In a genetics journal, I read about a painting that included one of the earliest depictions of a person with Down syndrome.38 The painting was a Nativity scene—The Adoration of the Christ Child—by an unknown painter, and among the angels and shepherds were two with Down syndrome. The shepherd was a “maybe,” but both doctors writing the article agreed that for the angel, the diagnosis was clear.
After learning of the painting, I began to read about Early Netherlandish art. I wanted to be confident that the angel with Down syndrome was not a mistake. I studied books from the Duke University library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and learned that while Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, in Italy, were creating formal compositions of heroic and ideal beauty, the artists in the Netherlands were capturing, with unprecedented precision, the daily world in which they lived. Brocades and furs, mirrors and glass bottles, were rendered with startling accuracy. The artistic ambition was to capture reality itself, with optical clarity.
During this period, a religious movement that involved using one’s imagination to place oneself in the midst of a biblical scene swept through Europe. People would gaze at these breathtakingly realistic paintings—Mary’s annunciation, Christ’s birth, the Crucifixion—until they were drawn into the scene by innumerable details. The paintings were so real, one could almost feel the warmth coming off of the horses and donkeys, smell the incense and myrrh. In this way, one could have an empathic and emotional experience.39 Religion became personal.
After reading so much about the nativity painting with the angel with Down syndrome, and staring at a picture of it in a book from the Metropolitan, I felt ready to stand in front of the real thing.
I grabbed an early flight to LaGuardia, took the M–60 bus to Astoria, and the subway from there into Manhattan. Once inside the museum, I clipped the small tin badge to the pocket of my shirt and went to the front desk to ask where I could find the Northern Renaissance paintings. A young woman with long blond hair and tortoiseshell glasses seemed pleased to help, and showed me on a map. I felt a twinge of excitement, and some anxiety.
In the gallery, I recognized other paintings from the book I’d ordered from the Met—works by Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I hustled past annunciations, nativity scenes, and crucifixions, and hurried through the adjacent galleries, glancing at portraits like faces in a crowd, but the one I wanted to see wasn’t there. I went back to the help desk and flipped through my note cards for the painting’s accession number.
“It’s in the Linsky Collection. Gallery 537,” the young woman with the glasses said. “Just past the Watson Library. Go to the stairs.” She made a motion with her hand. “Take a left and then a right, and go through the piazza, and then you’ll see it.”
“Thanks.” I slipped through the throngs of visitors and smiled at the guard at the velvet rope. He glanced at the small tin badge clipped to my shirt pocket and nodded his head.
I loved the little red badge. This museum.
I walked through the reconstructed patio of a castle built during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the marble blocks carefully restacked, the space large and open and decorated with Italian Renaissance sculptures. I hurried past a bronze boy plucking a thorn from the sole of his foot, and past a marble man and woman, naked and struggling.
A guard stood at a doorway, his feet shoulder-width apart and his hands behind his back.
“Is this the Linsky Collection?” I asked, my voice pitched for a library, or a church.
“What?” He turned his face toward mine. Scowled.
“The Linsky Collection.” I glanced at my notes from the help desk. “Gallery 537.”
He jerked his thumb toward a number next to the door. “Then I guess this is it.” He looked away, shaking his head.
I walked from the brightly lit hall into a darker space—parquet wood floor, pink wallpaper with a maroon heraldic pattern. There were walnut baseboards and wide crown moldings. Off to the side, away from the throngs of visitors, the space felt like a wealthy person’s parlor, minus the furniture.
I saw the Adoration, and walked to it. Stood. The most striking thing about the painting was the light emanating from the table on which the naked infant lay. Three angels knelt behind the table. Mary knelt at the end, and Joseph stood behind her. He was holding a candle. The angel with Down syndrome was looking over the shoulder of the angel at the center of the painting. She looked young, just like she did in the color photograph in the book. She looked like Sarah.
The faces of the two people closest to the child—Mary and the angel in the center of the painting—were illuminated so brightly that their facial features seemed slightly flattened, the brilliance of the light almost washing out the details. Mary spread her hands above the child as if beholding him with her palms and fingers as well as her eyes. Her hands glowed. The central angel’s hands were bright as well, her fingers held together in a steeple.
The light itself was invisible. No rays streamed forth from the baby, no beams, no halos. The light was only present as it reflected against the things and people in the painting: the highlights in Mary’s long blond hair, the undersides of the cherubim—baby angels—singing and cavorting overhead, like high stratus clouds illuminated by the morning sun.
This painting, thought to have been done in a shop in Antwerp, Belgium, was a depiction of a vision of Saint Bridget. In her vision she saw a young virgin mother with flowing hair, a naked Christ child, and a chorus of angels singing “sweet and most dulcet songs.” She also described a “great and ineffable light” emanating from the Christ child—a “divine splendor [that] totally annihilated the material splendor of the candle” that Joseph held.40
I looked over at Joseph, holding the candle in his left hand, shielding it with his right. Sure enough, it was much less bright than the light coming up from baby Jesus. Joseph’s sleeves were painted red, his shawl blue-black. Joseph’s face, farther from the child than Mary’s, was unbleached by the brilliance of the light, and had more nuanced skin tones, with more pinks and browns—the same warm tones as the skin of the angel with Down syndrome, one row back.
The angel with Down syndrome, kneeling between Mary and the central angel, seemed incidental. Unremarkable. Just another witness of something never seen before. I stared at her face—the familiar little upturned nose, the small chin. The eyes.
