FROM THE ARCHIVES: Tracing the Story of a Nativity Painting
By Lara Colrain, Archives Officer
Alongside recording sacramental data from parish registers into our ArchivEra database, handling family history research, and digitising marriage certificates, I have also begun cataloguing the Archdiocese’s art collection. It’s a project that offers a fascinating glimpse into the devotional and cultural history held within our archives. The very first artwork I selected to catalogue is a large canvas Nativity scene, a timeworn piece that carries artistic significance and a beautiful connection to the Christmas story.
The painting bears a handwritten inscription on the reverse: “Mario Calistri copió, Fornace Street No. 22, Firenze.” Mario Calistri, active in the early 20th century, was known for creating faithful copies of masterpieces from the Uffizi Gallery. Our painting is a copy of Gerard van Honthorst’s 1622 masterpiece ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’. How this copy travelled from Florence to Tasmania remains unknown. Did it accompany Italian clergy or religious orders coming to Tasmania? Could it have been a parish gift from an Italian Catholic migrant family? Was it acquired as devotional art for a church or presbytery and eventually deposited in the archives? Part of the quiet joy of archival work is honouring the gaps in our knowledge while continuing the gentle detective work that may one day close them.
Honthorst’s original Nativity once hung in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Renowned for depicting Christ as the sole source of light, the painting was tragically damaged in the 1993 mafia bombing outside the Uffizi. Although the painting survived, much of it is now obscured. Remarkably, its likeness endures here in Tasmania through this Florentine copy.
Studying this painting, we see: Mary, leaning protectively yet peacefully toward her child, her face softened by the light He emits; Joseph, quiet and contemplative, a presence often understated, yet essential; the shepherds, men who arrived unwashed from the fields, representing the first ordinary souls to receive the extraordinary news, with gestures of awe, curiosity, and tenderness; and the angels above, cascading downward in a swirl of movement, echoing the proclamation from Luke’s Gospel: “Glory to God in the highest…”
The scene is a moving reminder that artworks are not simply objects; they are vessels that carry devotion across continents and generations. Somewhere, over a century ago, an artist in Florence stood before Honthorst’s glowing Nativity and painted this very scene. And somehow, that glow found its way to Tasmania.
As we celebrate Christmas this year, may we hold onto the same truth the painting so beautifully illustrates: that Christ’s light reaches us no matter the distance—across oceans, across time, and even through the gentle dust of an archive.