Top 10 Adoration of the Shepherds Paintings, Ranked

And there were shepherds residing in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks by night. Just then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.

Luke 2:8–9 · BSB

Luke tells the whole episode in thirteen verses (Luke 2:8–20): an angel, a sign, a hurried walk into Bethlehem, a baby in a manger, and a group of working men who return “glorifying and praising God.” Luke gives them no names, no number and no gifts. The lambs, the bowls of milk, the flute and the shepherd touching his hat all come from painters and the traditions they worked in, which is why no two of these ten pictures look alike.

Shepherds or Magi?

The two Christmas visits are often merged, but they come from different Gospels. Luke’s shepherds arrive on the night of the birth and find the child “lying in the manger.” Matthew’s Magi come later, follow a star, and find him in a house:

On coming to the house, they saw the Child with His mother Mary, and they fell down and worshiped Him. Then they opened their treasures and presented Him with gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.

Matthew 2:11 · BSB

So a picture with a manger, straw and men in sheepskins is an Adoration of the Shepherds, and one with crowns and gold is an Adoration of the Magi. Painters did not always keep them apart: Ghirlandaio (number 7) sends the kings’ procession through the background, and Carl Bloch (number 10) puts a star, which belongs to Matthew’s story, over Luke’s shepherds.

The story: Correggio’s Holy Night, ordered in 1522 by Alberto Pratoneri for his family chapel in the church of San Prospero in Reggio Emilia and now in Dresden, shows the shepherds arriving in the dark to find the newborn Jesus giving light to everyone around him.

The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:5 · BSB

Pratoneri’s handwritten promise of payment was kept in the Modena archives. On 14 October 1522 he promised Correggio 208 lire for a Nativity and paid 40 of them on the spot, and Correggio signed the receipt “Antonio Lieto”, which the Biblioteca Estense explains as a Latinized form of his surname, Allegri (allegro and lieto both mean cheerful). The picture went up over the altar eight years later, and fifty-seven years after that the trouble began. In 1587 an agent of the Este dukes promised his master he would look for “any possible means of obtaining it”; in May 1640 Duke Francesco I had it removed to Modena. Corrado Ricci, summarising the parish chronicle in 1896, wrote that it was “sacrilegiously carried off… to the inexpressible grief of all the citizens.” In 1746 the Este sold it to Augustus III of Saxony as part of a sale of about a hundred masterpieces, and it was the most famous painting in Dresden until Raphael’s Sistine Madonna overtook it around 1800.

The Dresden museum calls it the first monumental night piece in Italian painting. Vasari admired the angels over the hut, who “appear rather to have rained down from Heaven than to have been made by the hand of a painter,” and we have written elsewhere about why the baby in pictures like this one glows. John’s Gospel puts it in one line: the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The story: Hugo van der Goes painted this enormous triptych in Flanders for Tommaso Portinari, the Medici bank’s representative in Bruges, and when it reached the family chapel in the hospital church of Sant’Egidio in Florence in 1483, Florentine painters found its rough-faced shepherds extraordinarily new.

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph and the Baby, who was lying in the manger.

Luke 2:16 · BSB

Portinari’s predecessor in Bruges had ordered a great Flemish altarpiece too, Memling’s Last Judgment, and lost it at sea: according to the critic Martin Gayford, Hanseatic pirates seized the ship, and the painting is still in Gdańsk. Portinari’s arrived. It went by sea to Pisa and up the Arno, and from the city gate it was reportedly carried by sixteen porters. The Uffizi says that its arrival “was quite an event” and that Florence’s painters especially praised “the realistic likeness of the objects, landscape and facial features.” Vasari was less attentive and credited it to “Hugo of Antwerp”; Hugo was a master in Ghent.

Open, it is 652 centimetres wide, and Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie calls it the largest triptych in early Netherlandish painting. Its saints tower over the donor family because, the Uffizi explains, size here follows rank. The flowers at the front are worth a look: the Uffizi reads the white iris and the red lily as purity and the blood Christ shed in his Passion, and the columbine as his mother’s sorrow. So the newborn the shepherds hurried to see is surrounded, on the Uffizi’s reading, by flowers that already speak of what his birth will cost.

