L’Adoration de l’Enfant

Inside a ruined building the Virgin, in a white robe with her hair loose, kneels in prayer before the newborn Christ Child laid on the ground in the folds of her mantle. Around them kneel Saint Joseph holding a candle and the two midwives in their headdresses, while three angels beside the child hold a scroll inscribed with the words of the Annunciation to the shepherds; through the opening of a stable in the background appear two shepherds, an ox and an ass. The anonymous Cologne master who painted this panel in the late 1470s takes his name from the great altarpiece he made for the church of Saint Bartholomew in Cologne; his glowing colour and tender realism made him one of the most admired painters of the Rhineland on the eve of the Renaissance. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.