Geburt Johannes des Täufers

This little scene once ran along the base of a much larger altarpiece, in the strip painters called the predella, where the big sacred figures above gave way to small narrative panels telling a story. Here it is the household bustle just after the birth of John the Baptist, women tending the newborn and the mother resting. Signorelli, a Tuscan painter trained in the orbit of Piero della Francesca, treated it as a place to experiment. Scholars date it to around 1490 and single out the light, which falls unusually sharply for its time, modelling the figures almost like sculpture. The Louvre bought it on the art market in 1824, long separated from whatever altarpiece it first belonged to, which has never been securely identified.