Cariani’s early work shows the influence of Giovanni Bellini and the poetic subject matter of Giorgione. In this eccentric composition the tightly knit group of figures crowd together in front of a distant view of a lake and hills. To the right two more shepherds receive the news of Christ’s birth.This painting was attributed to Giorgione until Cariani was suggested as the artist in the nineteenth century; most subsequent scholars have agreed with this. The painting has been abraded, probably in the nineteenth century, but much of the detail is still intact and shows the distinctive qualities of Cariani’s work.

It seems likely that Cariani decided to paint over the group of angels in the clouds top left, although in subsequent restoration one of them has come to light again. The pronounced craquelure in this area has resulted from the artist painting an upper layer before the previous one had dried, as he re-worked his ideas. The lower angels, crowding around the Virgin, seem to have been planned from the start, as Cariani left a reserve for them. The composition is unusual, with the tightly knit group of participants crowded together in the foreground in front of a distant view of a lake with hills beyond. In the right middle ground two more shepherds receive the news of Christ’s birth, from earthbound angels. John Shearman suggested that the painting began life as a ‘Rest on the Flight into Egypt’, to which shepherds were later added. This would explain the hillside setting, which is most unusual for an Adoration, but there is no technical evidence to support the hypothesis.

The long horizontal format and the tendency to overlap figures in the foreground plane are characteristic of Cariani’s work of this early period, and can be seen in The Concert of c.1515-16 (National Museum, Warsaw). The dreamy sense of isolation of each participant, despite their close proximity to one another, recalls the enigmatic quality of Giorgione’s work. Many similar details of gesture and costume can be found in Cariani’s Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors commissioned in 1514 (private collection, Bergamo). In these paintings colour is strong, with dazzling highlights laid on with fine touches of thick paint. The energetic angels resemble those in the fragment of Adoration of the Shepherds of 1518-20 (Brera); the shepherds and animals on the right are angular and summarily painted like the soldiers in the background of the Resurrection of Christ of 1520 (Brera). Cariani’s Virgin between Saints Roch and John the Baptist (private collection, Bologna) of c.1516-18 is most comparable in subject and arrangement, although it is closer to the balanced compositions of Titian.

Catalogue entry adapted from The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque, London, 2007