The Birth of Christ by Sandro Botticelli

The Mystical Nativity is a painting dated c. 1500–1501 by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, in the National Gallery in London. Botticelli built up the image using oil on canvas. It is his only signed work and has an unusual iconography for a painting of the Nativity.

The Greek inscription at the top translates as: 'This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three and a half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture'. Botticelli believed himself to be living during the Great Tribulation, possibly due to the upheavals in Europe at the time, and was predicting Christ's millennium as stated in the Book of Revelation.