Adoration of the Shepherds

Joseph Heintz
(1564 Basel – 1609 Prague)

Adoration of the Shepherds
before 1600

oil, copper, 30 x 22 cm; O 776; before 1950 in the Abbey inventory.

Joseph Heintz trained with Hans Bock the Elder in his hometown. Between 1584 and 1591 he lived in Italy where he was inspired by the works of Raffael, Michelangelo and Corregio in Rome and by Tintoreto, Veronese and others in Venice. In 1591, while travelling to Dresden on the invitation of the Elector of Saxony, he stopped in Prague and became the court painter for Emperor Rudolf II. A year later he became his agent for the purchase of Italian art works. In addition to painting, drawing and graphic art, he also engaged in architecture.
This small but masterful painting gives the feeling of future Baroque art expression. It is a synthesis of the painter's knowledge of the Italian masters and of his compatriot Hans Holbein the Younger, from whose altarpiece in the Freiburg Münster he borrowed the figure of the shepherd with a hat. Beside the Strahov version, there are at least three other variations by the artist. One is at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, another is in a private collection and the third is at the Augustinermuseum in Freiburg where there is an apparent counterpart to the Strahov painting The Circumcision of Christ. The painting was copied by other artists until the middle of the 19th century, as in the form of the central motif of the paper Crib by Georg and Felix Haller (now at Diözesanmuseum Freising).