Adoration of the Shepherds

Lighting a Nativity only from the Child was an old idea by the time Mehus used it. Correggio had made it famous around 1530 with the altarpiece everyone simply called The Night, which in Mehus's lifetime hung in the ducal gallery at Modena and was copied and engraved across Italy.

This canvas is 73 by 88 centimetres, the size of something kept in a bedroom rather than a chapel. The Virgin lifts a corner of the sheet over the baby, the light comes off him onto the faces leaning in, and shepherds and countrywomen crowd the space with angels above them. Over on the left the sky breaks into streaks and flashes, weather coming in over the shed while nobody inside it looks up.