The depiction of the Nativity in the frescoes of the church of Mezzaratta holds a crucial place among Vitale’s works.

“When Vitale’s art exploded in the incomparable ‘Nativity Scene’ at Mezzaratta, Giotto had been dead for some ten years, and Simone Martini had just passed away. Although they had different leanings, they left the legacy of a perfect balance between life and art, and it is this balance that Vitale reacted to, or rather rebelled against, with an intensity of the senses and imagination that would be hard to define as anything other than ‘anarchic’, in the etymological sense of the term...”

“Nothing can give a better idea of the complexity of Vitale’s painting than the Mezzaratta ‘Nativity’”, continues Arcangeli, commencing with the subject. Roberto Longhi had already described it as being not so much a Nativity as “a concert and dance of angels around the Nativity”. “If we think of Giotto’s or Giottoesque Nativities in Padua and Assisi, it will be clear that, compared to the solid balance of their relationships, the carefully considered positioning of the protagonists, the regular flight of the angels, the innovation in Vitale’s work is the unleashing, on the steep hillside, of pandemonium, of a frenzy and din, where the ‘demonic’ in the angelic nature breaks out uncontrollably in songs and gestures, in the most incredible and dissociated outbursts imaginable”.

All this can be seen in the detail of the Angel, bottom right, who acts as an intermediary between the sacred scene and the shepherds: this detail “shows the mad inventiveness of movement often present in Vitale’s work. It is barely worth noting that the angel is absurdly distorted (but what an incredibly fantastic energy!) between two movements – pointing to the hut and gesturing invitingly to a kneeling shepherd – so disparate that they seem to belong to two different beings; and that the great Gothic curved trajectory that goes from the angel’s left foot up to his head is suddenly contrasted, in the syncopation of rhythm used so often by Vitale, by the straight or squared motion of the right leg and arm”.

Arcangeli stresses how what is “unique in this masterpiece, not only in the Italian context but also in the European one, is the power of enthusiasm, the spontaneity of action, the irrepressible animism of every attitude, of every movement...”.

Vitale’s art is “more transalpine than Italic, more European than Mediterranean”. One need only “look further inwards into the apparent chaos of the great angelic choir of Mezzaratta, [to] catch a glimpse, on closer inspection, of the over-crowded but flowing progression of a sculpted tympanum of a transalpine cathedral emerging from below up to the apex of the hut; of how, around the right and left at the top, you will discover that the angels wrap their elegant or sudden gestures into themselves according to the rotation of a rose window... This is one of Vitale's distinctive hallmarks, to finally draw into a great wave of life, into a great ‘raptus’ of inspiration, details that at first sight seem to call attention entirely to themselves... These elements, and the alignment of his idea of life with many aspects of northern art, particularly German art, make Vitale’s artistic persona stand out in a European context”.

On the other hand, the panel next to the Nativity scene, bottom left, with the scene of theVirgin’s Dream“is a fine example of the polarity in Vitale's work” between tenderness and “the wildest action fantasy”.