Aanbidding door de herders 1740

Giovanni Cattini made this engraving, titled "Adoration of the Shepherds", sometime in the 1700s. It’s a depiction of a scene from the Nativity story in which shepherds visit the newborn Jesus. The scene would have been very familiar to Cattini’s contemporaries. By the 18th century, the Catholic Church was an immense political and cultural power, and images like this one were used to promote its teachings. But the print medium also made religious imagery more accessible to those outside the Church, allowing individuals to privately contemplate biblical stories. We can think about this engraving, then, as part of a wider democratization of religion. As a social historian, I’m interested in how Cattini made this well-known scene his own. What details did he include, and what did he leave out? To answer that, I’d want to know more about the different religious orders and social classes in Italy at the time.