Art and Eye

  My eye is not immediately drawn to anything. The image is so familiar, over familiar, that I look without really seeing. It is almost impossible to see this as 'radical' and yet when it was painted the term Impressionism had not been invented and this apparently harmless landscape was rejected by the French salon. The magpie on the gate is clearly the focus: it is the title of the painting, the only sign of warmth and life in this chilly landscape, but my eye still prefers to dart across the whole canvas than linger on the dark silhouette of the bird. Perhaps Monet simply needed a subject, an excuse to paint the light and weather conditions he was really interested in. Yet the choice of this bird seems deliberate. Magpies carry so much symbolism that it seems unlikely he just happened across it sitting on a gate, and the footprints which lead the viewer into the canvas also lead one to climb the 'ladder' of the gate's shadow and then the bars of the gate itself. T

  My eye has difficulty focusing on anything, certainly not on the religious subject. There is so much going on, so much detail and decoration, colour and gold. It feels more like a Christmas party than a Nativity. In the foreground the basic story is played out: Mary, Joseph, Jesus, architecture to represent the stable, a manger with straw, ox, ass, star, and the Magi with their gifts. The compositional curve of their flat, Gothic, disc-like haloes creates a focus and the 'sky' above the animals completes the circle - a space of calm. But that is less than half the picture space, and the rest is stuffed to bursting, from the background narrative of the journey to the extreme foreground where a kneeling servant removes spurs from one of the Magi, to the unexplained monkeys in the centre. Even the elaborate frame with its Trinity of arches is decorated with panels of greenery and flowers. There's an element of showboating here: Gentile is boasting of his skill with the fores