Adoration of the Shepherds

Luke's Gospel says that the first people to come to the newborn Christ were shepherds, told of the birth by an angel while they watched their flocks at night. Jacopo Bassano, painting around 1560 or 1561, gives them most of the canvas. The Virgin, the old Joseph and the Child are there in front, but the museum points above all to the shepherds and to how plain they are, in rough clothes, with bare feet right in the foreground. Simple men, they were the first to recognise the Messiah.

Behind the stable stand ancient ruins and broken columns. A medieval legend told that on the night Christ was born a great pagan temple in Rome fell down, and Renaissance painters often set the Nativity among fallen classical stones. The museum reads them here as the Christian Church rising on the ashes of paganism.

One figure does not belong to the group. Down at the lower right a young man in a blue jacket, seen from behind, is busy on his own. In the museum's reading, he is trying to make himself some light, while the others have already found it.