Giovanni Battista Spinelli, The Adoration of the Shepherds

The Virgin Mary gazes down at the infant Christ Child, who lies on a woven manger: wisps of hay poke through the sides of the basketwork. Beside them Saint Joseph leans on a stick; on the right the shepherds look on in wonder, their humble gift of a lamb lying on the floor beside the manger. Other figures crowd around the edges and a small dog even perches its front paws on a step in an attempt to get a better view of the baby. This is the Adoration of the Shepherds as described in the Gospel of Luke (2: 16–17): the Virgin has laid her son in a manger as there was no room at the inn, and the shepherds have come to Bethlehem to see the new-born Messiah. In spite of the ox and the donkey, the setting evokes a classical ruin rather than a stable, perhaps intended to signify the pagan religion which Christianity replaced.

The painting entered the Gallery’s collection, damaged and largely repainted, in 1884. It has been ascribed to both Spanish and Italian seventeenth-century artists, with its recorded purchase from a monastery in Naples in the 1860s supporting the latter. At one time it was attributed to Bernardo Cavallino but recent conservation has revealed the painting to be a typical work by the idiosyncratic Neapolitan painter, Giovanni Battista Spinelli. According to his eighteenth-century biographer, Spinelli was a pupil of Massimo Stanzione and gave up painting for alchemy, dying during an experiment in 1647. The story is unreliable, however, for Spinelli is still documented in Naples in the 1650s.