Adoration of the Shepherds

In April 1609 Spain signed a truce with the Dutch republic that stopped the fighting for 12 years, and the churches of Antwerp, stripped in the iconoclasm of the previous century, started ordering pictures again. Rubens had come home from Italy only months before, and this is among the first large altarpieces he painted in the city, for the Dominicans of Saint Paul's, where it still stands in front of the choir. He reused a composition he had made the year before in Italy for a church at Fermo, and worked it up in browns and heavy shadow, with the only light in the stable coming off the newborn child. That way of lighting a scene he had picked up in Rome, from what Caravaggio and the painters around him were doing.