Few modern Christmas traditions have their origin in Gospel accounts of the Nativity. Read those, and you’ll see no mention of the ox and ass that appear inside the shed depicted widely over much the last 1,600 years. Although literary sources for them don’t appear until the eighth century, they started to feature in visual art in about 400 CE, and became frequent in miniatures in manuscripts from the tenth century onwards.

It’s probably Duccio’s Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel from 1308-11 that formed the prototype for paintings over the following centuries, with its humble shed set into rock, the Holy Family, attendant ox, ass and sheep, shepherds and angels. This triptych was installed at the high altar in the cathedral of Siena, Italy, on 30 June 1311, and remained there for nearly two centuries, only being removed in 1506.

By the dawn of the nineteenth century, artists like William Blake were departing from that well-worn tradition.

By comparison, Blake’s Nativity from 1799-1800 is extraordinary. On the left, Joseph supports the Virgin Mary, who appears to have fainted. Jesus has somehow sprung from her womb, and hovers in mid-air, arms outstretched as if preparing for crucifixion. On the right, Mary’s older cousin Elisabeth greets the infant with her own son John the Baptist on her lap. Although most unconventional, at the top right Blake still includes the familiar oxen, and a cross or star burns bright through the window at the top.

Jean-Léon Gérôme was one of the first to set the traditional Nativity scene inside a different context, as a reminder of the events that were taking place at the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. In The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c 1852-54), the emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over his empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a conventional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the Roman Empire in the centuries to come.

Later in the nineteenth century, progressive artists interpreted the traditions amid more contemporary surroundings.

Fritz von Uhde’s Sacred Night triptych, painted in 1888-89, shows three scenes from his contemporary recasting. In the centre is a modern interpretation of the classic Virgin Mary and Child, with the adoration of the magi on the left, and a delightful angelic choir singing amid the barn’s rafters on the right.

Uhde’s undated Christmas Night concentrates on the Nativity, in another atmospheric interpretation of the Holy Family of Joseph, the infant Christ, and the Virgin Mary in their improvised accommodation in Bethlehem.

Maurice Denis also transcribed several Biblical narratives into more recent settings. One of his most impressive is this thoroughly modern Nativity from 1894, where the birth of Jesus takes place in a contemporary French town. However, the artist couldn’t omit the traditional ox and ass behind the Holy Family, and the guiding star still burns bright in the sky.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s watercolour of The Nativity is another contemporary interpretation of the cowshed, singular in the dress of the mother attending to her infant. Joseph is absent, though, as is the traditional ass or donkey.

Joseph Stella’s Crèche from 1929-33 is an ingenious framing. At its centre is the Nativity crib so often shown at Christmas, with an audience who might have been drawn from the artist’s home city in Italy, playing traditional bagpipes in homage.

That conveniently leads us to tomorrow’s final article covering paintings of the Christmas festival. Until then, I wish you a very merry Christmas!

Balconies have been a significant device in painting, and in this and tomorrow’s articles I look at two groups of views using them with effect. This article looks from outside the balcony towards it, and the interior behind; tomorrow I’ll reverse that and look from balconies, typically from inside looking out at the world beyond.

These balconies are mostly platforms projecting from the upper part of a building, above ground level, normally capable of containing people, and constraining them from falling by a surrounding balustrade. They were popular features of some of the most ancient buildings in Europe, and much loved by classical civilisations.

For the visual artist they offer several opportunities, from their height above the ground affording good views or giving vertical extent, for the relationships between people on the balcony and those below, and most interestingly for their extension to the interior of a building into the exterior. Suspended in mid-air, they’re simultaneously both inside and outside, but neither.

Balconies play a significant role in several well-painted narratives, including that of David and Bathsheba, here in Jan Matsys’ painting of 1562. The action is taking place at ground level, where one of King David’s court has been sent down to express regal interest in the scantily-clad Bathsheba, to the wicked amusement of her maid. King David himself is leaning over the balustrade in the distance, elevated as his position demands, and looking down at us.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s much later Bathsheba from 1889 may have been painted three centuries later, but bears striking compositional similarities.

Another well-known story in which a balcony plays a key role is the love of Romeo and Juliet, as told in Shakespeare’s play, in which Act 3, scene 5 is known as the Balcony Scene. Richard Dadd’s version, in his watercolour Sketch for the Passions: Love from 1853, shows Romeo ascended and about to kiss Juliet, as a rather ugly nurse behind them looks away anxiously.

Ford Madox Brown’s interpretation from 1869-70 makes this even more vertiginous, with the couple alone and squeezed into a balcony smaller than a single bed. We ascend to the heights of love, and of ecstasy.

Balconies proved popular among those allied with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, such as Philip Hermogenes Calderon, who in his Home After Victory from 1867 uses one to lend a more courtly mediaeval air to this scene of rejoicing.

Balconies even appear in pioneer landscape painting. Possibly the smallest major painting of a balcony is that in Thomas Jones’s early plein air oil painting of A Wall in Naples, made on paper in about 1782. Not only is this painting tiny, little more than 10 x 15 cm (4 x 6 inches), but the balcony is so small that it’s really only good for hanging out the washing.

Another landmark painting of a balcony, Francisco Goya’s Majas on a Balcony, made between 1800-12, is unusual for ignoring almost all its compositional properties. These two young women are at much the same height as the viewer, and there’s no clear inside or out, just a couple of shady guys skulking behind them, and the black iron balustrade fencing them in. Majas were lower-class women in Spain, particularly its capital Madrid, who dressed in elaborate local style, here in florid mantillas, for example.

Goya apparently inspired Édouard Manet to paint The Balcony in 1868-69. Its four figures are Berthe Morisot (seated, left) who later became Manet’s sister-in-law, the painter Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, Fanny Claus (standing, right, with umbrella) a violinist, and in the shadows behind Léon Leenhoff, Manet’s son. As with the painting that inspired it, this all but ignores the visual potential of the balcony.

Shortly after Manet had exhibited that to derision at the Salon, the young American Impressionist-to-be Mary Cassatt visited Spain, where she painted her more conventional take, The Flirtation – A Balcony in Seville (1872). Romeo and Juliet have been revisited, without a maja’s mantilla in sight.

It took the Valencian painter José Benlliure a trip to Italy to find his balcony, in The Carnival in Rome (1881), and exploit its potential more fully. Festooned with flowers and richly-decorated carpets, this balcony has become the carnival in miniature, its occupants dressed for the occasion. Even a pair of pigeons are joining in the revelry.

Balconies have also been places for more formal ceremonial, such as Papal and royal addresses. Jean-Jacques Scherrer uses this allusion for Charlotte Corday in Caen from 1894. It was Corday who assassinated the revolutionary Marat in his bath. Here Scherrer imagines her as heroine, greeting crowds of supporters beneath her balcony.

Around the end of the nineteenth century, the viewer became one of the riff-raff below the balcony of those richer and more famous. George Clairin’s undated Spanish Woman on Balcony looks down at us with disdain from lavish potted flowers.

In Clairin’s On the Balcony, from around 1910, we aren’t even close to those already halfway to heaven behind their ornate art nouveau balustrade.

Pierre Bonnard’s painting of the Blue Balcony from 1910 doesn’t reveal how important balconies became to him. But in each of two homes that he made with his lifelong partner (and later wife) Marthe, seen here on the balcony of the title, Bonnard had extensive balconies added.