Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1670): Art, History and Details

Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1670) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Carlo Dolci (Italian, 1616–1687).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The historical significance of the Baroque painter Carlo Dolci, a precocious artist whose skill was recognized early by the leading Florentine patrons of his time, is often diminished due to his traditionalist compositions. Having gained local reputation as a talented portraitist and painter of religious narrative, Dolci's anti-Mannerist technique dismissed many of the leading Baroque trends as superfluous, retaining an unobtrusive and placid style in the manner of those before him. Having been a devout follower of the brotherhood of St. Benedict, Dolci draws upon a strict Christian iconography in his depiction of the shepherds' witness account of the birth of Christ. --Charles Eppley (January 2009)

Object facts

• Title: Adoration of the Shepherds
• Date: c. 1670
• Creator attribution: Carlo Dolci (Italian, 1616–1687)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 108 x 90.2 x 7.7 cm (42 1/2 x 35 1/2 x 3 1/16 in.); Unframed: 88.6 x 70.5 cm (34 7/8 x 27 3/4 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1968.22

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Waagen, Gustav Friedrich, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Algernon Graves. Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being an Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Mss., &C. &C. London, United Kingdom: J. Murray, 1854.
• Royal Academy of Arts. Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters, Associated with the British School. London, United Kingdom: Printed by Wm. Clowes and Sons, 1870.
• Thieme, Ulrich, Felix Becker, Fred. C. Willis, and Hans Vollmer. Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Leipzig, Germany: W. Engelmann, 1907.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.