The Nativity

When it was painted

In December 1391 a young Florentine named Piero di Giovanni took his vows at the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli. He was about twenty. He received a new name in religion, Lorenzo, and the world came to know him as Lorenzo Monaco. Monaco simply means monk.

His monastery was famous for its giant illustrated choir books. After he became a deacon, Lorenzo painted pictures inside them. Many scholars think this is where he learned to pack a whole scene into a tiny space.

Then something unusual happened. In 1402 he joined the Florentine painters' guild, and he signed up under his old lay name, Piero di Giovanni. By then he was living outside the monastery walls and taking commissions like any city painter. He was a monk and a working artist at the same time.

When he painted this Nativity, around 1406 to 1410, Lorenzo was in his late thirties. A few years later, in 1414, he finished a large Coronation of the Virgin for the high altar of his own monastery. It now hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. This small panel took a much longer road. It became part of the Lehman family collection in New York and came to the Metropolitan Museum in 1975.

Now go back to the gold lines around the baby. A child glowing on the bare ground, with Mary kneeling before him, became a popular way to paint the Nativity after the visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden became widely known. Here a monk who had learned his craft on the pages of choir books drew that light stroke by stroke, on a panel just 31 centimeters wide.