Adoration of the Shepherds

Crivelli was a Venetian who spent his working life far from Venice, in the small towns of the Marche on the Adriatic coast. This little panel, barely half a metre wide, sets the birth of Christ against a strange background. Behind the shepherds he paints Bethlehem, and among its buildings a tall column carrying a gilded statue, borrowed from one of the celebrated ancient monuments of Constantinople. For a while scholars doubted it was his at all. In 1896 one critic called it a fake, and it was filed under an invented name, the Master of the Adoration of Strasbourg, until experts came back around to Crivelli's own hand. It hangs in Strasbourg, bought in Florence in the 19th century.