The Adoration of the Shepherds

This panel was painted on Corfu, still Venetian territory then, sometime between 1688 and 1700. Nobody has narrowed the date further, and the painter's own birth and death years are unknown. Around the Adoration sit eight more figures, the evangelists with their symbols and the prophets, David with his harp, Moses with his tablet, Isaiah, and Solomon crowned. Four of those come straight out of a print, an engraving by the Netherlandish printmaker Cornelis Cort after a fresco by the Italian painter Federico Zuccari in Rome, the kind of sheet that travelled into workshops all over the Mediterranean. Tzangarolas went further than borrowing the poses. He mixed his black and white into greys so those figures read like the engraving itself, while the craft underneath stays Byzantine, egg tempera on wood with gold leaf. Mark appears at the lower right with his lion, which on Venetian ground was also the emblem of the state.