religious patrons and critics who were fond of Caravaggio's brutal realism. Many were critical of Caravaggio's approach to his religious paintings and called it “vulgar” to represent biblical figures as ordinary peasants. The focal point of the scene is Mary in the center. She is swathed in bright red. One of the three shepherds closest to her also has a little bit of what appears to be the same red robe draped along his arm. This might be symbolic of the gesture he is making to touch the Virgin as she is holding Christ. All three shepherds, as well as Joseph identified by a faint halo, look on with amazement and complete adoration at this infant child born in a barn. Caravaggio's Baroque work is starkly different and revolutionary from Renaissance predecessors. To start, these divine figures are represented as ordinary people of the times. They are barefoot with ordinary robes. There is no divinity in the barn, either. There is no holy light source to shine the entire scene and make it overly-apparent that a divine event is occurring. Instead, the background is extremely dark with only a small single light source. It seems as though the space was lit by a single candle, as it might have realistically been during the actual event. We know that in the biblical account, Mary and Joseph were extremely poor. Their halos are almost barely seen, in contrast to the ornate halos of the Renaissance. Other than the halos, the clasped hands of the shepherds is the only thing hinting of any religious importance in the painting. There was nothing overtly marvelous about the birth of Christ. Caravaggio renders this aspect perfectly. Caravaggio's compositions are also non-classical: he arranges his figures along imaginary diagonal lines rather than a perfectly center linear composition like the Renaissance. There is a box of tools in the foreground, presumably Joseph's since he was a carpenter. There is a single roughly baked loaf of bread as well, to reiterate Mary and Joseph's poverty. There is nothing pre-arranged in the painting. It looks like a photograph that would have been taken in the exact moments after Christ's birth. Stylistically, Caravaggio used a technique he was famous for developing called chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is a contrast between dark and light. Using this technique heightened the drama of the work to make it seem raw and magnify the emotional aspects of