The story: Painted in 1608–09 for the high altar of the Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Messina, Sicily, while Caravaggio was a fugitive moving around the Mediterranean, this Adoration shows the shepherds finding Mary half-reclining on the ground with her newborn son in her arms.

And she gave birth to her firstborn, a Son. She wrapped Him in swaddling cloths and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Luke 2:7 · BSB

The paperwork is still turning up. An eighteenth-century source says the city Senate commissioned it for a very high fee; in 2025 a curator reported finding a 300-ducat payment for it in a Naples bank archive, the first known document for the painting, and argued that it was painted in Naples and shipped to Messina in the autumn of 1609. The canvas itself has been cut down: the museum says traces show it was once about 10–20 cm taller.

The museum also points out how unusual Mary is here: half-reclining on the ground with her hair veiled, unlike almost all of Caravaggio’s Madonnas, and the earliest writer on the picture, the Jesuit Placido Samperi in 1644, called the picture a Madonna del Parto, a Madonna of childbirth. Luke’s verse directs our attention to the circumstances of that birth: no room for them in the inn, and a manger for a cradle.

The story: Painted in the duchy of Lorraine around 1644 and now in the Louvre, Georges de La Tour’s Adoration of the Shepherds shows the visitors gathered round the newborn by the light of a single candle in Joseph’s hand.

The true Light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

John 1:9 · BSB

It surfaced on the art market in the mid-1920s labelled as a Honthorst, which is a little awkward, because Honthorst is number 9 on this list. Hermann Voss gave it back to La Tour in 1926, and that year the Louvre bought it from the art historian Vitale Bloch, the first La Tour the Louvre ever acquired. (Vitale Bloch is not, so far as anyone has shown, related to the Bloch at number 10.) The picture may be the night-time Nativity that the town of Lunéville gave the provincial governor in 1644, though the Louvre says doubt remains.

Someone has also cut it down at the right and especially at the bottom, and added a 7 cm strip at the top. A copy in Albi preserves the original format, including Joseph’s carpentry tools set just below the sleeping child, which is why the Louvre reads it as a picture about Joseph too. The Louvre also notes that La Tour lights the child only indirectly: the light comes from the candle Joseph shields with his hand. John calls the child the true Light; the candle is only the light we can see him by.

The story: El Greco painted this towering Adoration of the Shepherds in Toledo for his own family tomb in the convent church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, the church where his Spanish career had begun in 1577, and the Prado, which received it in 1954, says it can be considered his last work before his death on 7 April 1614.

And suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favor rests!”

Luke 2:13–14 · BSB

The burial deal was signed on 26 August 1612 by his son Jorge Manuel, acting for himself and his father, and it gave the family the altar for ever, along with a vault that the nuns said lay beneath it. For ever lasted six years. After a disagreement the agreement was cancelled in 1618, and the Prado says the nuns demanded that Jorge Manuel exhume the remains. The painting stayed in the nuns’ church for more than three centuries. In his book of 1910 the historian Francisco de Borja de San Román described going down into the convent’s crypts looking for El Greco’s bones; he came back with a hypothesis he admitted would be very hard to prove. Nobody knows where they are.

El Greco went on painting this subject for most of his career, and the Prado says this last version refines compositions he had used in Bucharest, Valencia and Illescas. Here the angels carry a banner with the words the shepherds heard, which the Prado reads as GLORIA IN EXCEL[SIS DEO E]T IN TERRA PAX [HOMINIBUS]. Over his own grave, El Greco set the angels’ song: glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth.

The story: In 1646 Rembrandt painted this night-time Adoration of the Shepherds in Amsterdam for Prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange, the Stadholder of the Dutch Republic, as an addition to the series of Passion scenes he had been delivering to the prince since the 1630s; it is now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

After they had seen the Child, they spread the message they had received about Him.

Luke 2:17 · BSB

The prince’s payment order of 29 November 1646 survives: 2,400 guilders for two paintings, one of the birth of Christ and one of his circumcision. Seven years earlier Rembrandt had reminded the prince’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens, that his earlier Passion pictures had fetched no more than 600 guilders apiece. The companion Circumcision is lost, and the Pinakothek suggests the prince’s death in 1647 may have prevented further scenes.

