In his Adoration of the Shepherds, now in the National Gallery in London, Guido Reni has given a truly celebratory representation of the scene, as he imagined it to have been, in the stable at Bethlehem, on the night when Jesus was born. Light radiates from the Child, as he lies on the straw, which his mother Mary has covered with a white cloth. Standing behind his manger-cot, Mary bends over him, to show him to the shepherds who have come crowding in from the fields.
With them, two young women have come also, with gifts. Some of the shepherds look quite old. Bearded and balding, they lean on their long staves as they press forward to see the Child. In the foreground, however, there is a young shepherd-boy. Fair-haired and bare-footed, he kneels on one knee, holding close to him a sheep, and looking up towards the one who, when he is grown up, will say of himself that he is the Good Shepherd; that he knows his sheep and that his sheep know him.
Two of the shepherds have stayed outside the fence that protects the stable, and are playing a tune on their pipes. One of them has a bag-pipe; the other is holding his instrument to his lips. Behind them, in the distance, is the outline of the hillside they have just left, and, in the darkness, we can see that more shepherds are converging on the stable.
The night is dark, and the clouds have almost obscured the pale, silver sliver of a new moon, high up, to the left, above the stable. The heavenly light that had shone all around the shepherds as the angel announced the good news to them, and the multitude of the heavenly host they had heard singing God’s praises, have moved, now, to the stable where the Child is. Now, the angels are hovering above the stable’s roof, carrying a ribbon-like scroll, on which are the words that Luke, in his gospel, tells us they sang: ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven; and on earth peace…’ - ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax….
Seated in the left foreground, is St. Joseph, wearing a golden yellow mantle over his grey-blue tunic. He presses the palms of his hands together in a time-honoured gesture of prayerful reverence, and looks at the Child Jesus. Behind him, between his head and Mary’s, we can see, in the shadows of the stable, the ass and the ox we have come to expect to find in Nativity scenes. These animals are not mentioned in the gospel narrative. They are included, not simply because they are ‘at home’ in a stable, but because they are mentioned at the beginning of the Book of Isaiah, in a passage that is interpreted as foretelling the rejection of Jesus by his own people. Isaiah calls out to heaven and earth to listen, and says, ‘The ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib, Israel knows nothing, my people understands nothing.’
Guido Reni’s Adoration of the Shepherds is a very large painting, measuring more than sixteen and a half feet high by about ten and a half feet wide. It is an ‘altar-piece’, that is, it was intended to hang directly behind and above the main altar in a church. It would therefore be seen at a distance by the faithful attending Mass. Even so, the details are most carefully painted, and stand up well to the close scrutiny that is possible now that it is hanging in a public gallery.
If we try to imagine ourselves looking at the painting from a distance, we can see how simply and clearly the artist tells the story he is depicting. We notice that there are two really bright areas - the light radiating from the Child, and the glowing light of the angels. We notice, too, how we keep looking from one to the other, not as if they were two separate bright patches, but because each leads to the other. That is because Reni has placed these two areas of light diagonally, in the composition, with Mary and the Child towards the left in the lower part, and the angels towards the right, in the upper part. Also, he has very cleverly left a space between the feet of St. Joseph, and the kneeling shepherd-boy, a space that invites us into the picture. If we enter through that space, we find that we are following a pathway moving diagonally upwards towards the right. We notice the light glancing off the faces of the shepherds, and, although our pathway seems to finish in the bright light of the angels, we allow ourselves to follow their gaze, and look again at the Christ Child, the centre of all attention in the picture.
This clever use of diagonals that make us look into, upwards and across the picture, is a characteristic of the baroque style in painting. So is the importance given to the activity of the angels in the upper part of the composition. Another baroque element is the strong contrast between the brightly-lit areas and the areas in deep shadow, an element known as ‘chiaroscuro’, an Italian term that means ‘light and shade’. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that the date of this painting is about 1640-1642, when the baroque style was at its height, in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.
Guido Reni was one of the great masters of baroque painting. Born in Bologna, he soon went to Rome. There, the influence of Caravaggio’s lighting effects combined with the classicism he had learnt in his own native town, to produce a style that won him enormous success in his lifetime, and great renown for a long time afterwards.