(deseret.com 12-24-24)
If you trust ChatGPT, the most commonly painted historical scenes throughout the history of the human family come from the life of Jesus Christ — with the Lord’s earliest moments in the arms of Mary among the most popular.
Approximately 200 years after his death, the first images of Christ showed up in Roman catacombs (235 A.D.) — with the first known image of his birth, “The Adoration of the Magi,” appearing on an arch in the Greek Chapel in Rome’s catacombs of Priscilla sometime over the next 100 years (late third or early fourth century). Portrayals of the wise men appearing before Mary and Jesus, according to one historical source, became “the most common scene of Jesus’ birth and childhood in early Christian art.”
According to one tradition, some early images of Mary with the baby were attempts to mimic a portrait originally drawn during her life by Luke. By the fifth century, Christian art had spread from catacombs to many public spaces, with Mary and baby Jesus continuing as a central theme of Christian art, especially during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A dizzying array of Nativity scenes have since been painted by countless other artists across centuries and countries — with sculptures, stained glass windows and ceremonial objects also displaying the iconic scene from Christ’s birth.
Latter-day Saint painter Greg Olsen acknowledges that the nativity had been portrayed so many “countless times throughout history,” that virtually “every Christian man, woman and child has already developed a very personal and treasured image in their minds of what that special night might have been like.”
That fact alone made him reluctant to move into such “sacred emotional territory” by trying his own version of these events. Yet as a subject so “quintessential” to Christianity, he says it’s one of those pieces, as a believing artist, that eventually “you just gotta do!”
Rather than trying to be different and unique, Olsen “wanted the image to feel familiar,” including the presence of three wise men. Despite not being “chronologically accurate,” he says they are part of the “magical imagery” surrounding that first Christmas night. “Who wants a Nativity set without any Wise Men?” Olsen added another kneeling woman with a small lamp, leaving her identity up to viewers.
A river of witnesses
Recalling how deeply he felt the birth of his own children was “attended to” by otherworldly beings, artist Brian Kershisnik admits getting so ”carried away” by his “river of witnesses” (which he prefers to “angels”), that there was no room in the stable for farm animals, except for one dog and her pups as sole representatives of animal-kind (the only mortal in the painting who can see the angels).
The title of Brian Kershisnik’s piece, “Nativity,” draws attention to that word’s actual meaning (the process or circumstances of being born). “Notwithstanding the overwhelming significance of Jesus coming, He came very much like you and I came,” he says. “He came into our dirt and sweat and blood and milk. He arrived into our hunger and discomfort, just as everyone else on the planet ever has … It hurt his mother and Him.”
More than the historical reality alone, Kershisnkik says his originally 17-foot long painting was trying to “fathom an emotional reality to the experience,” pointing out that “virtually all of the visual memory we have of Jesus’ birth has come from centuries of this kind of imagining — the event being so very important, the historical details so very scant.” (No animals are mentioned in the text, he points out, with the only reason we think of a stable being the single phrase, “laid in a manger”).
Kershisnik includes midwives despite no scriptural mention, saying, “The chance of a young woman having her first child away from her usual residence and not being attended by women (even strangers) seems to me very unlikely. Women would come. They would hear; they would help. I feel sure of it.”
O Holy Night
Few modern artists have captured the majesty of this night more than Rose Datoc Dall’s Nativity Quadriptych — four pieces that are originally 7 feet by 7 feet all together.
Alanna Naylor remarks on how much highlighting the heavenly hosts add to the image. And Holly Abbe notes that the artist’s use of light “draws my attention to different areas in the picture.”
Dall admits, “I have a thing for moonlight,” in response to Shannon Sidwell Knight’s observations that she had “mastered the subtleties of moonlight” in the painting, in a way that brought tears to her eyes.
Mary and Joseph together
While attempting to facilitate viewers’ own witnessing of the Savior’s birth, these artists naturally feature prominently the original witnesses in the flesh - starting with Mary and Joseph.
About her depiction of the nativity, “Love’s Pure Light,” Lee recounts to LDS Living feeling guided to colors and lighting that “draws the eye straight to baby Jesus.” In the painting itself, she highlights how each person’s hands, including Mary’s and Joseph’s, are pointing to the Savior.
Lee describes wanting viewers to “feel the beauty” in this pivotal moment — “Can you imagine being there, witnessing this beautiful moment? What did they feel? What did they say to each other?”
As part of this, she tries to capture the “love expressed between Mary and Joseph” as their momentous calling continues — looking at one another, as if to say, “Together we can do this.”
“I love how Mary is looking up at Joseph, full of love and trust for her husband,” the artist adds, pointing to how he holds the baby so his wife can rest, while she also places her hands gently under his, “helping him as he holds not only his new baby son, but his Savior.”
In all the colorful paintings Yongsung Kim creates, he says, “not only is everyone in the presence of Jesus Christ smiling, but Jesus is always smiling back at them.” Even the animals are “glad to be in His presence.” That includes his painting, “Immanuel.”