The National Gallery in London owns a smaller version of the same year, signed with Rembrandt’s name, which it now catalogues as the work of a pupil. The prince paid good money to have this scene on his wall. Luke’s shepherds saw it for nothing, and then spread the news.

The story: Domenico Ghirlandaio painted this Adoration of the Shepherds, dated 1485 on one of its pillars, for the burial chapel of the banker Francesco Sassetti and his wife Nera Corsi in the church of Santa Trinita in Florence, two years after the Portinari shepherds (number 2) had arrived in town.

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

Luke 2:19 · BSB

Sassetti had wanted his chapel in Santa Maria Novella, but the Dominicans there objected to his plan for frescoes of Saint Francis, a rival order’s founder, so he went to Santa Trinita instead. The scholar Jean Cadogan points out that in September 1485, three months before the Sassetti altarpiece was finished, his rival Giovanni Tornabuoni hired the same painter for the main chapel of Santa Maria Novella. Vasari says Ghirlandaio portrayed himself in this Nativity, without saying where; the favourite candidate is the shepherd pointing to himself, though scholars still disagree. The panel itself spent 1743 to 1920 away from its altar, and it is back there now.

The cleverest touch is the manger. It is a painted ancient Roman sarcophagus, and its invented Latin inscription has Pompey’s augur Fulvius, falling by the sword at Jerusalem, prophesy that the urn covering him will give forth a god. Behind it the Magi ride in through a Roman triumphal arch, and Cadogan reads the big stone in the foreground as a pun on the patron’s name (sasso is Italian for stone). The original frame says, in Latin, “Mary adored the One whom she had borne,” and Luke gives us the same Mary in one sentence, keeping all these things in her heart.

The story: Painted in Venice around 1505–1510 and named after the Viscounts Allendale, whose family owned it in Yorkshire for ninety years, Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and it is usually blamed for ending the long and lucrative partnership between the dealer Joseph Duveen and his expert Bernard Berenson.

Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice; let the sea resound, and all that fills it.

Psalm 96:11 · BSB

Its earlier owners included Cardinal Joseph Fesch, Napoleon’s uncle, whose estate inventory reportedly counted nearly 16,000 paintings. In 1937 the dealer Joseph Duveen bought it from the Allendale family and wanted it sold as a Giorgione. His long-time expert, Bernard Berenson, refused to agree; as the critic Martin Gayford tells it, Berenson’s side replied that it would be “utterly below his self-respect … to be kept as a pet, and not as an unquestioned authority.” The two parted for good that year, and in 1938 Samuel H. Kress paid Duveen $400,000 for the picture anyway.

The great Italian scholar Giovanni Cavalcaselle had already called it Giorgione in 1871; Berenson argued against him vehemently and eventually conceded it might be partly by Giorgione, and Giorgione is the name it carries now. Whoever painted it gave half the picture to the countryside. Our pairing, Psalm 96, gives the earth a part in the rejoicing too.

The story: Painted in 1622, two years after Honthorst came home to Utrecht from Rome, where his night scenes had earned him the nickname Gherardo delle Notti, “Gerard of the nights,” this Adoration of the Shepherds spent more than a century in Pomeranian village churches, mostly over the altar at Pantlitz, before anyone knew who had painted it.

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.”

Luke 2:15 · BSB

According to the local church newspaper, it was given in 1869 to the newly built village church of Pantlitz, in north-eastern Germany. In the late 1960s that church was due to be blown up. It survived (legend says the demolition squad went to the wrong village), but the painting picked up a 75 cm tear from a break-in, and in one well-meant earlier repair someone went at the blistering paint with flat irons. In 2004 the old frame came off, the quality of the painting became obvious, and the art historian Ricarda Gutsch identified the painter. The picture now hangs in the Pommersches Landesmuseum in Greifswald, and Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, which owns another Honthorst Adoration of 1622, calls it a recently discovered “twin version.”

Honthorst’s name was a favourite label for unattributed night scenes: La Tour’s Adoration (number 4) once turned up on the market as one of his. In this picture there is no candle at all, and the light comes from the child, from whom Mary lifts the cloth while the shepherds look on. Luke 2:15 gives the shepherds’ own plan: let us go to Bethlehem and see.

