The Adoration of the Shepherds

Turn this panel around and there is a second painting on the back: Saints Lawrence and Catherine, standing side by side. The front holds the night of Christ's birth, with the shepherds crowding in around the newborn child. A picture worked on both faces was never meant to hang flat against a wall. It stood free, most likely a wing that could be opened and shut, so a worshipper met the two saints when it was closed and the Nativity when it swung open. Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen painted it around 1515 in Amsterdam, still keeping to the older Netherlandish manner, dense with fine detail and crowded with figures, at a time when younger painters were beginning to look south to Italy. Much later it came to Basel with the collection of Louise Bachofen-Burckhardt, a local woman whose pictures reshaped the Kunstmuseum's holdings of early masters.