Cannot Stay. Kevin Oderman

the other two, like maids, pulling open the curtains of an elaborate, outdoor pavilion. More likely, they are abashed by Mary, who though she could hardly be more richly dressed, has pulled a breast out from under her velvet cape and with her left hand presses a stream of milk in a white arc in the direction of Jesus. Which falls well short—as if a milking farmer trying to feed a barn cat had painted the floor of the stall instead.

      Harold fails to register that he’s missing lunch, but he hardly looks to need it. His body seems to have quite outgrown his head. In this, he does not take after his mother. And the arm he lifts to reach for Mary’s hand is just bigger than the other, closer arm, which looks stunted by comparison. But there is nothing stunted about Harold from the belly down. The contrast between head and haunch suggests we are looking at parts of two different babies, almost two different species, along the lines of a centaur, half baby, half pig. What could Botticelli have been thinking? About dinner, some smoky trattoria with ham quarters hanging from the ceiling?

      If I hadn’t been tired to begin with, and exhausted myself further in the contemplation of Judith, probably my response to Botticelli’s portrayal of the Christ child would not have been so flippant. I’d like to think so, to think better of myself than I do.

      But how I loved Tobias’ little fish, the one he carried shining in a sling when he was confronted on the road by Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, in Filippino’s The Three Archangels. The fish looked something like a small sturgeon and wonderfully distinct against Tobias’ bright red tunic. And of course, I noticed how the angelic getups in the painting, especially Michael’s, bore a striking resemblance to Judith and Abra’s outfits when they took the rocky path back to Bethulia. I wondered, momentarily, if Botticelli had dressed Judith like an angel to suggest her role as messenger, as a sartorial sign of her famous pluck. She certainly had, in media-speak, sent a message to the Assyrians.

      Judith could easily have slipped in among the twenty angels in Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity without calling attention to herself. Another party she could have crashed. She was dressed for it, even carried the de rigueur olive branch; all the angels at the nativity had one. Though, it’s true, Judith wasn’t wearing that other to-die-for accessory, wings.

      Botticelli wrote a message right on The Mystic Nativity, in Greek, and Delta and I were glad the curators provided a translation: “I Sandro made this picture at the conclusion of the year 1500 in the troubles of Italy in the half time after the time according to the 11^th [chapter] of Saint John in the second woe of the Apocalypse during the loosing of the devil…” Botticelli’s apocalyptic understanding of history, of for him contemporary Italy, unsettled us across five hundred years. The apocalypse, it didn’t happen, however many times it was predicted. And I associate Botticelli’s kind of interpretation with fundamentalist fanatics, whatever their religion.

      (I remember stopping once, climbing up the white rocks of Patmos, at the mouth of the cave where Saint John is reputed to have written his ugly Revelation, just wishing he hadn’t. Patmos, the place itself should have been revelation enough; perhaps that’s why he needed the cave, a dark place for a sick imagination. Revelation loosed some demons, that’s for sure, and what’s especially dispiriting is the sad fact that there have always been many ready to welcome them in, to see through Revelation to apocalypse now.)

      Into the Mystic Nativity itself, Botticelli admits nothing ugly. Even the seven little devils in the foreground are more amusing than terrifying and clearly on the run. Under the thatched roof of a shed, Mary kneels amid the livestock, adoring. To the left, an angel instructs the rapt wise men; to the right, another explains the goings-on to the shepherds. Above, an angelic merry-go-round hangs turning in the sky. A round dance, midair. Right in the middle of everything, getting all the attention, Harold lifts a hand as if in benediction. Too old, too long limbed for a newborn, hair enough to look coifed. That baby’s just too big!

      Delta and I took a last turn through the exhibition, having a second look at our favorites. Delta spotted Joey, present too, here and there, wherever a showy bird was needed. We puzzled for a moment over Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles, meant to warn “the rulers of the earth” to be wary of heeding false council. Although allegorical figures struggle mightily in the painting, contesting the truth, the foreground is strangely empty, plenty of room there for a “Bird of Paradise,” if one had been wanted.