CHRISTMAS 2005

This year’s Croatian Christmas stamp represents a part of the polyptych “Our “Lady with Child and Saints” from the Art Gallery in Split. The polyptych originates from the 16th century and is attributed to the circle of Paolo Veneziano. It came to the Split Gallery through the family Bedrica from Skradin, connecting in this way the three points of the Adriatic basin, thus establishing the unity of Mediterranean culture and the Croatian place in it. In the early centuries of Christianity, the visual representations were not illustrative but symbolic and allegorical. In St. Sebastian’s Catacombs, where we find the first representation of the Infant in a wooden casket between two animals, it goes only for the visualization of the sentence spoken by the Prophet Isaiah: “The ox knows his master; the donkey knows his Master’s manger.” After the Council at Ephesus, when the dogma about the Immaculate Conception of Virgin Mary was proclaimed, paintings start showing the emergence of elements from the Gospel according to Luke as well as all the various lavish writings of the Apocrypha. The models for the scene were pagan images – but in a new composition that, particularly with the deeply humane participation of St. Francis in the 13th century, began developing intimist poeticism. Our stamp, too, concisely containing all the elements of the Christmas story, is an example that reminds of archaic symbolic patterns, though in the manner of Franciscan emotionality. The Infant is lying in the manger swaddled like small loaf; Mary is not spread on her side after the pains of childbirth but kneels in her blue mantle before her holy child, graciously pointing to him with her hand; St. Joseph keeps his difficult, marginal, thoughtful role, angels have gathered like heavenly bees, and the shepherd looks like the herald from heaven. The ox, with a style like inclination his neck, bends together with the donkey over the manger in a gothic manner, and the stylized cave encompasses the scene with the intensity of a cracked egg shell. Compact and costly like a precious jewel, this little, almost seven hundred years old scene reminds us of the soul in our throat that comes with the illuminated Christmas, when wealth does not help in loneliness, when the year that has yielded nothing cannot be turned back in the calendar, when all that has been taken from us, what we have not given willingly, what our soul craves for – at least for one evening, the Christmas Eve, for one night, the night when animals give up their mute speech to give us a chance, when all this calls, calls for a better person in us ... Zeljka Corak