The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sandro Botticelli · oil on canvas, about 108.5 by 75 cm, an upright · the one canvas as it stands, its image whole, the band of Greek across the top damaged in part · three registers: a ring of twelve angels dancing against an opening of gold; the shed before a rock cave, the Virgin kneeling to the Child, Joseph, the ox and the ass, two processions led by angels; three embraces of angels and men, and devils fleeing into the ground · dated by its own inscription to the end of 1500, which by the Florentine year may fall early in 1501 · some three centuries in private hands and out of sight, in England from about 1800 · National Gallery, London
Mode
Devotional painting in a deliberate archaism: hieratic scale, a stacked and flattened space, a gold heaven, a written prophecy across the top
Mythos
The Nativity as the end as well as the beginning: heaven in its ring, the birth at the centre of the earth, the adversary driven under it, and the orders reconciled
Phase
One moment read as the last: the hour of deliverance after the troubles named in the inscription
Presentation
One canvas, about 108.5 by 75 cm, an upright of about 1.45 to 1; three registers below a band of Greek
Register
Joy and consolation throughout; tenderness in the embraces, stillness at the centre, a small comic dread in the fleeing devils
Scale
A canvas a little over a metre high, holding heaven, earth and the pit
Governing Proposition
A shed before a rock, the Virgin kneeling at a size no other figure approaches, a ring of angels dancing in the gold above and, below, angels taking men into their arms while devils slip into cracks in the ground. Across the top the painter writes that he made the picture at the end of 1500, in the troubles of Italy, inside the time of the Apocalypse. Its wager, in the year Florentine painting was going forward into the space of Leonardo, is that an older order, rank as size and the vertical as the order of being, can show the birth of Christ and the end of history as one event, and the present catastrophe as the last hour before reconciliation.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Mystic Nativity is a single canvas, about 108.5 centimetres high by 75 wide, an upright of about 1.45 to 1. It is catalogued here as oil on canvas; it has also been described as tempera on canvas, and nothing in the judgment turns on the difference. Across the top runs a band of Greek in which the painter dates the picture himself, to the end of 1500. The Florentine year then began on 25 March, so the date may fall early in 1501 by the modern reckoning. The unit scored is the one canvas as it stands: its image is whole, and the band of writing, part of the work, is damaged in places and doubtful in its reading.
The inscription is usually rendered, in substance, as follows: that Sandro painted the picture at the end of 1500, in the troubles of Italy, in the half time after the time, according to the eleventh chapter of John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosing of the devil for three and a half years; that the devil will then be chained, according to the twelfth chapter, and will be seen trodden down as in this picture. The wording is not given here as exact, and no phrase of it is quoted. What it does is plain: it places a dated picture, made by a named hand, inside the prophetic calendar of the last things.
Two pieces of history stand behind it as context and are not scored: the French invasions of Italy from 1494, and the preaching of Savonarola in Florence and his execution in 1498. The connection to Savonarola is widely argued and probable; the picture does not document it, and it is weighed here as context only. Who the canvas was made for is not known. The Primavera and The Birth of Venus, the painter’s two great mythologies, are context and comparison. What the canvas carries without dispute is its order: three registers stacked under the band of words, and a single vertical running through them.
Movement II
At the top, twelve angels dance in a ring in the sky, against an opening of gold. They hold olive branches, and from the branches hang crowns and scrolls. The ring is drawn as one continuous rhythm: limbs, drapery and branches are carried round by a single movement, and the circle is stopped at the top of its turn. The gold behind it opens like the inside of a dome. This is the heaven the inscription promises, and it cannot be taken away; it is also the picture’s first height, a dance in the air that is transport rather than ornament.
The ring is a form only painting can hold. A circle of motion stopped at the top of a turn cannot be had in words, and it cannot be had in the deep space the painter’s contemporaries were building, where the angels would recede and the circle would become an ellipse in a landscape. Here it lies flat against the gold, a closed figure at the head of the picture, and the ancient image of the heavenly dance becomes the roof of a cosmos. Colour is set in deliberate triads: the three angels on the shed’s roof wear white, red and green, the colours of Faith, Hope and Charity, and the same colours are repeated round the ring.
The line is the making, and it carries the ring, the embraces below and the fluttering ends of drapery and scrolls that are the picture’s breath. The painter of the Primavera knew what perspective and proportion could do and set them aside. The costs are real, and they are not the archaism’s. The middle register is crowded and less resolved than the sky and the ground; the faces are repeated types; the shed and the rock are drawn more as signs than built as things; and the handling is not the most refined of his career. The Made stands at 8.8, below the Primavera at 9.2, and the gap is in the middle of the canvas.
