Adoration of the Christ Child

The episode: adoration at the manger

The subject is the birth of Christ at Bethlehem, in the devotional variant where the Virgin kneels in adoration before the newborn rather than resting after the delivery. Luke places the night in a stable because there was no room at the inn, and gives the shepherds as the first witnesses. Every later element of the cycle — flight, ministry, Passion — depends on this point of entry.

Its place in the cycle

The Adoration of the Child sits at the very start of the narrative, before the arrival of the Magi and before the Presentation in the Temple. In the ordering used across Renaissance altarpieces it is the first of the joyful scenes, and it is the moment painters used to establish the two figures — mother and child — who will be separated only at the Crucifixion.

The catalogue entry

The record attributes the work to Correggio, dates it to 1515, and places it in the Palazzo Brera, Milan. It measures 79 by 100 centimetres, a cabinet-sized horizontal format rather than an altar panel. The style is entered as High Renaissance and the artist as Italian. The record also files the work under landscape and forest as well as religious subject matter, and the measured palette reads as brown. No commission, patron, or ownership history is recorded, and none is supplied.