Adoration Of The Shepherds - Circle Of Maarten De Vos, Late 16th Century

Oil on oak panel. Antwerp school, late 16th century.
Our composition depicts the Adoration of the Shepherds, an episode in the Nativity of which it is the prologue. The Gospel according to Luke is laconic on the subject: "Mary gave birth to a son and laid him in a manger because there was no room for her at the inn." This theme has developed and become entrenched in Christian artistic iconography since the Renaissance.
Here, the Virgin is depicted kneeling before the Child, who is resting on an improvised bed covered with straw. Behind her, the old man with the graying beard who is bowing is none other than Joseph thanking God for having made him a father. The donkey and the ox are standing nearby. Around them, the shepherds and two angels bow before the Messiah and complete the picture. In the foreground, on either side of the composition, two men, probably a father and son, wearing the alb that testifies to their faith, kneel in prayer. They are the donors of the work, those who commissioned and paid for the painting.
On our large panel, the piety of the protagonists is perceptible and the great gentleness that reigns there offers the viewer the unfolding of an intimate scene where the shepherds bring their modest gifts – lamb, basket of fruit and a curious urination – to the son of God. At the top of the composition, in a halo of light, the angel of the Annunciation who guided the shepherds to the crib of the Nativity.
Our painting, whose stylistic characteristics are unmistakable, clearly falls within the production of the abundant artistic center that was Antwerp in the second half of the 16th century. And we can situate it more precisely in the immediate vicinity of the most important history painter of this period: Maarten de Vos.

Our large panel is presented in a blackened and gilded wooden casseta frame.
Dimensions: 93 x 76 - 112 x 94 cm with the frame
Sold with invoice and certificate of expertise.

Maarten (Maerten, Martin or Marten) de Vos (Antwerp 1532 – Id. 1603) was a prolific painter and draftsman of the second half of the 16th century. Initially trained by his father Pieter, himself a painter, it was probably under the tutelage of the great Frans Floris that he found his way as a history painter. In the 1550s, he undertook a trip to Italy accompanied by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and stayed in several cities including Venice where, according to Carlo Ridolfi, he worked in Tintoretto's studio. The Venetian influences on De Vos's work corroborate this hypothesis. Returning to Antwerp in 1558, he was received into the Guild of Saint Luke. After the iconoclastic fury of the 1560s, during which most of the paintings were burned by Protestant mobs, and Frans Floris still not recovering from the destruction of most of his works, Maarten de Vos became the most prominent history painter in Antwerp. He was invited to redecorate most of Antwerp's churches. Regarding his immense drawing output, Karel van Mander says: "The numerous prints that various engravers have executed from his drawings show us in superabundance his facility of composition, his skill in grouping figures, in a word, his genius. These plates are so numerous that one can say that Martin De Vos equals, if not surpasses in fecundity, the other Martin, I mean Martin Heemskerck. He was abundant, correct and precise in his drawing. »

Bibliography:
- JONCKHEERE Koenraad, Antwerp art after Iconoclasm: experiments in decorum: 1566-1585, Yale University Press, 2012
- BAUDOIN, Frans, From Bruegel to Rubens, the Antwerp school of painting 1550-1650, catalogue of the Antwerp exhibition (Dec. 1992 – March 1993), Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1992
- VAN MANDER Karel, Lives of the most illustrious painters of the Netherlands and Germany, 1604, translated reissue Les Belles Lettres, 2002
- REAU Louis, Iconography of Christian Art (vol. 2), PUF, 1957.