The Adoration of the Shepherds

Amico Aspertini was the odd man of Bolognese painting. Vasari, who wrote the famous lives of the artists, called him restless and eccentric, forever filling notebooks with drawings of ancient Roman ruins and sculpture. That hunger for the antique runs through this small nativity, painted on wood around 1530, where the holy family kneels among fragments of classical architecture rather than in a plain stable. The shepherds press in from the side, and the whole scene has the crowded, slightly nervous energy that made his work look strange to his contemporaries and oddly modern to us. It is a private, cabinet-sized picture, the kind made to be held and studied up close rather than seen across a church.