After Hugo van der Goes, 'The Nativity, at Night', probably about 1520-30

The shining Christ Child lies on the ground surrounded by angels, while his mother kneels to worship him and Saint Joseph stands holding a candle. Behind Joseph we see two women in exotic jewelled turbans – they are the midwives who attended the birth. Angels hover in the air above Christ.

The whole scene takes place in a roofless and crumbling building, perhaps symbolising the old law which Christ replaced. Through its arches we can just make out other episodes from the story of Christ’s birth: the Annunciation to the Shepherds at the left and the star appearing to the Three Kings in the centre.

The idea of the infant Christ illuminating the Nativity scene comes from the work of Saint Bridget of Sweden in the fourteenth century. She wrote that in her visions the light of the newborn child was so bright ‘that the sun was not comparable to it’. Here, there are five sources of light: the Christ Child, Joseph’s candle, the midwife’s lantern, the star and the light shining around the angel and the shepherds.

Although this picture is of poor quality, and the style of its underdrawing and painting technique suggests it is from the first decades of the sixteenth century, the composition is close enough to the Portinari Triptych (Florence, Uffizzi) to suggest a connection with Hugo van der Goes. It is one of three surviving versions of a lost painting by van der Goes, and by comparing the three we can get an idea of what the original looked like. The artist of this panel took the setting, the scheme of different kinds of light (natural, divine and artificial), the Virgin and Christ Child and the foreground angel from van der Goes, but also drew on the work of other artists: the figure of Saint Joseph is reminiscent of the early sixteenth-century ‘Antwerp Mannerists’, and derives ultimately from the work of Rogier van der Weyden.

The artist must have had access to patterns from van der Goes' workshop and used them to create a pastiche based on the lost Nativity, which was probably painted in the early 1470s and may have been the missing left wing of the Monteforte Altarpiece (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).