The Adoration of the Shepherds
A popular scene for Renaissance and later artists
The subject of the Adoration of the Shepherds was extremely popular among painters during the Renaissance, and continued to be so in later centuries. During an age when very few ordinary people could read or write, and in Catholic Europe the services were conducted in Latin, there was a ready market for images that could involve lay people in their religion, and many Bible scenes were painted for display in churches.
The scene portrayed as the Adoration of the Shepherds concerns the passage in St Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 2, in which an unspecified number of shepherds are bidden by an angel to visit Bethlehem and see the Christ child in the manger. Very few details of the scene are provided by Luke, other than that the child would be found “wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger”. This therefore gave the artists plenty of scope for imagination in their portrayal of the scene.
St Matthew tells a different story, namely of “wise men from the east” who pay homage at the house in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph are living, without any mention of mangers. This event has given rise to a separate strand of Nativity paintings, known as the Adoration of the Magi, in which gifts are presented in quite a formal manner. The “Shepherds” paintings tend to be far more…
