This radical Nativity is also one of the great whodunnits of art history

On 25 October 1510 Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, wrote a letter to her agent in Venice inquiring after a certain highly collectable item. ‘We believe that in the effects and the estate of Zorzo da Castelfranco, the painter, there exists a painting of a night scene, very beautiful and unusual.’

She thus set off one of the great whodunnits of art history: a mystery hidden inside an enigma that caused a furious 20th-century quarrel between one of the greatest connoisseurs of Renaissance art and the most powerful dealer of the age — and which has never been definitively solved.

It concerns a beautiful picture, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the artist who may or may not have painted it: Giorgione of Castelfranco — just George, ‘Zorzo’, to Isabella — who had died recently of the plague. This is still sometimes known as the Allendale Nativity because it was once owned by the Allendale family of Bretton Hall, Yorkshire.

When in 1937 the art dealer Joseph Duveen bought it from them, planning to sell it to an American millionaire, Paul Mellon, the renowned art historian Bernard Berenson was instructed to attribute it to Giorgione. Despite the fact that Berenson owed his palatial villa outside Florence and grand style of life to Duveen’s lavish fees, ‘BB’ refused. ‘It would be utterly below his self-respect,’ he furiously responded, ‘let alone his dignity, to be kept as a pet, and not as an unquestioned authority.’

One thing is certain: the picture depicts the Adoration of the Shepherds, an event described in the Gospel of St Luke 2: 8–15. In the countryside near Bethlehem there were some ‘shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night’, when an angel appeared from the darkness and uttered the words: ‘Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.’