The story: Carl Bloch, the Danish painter whose scenes from the life of Christ became twentieth-century favourites of Latter-day Saints, painted this night-time Adoration of the Shepherds in 1882, and Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum bought it the same year.

The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, which was just as the angel had told them.

Luke 2:20 · BSB

A year earlier he had etched the same scene: Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst holds the 1881 print. Bloch’s best-known religious work was the cycle of 23 scenes from the life of Christ for the King’s Oratory at Frederiksborg Castle, which he painted between 1865 and 1879 at the request of J. C. Jacobsen, the founder of Carlsberg. So the cycle that made Bloch the painter of Christ for so many Latter-day Saints began with a commission from the founder of Carlsberg. (More of his work is in our Carl Bloch guide.)

Look up and you will find a single star over the shepherds, although Luke mentions no star in their story; the star belongs to Matthew’s Magi. The sign Luke’s angel gave them was humbler, a baby lying in a manger, in a town whose name, Bethlehem, is traditionally explained as “house of bread.” Luke ends the scene with the shepherds returning, praising God for everything they had heard and seen.

Ten is a cruel number for this subject. Each of these could argue its way onto the list:

• Francisco de Zurbarán, Musée de Grenoble (1638). The signature calls Zurbarán Philipi III Regis Pictor, painter to King Philip III, who had been dead since 1621; the Met’s 1987 Zurbarán catalogue supposes a fourth I has worn away. The same catalogue reads the lamb with bound feet at the front as a preview of the Lamb of God, and says the figures fit together “in the manner of a rigorously coherent and perfectly legible puzzle,” which we can only applaud. The Grenoble museum’s database lists it in the Louvre’s Zurbarán exhibition, which runs until 25 January 2027.
• Peter Paul Rubens, Pinacoteca Civica, Fermo (1608). Rubens took a 25-scudi deposit for this night scene in March 1608, his last year in Italy, and promised it within six months. It was then largely forgotten until Roberto Longhi recognised his hand on a visit to Fermo in 1927.
• Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Museo del Prado (c. 1650). Carlos III bought it in 1764 from an Irish merchant in Madrid. The Prado sees Ribera’s influence in its darkness, and says the scene, with its lamb, hens and basket of eggs, is conceived as “a humble counterpart to the Adoration of the Magi.”
• Andrea Mantegna, Metropolitan Museum of Art (shortly after 1450). It spent more than a century at Downton Castle, bought by Richard Payne Knight, the collector who tried to talk Parliament out of buying the Elgin Marbles, and Berenson once listed it, in the Met’s words, “erroneously” as an Adoration of the Magi.
• Jacopo Tintoretto, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice (1578–1581). Tintoretto puts the Holy Family upstairs in a hayloft and the shepherds on the ground floor. Ruskin, who admired the building enormously, called this canvas “literally a piece of scene-painting” and said the child’s halo was “like a glory of chopped straw.”
• Gaspar de Crayer, Rijksmuseum (c. 1640–1650). A Flemish canvas more than three metres tall, very probably painted for a church, that spent 72 years, from 1936 to 2008, on loan to the Dutch embassy in Brussels. The Rijksmuseum notes how unusual it is to see Joseph tethering the ox.

Visio Divina (Latin for “divine seeing”) is a way of praying with an image, modelled on lectio divina (“divine reading”), the old monastic way of praying slowly through Scripture. Try it with Honthorst’s Adoration (number 9).

1. Look. Give the painting a full minute before you think about it. Let your eye go where it wants, then notice where the light comes from and whose faces it reaches.
2. Meditate. Read Luke 2:15–16 slowly. The shepherds hear the news and go to see for themselves. What would you have to leave behind tonight to go and look?
3. Pray. Tell God plainly what you are bringing to the manger, even if it is nothing more than curiosity, and ask to be shown the child.
4. Contemplate. Sit quietly with the shepherds’ words, “Let us go to Bethlehem and see,” and let them be the whole prayer.

What is the Adoration of the Shepherds?

