The Portinari Altarpiece

Artist: Hugo van der Goes  |  Medium: Oil on panel  |  Year: circa 1475  |  Location: Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Hugo van der Goes made this work in circa 1475, during the period of The Early Renaissance in the North. It is oil on panel, and it lives today in Uffizi Gallery, Florence. The period was one in which the flemish masters brought a different gift to the madonna: the ordinary world made holy, and this work belongs to that tradition.

The subject is the Nativity, the birth of Christ, and Mary is at its center. She is the one who said yes, who carried Him, who brought Him into the world, and who is the first to adore Him.

Mary kneels in adoration of the newborn lying on the bare ground, shepherds rushing in, the whole scene hushed and grave. The first response to the Incarnation, even from His own mother, is to kneel.

What makes this work endure is not only its craft but what it asks of the person who stands before it. The oil on panel is the vehicle; the lesson is the destination. Mary is shown here not as an abstraction but as a person, and the person she is points always past herself toward her Son. That is the consistent grammar of Marian art across eighteen centuries: she is never the end of the gaze. She is the direction of it.

Take a moment with this image. Let it do what it was made to do. It was not made to be admired from a distance. It was made to be prayed before.

Pause before this image. Let it do what it was made to do. It was not made to be admired from a distance. It was made to be prayed before.