Adoration des bergers

Lorenzo Lotto painted this Nativity around 1534, and he refused the usual grandeur. The Christ child lies in a plain wicker basket stuffed with straw, no manger at all, and his mother kneels on the bare ground before him. The two shepherds crowding in were real men: Braccio and Sforza Baglioni, noblemen from Perugia who seem to have commissioned the work and had their own faces worked into the holy scene. The ring on Mary's hand points to the Holy Ring, a wedding-band relic kept in Perugia's cathedral, which is likely where the painting was headed. Lotto spent much of his life moving from town to town for jobs like this, and he signed it simply, Lottus.