Luca Signorelli, 'The Circumcision', about 1490-1

Following Jewish tradition, Christ was circumcised when he was eight days old (Luke 2: 21). Seated on his mother’s lap, Christ reaches out to the mohel, the man who will perform the surgery, who holds a fine blade between his wiry fingers.

Joseph, the Virgin Mary’s husband, looks on, his serious expression reinforcing the solemnity of the occasion. The old man raising his hands in an almost ecstatic pose in the background is Simeon, one of the first people to recognise Christ’s divinity (Luke 2:25–35). Signorelli has painted him wearing a gold-woven cope, as though he were a high-ranking Catholic cleric. The two other men, by contrast, wear striped turbans, Signorelli’s shorthand for biblical dress; they may represent Jewish priests or elders. The one on the right, touches the tip of his finger, perhaps in allusion to the circumcision.

The subject was chosen by the patrons, the Confraternity of the Holy Name of Jesus, who were connected with the church of San Francesco, Volterra. The group was founded in 1424 after a visit by Saint Bernardino of Siena, who had preached a sermon in the city in 1424. Saint Bernardino was famously devoted to the name of Jesus, creating the trigram IHS (the first three letters of Jesus’s name in Greek) which often featured as a focus of devotion. The scene was a way of expressing this devotion through narrative, since it was when the infant Christ was given his name: Jesus.

Technical analysis undertaken when the painting was restored in the 1960s revealed that Christ’s pose was altered three times. The child as we see him now is the invention of a different artist, Sodoma, who was working in Volterra in the late 1530s. Vasari claimed Sodoma’s intervention was due to damage to the original from damp, but we can‘t be sure. Signorelli has signed the picture at the bottom edge: LVCAS / CORTONENSIS / PINXIT (’Luca from Cortona painted this').

The painting was intended to look like an extension of the chapel in which it was installed so that viewers felt they were seeing the event as it happened. The figures are set beneath a half dome, a common feature of Renaissance chapels, which usually crowned the altar upon which pictures like this stood. The walls are painted with swirls of bright paint in imitation of marble; the circular reliefs in the spandrels represent a prophet and a sibyl who foretold Christ’s coming. The vibrantly coloured marble floor tiles are designed to attract the viewer’s attention, and the white borders lead the eye towards the central focus of the image, the infant Christ.

Christ’s blood shed at the circumcision was seen as a precursor to his sacrifice at the Crucifixion. The basin placed in the centre of the composition, ready to collect the blood, might stand in for the chalice from which Christians would drink wine – thought to transform into Christ’s blood – at the Eucharist.