The Nativity

X-rays show that this Nativity began as a different picture. Tintoretto built it around the lower part of a tall Crucifixion he had painted some 20 years earlier, and the two large women at the front, the Virgin and an older woman who may be Saint Anne, were first painted for that scene at the foot of the cross. The Museum of Fine Arts dates the first painting to the late 1550s and the reworking to the 1570s, when the canvas became a long horizontal more than three and a half metres wide. The small, sketchy scenes behind, the journey of the Magi and the angel appearing to the shepherds, were added by an assistant. Why Tintoretto took his own picture apart like this is still not clear. Its later history is uncertain too. A Boston collector bought it in Italy, perhaps in 1874, and his son remembered it hanging over the altar of a church in a small town north of Florence, while an American survey of 1882 said it had been bought in Venice.