Follower of Jacopo Bassano, 'The Adoration of the Shepherds', about 1600-25

The Gospel of Luke tells how an angel visits shepherds who are tending their flocks and announces that a saviour has been born. The shepherds travel to Bethlehem and find the infant Christ lying in a manger (Luke 2:8–20).

In this painting, the Virgin Mary lifts the white cloth covering the manger to reveal the newborn baby. The shepherds fall to their knees in adoration. One respectfully takes off his hat while another holds down the trussed lamb he has brought as a gift. A goat, ox and ass also gaze in wonder at the miracle of Christ’s birth. The peacock that can just be glimpsed behind the ass is a surprising addition. These exotic birds were often included in fifteenth-century Italian paintings of the Adoration of the Kings as a symbol of immortality, but rarely in later ones, or in paintings of the Adoration of the Shepherds.

The thatched wooden stable, in which the holy family shelters, is built in the ruins of a classical building with huge stone columns. This ruined building symbolises the end of the old pagan order and the beginning of the new Christian era. The night sky is very dark, with neither moon nor stars, as the first glimmers of dawn appear on the horizon. The scene is illuminated by the bright light that radiates from the infant Christ himself.

A little shepherd boy with bare buttocks sits on the stone steps blowing on a burning stick. This glowing ember forms a third light source in the painting, and illuminates the boy’s face, but it is much fainter than the light coming from Christ. Many earlier paintings of the Nativity include a figure holding a candle. This idea derives from the mystical writings of Saint Bridget of Sweden, in which she explains that the candlelight was outshone by Christ himself. The shepherd boy with the burning stick may have seemed a more fitting figure to include in Bassano’s rustic scene.

The painting would not originally have been quite so dark. The blue of the sky seems to have darkened and the whole painting is covered with an old and very brown varnish.

Jacopo Bassano first painted the Adoration of the Shepherds in the mid-1540s at about the same date as The Way to Calvary. He returned to the subject in about 1562 (Palazzo Corsini, Rome) in a style very close to The Good Samaritan. This painting is derived from that composition but the figures are smaller and it is less crowded. In further versions, Jacopo kept slightly altering the composition or reversing elements. These versions were then copied by his sons Francesco and Leandro. This painting may be a workshop copy of a version by Leandro, so it is not easy to determine exactly who it is by. The most celebrated nocturnal Adoration painted by Jacopo Bassano’s workshop under his direction was made for S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in the early 1590s.