Movement III
At the bottom, three pairs of angels and men embrace. The angels draw the men into their arms, and the contour knots each pair into a single form. Around them small devils flee into cracks in the ground. Take the embraces away and the end of time in this picture has no event in it, only an announcement; with them, the reconciliation is an act, seen. The devils add a small, almost comic dread, and they are the only dread in the picture. Its register is joy and consolation from top to bottom, and the terror the Apocalypse might have carried is not there.
What the picture discloses can be stated. The birth of Christ and the end of history are one event seen twice, and the present, the troubles of Italy, is the hour before deliverance. The condition of mind it shows holds outside 1500: hope held at the moment of catastrophe, the private conviction that the worst of the present is the last darkness before things are made whole. The inscription fixes that to a year and a crisis, which makes the disclosure historical as well as devotional. It is held at 8.0 on The Unconcealment because the meaning is a doctrine illustrated more than a truth the image uncovers, and because its sharpest content is carried in words. The image’s own disclosure is the embrace.
The picture is built as a cosmos: heaven in its closed ring, the earth with the birth at its centre, the underworld opening at the bottom to take the adversary. The Nativity is made load-bearing as the end as well as the beginning, and the three tiers carry that identity in the composition itself. The orders it holds follow from that: the sacred entire; history, by the inscription; the family at the centre; shepherds and travellers, labour present in the shepherds; and the reconciliation of the human and the divine. The state is only a word in the band, consciousness goes no further than devotion and one bowed head, and nature is rock and a few trees. The Encompassed stands at 7.6: a small canvas holding more orders than its size suggests.
Movement IV
At the centre stands a thatched shed before a rock cave. The Virgin kneels before the Child, and she is much larger than every other figure in the picture, several times the height of the shepherds and the embracing men. Joseph sits hunched at the left, asleep or in sorrow; the picture does not settle which. The ox and the ass are behind. From the left an angel leads men in long robes toward the Child, Magi or companions, the identification open; from the right an angel leads shepherds. Three angels on the roof, with their book, join the earth to the heaven above. Olive branches are carried throughout.
The scale is deliberate. Botticelli had commanded perspective and proportion in the 1470s and 1480s, and Florentine painting in the 1490s was carrying them toward Leonardo. Here figures are sized by rank, the space is flattened and stacked, the heaven is gold and a written prophecy runs across the top: a turn backward, toward an older and visionary order, in the year the High Renaissance was arriving. The late manner cost the painter favour. The stake is discounted, because the picture was out of public sight for three centuries and because an archaism turns back along a known path. The Swerve stands at 8.2, a real turn, privately placed.
The stacked space is what the picture knows. Size is rank and the vertical is the order of being, heaven over earth over the pit, and the law holds from end to end: the gold at the top and the cracks at the bottom obey it, the olive branch carried in every register is its thread, and the Virgin is largest because she is nearest the event. Put the same figures in the space of a Leonardo and the Virgin could not be the size she is; the cosmos would become a landscape. What yields is in the middle: the two processions make one statement twice, with variation, and the shed’s construction is less firmly bound to the law than the ring and the embraces. The Living Form stands at 8.7 and The Inner Law at 8.8.
Movement V
In its own century the canvas reached no one the record shows. It was in private hands, and the field went the other way, to Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, to the space and mass this picture refuses. Its reach began after it came to England about 1800 and entered the National Gallery, through the nineteenth century’s recovery of Botticelli by Ruskin, Pater, the Pre-Raphaelite circle and Burne-Jones, and in that recovery it was one source among several, not the source. Its wide later fame as a Christmas image is presence, not reach. Pressure on Tradition stands at 7.6, against 8.6 for the Primavera, 8.4 for The Birth of Venus and 8.6 for Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari Altarpiece, the other Nativity of shepherds and a shed on the desk, a picture that moved Florence.
The questions it raises are real and still argued: what the Greek says where it is damaged, and how its time after the time is to be counted; who the picture was for, and how far it answers Savonarola; who the robed men are; whether Joseph sleeps or grieves; whether the archaism is the painter’s conviction, a patron’s wish or the convention of a devotion; what the crowns and scrolls on the branches say. The surface yields on return, in the drapery, the faces of the embracing pairs, the devils in their cracks. But the debate turns largely on one inscription and one context, and The Bottomless Well stands at 8.4, against 9.1 for the Primavera. Overall the canvas stands at 8.4, below the Primavera at 8.7 and The Birth of Venus at 8.6, and a tenth below Fra Angelico’s Annunciation at San Marco at 8.5.
