Singing in exultation

Every Christmas, I face the problem of choosing an official card. The National Gallery Company sends through the range of choice some time in June, when it all seems far off. I can choose from the ‘Wilton Diptych’ (well, it’s not very Christmassy apart from the fact that it has a gold background) to the Leonardo Cartoon (too well-known) to a Chardin still-life (too secular for my taste because I still feel that Christmas should be about more than a bottle of wine). This year I have chosen a detail from Velázquez’s ‘The Immaculate Conception’, in spite of the fact that, as a detail, it looks rather too reminiscent of a Roman Catholic keepsake, bought in the side-aisle of a pilgrimage church. I chose it as a subliminal reminder that our Velázquez exhibition closes not long after Christmas (book now!) and has certainly been my most memorable event of the year.

In choosing images for a Christmas card, I realise that I am influenced by inherited notions of what Christmas should look like and that upstairs in the National Gallery I can take my choice. Many of the images are northern European and I never quite feel that they conform to my image of events which may or may not have taken place in the Holy Land two millennia ago. They are too precisely delineated, too time-specific. Perhaps it is also the effect of illustrated bibles from my childhood, which always showed rather saccharine Victorian images of the hot and parched landscape of Palestine.

So, much as I admire Pieter Bruegel’s great painting of ‘The Adoration of the Kings’, which is the National Gallery’s December Painting of the Month, I find that its gritty northern realism, the awkwardness of the Christ child, the wizard-like king who kneels down while offering the gift of myrrh and, most of all, the wilful ordinariness of the Virgin are too everyday for my religious tastes, essentially too coarse.