The Nativity

Created before Patriarch Nikon’s reforms that concerned both sacred images and texts, this panel was likely part of an iconostasis, a continuous wall of icons that separates the altar from the congregation. The Oberlin icon collapses the birth of Christ, the Annunciation to the Shepherds, and the Adoration of the Magi into a single image. In the center, a recumbent Mary and the Christ Child, accompanied by an ox and a horse, occupy a dark cave inside a mountain. To their left, an angel announces the arrival of Christ to a shepherd, while to the right, the three Magi approach, the Star of Bethlehem guiding them with three rays of light.

The lower portion of the image contains two scenes transmitted through apocryphal stories: Joseph tempted by the devil in the guise of an old and bent shepherd and the bath of the Christ Child as related in the Gospels of Pseudo-Matthew and Pseudo-James. According to apocryphal texts, the devil, sensing Joseph’s doubts, told him that a virgin birth is not possible. The icon’s inclusion of these non-canonical accounts reinforces, on the one hand, Christ’s divinity manifest in his immaculate conception and, on the other, his humanity evident in his bath, customary for any newborn baby.