The Manger and the Cross

I don't usually pay much attention to art. Don't get me wrong--I like art and visiting art galleries, but when I see something about art in the paper or on the web, I usually gloss over it. Today was different. Today I read about a discovery at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts that struck me sideways like a gust of air.

Apparently there's a painting kept there at the MFA called "The Nativity" by a Renaissance painter named Jacopo Tintoretto. I've never heard of him and never seen the painting, but the article describes the work as very large, somewhat pedestrian and, truth be told, not very good. At least that's what the critics say. But recently, during a routine restoration of the painting, the staff there made a startling discovery. An x-ray revealed that Tintoretto had used this canvas before, and they found that lying beneath the images of Mary and the Baby Jesus and the shepherds and all the rest was a portion of an even larger painting that the artist never completed. I guess artists did this all the time (recycling canvas, perhaps?), but here's the rub: the painting underneath was of Jesus hanging on the cross. All you can see are his legs, but it's impossible to mistake it--that's the death of Jesus, hiding beneath his birth. (Click here if you want to glimpse a remarkable graphic of the two scenes.)

The article goes on to explain the nature of these things, that Tintoretto probably didn't like how he had done the crucifixion and just decided to paint over it like a schoolboy might write over a mistake on a math problem instead of using an eraser.

Perhaps.

But I think there's something deeper going on here. And I wonder if Tintoretto didn't do this on purpose, a clever transfiguration of canvas silently whispering to us from the 16th century. "Take a closer look," he seems to be saying. "Look beneath the peaceful manger and the light of the stable and see the very purpose of this birth. The crucifixion is why he came."

The wise men knew this of course; why else would one of the gifts be what amounts to ancient embalming fluid? But was Tintoretto picking up on this idea when he decided to reuse his canvas? We do not and cannot know. But I suspect he did.

It is tempting to forget, even now just two days before Christmas, that Jesus came to die. Too morbid, we say to ourselves, too sad and scary to think of this beautiful baby hanging on a cross. No, we'd rather stay focused on the baby even though we know his fate. Come to think of it, Santa is a safer option altogether.

So it turns out that the painting of the cross completes the painting of the manger, that the crucifixion lies in the shadow beneath the birth. Maybe Jacopo Tintoretto knew this all along.