Their gifts are troubling. Myrrh was used for embalming - it prefigures Christ's death. Even without that clue, the fact that Christ has been born to suffer for human sins is not hard to see. In Leonardo's Adoration, he reaches out to accept a gift as if accepting his fate. Part of the reason this painting is so potent as an unfinished work is that the uncoloured shadows evoke mortal thoughts.

Yet we don't just ignore dark hints in paintings of the nativity - at Christmas we glide completely over a part of the story that artists in the past portrayed with the same insight they brought to the stable scene. You won't find the Massacre of the Innocents on any Christmas cards, but it was painted as acutely as any nativity image by Bruegel, Rubens or Poussin.

Herod's massacre of the firstborn does not fit our heartwarming image of Christmas. Unfortunately nor do nativity scenes, if we look at them with both eyes open. Caravaggio's Adoration of the Shepherds includes a brilliant still life of a set of carpenter's tools in the foreground. Is this just a nice allusion to Joseph's job as a carpenter? Of course not. It is also a forewarning that one day such tools will be used to build a cross for Christ to die on.

Caravaggio includes a set of carpenter's tools. One day such tools will be used to build a cross for Christ to die on

The seriousness of this birth is such that some artists simply shun cuddly domestic detail and portray it in an utterly sombre way as a moment of revelation. Piero della Francesca's Nativity portrays Mary not nursing her child but kneeling on the earth to pray to and for him. The shepherds keep a respectful distance in front of a stable so humble and broken down that it places this mystical moment outside all human comfort. Only a choir of angels brings a silent music of joy.

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The Nativity (1470-5) by Piero della Francesca. Photograph: The National Gallery Photographi/National Gallery, London

Sandro Botticelli goes even further. His Mystic Nativity sees the holy birth not in cute human terms but as the event that ultimately foretells the Last Judgment, the end of days and the coming of a new heaven and a new earth. Devils flee into hell as angels soar aloft.

Of course Renaissance and baroque artists find joy and hope in the nativity. Angels rejoice, dumb animals recognise the weight of this moment, and all eyes are on the child who will redeem the world. It doesn't have much in common with the festive fun of our modern, highly secularised and commercial Christmas. These paintings are about death and resurrection and the shock of revelation. That nativity scene on a card is an opportunity for a moment of meditation amid the tinsel. More Silent Night than Jingle Bells.
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Look closer at nativity paintings - and see visions of apocalypse

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Nativity scenes are the art we see at Christmas, often on cards that put a masterpiece on the mantelpiece. Baby it's cold outside, so let's warm our hearts with a bit of Piero della Francesca or Bruegel. Yet we close our eyes to the reality of this art.

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Glasgow University is giving theology students what the Daily Mail calls "trigger warnings" about potentially upsetting images of the crucifixion. The theology department concedes that its course about Christ in cinema "contains graphic scenes of the crucifixion, and this is flagged up to students beforehand". Given it includes Mel Gibson's blood-spattered The Passion of the Christ, you can understand the anxiety (though the university tells us no students opted out); more recently, Martin Scorsese has featured underwater crucifixions in his new film Silence. Yet long before Jesus was dying on screen he was being nailed up in paintings and in sculpture.

One work that haunts me, and not in a good way, is a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder that I chanced on a few years ago in the great Alte Pinakothek museum in Munich. Painted in 1503, it shows not only Christ but the two thieves who died beside him. At first sight it may not seem so sensational - except for a nasty spurt of blood out of Christ's nailed feet. Then you notice that a single huge nail goes through both feet. Oh wait, this really is horrible. For the feet are bizarrely twisted together and shapeless, as if the nail has smashed bones and torn tendons in its violent riveting of flesh to wood.

Such gross deathly distortions can be seen, too, in the roughly slung up, lumpen bodies of the criminals, the slump of a head sagging into a chest, legs hanging as flaccidly as animal skins. Then you see more blood, seeping from the spear wound in Christ's torso, dripping over the face and throat of a thief who appears to have been beaten and perhaps garrotted before being crucified, streaming down an inert flank.

Cranach - who later served as best man at Martin Luther's wedding and was a magistrate responsible for several judicial murders of supposed witches - paints the crucifixion with an almost nauseating physical realism. This great and horrible picture reminds me of Francis Bacon in its insistence on the carnal facts of torture and death. Bacon's own Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c1944) is another painting nervous teachers might want to warn their students about. Bizarre gargoyles crouch and gurn, eyeless and many toothed, their grey bodies warped and stumpy. They are, perhaps, creatures made up of the leftover flesh after Christ's spirit left his body. As in Cranach's painting, Bacon's nightmare dwells not on the triumph of the soul but the decay and sickness of our biological selves.

These creatures, too low to be saved, are monsters at the base of the cross, but even Christ himself can look repulsive in art. Mattias Grünewald in 1512-16 gives him grey-green skin covered in sores and scabs. His fingers are twisted and splayed in grotesque positions of paralysed agony. As in Cranach's version, both feet are pinned together by a single nail, the bones that stick through collapsed skin horribly tautened by this brutality.

Why do Renaissance artists such as Cranach and Grünewald resort to such excess in painting the crucifixion? The theological answer is surely straightforward. God gave his own son to suffer and die as a mortal human. To grasp the nature of this sacrifice you need to picture its full tragic reality. In art, the image of a suffering Christ evolved as medieval Christianity became increasingly personal and introspective. As laypeople took more responsibility for their own piety, and the rich lavished their money on personalised Books of Hours, depictions of the crucifixion became more realistic and harrowing. Late medieval artists dwell not only on the crucifixion but the grief of Christ's followers as they collect his corpse, the agony of his mourning mother and even the inertness of his lifeless body.

Leaving aside moral panics over "trigger warnings", "politically correct universities" and a supposed "snowflake generation", it is interesting that the 21st century may shy away from the graphic nature of Christian images 500 years ago. For we are much less used to death in general. Every old parish church should have a trigger warning, and not only for images of the crucifixion. In any English church with tombs that go back to pre-Victorian times, you are guaranteed to see horribly realistic skulls with empty black eye sockets and grinning, vacant mouths. These grisly icons of death are found on Tudor and Jacobean tombs and on 18th-century memorials

One reason people before modern times wanted their crucifixions gory and their churches full of images of death was that mortality and its horrors haunted their real lives. Death was everywhere, from the sick beds of people struck down by all the diseases medicine had yet to conquer to public executions whose victims were left to rot on gibbets or, as Bruegel paints them, on open platforms at the tops of wooden poles.

In other words, when artists 500 years ago depicted the crucifixion they were not showing a totally unfamiliar sight. People were still executed and left to rot in public, just as they had been in ancient Roman times. Death was ever present.

It still is, of course, in cells and war zones. But we in wealthy peaceful countries don't usually see death on the street. We can turn our eyes away more easily from suffering. That is why we need art's tormenting images of the crucifixion - to make us see what we would rather ignore.
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Crucifixion is horribly violent - we must confront its reality head on

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Glasgow University is giving theology students what the Daily Mail calls "trigger warnings" about potentially upsetting images of the crucifixion. The theology department concedes that its course about Christ in cinema "contains graphic scenes of the crucifixion, and this is flagged up to students beforehand".

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The meaning of prayer in the life of the Christian.

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The importance of prayer in the life of a Christian in getting to know God. Be still and know I am God is the basis for all prayer..

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The Eye of Faith, Series 1, Civilisations - BBC Two

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Professor Mary Beard broaches the controversial topic of religion and art.

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Sean Fletcher explores the power of singing to express the Christian faith.