The adoration of the shepherds (Luke 2:8-20)

The Adoration of the Shepherds, painted in 1617 and now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Brunswick, is among Jordaens's earliest ambitious religious canvases — executed when he was just twenty-four — and already demonstrates the qualities that would define his mature work: dense figure groupings, nocturnal Caravaggesque lighting, and flesh of convincing warmth and weight. The Adoration was one of the most frequently commissioned religious subjects of the Counter-Reformation, serving to emphasise the Incarnation's earthly reality against Protestant denial of Christ's physical presence. Jordaens places the shepherds — rough, astonished, socially marginal — at centre stage, giving them the dignity of direct divine encounter denied to kings and scholars. The Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum's distinguished collection of Flemish old masters, assembled by the dukes of Brunswick in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, acquired this canvas during a period when Jordaens's works were avidly sought across German courts.

The composition uses a nocturnal setting illuminated primarily by the divine light emanating from the Christ Child, a device Jordaens developed under the influence of the Utrecht Caravaggists and Rubens's own nocturnal subjects. Paint on the faces of the shepherds is applied with urgency — impasto highlights catching the divine light on brow and cheekbone. The shadows are richly glazed, creating depth without deadness.