The Adoration of the Child

Josse Lieferinxe's Adoration of the Child, painted around 1500 and now in the Department of Paintings of the Louvre, depicts the Virgin Mary adoring the newborn Christ laid on the ground before her — a devotional image type that derived from the Nativity vision of Saint Bridget of Sweden, in which the Virgin described kneeling in prayer before the luminous infant. This Brigittine Nativity type, in which the adoring pose of the Virgin replaced the nursing Madonna, spread rapidly across Europe in the late fifteenth century through the influence of both Flemish painting and the printed devotional literature of the period. Lieferinxe brings to this intimately devotional subject the warm Provençal naturalism and careful spatial organization that distinguish his best work. The Louvre panel is among the key works in the corpus of this important but underappreciated southern French painter.

Lieferinxe renders the Adoration in warm, intimate nocturnal or low light, the luminous infant Christ as the primary light source in the Brigittine tradition — a device of great devotional power that Geertgen and the Flemish masters had established and that Lieferinxe adapts to the warmer Provençal palette and sensibility.