Provenance

Santa Maria della Consolazione

Italian

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Five men and two women gather around an infant in a landscape in this vertical painting. The people all have pale or peachy skin with delicate facial features. Halos, like gold rings, float behind each head. All the men but one have beards, and most of the people’s lips are parted. The pudgy baby, Jesus, lies nude on a white cloth on the grassy ground near the bottom center of the composition. Three people kneel around and look down at him. To our left, a man wearing a fur-lined, powder-blue tunic under a rose-pink robe crosses his arms to touch opposite shoulders. A tall staff with a gold cross at the top rests in one elbow. Just behind Jesus, a woman wearing a gold crown and sage-green and pink robes holds a palm frond in one hand and extends the other over the baby. To our right, Mary wears a gold diadem and an apple-red dress. The cloak billowing behind her shoulders and fluttering to our right is emerald green on one side and silvery blue on the other. She also crosses her hands over her shoulders. Four men stand behind the group. Starting behind Mary, to our right, a man faces our left in profile. He holds a tall staff in one hand and points at Mary with the index finger of the other. The next man looks at the first with his hand held by his own face, the first two fingers splayed over his beard near his mouth. Next, another man looks down at Jesus with his hands together in prayer by the shoulder farther from us. These three men wear robes in canary yellow, burnt orange, dark blue, vivid green, or raspberry pink. The fourth man, along the left edge of the painting, is nude except for a coral-orange and yellow cloth tied around his hips. He has short brown hair and is cleanshaven. The feathered ends of three arrows project from his torso and three more wounds on his neck, shoulder, and thigh trickle blood. He holds an arrow by his side with one hand and reaches out with this other to hold the first two fingers and thumb up over Jesus. A gray stone building rises along the right edge of the composition behind the group. A person wearing a white tunic, red robe, and a straw-colored hat climbs a set of stairs there. That person holds a long staff over one shoulder and carries a lamb by the animal’s four legs in the other. In the sky above the main group, a bearded man a triangular halo over gray hair floats among about a dozen winged, child-like angels on a cloud bank. The man holds up one hand in blessing and holds an orb topped with a cross in the other hand. A bank of winged baby heads clusters in the distance, farther along the cloud bank. A few people, tiny in scale, sit or walk through the landscape, which leads back to ice-blue, craggy mountains. Cream-white and muted blue clouds fill the sky above. The artist signed the work as if he had left an inscribed tablet near Jesus. It reads, “M.D.XXXIIII. PERINO BONAC CORSSI FLORENTIN OPVS FACEBA.” The letters of the artist’s name, PERINO, are then combined into two monograms.
Perino del Vaga, The Nativity, 1534, oil on panel transferred to canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.31

The Nativity

Perino del Vaga · 1534 · oil on panel transferred to canvas ·  Accession ID  1961.9.31