It is the scene in Luke 2:8–20 in which shepherds, told by an angel that the Saviour has been born, go to Bethlehem and find the baby Jesus with Mary and Joseph. Museums tend to call a painting a Nativity when the shepherds are absent or far off, and an Adoration of the Shepherds when they have reached the manger.

What is the most famous Adoration of the Shepherds painting?

Correggio’s Holy Night in Dresden, which was already famous when Dresden bought it in 1746, has the strongest claim, with the Portinari Altarpiece in Florence close behind.

What is the difference between the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Adoration of the Magi?

The shepherds come from Luke’s Gospel, on the night of the birth, and find the child in a manger. The Magi come from Matthew’s Gospel, follow a star and find him in a house, with gold, frankincense and myrrh.

How many shepherds came to see Jesus?

Luke does not say, and he names none of them. Painters chose for themselves: Giorgione puts two in the foreground, and El Greco three.

Why do the shepherds bring a lamb in so many paintings?

Luke mentions no gifts. The lamb is a painters’ tradition: it is what a shepherd would bring, and it is often read as pointing ahead to Jesus as the Lamb of God. Describing a Florentine Adoration of about 1600, the National Gallery in London calls one shepherd’s lamb “his gift to the Child and a symbol of Christ’s future sacrifice,” and in Zurbarán’s picture the lamb’s feet are tied.

Why does baby Jesus glow in these paintings?

Luke says the glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds in the field, but he never says the baby glowed. The National Gallery in London traces the idea to the visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden, and the Dresden museum notes that the glowing Christ Child spread first in Flanders, at the end of the fifteenth century. We tell the whole story in Why Does Baby Jesus Glow in Nativity Paintings?

• Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (2nd ed. 1568), lives of Domenico Ghirlandaio (vol. 3) and Correggio (vol. 4), translated by Gaston du C. de Vere (London, 1912–14). Project Gutenberg vol. 3 and vol. 4
• Vasari on Technique, translated by Louisa S. Maclehose (London, 1907), introduction to painting, ch. VII, § 83 (“Hugo of Antwerp”). Project Gutenberg
• Corrado Ricci, Antonio Allegri da Correggio: His Life, His Friends, and His Time, translated by Florence Simmonds (London, 1896), for the 1522 contract and receipt, the 1587 Este letter and the 1640 removal.
• Jean K. Cadogan, interview on the Sassetti Chapel, Apollo (2022), and Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (2000).
• Martin Gayford, on the Portinari Altarpiece (The Spectator, 2007) and on the Allendale Nativity (The Spectator).
• Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, exhibition texts for Hugo van der Goes: Between Pain and Bliss (2023).
• Francisco de Borja de San Román, El Greco en Toledo (Madrid, 1910), for the 1612 contracts; Manuel B. Cossío, El Greco (Madrid, 1908).
• Die Urkunden über Rembrandt, ed. C. Hofstede de Groot (The Hague, 1906), nos. 68, 70 and 107; National Gallery, London, record NG47 (Pupil of Rembrandt).
• Louvre collection record RF 2555 for the La Tour, including its 1924 Amsterdam appearance as a Honthorst and the Albi copy; Charles Sterling, Les Peintres de la réalité en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1934), no. 46.
• Kirchenzeitung Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (2013) on the Pantlitz Honthorst; Wallraf-Richartz-Museum exhibition text via CODART (2017); Gallerie degli Uffizi on Honthorst’s nickname.
• Kress Collection Digital Archive (K509) and Dictionary of Art Historians (Berenson, Duveen) for the Allendale Nativity; INHA on Cardinal Fesch’s collection.
• Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, record NM 1352; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Bloch etching of 1881; Frederiksborg Castle on the King’s Oratory; BYU Magazine (2011) on Bloch’s reception.
• Jeannine Baticle in Zurbarán (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), and the Musée de Grenoble collection database (MG 1324).
• Museo del Prado record P000961 (Murillo); Metropolitan Museum of Art record 32.130.2 (Mantegna); Scuola Grande di San Rocco; John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 3, Venetian Index; Rijksmuseum SK-A-74 catalogue entry (de Crayer); City of Fermo exhibition sheet (2017) on Rubens.
• National Gallery, London, catalogue entries on Adorations of the Shepherds (Humphrey Wine, The Seventeenth Century French Paintings, 2001).