St Sylvester, 31st December, 2023
It is the final day of the Octave of Christmas, what in Orthodoxy is termed the Apodosis - the 'Leave Taking'; and I thought I'd conclude this little sequence of paintings with this arresting image: 'The Madonna & Child with the infant St John the Baptist' attributed to the Renaissance Florentine Master Sandro Botticelli, (14415-1510). It currently resides in the Barber Institute in Birmingham. Sadly the Institute, unlike the Fitzwilliam Museum, does not list provenance online.
The painting depicts the meeting of the infant Christ with St John the Baptist, a subject that seems to have been continuously popular with artists in the Middle Ages and beyond. It is however an event that is apocryphal but not impossible. There is a near identical painting that, according to Wiki, is in the Palazzo Pitti collection, though it is not listed in the online gallery collection. It is the mirror image of the painting in the Barber. The colour of the Barber painting however seems, to judge by a comparison of photographs on the internet, to be the more sombre. Both paintings seem a long way from the usual 'sweetness and light' Botticelli style. The extraordinary element lies in the composition which seems to echo depictions of the adult Christ's Deposition from the Cross. Christ appears as one dead.
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