What is "the nativity"

Nativity \Na*tiv"i*ty\, n.; pl. Nativies. [F. nativit['e], L. nativitas. See Native, and cf. Na["i]vet['E].]

1. The coming into life or into the world; birth; also, the circumstances attending birth, as time, place, manner, etc.
   --Chaucer.

   I have served him from the hour of my nativity.
   --Shak.

   Thou hast left . . . the land of thy nativity.
   --Ruth ii. 11.

   These in their dark nativity the deep Shall yield us, pregnant with infernal flame.
   --Milton.

2. (Fine Arts) (capitalized) A picture representing or symbolizing the early infancy of Christ. The simplest form is the babe in a rude cradle, and the heads of an ox and an ass to express the stable in which he was born.

3. (Astrol.) A representation of the positions of the heavenly bodies as the moment of one's birth, supposed to indicate one's future destinies; a horoscope.

   The Nativity, the birth or birthday of Christ; Christmas day.

   To cast one's nativity or To calculate one's nativity (Astrol.), to find out and represent the position of the heavenly bodies at the time of one's birth.

The Nativity is a 1978 television film starring Madeleine Stowe as Mary, set around the Nativity of Jesus and based on the accounts in the canonical Gospels of Matthew and Luke, in the apocryphal gospels of Pseudo-Matthew and James, and in the Golden Legend. It was directed by Bernard L. Kowalski, written by Morton S. Fine and Millard Kaufman, and filmed in Almería, Spain.

The Nativity is a 2010 British four-part drama television series. The series is a re-telling of the Nativity of Jesus and was broadcast on BBC One and BBC HD across four days, starting on 20 December 2010. It was rebroadcast in two hour-long parts on the mornings of 24 and 25 December 2011.

The series stars Tatiana Maslany as Mary; Andrew Buchan as Joseph; Neil Dudgeon as Joachim; Claudie Blakley as Anna; Peter Capaldi as Balthasar; and John Lynch as Gabriel.

The Nativity was a 58-minute United States television drama with music about the birth of Christ, presented on the television anthology Westinghouse Studio One. Directed by Franklin Schaffner, it is a rare modern network television production of an authentic mystery play, mostly culled from the York and Chester mystery plays of the 14th and 15th centuries in England. The adaptation was by Andrew Allan. The presentation, originally telecast live the evening of December 22, 1952 on CBS, has been preserved on kinescope. It has been issued in several DVD public domain versions.1 It can also be seen complete online on Internet Archive.

The play was performed in what is now known as Elizabethan English. Although it takes its text straight from fifteenth-century English, the words were not pronounced as Middle English would be, but in a more modern manner. Musical selections were selected from Christmas carols and sung by the Robert Shaw Chorale. The cast included Thomas Chalmers, Paul Tripp, and Miriam Wolfe. Hurd Hatfield serves as narrator.2

__NOTOC__ The Nativity is one of a pair of monumental paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones commissioned for the chancel of the church of St John the Apostle, Torquay, England (at ), in 1887. The Gothic Revival church was designed by architect George Edmund Street in the 1860s and decorated by Morris & Co., the decorative arts firm in which Burne-Jones was a partner.

St John's sold The Nativity and its companion painting, known as The King and the Shepherd, in 1989 to pay for a new roof for the church (copies were hung in their places). The two paintings were acquired for £1.5 million by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, a collector of Victorian art. In 1997, Lloyd Webber donated the paintings to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, United States, where his musical Jesus Christ Superstar had premiered in 1971.

In this treatment of the birth of Jesus, Burne-Jones places Mary reclining protectively around the infant Jesus while Joseph looks on. At the left are three angels bearing the symbols of the Passion and Crucifixion, the crown of thorns, a container of myrrh and a chalice. The painting bears an inscription in Latin from the Gallican Psalter (Psalm 11, verse 6) ["Because of the misery of the poor and the groaning of the needy, now will I arise, saith the Lord"].

Several studies for The Nativity have survived. A pencil drawing sold at Sotheby's New York in 2012 places Joseph on the right, while an 1887 pastel sketch in the Garman-Ryan Collection at The New Art Gallery Walsall shows the final composition but a very different colour palette.The position of Mary and Jesus echoes Burne-Jones' design for a bronze relief of the Nativity of 1879. The relief was commissioned by George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle as part of a monument to his parents for Lanercost Priory, Cumbria. A drawing of this design is in the Fitzwilliam Museum.