The Enduring Iconography of the Ox and the Ass in Christmas Nativity Scenes
As the Florentine townsmen prepare for the celebration of the birth of Christ by decking the halls with stockings, hanging Christmas lights, and most important of all, doing the shopping, one can only hope for the masses to notice the signs hanging on the Church doors, inviting everyone to come in and take a look at their presepe. It is a Tuscan tradition that celebrates the very origins of the Christian holidays, the physical representation of the birth of “bambino Gesu”, commonly known as the nativity scene, through the use of many mediums.
The ubiquitous scene usually features a mother and father adoring their new-born child, an ox and ass leaning over the child, angels, shepherds with their sheep in the field, luxuriously clad “wise men” or kings who approach the child with gifts, and a star hovering above this scene.
One famous example would be The Nativity by Jacopo Tintoretto, a painting which has hung for most of its life, since the late 1550, above the altar of a church in Northern Italy before being moved to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Aside from the traditional elements of the nativity scene, Tintoretto has also included another pair of human figures which are often identified as the parents of the Virgin Mary, Anna and Joachim, and also added less traditional animals such as a chicken, a rabbit, and a dog curled at the foot of the manger.
Yet these rich details depicted by Tintoretto and many others required its own long historic Advent wait to emerge. Appearing after the fourth century, the early Church movements are not to be given any credit to these scenes as the oldest gospel (or considered to be so), the Gospel of Mark, possesses no reference to the birth of Jesus Christ.
The Gospels of Luke and Matthew built up the stories of the Gospels of Mark, particularly on the birth of Jesus, where the familiar shepherds, angel choirs, and the manger came from Luke and Matthew provides us with the Magi and the guiding star. However, the last written Canonical Gospel, John, provides a more abstract or conceptual account, where the eternal Word becomes flesh.
No surviving evidence suggests that Christian art flourished before around the 200 CE, and when it eventually did, they were borrowing motifs from Roman Imperial imagery, classical Greek and Roman religious and popular art, as one could see from how the motif of Christ in Majesty bears strong resemblances with the imperial portraits and depictions of Zeus.
Later, in the Late Antique period, Christian iconography were finally standardised to relate more closely to Biblical texts, yet still many gaps from the Canonical Gospel were filled with substances from the Apocryphal Gospels (non-canonical narratives). Eventually the Church would success in weeding out the influence of Apocryphal Gospels, yet some still remain and possess a strong modern presence, such as that of the ox and the ass in the Nativity of Christ.
The Christian tradition of the ox and the ass can first be found in a biblical passage from the Hebrew Bible Isaiah 1:3 relating:
“The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib;
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.”
This prophecy may have had a very different meaning at the time of Isaiah (8th Century BCE), yet it was later interpreted as the prophecy of the arrival of the Messiah. This imagery of the ox and the ass became the Christian appropriation of Isaiah’s prophecy in the Hebrew Bible to solidify the claims of gospel writers that Jesus is the Christ took a strong hold in the first few centuries of Christianity, and eventually becoming so entrenched in the imaginings of the Christmas stories one can view today.
One of the earliest images of the ox and the ass can be found on the Sarcofago di Stilicone, a Roman Sarcophagus (stone coffin) from around 385 that now resides within the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, Italy. In this depiction, one will recognise the infant Christ front and centre without the presence of Mary and Joseph, the baby is instead accompanied by an ox and an ass.
Other Apocryphal Gospels in which the ox and the ass appeared were those of the stories within the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, a Latin adaptation of the Proto-Gospel of James. Where after Jesus’ birth in a cave (not a manger), it relates that:
“On the third day after the Lord’s birth, Mary left the cave and came into a stable, and she placed the child in a manger. And an ox and an ass bent their knees and worshiped him. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, who said, “The ox has recognized its owner and the ass the manger of its lord.” (14:1; in Ehrman and Pleše, 103)
The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, a bestseller in the medieval period, was compiled in the late 17th or 18th Century by taking into account earlier materials and popularising the idea of the ox and the ass to this very day as many had access to this narrative. Its contents were included in many chronicles of world history and even used by many preachers in their sermons unlike the other Apocryphal Gospels.
According to the dietary proscription of the Old Testament, the ox (seen as Israel) is a “clean” animal, while the ass (seen as the Gentiles) is an “unclean animal”. Their presence together within the Nativity scene is related very tightly to the mixing of the Jews and the Gentiles, very aptly put by one Mosaic Law:
“Thou shall not plow with an ox and an ass yoked together.”
Accentuated by St. Peter’s vision of clean and unclean meat placed together, which signifies the entry of Gentiles into the body of the Church, essentially the bringing together of the “inside” and the “outside”, accomplished without sin by the Christ.
This tradition was further carried out by St. Paul, using the same imagery to warn Christians to not be “yoked” with unbelievers. Eventually this leads to another interpretation, one regarding the Incarnation, and the universality of the Church. The ass is a beast of burden, a seemingly mindless strength striving only to carry. It is a symbol of corporality, of the unclean, and of the “outer”. These elements and the senses, the Gentile, are related to the garments of the skin, the protector and carrier of the precious “inner”, the shell of the ark.
It is therefore only natural that stories such as the Talking Ass of Balaam is seen as the prefigurations of the incarnation and that it is of high importance that Christ is found riding an ass as Anthony van Dyck and many other artists illustrates.
The images of the joining of the ass and the ox in the icon of the Nativity are therefore symbolic of the joining of extremes, the union of the spiritual and corporal, the clean and unclean, the inside and outside and ultimately the uncreated and created in the person of Jesus Christ.
Bibliography
André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 44–45. For an alternate view, see Robin M. Jensen, “Allusions to Imperial Rituals in Fourth-Century Christian Art,” in Lee Jefferson and Robin M. Jensen (eds), The Art of Empire: Christian Art in its Imperial Context (Fortress Press, 2015), 15–24.
Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011).
David R. Cartlidge and J. Keith Elliott, Art and the Christian Apocrypha (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 74–133.
