The Birth of Christ

This panel is barely 38 centimetres tall and painted on both sides, and that tells you what it was. Around 1445 Stefan Lochner made it in Cologne as one wing of a small folding diptych, a picture for private prayer that could be opened and shut like a book. Opened, it showed the Virgin kneeling before her newborn son, who lies on a cloth on the bare floor, with a ring of small, childlike angels around them, the kind Lochner is known for. The museum points out the symbols of the Eucharist woven into the scene. Off to the left the shepherds receive the news, in a deep landscape that owes a good deal to Netherlandish painting. The other wing, a Presentation in the Temple, is now in the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. Closed, the pair showed the end of the story. The back of this panel carries the Crucifixion, and the back of the Lisbon wing shows Saint Francis receiving the wounds of Christ.