L'Adoration des bergers

Around 1480, near the end of his life, Hugo van der Goes did something unusual with a Nativity. He painted it wide and low, like a stage, and had two Old Testament prophets lean in from either side to draw back a green curtain and show you the newborn child. The curtain rings even hang from a real rod fixed to the frame, so the cloth seems to open into your own space. The prophets are there because they had foretold this birth centuries before, and van der Goes lets them present it as if the promise were being kept in front of you. He made this after entering a monastery near Brussels, where he kept painting for lay patrons while struggling with a mental illness that overwhelmed him not long before he died.