Lorenzo Costa, 'The Adoration of the Shepherds with Angels', about 1499

This extraordinary painting is a unique depiction of the Adoration of the Shepherds. The Virgin Mary, Joseph and two shepherds cluster round the infant Christ, who lies naked on a cloth spread over grass; the ox and the donkey peer out of the darkness behind them. They are not, however, in a stable in Bethlehem, but gathered in front of a verdant grotto. The shepherds have no gifts, and there are no flocks of sheep or angelic messengers in the background. Instead, two trumpeting angels stand on rocky outcrops.

A host of angels overhead hold the instruments of the Passion – among them the Cross, the sponge on a spear, the ladder, pincers and column – explicitly linking Christ’s birth with his eventual crucifixion. Angels with instruments of the Passion were sometimes included in Ferrarese paintings of the Adoration, but there are none quite like this. Even more exceptional is the angelic orchestra that flanks the scene. Nine groups of angels on clouds play instruments ranging from drums and tambourines to portable organs, lyres and pipes. Although musical angels appear in a number of Ferrarese paintings (like The Holy Family with Saint Nicholas of Tolentino and The Holy Family with Saints John the Baptist, Elizabeth, Zacharias and (?)Francis), this imagery is unparalleled.

According to medieval Christian theologians, angels were organised in a hierarchy of nine orders – sometimes known as choirs – from cherubim and seraphim at the top to archangels and ordinary angels at the bottom. Some artists, such as Francesco Botticini in The Assumption of the Virgin, tried to illustrate all the different types. But there were simpler schemes, more like the one in this picture. A lost fourteenth-century fresco in the hospice of S. Giacomo al Colosseo in Rome is framed by choirs of musical angels, and a similar arrangement is found in an illumination of Christ in Majesty attributed to Andrea da Bologna in the Missal of Cardinal Bertrand de Dreux (Vatican Library, Rome). Perhaps the patron of this picture asked Lorenzo Costa to follow such a model.

This painting was probably made at the very end of the fifteenth century; the closest stylistic comparison is Costa’s 1499 predella of the Adoration of the Kings (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan). Such a date might help explain its meaning. It was commonly believed that the year 1500 – one and a half thousand years after the birth of Christ – would be marked by some kind of divine intervention in the world. This idea, which also prompted the creation of Botticelli’s ‘Mystic Nativity’, might have been behind this very unusual painting.