Oil on canvas.
The adoration scene revolves around the centrality of the Sacred Family, towards which many shepherds and shepherdesses converge, with flutes, sheep, and dogs; between them, on top left, another family arrives riding a donkey, almost like an anticipation of the flight into Egypt; on top right, outside the building, an angel announces the birth to other shepherds.
This fine quality piece is identical in subject to the painting preserved at the Musei Civici di Pavia, donated to the city in 1838 by the legate Malaspina and is also referred to the scope of Camillo Procaccini.
Our piece is almost identical in the dimensions as well to his twin of Pavia, if not for a few centimetres more due to the increase of the dimension of the canvas in the restoration phase, that created the need for a 'stretching' of the canvas along the border, as highlighted by an analysis of the edges.
This analogy of subject and dimensions, other than the same time frame, argue in favour of the two paintings belonging to the same atelier.
Moreover, both of them remind of the 'Adoration of the Shepherds' certainly autograph by Camillo Procaccini, one of the most vivid of his production, preserved in the Church of Sant'Alessandria in Zebedia in Milan, that, even with an obvious difference in the vertical development and the disposition of the figures, presents the same scenic setting and the same methods used for the two twin canvases.
What catches the eye is the compositional equivalence of the central group of the Sacred Family, as well as the same identity of some characters, like the shepherd with the dog in the bottom left corner, but also the face of a flute player, the one in the background on the right in the two twin pieces, and the one that is almost hidden on the left in the piece of S. Alessandro.
In the piece proposed here, as well as in the twin in Pavia, the evident realism of the scene that details the roles of the characters, the intense plasticity of each figure, never static even when it's still and intertwined with the others in a game of overlays and colour contrasts, and the didactic scenes, find a place in Procaccini's adhesion to the Counter-Reformation program, promoted by Cardinal Borromeo in Milan, where the artist from Parma lived and worked for a long time.
The painting has been previously restored and recanvassed.
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