Shepherds in a grotto

This scene of shepherds in a grotto combines pastoral genre with the cave setting that Magnasco explored obsessively throughout his career. Shepherds, like monks and hermits, represented figures of outdoor, non-urban existence whose natural simplicity the grotto setting amplified into a vision of primitive dwelling. The pastoral tradition — from Virgil's Eclogues through Italian Renaissance pastoral poetry to seventeenth-century painted pastoral — gave shepherds a literary and cultural dignity that made them appropriate subjects for serious painting despite their humble social position. Magnasco's shepherds inherit this tradition while sharing his monastic figures' quality of existing in a landscape that is both literally real and psychologically expressive.

The grotto setting is animated by Magnasco's restless brushwork, the shepherds' figures merging with the surrounding rock in a composition that dissolves the boundary between human habitation and natural environment.