牧人来拜

For years the biggest question about this small nativity was who actually painted it. When the dealer Joseph Duveen sold it in 1938 to the American store magnate Samuel Kress as a Giorgione, his own trusted expert, the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, insisted it was an early Titian instead. The disagreement was bitter enough to break a partnership that had shaped the American art market for decades. Today most scholars come down on Giorgione, one of the shortlist of Venetian painters who died young around 1510, probably of plague. You can see why the argument was hard to settle. The scene splits in two, a dark rocky cave on the right where the holy family gathers, and on the left a soft, luminous stretch of Venetian countryside that feels painted for its own sake, with the light doing as much work as the figures.