L'Adoration des bergers

Mantegna painted this around 1450, when he was still in his late teens or barely 20, probably during a stay in Ferrara for the ruling d'Este family. Look at the shepherds arriving to see the newborn Christ. Their clothes are torn, their faces are worn and ordinary, and their hands come together in real astonishment. That plainness was a choice. Where other painters gave the poor a certain prettiness, the young Mantegna treated them almost like sculpture, hard-edged and specific, set in a landscape drawn with a jeweller's care all the way to the distant hills. The panel was later moved from its original wood onto canvas, which is why the paint surface reads the way it does today. It now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.