Famous Christmas Paintings: 5 Masterpieces and the Stories Behind Them

A comet blazes over the stable in Giotto's Adoration of the Magi, painted on a chapel wall in Padua soon after 1300. It is the oldest of these five famous Christmas paintings, and Caravaggio's Adoration of the Shepherds of 1609 is the newest. Between them come two pictures in London, Geertgen tot Sint Jans's Nativity at Night and Botticelli's Mystical Nativity, and Pieter Bruegel's snowy Census at Bethlehem in Brussels. All five have a place on a much longer list of famous paintings.

Across those three centuries, each painter found a new way to bring a familiar story closer. Giotto used a comet and Geertgen a glowing baby. Botticelli filled the sky with dancing angels, Bruegel moved Bethlehem into a snowbound village, and Caravaggio crowded a dark stable with ordinary people.

At a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Medium	Where to see it (October 2026)
1	Adoration of the Magi	Giotto	c. 1303–1305	Fresco	Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
2	The Nativity at Night	Geertgen tot Sint Jans	About 1490	Oil on wood, probably oak	National Gallery, London
3	The Mystical Nativity	Sandro Botticelli	1500	Oil on canvas	National Gallery, London
4	The Census at Bethlehem	Pieter Bruegel the Elder	1566	Oil on oak panel	Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
5	Adoration of the Shepherds	Caravaggio	1609	Oil on canvas	Regional Museum, Messina

What painters put into a Nativity

Famous Christmas paintings from Giotto to Caravaggio are full of signs that churchgoers knew how to read. A lily stands for Mary's purity, a dove for the Holy Spirit, and a star over the child for God the Father. Ruins mark the end of the old pagan order. In a Flight into Egypt from Goossen van der Weyden's workshop, a pagan statue topples in the background, after a legend that idols fell as the Holy Family passed.

All five are religious pictures, so they also belong beside ten famous religious paintings, from the Ghent Altarpiece to The Last Supper. More Nativities and Adorations are in our collection of religious subjects.

The five paintings

01Adoration of the Magi, Giotto (c. 1303–1305)

The Padua banker Enrico Scrovegni built the chapel, and Giotto covered its walls with scenes from the Old and New Testaments. The Adoration of the Magi is one of them. He painted it into wet plaster, so it stays where he made it, on the wall of the Scrovegni Chapel.

Look at the sky. Instead of a neat star, Giotto painted a comet with a blazing tail. It is traditionally identified with Halley's Comet, which appeared in 1301. When the European Space Agency (ESA) sent a probe to meet that comet, it named the craft Giotto.

Below the comet, the eldest king kneels at the child's feet while an angel stands at the right. Another scene from the same walls, the Lamentation, opens our list of the best-known paintings of Jesus.

02The Nativity at Night, Geertgen tot Sint Jans (about 1490)

Geertgen's panel is the smallest picture on the list, painted in oil on wood, likely oak, and probably made for private prayer. Its date is uncertain, possibly about 1490, though the attribution to Geertgen is almost universal. In October 2026 it hangs in Room 52 of the National Gallery, and the gallery's file on Geertgen's panel names its owners since about 1900.

Geertgen leaves out the swaddling clothes. The naked baby gives off the light, and Mary and the little angels catch it on their faces while an ox and a donkey peer out of the dark.

Through a gap in the back wall, shepherds huddle by a fire on the hill. They look up at a shining angel, and one shields his eyes with his red cloak. Geertgen keeps three sources of light distinct: the child, the fire and the angel.

He borrowed the night setting from two lost Nativities by Hugo van der Goes. The glowing child comes from the writings of Saint Bridget of Sweden, a fourteenth-century mystic. Time has darkened the colors, and Mary's dress and mantle, once different shades of blue, now look black.

03The Mystical Nativity, Sandro Botticelli (1500)

Botticelli signed and dated his Mystical Nativity in 1500 and added a Greek inscription at the top. In it he reads "the troubles of Italy" in the light of the Book of Revelation, which foretells the end of the world. The troubles were probably the French invasions of Naples and Milan and the civil strife in Florence itself.

Every angel in the picture carries an olive branch, a sign of peace. Twelve of them dance in a ring under the golden dome, their branches hung with scrolls and crowns. Below, three angels embrace three men, while winged demons and horned little devils scuttle into cracks in the rocks. Revelation promises that the devil will be buried when Christ returns, and here he is going underground.

The kings come in from the left and the shepherds from the right, but the baby reaches up to Mary and ignores them all. The end-of-the-world tone echoes Girolamo Savonarola, the radical preacher executed in 1498, whom Botticelli is thought to have followed.

