Attributed to Evangelista Dossi

For much of the 20th century this little Nativity passed as the work of Battista Dossi, brother of the Ferrarese painter Dosso Dossi and his partner in work for the Este dukes. In the 1960s the American scholar Felton Gibbons proposed a weaker hand from the same family, Evangelista Dossi, known as Dossazzo, and later critics accepted him. Attributed to is how the Galleria Borghese records that consensus, which rests on style and has no signature or document behind it.

Little else is securely known of Evangelista beyond his death in Ferrara in 1586. The panel, about 44 by 30 centimetres, shows the Child laid on white linen directly on the ground, an ox seen from behind in a wooden stable, and a white cloud carrying a group of cherubs. Its route to Rome is uncertain, possibly through Lucrezia d'Este in Ferrara and then the Aldobrandini, the family of Pope Clement VIII, before it appears in the Borghese inventory of 1693.