Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat... the excitement mounts (if you happen to get excited about Christmas that is!) Sorry, I’m not going to be the Grinch and to prove it, here are three remarkable Adoration of the Shepherds from three remarkable artists – Luis Tristán de Escamilla, Sebastiano del Piombo and Jacopo Robusti, whom we know as Tintoretto.  (While you’re reading, press the play button for an appropriate soundtrack.)

Let’s start with the Spaniard Luis Tristán de Escamilla’s version.

What we witness in the painting is the moment immediately following the birth of Christ when a group of shepherds, overwhelmed by the celestial light of a heavenly star, are guided by angels to go into Bethlehem, seek out the stable and pay homage to the newborn child. They bear gifts of a pair of doves and of lambs (one of which is trussed up, bottom centre, ready for sacrifice - a prefiguration of Christ’s Passion).

The tale is told in the Gospel of Luke 2:1-16. Nowhere does Luke mention the gifts of lambs and doves that the shepherds present to the Christ-child here: they are added by the painter as allegorical devices.

The lamb first gets a mention in the Bible as a sacrificial offering in the Book of Genesis when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his own son. On the way to the altar an enlightened Abraham said to Isaac, God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering (Genesis 22:8). 

A later, more explicit reference to the lamb being symbolic of Christ is in the New Testament when John the Baptist, on seeing Jesus, proclaims: Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29).

References to the dove as a bringer of peace also go back to the earliest book of the Old Testament and appears at Christ’s baptism as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Throughout western art the use of the dove to symbolise the Holy Spirit is ubiquitous.

The Virgin Mary, dressed in a blue robe (very much darkened with time) and scarlet bodice, looks on at her child with tenderness, love but with a gesture of awe made by her left hand.

Two older men are engaged in animated conversation behind the group. One, most likely to be Joseph, is holding back the swaddling cloth to reveal Christ to the wider world. As we shall see later, the same two characters appear in a slightly earlier rendition of the Adoration of the Shepherds by El Greco, Tristán’s master. In the El Greco, the unnamed man is in fact a self-portrait – has Tristán followed his master’s example?

Luis Tristán’s scene is bathed in a shaft of heavenly light while a cluster of flying putti bear an inscribed scroll that reads: Glory to God in the Highest and on Earth, Peace.

In fact there are two inscriptions in the painting: GLO[RI]A IN EXCELSIS DEO ET IN TE[RR]A PAX, found on the scroll carried by the airborne putti as mentioned above and Ls TRISTA.F which is found to the lower right and is in the form of Luis Tristán de Escamilla’s signature.

The Adoration of the Shepherds probably formed part of an altarpiece in the Jeronymite Convent of the Queen in Toledo, together with an Adoration of the Magi (now in Budapest), Pentecost (now in Bucharest) and Resurrection (lost).

Around 1600 the dominant influence in Toledo was that of Doménikos Theotokópoulos known as El Greco. Luis Tristán de Escamilla’s tutelage at the hands of this master is most evident in his use of extreme contrasts of light and dark in figurative compositions to heighten their dramatic effect and add three dimensional depth (chiaroscuro) which draws directly from El Greco's work.

The influence of El Greco on Tristán is made clear when one looks at El Greco’s rendition of The Adoration of the Shepherds (click on the image to see it in all its glory: it’s worth it!).

This work was part of the high altar of the Dona María de Aragón Collegiate Church in Madrid on which El Greco had worked between 1596 and 1600. The artist had conceived a monumental structure consisting of 6 paintings and 6 sculptures which visually embodied the idea of the Incarnation of the Son of God, the subject of many theological debates in contemporary Spain. The altar was dismantled in the early 19th century, the other five paintings being now with the Prado Museum.

The scene is set at night. The lower part of the painting features the secular while the upper half represents the Divine world, angels singing songs of praise to the Lord. El Greco focuses on the moment when shepherds kneel in front of the infant Jesus, venerating Him.

As with Luis Tristán’s rendition, the gift the shepherds offer, a trussed lamb, foretells Christ’s sacrifice.

With an emphatic gesture, the Virgin holds open Jesus’s white swaddling cloth revealing the miracle of the Incarnation. Clearly her gesture is not meant for the shepherds or the angels: it is meant for us.

Looking more closely behind the Virgin we notice two somewhat elderly men engaged in conversation. The character on the left is Joseph while the character on the right in dark blue is a self-portrait of El Greco himself.

But the El Greco Adoration is not in our Christmas Corner at the Fitzwilliam: it is in the Prado. The second Adoration of the Shepherds that sits in Christmas Corner is the work of Sebastiano del Piombo, made in about 1512. In terms of artistic development, the Adoration of the Shepherds is a transitional piece for Sebastiano. Venetian colour certainly dominates his work at this time, primarily under the influence of Giorgione, but the angular forms and gestures of the shepherds are more Roman in style, and recall his time with Michelangelo.

The association with Giorgione was such that painting was originally attributed to Giorgione, underlining its similarity to his direct teachings. It was as late as 1913 that Sebastiano was confirmed as its creator, due to the elements of Roman influence that can also be found here.

The cast list is stripped down to the Virgin and Child, Joseph and three shepherds who each pay homage in their own individual way. There are none of the offerings we saw in Luis Tristán’s painting and the principal symbolic device is the prefiguration of the pietà evidenced by the limp prostrate form of the Christ child.

Vivid colour radiates from every part of the painting while each of the figures has a sculptural quality about their rendition. The intensity of the colour is all the more significant when we consider the provenance of this work: it did not always look like this.

The painting was almost completely destroyed while owned by the French royal family as a result of a catastrophic attempt at restoration. At the time, the theory was that, by removing the paint layers from the unstable, possibly infested wood and transferring them to canvas, the future of the image would be secured. The proponents of the technique were a father and son named Hacquin, originally cabinet-makers. They used planes and chisels to carve away the wood while another associate chose to use nitric acid vapours to separate the paint from the wood: what could possibly go wrong? Everything, in fact, as the picture immediately below shows prior to a remarkable piece of restoration by experts at the Hamilton Kerr Institute - the restoration department of the Fitzwilliam - and completed in 2017. It is calculated that five years of person-hours by the immensely skilled and experienced team at the HKI went into the painting that we can see today, in its new antique frame.

The final painting of the trio is by Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto. Made in about 1540, we see the by now familiar nativity scene but this time with the addition of a second maternal figure. This is likely to be Elizabeth with her child John the Baptist. Traditionally she would have been portrayed as being older than she looks here. The kneeling Shepherd brings the gift of a pair of doves similar to those seen in Luis Tristán de Escamilla’s version but as far as I can see – there are no lambs on show.

Tintoretto’s Venetian roots shine through here – the radiant colours (colore) especially the rendering of the sky which, an old art history tutor once told me, was the biggest give-away when it came to Venetian painters.

However, there’s also the clear influence of both Titian (an early master in Tintoretto’s training) and more particularly of Bonifazio Veronese whose earlier version made in 1523-25 was clearly the model from which Tintoretto based his own portrayal of the scene: