Adoration of the Shepherds

By 1608 Rubens had spent nearly ten years in Italy, and it shows here. He painted this in about three months for the Oratorian church in Fermo, on the Adriatic coast, and he built the whole scene around a single source of light coming off the newborn child. That trick of deep shadow around a bright center he had picked up from Caravaggio, whose work he had studied in Rome. The subject is old and familiar, shepherds crowding in to see the baby, but the darkness is new. For centuries the painting was half-forgotten, until the art historian Roberto Longhi recognized Rubens's hand in it early in the twentieth century, matching it to a work recorded in Fermo as La notte, the night.