The Mystical Nativity

The Mystical Nativity is a modern name given to an oil painting on canvas executed c. 1500–1501 by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli that is held in the National Gallery collection in London. It is his only signed work and has an unusual iconography for a painting of the Nativity. Other aspects of the work are unusual as well.

The Greek inscription by the painter at the top of the painting translates as: 'This painting, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three and a half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture'. Botticelli believed he was living during the Great Tribulation, and possibly due to the upheavals in Europe at the time, may have been predicting Christ's millennium as stated in the Book of Revelation.

The painting is connected with the influence of Girolamo Savonarola, whose influence appears in a number of late paintings by Botticelli, although the scene depicted in the painting may have been specified by those commissioning the work.

The painting uses the earlier medieval convention of showing the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus larger both than other figures and their surroundings rather than following the advances seen in early Renaissance art; this distortion was certainly created deliberately for effect, as earlier works by Botticelli use correct graphical perspective.

The painting is not to be confused with the Mystical Nativity or Adoration in the Forest by Filippo Lippi, now in Berlin.