Nativity at Night

[2] It is a small painting presumably made for private devotional use, and Geertgen's version, with significant changes, of a lost work by Hugo van der Goes of about 1470.

Then I heard also the singing of the angels, which was of miraculous sweetness and great beauty ...[5]Many depictions reduced other light sources in the scene to emphasize this effect, and the Nativity remained very commonly treated with chiaroscuro through to the Baroque.

The different shades of blue given the upper and lower parts of the Virgin's clothing and the sky outside now appear as murky dark browns or blacks, and the painting is generally darker.

Apart from the reversal, there were other differences: in the van der Goes four angels knelt round the manger, and a larger group hovered near the top of the picture-space; the window had a sill higher than the Virgin's head; and Saint Joseph held a lighted candle in his hands.

In Early Netherlandish painting the usual simple shed of the Nativity, little changed from Late Antiquity, often developed into an elaborate ruined temple, initially Romanesque in style, which represented the dilapidated state of the Old Covenant of the Jewish law.

Various attempts have been made to relate his style, in this and other works, to much later Dutch painting, for example by Max Jakob Friedländer,[15] but "nationalistic allegations that Geertgen was quintessentially 'Dutch'" are rejected by Lorne Campbell.