Adoration of the shepherds

This Adoration, painted around 1548, shows Bassano taking in the most fashionable art of his day. The way the Virgin turns in a long, elegant sweep to lift the cloth and reveal the newborn to the shepherds owes a clear debt to Parmigianino, the great mannerist whose graceful, elongated figures were then the height of style. Bassano would have known such inventions largely through prints, the engravings that carried the latest ideas from Rome and Parma out to painters everywhere. Around that refined central gesture he sets the shepherds down as real country people, unpolished and closely observed. The picture stayed in a private collection in Verona for centuries, until the gallery acquired it in 1983.