The image is whole after about five centuries, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost; the band of Greek is damaged in part. For some three centuries the picture was out of sight in private hands, and it has been on view and widely reproduced since it came to the National Gallery. A canvas of 1500 is rarer than a panel and more vulnerable, and the figure is held near the foot of its row for the long absence and the damaged text: The Imperishable stands at 9.2. The nearest work on another desk is Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, at 8.8, another vision of the last things made in a time of catastrophe, which moved its field as this canvas did not. At the top of the canvas the ring of angels is still turning, and at the bottom the devils are still going into the ground.
Act III · The Twelve
Taken register by register, the parts are required. The ring of angels is the heaven the inscription promises and cannot go. The embraces below are the reconciliation that the devils’ flight makes visible; take them away and the end of time has no event in it, only an announcement. The Virgin at her outsized scale is the axis on which the three registers hang. The two processions, led by angels toward the Child, are the human approach and balance each other across the shed; the roof angels join earth to heaven. What yields: the processions make one statement twice, with variation, the olive branches and crowns are multiplied for emphasis more than argument, and some rock and landscape fill the edges.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Something can be stated, and it is more than a mood. The picture says that the birth of Christ and the end of history are one event seen twice, and that the troubled present is the hour before deliverance: men and angels embrace, the devils go under the earth. It discloses a condition of mind that holds outside 1500, hope held at the moment of catastrophe, the conviction that the terrible present is the last darkness before reconciliation. The inscription fixes the image to a year and a crisis. Held at 8.0: the meaning is a doctrine illustrated more than a truth the image uncovers, and its sharpest content rests on words the painting carries in a band, not in its forms. The image’s own disclosure is the embrace.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The elevation is high and recurs. The ring of twelve angels against the gold is a summit of devotional painting: a dance in the air, drapery and olive branches carried by one rotating rhythm, the gold behind them opening like the inside of a dome. That is transport. The second height is the embraces below, angels drawing men into their arms with a tenderness the line makes urgent; the third, the Virgin’s stillness at the centre, vast and bowed. The fleeing devils add a small, almost comic dread. What holds it below the top: the register is joy and consolation throughout, with neither grandeur of scale nor the terror the Apocalypse might have carried, and the middle register is lower in pitch than the sky and the ground.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, at the level of structure. The picture is made as a cosmos: heaven above in a closed ring, the earth with the birth at its centre, the underworld opening at the bottom to take the devils. The Nativity is made load-bearing as the end as well as the beginning, and the three tiers carry that identity. The circle of angels is the ancient figure of the heavenly dance, the embrace the reconciliation of the orders, the devils driven into the earth the binding of the adversary; these are built into the composition, not hung on it. The particulars stay particular: a thatched roof, an ox, Joseph’s bowed head, a year in the inscription. Held below the top because the structure is the received Christian cosmos, given form here rather than found.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is Florentine painting of the 1490s as Botticelli had helped to make it, and its direction: perspective, proportion, a naturalism carried toward Leonardo. The departure is backward and deliberate: hieratic scale, a flattened and stacked space, figures sized by importance, a gold heaven, a written prophecy across the top. It turns from the century’s achievement toward an older, visionary order in the year the High Renaissance was arriving, and the late manner cost the painter favour. The stake is discounted twice. The canvas was out of public sight for some three centuries, so the risk was taken in a private room; and an archaism turns back along a known path rather than opening a new one. A real swerve, privately placed.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Substitute a different form and much of what the picture knows goes. The stacked space is the knowledge: a world in which size is rank and the vertical is the order of being, heaven over earth over the pit. In the space of a Leonardo the Virgin could not be the size she is, and the cosmos would become a landscape. The ring is a form only painting can hold, a circle of motion stopped at the top of a turn. The inscription joins word and image on one surface, so that the picture is also a document dated in the hand of its maker. Held a step below the top: the same programme could be carried by an altarpiece of another format or an illuminated page, with loss of rhythm and scale more than of meaning.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise: about five centuries, of which some two have been of attention. The open questions are real and argued: what the Greek says where it is damaged, and how its reckoning of time is to be counted; who the picture was for, and how far it answers Savonarola; who the robed men on the left are, Magi or companions; whether Joseph sleeps or grieves; whether the archaism is the painter’s conviction, a patron’s wish or the convention of the devotion; what the crowns and scrolls on the branches say. It yields on return, in the drapery, the faces of the embracing pairs, the devils in their cracks. Held below the higher band because the debate turns largely on one inscription and one context.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is Florentine and Italian painting about 1500. Intrinsic force is modest as reorganisation: this is a powerful late statement of an archaic devotional order, and it opened no possibility the field took up; the field went to Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, the opposite way. In its own century it reached no one the record shows; it was in private hands and out of sight. