Adorazione dei pastori

Poussin painted this in Rome around 1633, where he had settled among the ancient ruins that shaped everything he did. He sets the Nativity not in a plain stable but inside the broken columns of a classical temple, a deliberate idea in his day that Christianity had risen where the old pagan world fell. Through the stone arch you can see an earlier moment of the same night, the shepherds startled in a field as an angel breaks through the clouds, so two scenes unfold at once. Poussin rarely signed his work, but here he did, on the stone at the lower right. Within four years the picture belonged to Cardinal Gian Carlo de' Medici, hung in his villa outside Florence.