Romanino made this painting for the high altar of S. Alessandro in Brescia, which served as a parish church although it was attached to a Servite convent. It may have been commissioned by the Confraternity of Corpus Christi – a lay brotherhood which venerated the body of Christ – who were then responsible for the high altar. On the altar was a wooden tabernacle which must have been directly below Christ in the painting. The Eucharist (the bread and wine believed by Catholics to transform into the body and blood of Christ) would have been kept in the tabernacle.

There was almost always more than one saint or mystery to be venerated in a high altarpiece, and this type of multi-panel painting, known as a polyptych, was well suited to the purpose. However by the 1520s, when this picture was painted, ‘unified’ altarpieces with all the figures on a single panel or canvas were more common in the artistic centres of Florence and Venice, and this format was a little old-fashioned. However it was still popular in the provinces – one of the other two high altarpieces made by Romanino for Brescia was a polyptych.

The central panel shows the Nativity, with Mary and Joseph kneeling before the infant Christ. The presence of the angels with a scroll suggests the annunciation of Christ’s birth to the shepherds, who appear in the landscape to the right. On either side, panels depict Saint Alexander (lower left) and Saint Jerome (lower right). Above them are Saint Gaudioso (upper left) and Saint Filippo Benizzi (upper right). Romanino blends and layers his long expressive brushstrokes in the clouds and landscape to create a very distinctive, painterly style, which brings the surface of his canvas alive with movement.

The painting originally had a crowning panel, which was described in 1700 as depicting three half-length figures of ‘the dead Saviour supported by the Virgin and Saint John.’ It is very likely to be the panel by Romanino of that subject, which was photographed in a private collection in Florence but is now untraced. The altarpiece also originally had large canvas shutters to protect it – The Annunciation was painted in glue size on the outside of the shutters, and on the inside was The Adoration of the Magi. These may be the two damaged glue size paintings of these subjects by Romanino now in SS. Nazaro and Celso in Brescia.

The altarpiece was probably completed in 1525. The main panel must have been painted at least in part by 1524 as Romanino’s associate Callisto Piazza painted a polyptych showing the Nativity with Saints (private collection) which was influenced by it and dated to that year.

The frame, which would have formed a fundamental part of this altarpiece, is now missing. It was usual at the time for the frame to be commissioned to the patron’s specifications before the painting. The work on the frame for Romanino’s altarpiece was begun by the woodcarver Stefano Lamberti almost a decade before the painting. Lamberti was one of the most celebrated woodcarvers of his day and was almost certainly a more celebrated artist than Romanino. Lamberti’s elaborate altarpiece frames have freestanding columns with every surface carved with brittle, pierced, applied ornament of fantastic variety, involving grotesques, tendrils, trophies and geometric tracery. The frame design for this altarpiece is unknown, but it is likely that the central panel of the Nativity was displayed lower than the flanking panels so that the horizon continued across all three paintings.