Menotti's Epiphany: Amahl's Roots in Hieronymus Bosch

Epiphany Blogging:
Hieronymus Bosch’s
The Adoration of the Magi
and Gian Carl Menotti’s
Amahl and the Night Visitors

The Adoration of the Magi by Hieronymus Bosch,
ca. 1470-75, oil and gold on wood, 28 x 22 1/4 in.,
John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

On Christmas Eve at 9:30 in 1951, an estimated five million Americans tuned in to watch an opera on television as NBC broadcast the world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors.  To introduce the opera, Menotti himself directly addressed the audience, explaining how he was inspired by the above painting by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516).

Gian Carlo Menotti introducing
the 1951 NBC broadcast of
Amahl and the Night Visitors.

Menotti’s epiphany before the painting didn’t occur at an academic level—he says nothing about the artist’s technical use of form, color, or line.  Instead, he describes a two-way interchange, where Bosch offers a unique, original vision and Menotti responds with memory and imagination, allowing the painting to direct his thoughts back to his youth.  The magic of art occurs within this exchange between two people who lived five centuries apart.

This is how Menotti described the moment of inspiration he experienced when encountering Bosch’s The Adoration of the Magi during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Details, The Adoration
of the Magi
by Hieronymus Bosch,
Metropolitan Museum
of Art

“This opera comes out of my own childhood because, you see, when I was a child I lived in Italy and in Italy we have no Santa Claus.  I imagine that Santa Claus is much too busy with American children to be able to handle all the Italian children.  Our gifts were brought to us by the three kings.  I actually never met the three kings…  How hard my little brother and I tried to keep awake at night to catch a glimpse of these three kings!  We would always fall asleep just before they arrived.  But I do remember hearing them.  I remember the weird song in the distance.  I remember the sound of the camel’s hoofs.  And I remember the tinkling of the silver bridles.

“And I remember that my favorite king was King Melchior because he had a nice long white beard.  My brother’s favorite was King Caspar whom we insisted was a little crazy and quite deaf.  I don’t know why he was so sure that he was deaf.  I suspect it was because he never brought him all the gifts he asked for.  Anyway, our people brought us the gifts and I should have been very grateful to them.  Instead I came to America and I soon forgot all about them.  Here we have so many Santa Clauses all over town and there is the big Christmas tree on Rockefeller Plaza, all the windows on Fifth Avenue, the choir in Grand Central Station, all the Christmas carols on the radio.  All these things made me forget the three dear old kings of my own childhood. 

“Well, this year I got into real trouble.  I was supposed to finish an opera for NBC and I just didn’t have an idea in my head.  So I was walking one afternoon, rather gloomy, through the Metropolitan Museum and I chanced to stop in front of this painting by Hieronymus Bosch.  And as I was looking at it suddenly I heard again the weird song of those three kings and I suddenly realized they had come back to me and they’d brought me a gift.  The opera you will hear tonight is the gift of these three kings and I hand it to you and hope you like it.  Thank you.”

Detail, The Adoration of the Magi
by Hieronymus Bosch

It’s fascinating to conjecture the extent to which Menotti genuinely drew upon this picture in composing the opera.  Just substitute Amahl for Joseph (lame and leaning upon his walking stick) and the story practically writes itself!

For a full description of the original 1951 broadcast, visit the TV Party website.

And to view that original broadcast, once the talk of the nation, here it is on YouTube!

© 2014 Lee Price

Nativity Essays: William Blake and a Gnostic-Style Manger Scene

Nativity Blogging
for the Season of Christmastide 2014-15:
William Blake’s
The Nativity

The Nativity by William Blake,
1799 or 1800, tempera on copper, 10 3/4 x 15 1/16 in.,
gift of Mrs. William Thomas Tonner, 1964,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

The most memorable Christmas Eve sermon I’ve ever heard was delivered by Pastor Brian Rhea (now pastor at Newcombtown United Methodist Church in Millville, New Jersey) shortly after the birth of his second child.  Fresh from experience, Brian vividly shared just how gross childbirth really is, with all its blood, tears, and other leaking fluids.  And he didn’t imagine the manger was all tidy and neat either!  It was truly a great sermon.

Today’s featured painting by William Blake (1757-1827) is the polar opposite.  Blake’s The Nativity has to be the most antiseptic of all childbirth paintings.  The baby literally flies out of the womb, spotless and glowing, into the hands of the waiting midwife, in this case Mary’s cousin Elizabeth.

Detail, The Nativity by William Blake,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

While it would be impossible to realistically reconcile Brian’s sermon with Blake’s painting, I’d like to think that both descriptions fall within a broad Christian tradition that’s always been open to embracing paradoxes.  Blake’s painting is the real boundary-tester.  As expressed in his poetry and artwork, Blake’s mysterious, complex, and intensely personal beliefs evince strong Gnostic tendencies, and Gnosticism has been labeled heretical by the mainstream church for nearly two thousand years.  But given a choice between celebrating visionary genius or the cold judgments of Inquisition-style church tribunals, I’ll go with genius any day.  Blake’s okay by me.

"The Tyger" by William Blake,
Songs of Innocence and
of Experience (1794),
Wikimedia Commons

William Blake dedicated his life to expressing his radical and mystical ideas through poetry, painting and etching, and the art of printing.  He’s probably best known for his poetry book Songs of Innocence and of Experience which contains the famous poem “The Tyger”:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forest of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The Nativity is one of fifty small Bible-based paintings that Blake made for Thomas Butts, an English War Office clerk, in 1899 and 1890.  For this project, Blake enjoyed considerable artistic freedom in choosing his subjects and approach.  While many of the paintings have been lost, there is enough of a record to attempt a reasonable guess at the scope of the ambitious project.  In Blake as an Artist, art historian David Bindman suggests that “the series probably consisted of approximately fifteen Old Testament subjects and thirty-five from the Life of Christ.”

