Do you have a painting that hit you like a wave of awe?

Dear Daniel,

Whenever I am asked for my favourite painting, I almost always name a work I’ve been preoccupied with for years. I first came across it as an art student, when I spent a lot of time looking at religious art. It is Adoration of the Child Jesus by Stefan Lochner. At that time, I had a thing about late medieval German and Flemish painting, and this work seemed a perfect distillation of that world. I don’t know how many hours I have spent poring over it.

When we were in Munich a few weeks ago, we had a day off, thanks to a managerial oversight, no doubt, so I went to the Alte Pinakothek. I had heard that they had the Lochner, but once inside I couldn’t find it amongst the museum’s unbelievably beautiful collection of sacred art. In my mind, the painting had become so monumental that I guess I expected it to be huge, to have its own wall, or something.

As I was leaving, disappointed not to see it, I walked into a small, annexed room and in the far corner, in the half-light, was the Lochner, only twelve inches tall, and rendered with such tender restraint and humility that I found myself overwhelmed.

The painting depicts the blue-robed Madonna kneeling in silent devotion within a ragged stable. Two mopey beasts, an ox and an ass, look on, while the shepherds receive the good news from small clusters of blue angels above. All of it is calm and beautiful, with the twin spires of a church rising in the distance from behind the sheep-filled hills. But it was the image of the infant Jesus that moved me so deeply. He lies on the ground, separate from his mother, on an altar cloth or a winding sheet, with one foot crossed over the other and arms open, foreshadowing the Eucharist and the crucifixion. This tiny, endangered baby, from whom so much of Western moral and philosophical thought would spring, speaks so eloquently of Jesus’ holiness and of the precarious nature of our shared humanness. It is a painting of adoration as mourning that touches our own broken hearts.

In that moment, something within me was released that had been building for some time—a tension that only awe and wonder could unloose—and I wept before it, moved by its smallness, its defencelessness and its moderation. As Mary and the angels adored the child, so I adored this small, devotional work with all my heart. 

How wonderfully, Daniel, how unexpectedly and without warning these things act upon us. Thank you for your question.

Love, Nick 

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