La Nativité

For a long time people thought Piero della Francesca had left this Nativity unfinished, the ox and the shepherds looking thin and sketchy, the surface oddly bare. A cleaning completed in 2022 at the National Gallery changed the story. Those worn passages turned out to be old damage from heavy-handed cleaning long ago, not an artist walking away. Piero had in fact finished it, and even the missing shadows were a choice, left out so the light on the stable wall reads as something miraculous rather than ordinary. He painted it in the early 1480s for his own family house in Borgo San Sepolcro, the Tuscan town where he was born, and it hung there for centuries. Five angels stand at the left like pale classical statues, two of them playing lutes and two more with their mouths open in song.