Nativity

Nativity may refer to:

Nativity (Campin)

Nativity is a 1420 panel painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Robert Campin. The work is noted for distilling three episodes from the life of Christ into a single panel, rather than presenting them in triptych format. The scenes are, from left to right, the birth of Christ, the Adoration of the Magi and the adoration of the shepherds. The painting is harshly realistic; the Child Jesus and his parents are shown in poverty; the figures crowd within a single space shared with animals, in a room with a thatched roof with a hole and broken-down walls. In this Campin abandons the traditional narrative.

The Virgin is presented as in her teens, Joseph as a much older man. Four angels hover above them, holding gifts. Two of them hold a banner with lettering addressed to midwives in the lower portion of the panel; it reads "Tangue puerum et sanabaris" (touch the child and you shall be healed). From the little record we have of Campin, he was a major pioneer and innovator of painting, and here his appeal to the poverty of the Holy Family. His skill with oil paint is reflected in the positioning of the central figures in the extreme foreground, giving the panel a very tight and focused feel, despite the highly detailed background details and landscape. The hut is slanted compared to the outline of the frame, a device later adopted by Rogier van der Weyden.

Nativity! (film)

Nativity! is a British comedy directed by Debbie Isitt and released on 27 November 2009. The film stars Martin Freeman and Ashley Jensen. The film is written by its director, Debbie Isitt, but is also partially improvised. The film premiered on 23 November 2009 in the SkyDome Arena, Coventry, England. It was released in cinemas on 27 November three weeks after rival festive film Disney's A Christmas Carol opened.

A sequel Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger was released in November 2012, and a third film, with filming starting in November 2013, was released in November 2014

Plot

Paul Maddens (Martin Freeman) is a "frustrated, under-achieving primary school teacher" who once had ambitions of being successful as an actor, producer or director. Every year St Bernadette's Catholic school in Coventry, where he teaches, competes with a local Protestant private school (Oakmoor) to see who can produce the best nativity play. Paul hates Christmas because his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Lore (Ashley Jensen), who attended drama school with him, left him at Christmas before he could propose to her. Despite this, the St Bernadette's headteacher Mrs Bevans (Pam Ferris) tasks him with running their nativity play this year, and gives him a new class teaching assistant called Mr Poppy (Marc Wootton), who turns out to be as much of a child as the rest of Paul's class.

Nativity (Christus)

The Nativity is a devotional mid-1450s oil-on-wood panel painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus. It shows a nativity scene with grisaille archways and trompe-l'œil sculptured reliefs. Christus was influenced by the first generation of Netherlandish artists, especially Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, and the panel is characteristic of the simplicity and naturalism of art of that period. Placing archways as a framing device is a typical van der Weyden device, and here likely borrowed from that artist's Altar of Saint John and Miraflores Altarpiece. Yet Christus adapts these painterly motifs to a uniquely mid-15th century sensibility, and the unusually large panel – perhaps painted as a central altarpiece panel for a triptych – is nuanced and visually complex. It shows his usual harmonious composition and employment of one-point-perspective, especially evident in the geometric forms of the shed's roof, and his bold use of color. It is one of Christus's most important works. Max Friedländer definitely attributed the panel to Christus in 1930, concluding that "in scope and importance, [it] is superior to all other known creations of this master."

Nativity at Night

The Nativity at Night or Night Nativity is an Early Netherlandish painting of about 1490 by Geertgen tot Sint Jans in the National Gallery, London (NG 4081). It is a panel painting in oil on oak, measuring 34 × 25.3 cm., though it has been cut down in size on all four sides. The painting shows the Nativity of Jesus, attended by angels, and with the Annunciation to the shepherds on the hillside behind seen through the window in the centre of the painting. It is a small painting presumably made for private devotional use, and Geertgen's version, with significant changes, of a lost work by Hugo van der Goes of about 1470.

Painting

Like many paintings of the Nativity, the depiction is influenced by the visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373), a very popular mystic. Shortly before her death, she described a vision of the infant Jesus as lying on the ground, and emitting light himself:

Many depictions reduced other light sources in the scene to emphasize this effect, and the Nativity remained very commonly treated with chiaroscuro through to the Baroque. Here the sources of light are the infant Jesus himself, in accordance with Bridget's vision, who is the sole source of illumination for the main scene inside the stable, the shepherds' fire on the hill behind, and the angel who appears to them. In fact this effect now goes beyond what was intended by the artist, as the painting was damaged in a fire in 1904, when it was in a private collection in Berlin. The different shades of blue given the upper and lower parts of the Virgin's clothing and the sky outside now appear as murky dark browns or blacks, and the painting is generally darker. The painting had been cut down by 1901. There is a copy of the painting in the Diocesan Museum in Barcelona, which suggests that the original size was about 45 × 31 cm. In this the rays emanating from the Christ-Child are more evident, and the animals behind less so.

Nativity (Correggio)

The Nativity (also known as The Holy Night (or La Notte) or as Adoration of the Shepherds) is a painting finished around 1529–1530 by the Italian painter Antonio da Correggio. It is housed in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

The work was commissioned from Correggio in October 1522 by Alberto Pratoneri for the family chapel in the church of San Prospero of Reggio Emilia: completed at the end of the decade, it was placed in the chapel in 1530. In a what was considered a minor sacrilege, the painting was absconded in 1640 by duke Francesco I d'Este and taken to his private gallery, it was moved to Dresden in 1746.

The artist, following the trail blazed by a number of celebrated works by Titian, interpreted a scene that is fully 'à la chandell' ("of the candle") and produced an outstanding result in the Chiaroscuro treatment of light. The scene pivots around the Child, surrounded by Mary's arms, with a group of shepherds on the left, of which the bearded figure is portrayed in the same position of Jerome in the Madonna with St. Jerome (c. 1523). On the right are the traditional presepe animals and St. Joseph. The upper left part features several angels reminiscent the ardite positions in Correggio's dome of the Cathedral of Parma, executed in the same years.