Sandro Botticelli’s “Mystic Nativity,” painted in 1500.
2 thoughts on “Today’s Art”
As an avowed atheist, I wish you a Merry Christmas. Ive decided my weapons in the war on Christmas will be kindness, charity and reason. Fight fire with fire, I always say.
It seems to me that Christmas, whatever its religious underpinnings, is a cultural phenomenon—one going back centuries. Botticelli’s painting is part of that, as is Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus and nativity sets with penguins in them. I like the culture—the candles, the trees, the music, the gift-giving. And, as Scrooge’s nephew Fred put it:
But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!
As an avowed atheist, I wish you a Merry Christmas. Ive decided my weapons in the war on Christmas will be kindness, charity and reason. Fight fire with fire, I always say.
It seems to me that Christmas, whatever its religious underpinnings, is a cultural phenomenon—one going back centuries. Botticelli’s painting is part of that, as is Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus and nativity sets with penguins in them. I like the culture—the candles, the trees, the music, the gift-giving. And, as Scrooge’s nephew Fred put it: