The Adoration of the Shepherds

At almost five metres tall, this is one of the largest paintings in the National Gallery. Reni stages the birth at night, with the light coming from the child in the manger and catching the faces of the shepherds bent over him. Above, through a break in the clouds, small angels hold a scroll reading Gloria in excelsis Deo. The Virgin's robe is painted in a fine grade of ultramarine, the blue made from lapis lazuli that was at one time worth more than its weight in gold.

It is a very late work. Reni's biographer, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, lists it among the paintings still in his studio when he died, and notes that it was meant per Germania, for Germany. It belonged to the princes of Liechtenstein, possibly commissioned by Prince Karl Eusebius, and hung in the chapel of their castle at Feldsberg, now Valtice in the Czech Republic, before moving to their Vienna palace in 1706. In 1939 it went with the family collection to Vaduz, and the Gallery bought it from them in 1957. A second late Adoration by Reni, close in date, is still in the Certosa di San Martino in Naples.