Ercole de' Roberti, 'The Adoration of the Shepherds', about 1490

This is the left hand panel of a diptych, a painting made up of two panels, joined with a hinge so that it could be opened and closed like a book. The right-hand panel shows the The Dead Christ. It was made for the Duchess of ferrara, Eleonora of Aragon.

The Virgin Mary and Joseph kneel to worship the Christ Child, who lies naked in a manger. Next to Mary, a shepherd in ragged, torn clothes follows suit bending his knee in prayer. In the landscape beyond we see what called him to the stable: three small, shadow-like figures look up at an angelic figure surrounded by light. This is the annunciation to the shepherds (Luke 2: 8-20) when the angel of the Lord appeared and told them to visit Christ who had just been born at Bethlehem. The stable looks like a temple or church, but its materials are humble: a structure of wooden beams is filled in with flexible young branches, woven together to create a lattice for the walls and for the manger which is being used as a crib. An ass leans his neck out to grasp for straw from the manger where the infant Christ lies; an ox with a golden coat turns his back on the Child, his imposing hindquarters dominating the middle of the scene.

Ercole has chosen to show the annunciation and adoration of the shepherds rather than that of the wise men which occurs in the Gospel of Matthew. He has taken care to paint the figures in simple clothes: Mary’s halo is modest, a faint series of sketchy gilded semi-circles, and the shepherd’s hose is torn at the knees and sags around his ankle. The grandeur of the stable’s architecture, with its classical style triangular pediments and supporting columns fixed in stone bases, is based on the ideas of the fifteenth-century architect Alberti. Alberti’s designs for churches, derived from ancient temples, were current at the time in the nearby city of Mantua. The contrast of cheap and rustic materials and grand architectural design is a reminder of the significance of the Christ Child’s birth in this rural setting and poor family. The message reflects Christ’s teachings on the importance and spiritual power of humility. The shepherd’s ragged clothing and the basket-weave style walls also feature in an Adoration scene by Mantegna painted for the Este family several decades earlier (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); it seems that the grand dukes and duchesses enjoyed such quaint details. The unpretentious simplicity of the painted scene would have contrasted with the exterior of the diptych, which was covered with velvet and gilded silver ornament fitting for a ducal family.

Christ’s body is not swaddled or covered but displayed stretched out and naked. This emphasis on his flesh reflects the Duchess’s particular devotion to the Corpus Christi (‘the body of Christ’) and refers to the institution of the Eucharist, the rite at which Christians remember and give thanks for the death and resurrection of Christ by eating bread and drinking wine; Catholics believe these miraculously transform into his body and blood. Christ’s naked body in this scene which celebrates his birth is mirrored in the diptych’s other panel, which focuses upon his body after his death. The point is reinforced by the angle of the crib, which matches that of the tomb. When the diptych was folded together, they would have met in the middle.