It is needless to point out the frank association of the two events,—­the Nativity, and appearance of the Angel to the Shepherds.  They are constantly thus joined; but I do not remember any other example in which they are joined so boldly.  Usually the shepherds are seen in the distance, or are introduced in some ornamental border, or other inferior place.  The view of painting as a mode of suggesting relative or consecutive thoughts, rather than a realisation of any one scene, is seldom so fearlessly asserted, even by Giotto, as here, in placing the flocks of the shepherds at the foot of the Virgin’s bed.

This bed, it will be noticed, is on a shelf of rock.  This is in compliance with the idea founded on the Protevangelion and the apocryphal book known as the Gospel of Infancy, that our Saviour was born in a cave, associated with the scriptural statement that He was laid in a manger, of which the apocryphal gospels do not speak.

The vain endeavour to exalt the awe of the moment of the Saviour’s birth has turned, in these gospels, the outhouse of the inn into a species of subterranean chapel, full of incense and candles.  “It was after sunset, when the old woman (the midwife), and Joseph with her, reached the cave; and they both went into it.  And behold, it was all filled with light, greater than the light of lamps and candles, and greater than the light of the sun itself.” (Infancy, i. 9.) “Then a bright cloud overshadowed the cave, and the midwife said:  This day my soul is magnified.” (Protevangelion, xiv. 10.) The thirteenth chapter of the Protevangelion is, however, a little more skilful in this attempt at exaltation.  “And leaving her and his sons in the cave, Joseph went forth to seek a Hebrew midwife in the village of Bethlehem.  But as I was going, said Joseph, I looked up into the air, and I saw the clouds astonished, and the fowls of the air stopping in the midst of their flight.  And I looked down towards the earth and saw a table spread, and working-people sitting around it; but their hands were on the table, and they did not move to eat.  But all their faces were fixed upwards.” (Protevangelion, xiii. 1-7.)

It would, of course, be absurd to endeavour to institute any comparison between the various pictures of this subject, innumerable as they are; but I must at least deprecate Lord Lindsay’s characterising this design of Giotto’s merely as the “Byzantine composition.”  It contains, indeed, nothing more than the materials of the Byzantine composition; but I know no Byzantine Nativity which at all resembles it in the grace and life of its action.  And, for full a century after Giotto’s time, in northern Europe, the Nativity was represented in a far more conventional manner than this; usually only the heads of the ox and ass are seen, and they are arranging, or holding with their mouths, the drapery of the couch of the Child; who is not being laid in it by the Virgin, but raised upon a kind of tablet high above her in the centre of the group.  All these early designs, without exception, however, agree in expressing a certain degree of languor in the figure of the Virgin, and in making her recumbent on the bed.  It is not till the fifteenth century that she is represented as exempt from suffering, and immediately kneeling in adoration before the Child.