On December 7, Pope Francis attended the opening Nativity of Bethlehem 2024, a nativity exhibition in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. One scene featured olive wood sculptures of Mary, Jesus and Joseph, designed by Johny Andonia and Faten Nastas Mitwasi, two Palestinian artists from Bethlehem. Nestled between a kneeling Mary and the standing Joseph, Jesus lay swaddled in a keffiyeha black and white scarf symbolizes Palestinian heritage and resilience. He lay beneath a circular mother-of-pearl firework symbolizing the Star of Bethlehem, with the inscription “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to all men” in Latin and Arabic.
After photos of Pope Francis visiting the nativity scene circulated online and sparked an outpouring of outrage, news media reported this week that the manger and baby Jesus swaddled in Keffiyeh have been removed from the Vatican exhibit. The Keffiyehs themselves have also received widespread support and have been the target of censorship over the past year amid what human rights groups see as a threat. genocide in Gaza. Some social media users on platforms such as
To condemn the nativity, however, is to deny the centuries-long history of artists depicting the Holy Family in Bethlehem – located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in Palestine – as marginalized, forcibly removed and diasporic peoples.
The location of Jesus’ birth and the people present took on deep meaning in early Christian paintings by Byzantine artists depicting the baby Jesus with a donkey and an ox under a ‘turugium’, or tiled roof structure in the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem, such as Duccio di Buonisegna’s “The nativity scene with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel” (1308–1311).
However, Renaissance and Baroque artists began to situate the birth of Jesus in the Greco-Roman context ruins – same ruins, scholar Andrew Hui explainsof religious and political systems into which Jesus was born and which would be doctrinally overthrown.
Likewise, the ethnicities of the Magi, the three kings following the Star of Bethlehem to worship Jesus and bring three gifts, and the dress and behavior of shepherds reflected the increasing pervasiveness of Christianity through colonialism and forced conversion. And over the past century, artists have often used both the Magi and the Shepherds as tools to reimagine the nativity in times of war, bigotry, and genocide.
During the First World War, artists reimagined the nativity scene in the context of nationalism and large-scale destruction — soldiers as shepherds in military uniform and in which Jesus, Mary and Joseph took refuge bombed stables or trenches. The linocut “Kriegsweihnacht” by the German artist Sella Hasse (1914) reinterprets the nativity scene as a mourning scene, Claudia Siebrecht explains in her 2013 book The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women’s Art from the First World War. A medieval knight bows his head to Mary’s left side as the naked bodies of dead soldiers ascend to an afterlife behind them.
During the Second World War, displaced artists, including Polish artist Stanisław Przespolewski, also saw Jesus, Mary and Joseph again in their traditional costumes. Przespolewski made his 1943 Nativity scene with a Mary dressed in Polish folk patterns and a winged hussar, a 16th century Polish soldier dressed in armor, protecting the family. A contemporary Polish soldier from the Second World War also stands at the edge of the manger with a rifle at the ready.
In 1968, a group of American artists led by Joey Skaggs built one Vietnamese nativity scene in Central Park, with a Vietnamese Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus in a manger covered in bamboo shades and a nearby paper pig decorated with a police hat, gun and badge. While dressed as American soldiers, they tried to burn the pig to protest the war. Skaggs and several other protesters were given tickets to the “Vietnamese Nativity Burning.” Skaggs told the New York Times“I want to make it clear that it is not a nice Christmas in Vietnam.”
