The Adoration of the Shepherds

Mazzolino is usually the painter of crowds, small panels crammed edge to edge with jostling figures. This nativity is the opposite kind of picture. The mood is calm and plain, the colours soft and almost Lombard, the shepherds kneeling on bare ground with an ordinary human tenderness. A monk leans out from a terrace to watch, and a few lively angels hover overhead, one of them bowing before the newborn child. That humble feeling points to where the panel was meant to hang: likely a monastery, made for prayer and quiet looking, in the manner of German and Flemish devotional scenes. Behind the figures a stand of trees thins into the distance toward a small town at the foot of a mountain, with a few broken ruins of the kind Mazzolino copied from the prints of Marcantonio Raimondi, a Bolognese engraver who spread Raphael's designs. He painted it in the early 1520s in Ferrara, where he worked for Duke Alfonso d'Este.