The mystery of the woman who invented the Nativity

    We don’t hear enough of Birgitta Birgersdotter and her immense contribution to Christmas. Basically, she invented it. These days, alas, her fabulous involvement goes under the radar. It never used to.

    Birgitta was from Uppland in Sweden. She was born in about 1303 and when she was 13 she was married off to Ulf Gudmarsson, Lord of Narke, to whom she bore eight children. In 1341 she and Ulf set off on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. That’s when it started to grow spooky.

    Since the age of ten, when Christ had appeared to her on the cross, Birgitta had been having visions. They came to her at night and she would carefully write them down as she travelled around the medieval world, from Santiago to Rome to Jerusalem.

    After her death in 1373 her descriptions of these visions were translated into Latin and circulated as the Revelationes Coelestes, or Celestial Revelations. They became the must-read imaginings of the Middle Ages. And in 1391 Birgitta Birgersdotter from Uppland was canonised as St Bridget of Sweden.

    Her most famous revelation concerned Christmas, or, more specifically, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Just before she died, on a visit to the Holy Land, she saw Mary giving birth miraculously — her womb shrunken, her virginity intact — to the holy infant. Mary, blonde and beautiful, “inebriated with divine sweetness”, was kneeling in prayer before the child. Jesus was naked, glowing with a light so bright “the sun was not comparable to it”. The ass and the ox were there. God was present, up in the heavens.

    If all this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the standard vision of the Nativity, as presented in innumerable paintings, sculptures and cribs in innumerable homes, churches and museums. This is the vision we are bombarded with every Christmas.

    When I started out on the journey of making a film about the Nativity in art — it is, after all, one of art’s greatest and most popular subjects — I expected all the sources to lead back to the Bible. Surely the Bible has the best description of the big birth in Bethlehem?

    In fact, there’s almost nothing. Only one of the four Gospels, the Gospel of Luke, describes the Bethlehem birth. All Luke tells us, in just a couple of lines, is that Jesus was wrapped in “swaddling clothes” and “there was no room at the inn”. That’s it. No mention of stables. No oxen or asses. No glowing Jesus. No singing angels. No Three Kings. They only pop up later as the “Magi from the East” who appear before Herod in the Gospel of Matthew.

    If the Bible tells us so little, where does all the famous imagery of the Nativity that we know so well come from? From Bridget and her medieval revelations. Everything goes back to her.

    As it’s a film about the Nativity in art, I hoped to show the earliest works that survive, and was expecting to discover lots of examples from the first 1,000 years of Christianity. The birth of Christ — the first Christmas — must surely have been significant from the early days, right? Wrong. As an artistic subject, it barely existed before Bridget. What’s more, the earliest Nativity I could track down, a sculpture in the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens, was unrecognisable as a Nativity. No stable. No Three Kings. No Mary or Joseph! Just a swaddled baby Jesus with an ox and an ass! What are the beasts doing there? Luke doesn’t mention them.

    It turns out that they come from a much earlier bit of the Bible, the Book of Isaiah. One of Isaiah’s puzzling prophesies tells us that “the ox and the ass will recognise their master”, but the people of Israel will not. Early Christian theologians, fretting over these resonant lines, interpreted them as meaning that when Jesus is born, even dumb animals will recognise Him as the Messiah, but the Jews won’t. Thus the earliest Nativities ignored the usual cast and focused solely on the animals.

    Pretty much every great western artist has painted a Nativity. With so few facts available, and only the crazy mystic visions of St Bridget as guidance, art has been free to let its imagination roam. The absence of information has been a blessing.

    In the Hieronymus Bosch work The Adoration of the Magi, in the Prado in Madrid, the holy birth takes place in a wildly ramshackle stable with ragged shepherds climbing precariously on to the roof for a better look. Mary is there, blonde and virginal as Bridget described, with a naked Christ on her lap. The ass is there. But there’s no sign of Joseph. He’s actually in the panel on the left, drying nappies by a fire. According to Bridget’s vision, “the old man . . . went outside so as not to be present at the birth”. Bosch has turned him into a hen-pecked older husband.

    Only rarely, though, did a Nativity play it for laughs. The ones that moved me most — the ones that thump you in the heart — are the ones that recognise Jesus’s birth as the prelude to his death. Jesus came down to Earth to save us. And to do that he had to sacrifice himself on the cross.

    A great Caravaggio in Messina, Sicily, The Adoration of the Shepherds, makes that point atmospherically with a huge expanse of looming darkness above the bedraggled Nativity cast, and by presenting Mary and Joseph, tragically, as ragged refugees, forced to have their child on the hard floor of a cold barn.

    But even that is subtle compared with the Saint Columba altarpiece in Munich, by Rogier van der Weyden. There’s the baby Jesus. There’s Mary. There’s the ox and the ass. And hanging above them all, pinned centrally to the wall of the stable, is the ultimate spoiler: a wooden Crucifixion.

    The Mystery of the Nativity is on Sky Arts on Tuesday 20 December at 8pm