La Sagrada Familia con un pastor

This is one of the first paintings Titian ever made, from around 1510, the year the plague killed his brilliant older colleague Giorgione and left the young Titian, barely into his twenties, as the coming man of Venetian painting. You can feel him still learning. The soft golden light and the low dreaming landscape are borrowed from Giorgione. The figures are a little stiff, the drapery not yet the effortless thing it would become across the long life ahead of him, painting for popes and emperors into his late eighties. A shepherd kneels at the edge of the stable while Joseph lifts the newborn Christ toward him and Mary steadies the child on a manger woven from sticks. Far off, a small angel flies low through the hills, carrying the news to the fields.