In October 2026 the canvas hangs in Room 60 of the National Gallery, which bought it in 1878. London's page on the Mystic Nativity has more on the inscription and the politics behind it.

04The Census at Bethlehem, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1566)

In Luke's Gospel, a census ordered by Emperor Augustus brings Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. Bruegel's Census at Bethlehem sets that scene in a snowy village in Brabant. Villagers crowd the house on the left to register and pay.

The holy couple are easy to miss. Look for Joseph with his saw and Mary on a donkey, heading for that crowd. She is wrapped in a big blue coat.

The ruin on the right may stand for paganism, and the church across the frozen water for Christianity. A plague house stands alone at the water's edge and adds to the picture's message of faith. Children skate and sled on the ice, and a red sun sits low behind the trees.

The panel is oil on oak. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium bought it at an Antwerp sale in 1902, and the Brussels museum's zoomable image of the panel lets you find each skater.

Bruegel had painted snow a year earlier in his Hunters in the Snow, which has nothing to do with Christmas. Hunters and an exhausted pack of dogs trudge home with a single fox, while skaters cross the ponds below. It was one of the first winter landscapes in European painting, and in October 2026 it hangs in the Bruegel room (Room X) of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. It is number 8 on our list of the twenty best-known landscape paintings.

05Adoration of the Shepherds, Caravaggio (1609)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

The Capuchin friars of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Messina commissioned Caravaggio's Messina Adoration in 1609. At more than three meters tall it is the largest picture here, and it belongs to the Regional Museum in Messina.

Caravaggio drops the glowing baby and the angels in the sky that Correggio had used some eighty years earlier. Mary wears a plain red dress. In the foreground, a basket with bread and a white cloth sits beside a few tools. A single hard light picks the figures out of the dark, the method behind Caravaggio's tenebrist style.

In 2009 the canvas traveled to Rome to be restored in public view. Conservators worked in a Chamber of Deputies space on Via del Parlamento, and passersby could watch through a window.

More Christmas paintings worth finding

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Correggio's Holy Night began as an altarpiece for the Pratonieri family chapel in San Prospero, Reggio. It was ordered in 1522 and painted mostly in the late 1520s, in oil on poplar. All its light comes from the newborn, an idea that first spread in Flanders at the end of the 1400s. It was the first large night scene in Italian painting.

When Augustus III of Saxony bought it from the collection of Francesco III d'Este, Duke of Modena, it was already famous. A Dresden gallery inspector wrote proudly that all of Europe called it Die berühmte Nacht, the famous Night. It belongs to the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, and the gallery's German catalogue entry has the inspector's words.

Three more Christmas paintings belong to the National Gallery in London. Guido Reni's Adoration of the Shepherds, about 1640, has angels holding a scroll that announces the birth. Jan Gossaert's Adoration of the Kings, from 1510 to 1515, sets the three kings in a ruin. Philippe de Champaigne's Dream of Saint Joseph, from 1642 to 1643, shows Joseph asleep in an armchair beside his carpentry tools.

Snow also turns up in history painting. In Paul Delaroche's Napoleon Crossing the Alps of 1850, a peasant guide leads Bonaparte's mule over the Great St Bernard Pass. The canvas belongs to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and was meant as a sober answer to the heroic versions by Napoleon's own artists. It is one of the paintings behind Napoleon's legend.

Bringing one home for December

Our studio artists paint five of these pictures by hand in oil: the Botticelli with its ring of angels, Bruegel's snowy census, Caravaggio's shepherds in the dark, Correggio's glowing Nativity and Bruegel's hunters coming home. If the painting has to stay up after January, choose a Bruegel, since the snow outlasts the holiday.

Sources

• The Nativity, National Gallery, London
• The Nativity at Night, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, National Gallery, London
• Mystic Nativity, Sandro Botticelli, National Gallery, London
• The Adoration of the Magi, European Space Agency
• Mark Kidger, What was the comet depicted in Giotto's Adoration of the Magi?, Journal of the British Astronomical Association (2026)
• Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel, Italia.it
• The Census at Bethlehem, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, on Google Arts & Culture
• Hunters in the Snow (Winter), Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna
• Die Heilige Nacht, Correggio, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
• Caravaggio, restauro aperto, Italian Ministry of Culture
• Researcher offers up new provenance for Caravaggio masterpiece, The Art Newspaper (2025)
• Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Paul Delaroche, Walker Art Gallery, on Google Arts & Culture
• Thomas Kinkade obituary, Associated Press, on MPR News (2012)
• The Meaning of Christmas Depicted in Works of Art, Erin Sweeney Design