The Nativity (1470-5) by Piero della Francesca (click on the image for a larger version). Photograph: National Gallery
Perhaps it's the Virgin's face - serene, poised, but also a little surprised at being so grown-up. Or maybe it's the baby, lying naked and vulnerable, a coil of wriggling flesh on the ground. But mostly I love this painting for its gaggle of angels, bellowing in song, plucking and sawing away at lutes and viols, two with their eyes closed as if they've been caught mid-blink. The heavenly host reimagined as a fidgety school choir.
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours meandering around the National Gallery in search of the ideal Christmas painting, and here, in front of Piero della Francesca's Nativity (1470-5), I wonder if I've found it. You feel that everything is present, a second or two of stillness snatched from the bustle of the Christmas story. The shepherds have just arrived, and are busy telling a nonchalant Joseph of astonishing visions in the sky. The cattle are getting restless. The three kings are due to turn up any moment. Jesus, just possibly, is about to burst into tears. To the left of the nativity scene, the road from Galilee winds wearily up mountains and down again - plenty of distance travelled, plenty still to go.
The colours, though some have darkened, are gorgeous, delectable Piero: earthy terracotta for the shepherds, the vivid pink swag of Joseph's cloak (more terracotta for his carpenter's feet), mother and child done in purest blue and cream. Even so, this, the painter's last surviving work, is probably unfinished, its finer details eroded from the board or never even applied. Somehow I think this only adds to its charm, and also to its intensity. It suits the makeshift quality of the scene: a stopgap, barn-like stable; that village choir of angels, loudly hollering praise.
What you look for in a Christmas painting echoes, I suppose, what you hope the whole thing might be about. I've always been drawn by depictions of awkward human drama in the familiar story: annunciations delivered to Virgins too overawed to understand; muddy, rustic nativities; crowded, slight-too-full adorations.
A close second to Piero, I think, is Bruegel's Adoration of the Kings, also in the National Gallery so also part of my whirwind lunchtime tour. It's a far darker experience. Soldiers crowd into the scene, pikes and halberds jostling menacingly - as of course they will at the other end of Jesus's life. Mary is stoutly framed and solidly dressed against the northern European cold. A shy Jesus squirms in his mother's lap, anxious to get away.
Again, though, it's the homely details that snag the eye - an onlooker squinting myopically, and hopelessly in the wrong direction, through bottle-bottom spectacles (this is 1564, and glasses hadn't evolved much since Roger Bacon). A posturing, slightly-too-fancy Balthasar, or the boozy sadness written onto the face of the bearded man to the far left of the image. It's sometimes said about this painting that Bruegel, satirist and human comedian, takes the opportunity offered by the nativity to mock our fallen state, scorn our blindness. As a non-believer, I'm not so sure. Maybe some of us are like the soldier in the slightly ill-fitting armour standing directly above the baby - peering into the scene, a little befuddled, doing our best to work out what's really going on.
But what do you look for in a Christmas scene? Which paintings do you wish you could rip off the walls of art galleries and stick up on the walls alongside the tinsel and ivy? Post your suggestions below.
