Byline: Philippa StockleyFIVE hundred years ago, 15th-century Italian artist Ercole de' Roberti painted a tiny nativity scene on a wooden panel. It pictures an unusual stable shaped like the portico of a grand Italian church, but made of willow fencing and freshly cut slender tree trunks, ...
As for the nativity cave, Luke also places it, if not in a garden, at least in a pastoral setting: And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; for there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same...