Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, 'Adoration of the Shepherds', 1383

Two sacred episodes from Christ’s birth unfold together in this touching Nativity scene. On the right of this small panel, the Virgin Mary sits on the ground, cradling baby Jesus in her arms. She wears a blue cloak over a pink robe. The child is wrapped in a blue-and-white-striped cloth. He gazes lovingly into his mother’s eyes. They shelter in an open-sided barn with a thatched roof, built outside the city walls. Behind them, the ox and the ass peer out from a cave. Jesus’ father, Joseph, dozes in the foreground. Beside him lie his water flask and a walking stick for carrying the family’s few belongings.

On the left, an angel guides two roughly dressed shepherds down from the hills to worship the newborn child. The artist combined two episodes from the story of Jesus’ birth, as told in the Christian Bible (Luke 2:8–20). First, an angel appeared to the shepherds grazing their sheep in the hills around Bethlehem, and told them that the Messiah had been born and was lying in a manger. Then the shepherds travelled down to the town and found the holy family in the stable.

The late fourteenth-century Florentine artist Niccolò di Pietro Gerini painted this panel. It was part of the lower tier (predella) from a large multi-panel altarpiece (polyptych). The work was made in 1383 for the church of Santa Maria di Monticelli, attached to the nunnery of the Poor Clares in Florence. Other parts include the main panel showing the Virgin and Child (Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence), another predella panel with the Adoration of the Magi (Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence) and a third with the Annunciation that was sold in 2000.

The main tier has been attributed to Jacopo di Cione, with whom Gerini often collaborated. The two had worked together on the huge San Pier Maggiore altarpiece (National Gallery, London) around ten years earlier. Gerini worked with many other painters, too. This was a common artistic practice during the second half of the fourteenth century in Florence.

The dark tones of the landscape and the sleeping Joseph suggest this scene happens at night, as described in the Gospel of Luke. Jacopo di Cione used the same approach in his Nativity with the Annunciation to the Shepherds. This is one of the earliest examples of a panel painting with a gold ground showing a night scene. Gerini loved mountainous landscapes painted in olive tones, with a high horizon and distinctive trees, inspired by the works of Fra Angelico. We can see these in his panel of the Adoration of the Magi (Gemäldegalerie der Staatliche Museen, Berlin), which also has a similar composition with the seated Virgin and the sleeping Joseph leaning on his hand.