Five other angels knelt around the baby. The one in the center wore a red brocade tunic and a gold embroidered harness encrusted with gems and rubies. She had blue-feathered wings, held together in repose like a resting butterfly, pointing upward toward the cherubim dancing near the ceiling.
I stared at the painting and let my eyes move freely. They settled on the shepherd who was outside, looking in through a window. In his left hand he held a curved horn. Did he have Down syndrome? His eyes slanted, but were too far apart. I agreed with the article in the genetics journal—it was hard to tell. Behind him, the morning sky showed tiny white stars against a deep and receding blue, and at the horizon a yellow edge of light, the clouds illuminated from below. In the near distance, two shepherds looked up, shielding their eyes from the cool white beams of the star of Bethlehem.
I stepped away from the painting and glanced at the miniature statues in the center of the room. The figures were all inside plexiglass boxes and lit from above. A bronze satyr with a thin layer of dark brown lacquer, all hooves and horns and muscles. Two other satyrs. Hercules with a cudgel on one shoulder and a wild boar on the other. A nude statue of Lucretia, the Roman woman who stabbed herself in the heart after being raped by the emperor’s son.
My eyes were drawn to another Netherlandish painting, this one from the workshop of Gerard David: The Adoration of the Magi. Kneeling men offered gifts to the Christ child. In the background, two men on horseback crossed a stream. One horse stopped for a drink. Further back, a knight rode on horseback, his lance long and thin and white. A white dog jumped and barked near him. I moved closer. The brushstrokes were tiny, smaller than the dates on a penny or a dime. In the distance, blue mountain ranges receded, their ridges thick with conifers, tiny and sharp. I leaned closer.
“Step away from the painting.” The guard’s voice was harsh, commanding.
I stepped back, and turned my head. “How close can I get?” I didn’t want to break the rules, but there weren’t any velvet ropes, or signs.
“One foot.” He pulled his eyebrows together, put his fists on his hips, and jutted out his chin.
“You sound angry.” Years of working in the ER had taught me to reflect back what I perceived before reacting: I could be seeing something that wasn’t there.
“I’m not angry.” He scowled. “I just think you already knew you were too close.”
“No, I didn’t. You’ve educated me.” I nodded. “Thanks.”
“Huh.” He shook his head. Glared at me.
“Look.” I turned my body to fully face his. “I’m not looking for a problem, but if you are, we can take this as far as you want.” I glanced at his name badge, and back to his face.
“I don’t want to take it anywhere,” he said. “You were just too close to that painting.”
I stared at him for another moment. “Okay.” I turned and tried to gauge what twelve inches would be, and looked at the painting some more. My heart was beating hard.
Why was I so quick to anger? What could I have gained by escalating things with a guard in an art museum? I was surprised to find myself so close to the edge where anger jumps past reason. I was standing in a room that swirled with myth and religion: Hercules, Lucretia, and Mary the Mother of God, Nativity scenes conjuring Christmas cards I’d seen all my life. And in this storm of iconography, searching all these faces of gods and babies, women and men, I was looking for confirmation that an artist in the sixteenth century had seen fit to portray someone who looked like my daughter. Never mind that there are forty-five acres of space in the Metropolitan. Two million works of art. And one painting that included someone like Sarah.
I took a deep breath, and left the gallery to go to the cafeteria. Maybe after lunch there would be a different guard on duty.
That afternoon, I went back to the painting of the angel with Down syndrome, and was struck by the fact that nobody—not Mary, or Joseph, or the angels—was squinting against the too-bright light. The cherubim dancing near the ceiling were laughing and singing, but everyone else had a calm and reverent expression. European noses, narrow and slightly pointed. Thin chins. Lips with subtle upturns, not quite smiling. Except for the angel with Down syndrome. Her nose was wider, stubby. Upturned. Eyes slanting. Lips turned slightly downward. When Sarah’s face was relaxed, her lips had the same downward turn, making her look mildly grumpy, or unhappy. “Are you okay?” I’d ask, and she would nod and shrug. “Yeah.”
My eyes wandered across the painting, but they always came back to the angel with Down syndrome. I found myself looking at her more intently than the Christ child, or Mother Mary.
This motif—St Bridget’s vision of the nighttime adoration of the Christ child—was very popular, and circulated widely. The artist used exquisite verisimilitude; each and every strand of Mary’s hair was rendered, the sheen of every wave and curl a golden gleam. The cuticle of Mary’s left thumb had a small puffy roll of flesh that we recognize instantly from seeing our own hands.
I didn’t know why the artist had included an angel with Down syndrome. But it was hard to imagine that it was an accident. The level of realistic detail was astounding: the feathers of an angel’s wings were crossed and ruffled from recent flight. The painting had been examined by infrared reflectography which revealed animated underdrawing, and pentimenti—changes in the composition, from the Italian word pentirsi, “repent”—indicating that the artist had changed his mind in the process of painting, but I couldn’t find a reference to pentimenti specific to the angel’s face.41
Max Friedländer, a renowned historian of Early Netherlandish art, wrote, “In general, the figures in fifteenth-century Netherlandish devotional panels are felt to be members of one family or society, and the donors, introduced by their patron saints, are admitted as equals into the holy circle.”42 There’s no evidence that this happened with this particular painting, but when one considers the care and precision with which each detail is rendered, it seems likely that the artist was working from a specific model. A model who happened to have Down syndrome.
I loved this painting, with its richly shadowed interior and the warm bright light shining up from an infant. And I was drawn to this incidental angel, one row back, who looked like my daughter.