Adoration of the Christ Child by the Virgin (the Nativity)

The Nativity, in its adoring form

This panel stands at the opening of the Christ cycle: the birth at Bethlehem, told in the second chapter of Luke. Painting developed two ways of showing it. The older one lays the mother on a bed after the delivery. The later one, called the Adoration of the Child, has the Virgin kneeling before the newborn laid on the ground, so that worship replaces childbed. The title entered in this record — Adoration of the Christ Child by the Virgin — names the second of the two.

Where it falls in the sequence

Almost nothing in the life of Christ comes before it. Only the Annunciation and the journey to Bethlehem precede this night, and everything the cycle later turns on follows from it: the Circumcision, the Presentation in the Temple, the years of teaching, and the Passion. A fifteenth-century devotional cycle that ran in order began at this scene, and a panel of this subject was made to be the first thing a viewer met.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives Stefan Lochner as the painter, 1445 as the date of creation, and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich as the location. The style is classed as Northern Renaissance and the artist as German. No dimensions are entered. The palette measured from the catalogue image reads as yellow. Nothing in the record speaks to the support, the commission, or the history of ownership, so none is claimed here.