L'Adoration des mages dans un paysage d'hiver

Look for the holy family and you will struggle. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted this small panel in 1563 and pushed the Adoration of the Magi into the bottom left corner, half lost behind a snowbound Flemish village going about its day. People haul water, cross a frozen river, huddle under the eaves. What makes the picture matter is the snow itself. Apart from two Italian exceptions, this is thought to be the first painting in Western art to show snow actually falling, and Bruegel did it with plain white dots flicked across the finished scene, so the whole village seems seen through a curtain of flakes. Meteorologists have since praised his grey sky as an accurate winter overcast. The sacred event that gives the work its title is here just one more thing happening in a cold town.