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a late reach, after the canvas came to England about 1800 and entered the National Gallery, through the nineteenth century’s recovery of Botticelli by Ruskin, Pater, the Pre-Raphaelite circle and Burne-Jones, to which it was one source among several. Delayed influence is credited and discounted; fame as a Christmas image is presence, not reach.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five centuries. Form is whole: the image the painter made stands, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost, though the band of Greek, which is part of the work, is damaged in part. Presence is charged: for some three centuries the picture was in private hands and out of sight, before it came to England and then to the National Gallery; since then it has been continuously on view and widely reproduced, and fame lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: a canvas of 1500 is rarer than a panel and more vulnerable, and its condition is not given here. The usual figure for centuries with form whole, held near the foot of that row for the long absence and the damaged text.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged as command of painting on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing in the line: the ring of angels is drawn as one continuous rhythm of limbs, drapery and branches; the embracing pairs are knotted by contour into single forms; the fluttering ends of drapery and scrolls are the picture’s breath. Colour is set in deliberate triads, the roof angels’ white, red and green repeated through the ring, against the gold and the dark rock. The archaism is a chosen idiom, not a failure of means: the painter of the Primavera knew what he set aside. The costs are charged: the middle register is crowded and less resolved, the faces are repeated types, and shed and rock are drawn as signs more than built as things.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the gold opening at the top, where the angels dance, and the cracks in the earth at the bottom, where the devils go. One law holds them: everything in the picture is placed on a single vertical of being and moves toward reconciliation. The olive branch, carried by angels in every register, is the thread of that law; the angels lead, embrace, sing and dance, so one agency runs from heaven to the pit. Scale obeys the law, not optics, and does so consistently: the Virgin is largest because she is nearest the event. The range is wide, heaven to hell, joy to flight, the eternal to a dated year. Held below the top because the middle register is less firmly bound to the law than the ring and the embraces.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held: the sacred, the whole of it, heaven, earth and the pit in one frame; history, by inscription, the troubles of Italy set inside the time of the Apocalypse; the cosmos as a vertical order; the family at the centre, a mother, a child and a bowed father; the human estate in shepherds and travellers, with labour present in the shepherds; and the reconciliation of the human and the divine. The vertical and the olive branch integrate them. What holds the axis at 7.6: the state is present only as troubles named in words, not in the image; there is no consciousness beyond devotion and one bowed head; and nature is a sign, rock and a few trees. A small canvas holding more orders than its size suggests; the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, then The Made and The Inner Law at 8.8. An image whole after about five centuries, nothing that carries its meaning lost; a line that draws a ring of twelve angels as one rhythm of limbs, drapery and branches and knots each embracing pair into one form; and a single vertical law, rank as size and the olive branch carried through every register, that holds the gold at the top and the cracks in the earth at the bottom.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 7.6: a powerful late statement of an archaic order that opened no possibility its field took up, out of sight in its own century and reaching later only as one source among several in the recovery of Botticelli. The Encompassed at 7.6: the sacred, history, the family and the human estate held on one vertical, with the state only a word in the inscription, no consciousness beyond devotion and nature a sign. Then The Unconcealment at 8.0: a doctrine illustrated more than a truth uncovered, its sharpest content carried in words.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls short by three tenths, The Unconcealment at 8.0 by five tenths and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 by nine tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The twelve sum to 101.0, an average of 8.42 that displays 8.4, below the 9.0 the summit also requires; the work is held in Tier IV on the gate and on the aggregate alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it hangs in the National Gallery, London (the three registers, the ring of angels, the shed and the processions, the embraces and the devils, and the band of Greek), of what has been argued about it and of what became of it; that knowledge is good on the image and its main facts and thinner on the condition of the canvas, on its history before about 1800 and on the full reading of the Greek. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the one canvas, about 108.5 by 75 cm, as it stands; its image is whole, the inscription is damaged in part, and its condition is weighed only as a fact of survival. The medium is given as oil on canvas; it has also been described as tempera on canvas, and the judgment does not turn on it. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the Primavera, The Birth of Venus and the painter’s other works, which are context and comparison; Savonarola’s preaching and execution in 1498 and the French invasions from 1494, which are context, the link to Savonarola probable and not documented by the picture. The nineteenth-century recovery of Botticelli is reception, weighed on reach. No words are quoted; the inscription is given in substance only, as it is usually rendered, and Ruskin and Pater are named, not quoted. Left open: the exact wording of the damaged Greek and how its reckoning of time is counted; who the picture was made for; whether the robed men are Magi or companions; whether Joseph sleeps or grieves. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the Gallery’s inventory number and the year of acquisition, the collections the canvas passed through before it came to England, whether it is the only work the painter signed and dated, the number of the devils and of the figures in each procession, any early account of the painter’s decline, what the scrolls on the branches carry, and the canvas’s condition and treatment.