Detail, The Nativity
by William Blake,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Nativity would have been the second of the Life of Christ paintings, following The Angel Gabriel appearing to Zacharias, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and preceding The Adoration of the Magi in the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.  In The Nativity, Joseph supports the unconscious Mary as she gives birth.  The child, his arms outstretched in a cruciform position, flies toward the outstretched hands of Elizabeth.  An infant John the Baptist sits in the lap of Elizabeth.  Behind Elizabeth, oxen contentedly feed from a trough.  The star of Bethlehem—cruciform, like the baby—shines through the window.

Throughout the ages, most Gnostic sects have professed a belief that the material world we live in is flawed beyond redemption and that secret knowledge is needed to unite the soul with the perfection of God’s spiritual realm.  This type of belief can become very dualistic, with earthly and human life viewed as untouchable.  A belief of this sort tends to rule out an understanding of Jesus as wholly Man as well as wholly God (a basic paradox of mainstream Christianity).  In most Gnostic sects, the earthy childbirth described in Pastor Rhea’s sermon would be altogether too yucky to apply to the spiritual being of Jesus.  Therefore, Blake paints a pristine, miraculous, and apparently pain-free birth.

Blake painted The Nativity in tempera, laying the paint over a mixture of whiting and carpenter’s glue adhered to a copper surface.  While he adopted this technique in the hope of preserving the original colors, his method failed, resulting in two centuries of darkening and surface cracking.  It’s not what Blake wanted, but I love the effect.  It brings out an other-worldly, archaic beauty in Blake’s vision that can’t be easily dismissed.  It’s hauntingly weird.

Detail, The Nativity
by William Blake,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Reference Sources

Blake as an Artist by David Bindman
William Blake:  The Seer and His Visions by Milton Klonsky
Genius by Harold Bloom
Philadelphia Museum of Art Collections

© 2014 Lee Price

Nativity Essays: Meditation on Botticelli's Virgin Adoring the Child

Nativity blogging
for the Season of Christmastide 2014-15:
Sandro Botticelli's
The Virgin Adoring the Child

The Virgin Adoring the Child by Sandro Botticelli,
1480/90, tempera on panel, 23 3/16 in. diameter,
Samuel H. Kress Collection,
National Gallery of Art

Christmas morning craziness is over but it’s still Christmastide, the twelve days of Christmas that stretch from the midnight announcement of Christmas day to the Epiphany arrival of the three Magi.  The Christmas company has departed.  Alone at last, Mary watches over her baby.  This is a part of Christmas, too.

I’m too introverted to be comfortable with the classic Nativity scenes.  They’re typically crowded with kings and their retinues, shepherds flocking down from the hills, angels on rooftops and dancing with the stars, and a stable-full of oxen and asses.  To find Mary and the baby, you have to search through all the turmoil.

The Adoration of the Kings by Sandro Botticelli,
1470-75, tempera on panel,
National Gallery, London

Painting in Florence and Rome in the late 15th century, Sandro Botticelli had a knack for crowded Nativity scenes.  In this early Botticelli Adoration of the Kings, I count more than 50 onlookers, a half-dozen horses, and a peacock (it’s on the wall on the right).  If it looks like a parade, that’s because Botticelli was almost certainly working from impressions of his hometown’s famous Brotherhood of the Magi pageants, known for their opulence.  A sense of wealth overwhelms the humbleness of the manger setting.

Technically, Botticelli’s early crowd scene is impressive, with its high-Renaissance mastery of architectural perspective and its varied portrait gallery.  Botticelli skillfully utilizes the tondo (round) format that was becoming popular at the time for paintings designed for private devotions.  But this crowded house isn’t what I crave from a Nativity scene.  For my private Nativity devotion, I prefer quiet, mystery, and a dash of expectant hope (the same elements I always hope for in a Christmas Eve service).

Botticelli’s Adoration of the Kings tondo came early in his career, perhaps one of his first works after finishing an apprenticeship with Fra Filippo Lippi in his early twenties.  As Botticelli matured—and his artistry became even more assured—he continued to paint Nativities, Magi scenes, and virgin-and-child images.  With some of his paintings, he started to pare the crowds back, placing more emphasis upon Mary and the baby.

Detail, The Virgin Adoring the Child
by Sandro Botticelli,
National Gallery of Art

In The Virgin Adoring the Child at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, painted circa 1490 when Botticelli was around 45 years old, the Nativity is reduced to its barest essentials:  Mary and child.  Even Joseph is absent.  The only intruders into this pastoral scene are a discreet ox and donkey, content to keep to the shadows.

Mary crosses her hands in a traditional sign of resignation to the will of God.  As in all of Botticelli’s mature works, Mary expresses a sadness that acknowledges an awareness of her son’s destiny.  Jesus’ sacrifice is hers as well.  Her sorrow will continue unabated through the lamentation and Pieta depictions of Mary cradling the body of the crucified Jesus.  In birth and in death, the figure of Mary calls us to contemplation of the fragility of humanity.

Exquisitely framed by a ruined stable wall, this Botticelli tondo is a triumph of personal devotion imagery.  We are asked to enter into the spirit of Mary.  The world is quiet, the child calls to us, and we respond with grace.  Above, revealed in a corner of sky, the Star of Bethlehem still shines, trailing glory.

Detail, Virgin Adoring the Child
by Sandro Botticelli,
National Gallery of Art

Reference Sources

Botticelli by Barbara Deimling
Botticelli: The Artist and His Works by Silvia Malaguzzi
Gardner’s Art Through the Ages by Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Mamiya

© 2014 Lee Price