L'Adoration des bergers

Lorenzo di Credi learned to paint in one of the most famous workshops in Florence, that of Andrea del Verrocchio, where a young Leonardo da Vinci trained beside him. You can feel that schooling here in the careful drawing and the smooth, rounded faces. The panel was made around 1510 for the convent church of Santa Chiara in Florence, an altarpiece of shepherds kneeling before the newborn Christ. By this date Florentine painting had raced ahead into the grand High Renaissance, but di Credi held to the patient, exact style of his teacher, almost a generation out of fashion. The nuns kept it on their altar for nearly 400 years, until it finally left the church in 1908.