Reflecting on his painting, Kim wrote to the Deseret News that so many people can relate to the “special joy of having a child,” suggesting, “there is nothing else like it” as we are “filled with such love and great hope for who our children will become.” Kim sought to capture in this image of Mary and Joseph being “aware of the vast impact that this child, the Baby Jesus, will have on the world ”
Mary and Jesus
While Jesus is rightfully central to most depictions, some artists have sought to draw more attention to what Mary’s experience would have been in that moment. Few have done so more effectively than Liz Lemon Swindle in her paintings, “She Shall Bring Forth a Son” and “Be It Unto Me.”
“I could probably paint a hundred painting of Mary and her baby,” Swindle writes about the pieces. “The relationship of a mother and a child is not easily explained in hundreds of words, but it comes immediately to our understanding with a picture.
“How great is God’s plan that allows mere mortals to bring His children into the world, care for them, and help them make their way back to Him. How amazing that he trusts us when so much is at stake.
“I remember a moment after the birth of my first child when everyone had left and I was alone with my son for the first time” Swindle says about “Be It Unto Me.” “I looked at him lying on the bed and realized I was responsible for this new life. How could I teach him everything he needed? I was terrified.
“I held him close and the two of us cried. Those were tears of fear and tears of joy, but most of all they were tears of love.” Then she asks, “Was it different for Mary on that night in Bethlehem? Like any first-time mother she must have felt all the fear, all the joy, and all of the love that comes with a child.”
Tender shepherds
About her 2010 Nativity, Annie Henrie Nader writes of this “incredible moment for those who attended to have been able to see the Savior in those first early moments,” with the shepherds reflecting “our awe at the condescension of the Son of God.”
Eva Timothy, whose painting, “Unto Us A Son is Given,” is featured at the top of the article, created another image of a diminutive shepherd peaking over the edge of the manger, “Tender Shepherd” (a sweet theme continued in Annie Henrie Nader’s “Approaching the Manger” and “Little Shepherd Boy”).
In reflecting on the image, Eva Timothy writes about trying to capture the “wonder and joy” we can approach God with — inspired by a 7-year-old in sacrament meeting drawing pictures. Her first reaction was to dismiss the girl’s distractions with an absentminded, “That’s nice,” until she saw what the girl was writing, “Jesus is gentle. I love Jesus. I love you.”
“There was more of wisdom and love — more of Jesus — on those sheets of paper in childlike scrawl than in most sermons I can recall,” she reflects. “Little children seem to have a direct line to heaven.
“Is it any wonder that the heart of the Good Shepherd is so tightly knit with those of our tender little shepherds?”
A first temple visit
One of the most iconic images of the young child presented in the temple to Simeon is Greg Olsen’s “A Light to the Gentiles.” The artist described how painting the scene “forever changed” the way he thought about Jesus and other scriptural characters. “It brought an endearment and connection with those individuals that I had not experienced before.”
While taking photos of models for the painting, Olsen described how the poor little baby had “had enough” and started crying vigorously for his real mother a few yards away. “I watched as she held him close, rocked him gently and whispered into his ear, calming his little cries for rescue.”
That prompted Olsen to reflect, “I wonder if the baby Jesus ever acted like this?”
“It sounds rather trite and silly but I had never before imagined the baby Jesus crying,” he says — recalling how he had grown up with images of a smiling baby in a manger “looking heavenward in a sort of detached bliss.”
It was touching to Olsen that the “Christ child may have come into this world exhibiting some of the same ‘humanness’ as children.” Not diminishing his divinity in any way, he says that this did “make him more real to me.”
As Olsen was able to relate to scriptural characters as “real, living, breathing (and sometimes crying) people — people who perhaps had more in common with me and my family and friends than the romanticized versions I had previously imagined,” he experienced a “subtle yet profound shift” in how he relates to them.
Growing up
There is much less known about what happens between Jesus’ birth and the family’s flight to Egypt, and the ministry he began 30 years later. “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man,” Luke writes.
That’s all we know. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s much less painting about the same interim period. Rose Datoc Dall’s 33 other images focus on the early years of the Savior try to explore those momentous years.
Along with other glimpses of Mary carrying baby Jesus and images soon after his birth, Dall has created less common scenes from when he was a young child, such as “Hope of Israel” below.
As a young mother painting about the Savior, Dall writes that her “driving thought” behind all these images involving the young boy Savior was the thought, “what would it have been like to have the sacred responsibility of raising the Messiah” — including for Joseph (see “Joseph and Boy Jesus” below). Greg Olsen has also created glimpses of Mary and the young boy, including “Consider the Lilies” and “Just For a Moment.”
Much can be said about the larger take-aways from these iconic early events in Christ’s life. For one, “our chances for reconciliation were all but lost when … this happened,” Brian Kershisnik says. “He said He would come. Then impossibly and improbably, He did, but not as we would have expected.”
Although the “epic drama of redemption is far from over,” Kershisnik added, that message remains sure: “He came. He came. Thank God, He came.”
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