Saint Joseph, often a rather superfluous figure in paintings of the Nativity, is shown making himself useful by carrying hay, presumably to feed the ox and ass, in the background, so filling a gap in the composition, and perhaps distracting them from joining in with the bagpipe music.

A charming but atypical miniature in the 15th-century Flemish La Flora Hours in Naples shows a shepherd playing his bagpipes as his two companions dance for the infant Jesus and a delighted Virgin Mary sits to one side.

However her gesture of lifting a cloth, revealing a full view of a naked Jesus, including his penis, is unusual in art by this date.

In the late medieval period pictures of the infant Jesus often made a point of displaying his genitals for theological reasons,[7] but in the Counter-Reformation this was discouraged by clerical interpreters of the vague decrees on art of the Council of Trent, such as Saint Charles Borromeo.

There is evidence bearing on the development of the composition in the form of a number of drawings by both Annibale and Domenichino, and two paintings by Giovanni Lanfranco, another young artist in the circle, that are based on the lost Carracci (one known only from a further copy).

Drawings can be regarded by different scholars as either copies of something already existing, sketches where an artist works out something new, or adaptations that are something in between, and this ambiguity has affected discussion of this question.

A Nativity attributed to Annibale Carracci, which might be either the original or the copy, is recorded by André Félibien as being in the large collection of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), the famous finance minister of Louis XIV.

[15] The Dulwich Picture Gallery was founded to hold the Bourgeois bequest and other artworks owned by the charity, and the painting hung there until it was controversially sold by the trustees in 1971.

[18] The picture is in good condition, but the blues in the robes of the Virgin and the shepherd standing at right, as well as the yellow of the boy holding the dove, have "been affected by chemical change".