The 5 Most Famous Christmas Paintings for 2026

These five famous Christmas paintings were made over about three hundred years. A picture of the birth of Jesus is called a Nativity. An Adoration shows visitors who come to honor the newborn baby. The oldest one here is Giotto's Adoration of the Magi. The Magi were the kings who came to see the baby. Giotto painted them on a chapel wall in Padua, Italy, soon after 1300. The newest is Caravaggio's Adoration of the Shepherds from 1609. In between come two pictures in London and a snowy village scene by Pieter Bruegel in Brussels. All five are on our much longer list of famous paintings. A short chart puts them in order by their reach on Wikipedia, counted in languages, wherever that count exists. It also names the museum or chapel that keeps each scene.

Each painter found a new way to bring an old story closer. Giotto used a comet, and Geertgen tot Sint Jans used a glowing baby. Botticelli filled the sky with dancing angels, and Bruegel moved Bethlehem into a snowy village. Then Caravaggio filled a dark stable with ordinary people.

How the five Christmas paintings rank

We chose Wikipedia languages over photo counts, since a page in a new language means people there wrote about this exact painting (October 2026). For Giotto, Geertgen and Bruegel we found no page about these exact works, and Giotto's match turned out to be a Botticelli, so those three come last, sorted by date.

What painters put into a Nativity

Famous Christmas paintings are full of signs that churchgoers knew how to read. A lily stands for Mary's purity, and a dove stands for the Holy Spirit. A star over the baby stands for God the Father. Ruins stand for the end of the old pagan world, when people prayed to other gods. In one painting from the workshop of Goossen van der Weyden, Mary, Joseph and the baby run away to Egypt. Behind them a statue of a pagan god falls over. That comes from an old legend, which said such statues fell as the family passed.

All five are religious pictures, so they also belong with ten famous religious paintings. That list runs from the Ghent Altarpiece to The Last Supper. You can find more Christmas scenes in our collection of religious paintings.

The five paintings

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

A banker in Padua named Enrico Scrovegni built a chapel. Giotto covered its walls with scenes from the Bible, and this is one of them. He painted it straight into wet plaster, which is called a fresco. So you can only see it on the wall of the Scrovegni Chapel. In the scene, the oldest king kneels at the baby's feet, and an angel stands at the right.

Now look up at the sky. Instead of a neat star, Giotto painted a comet with a blazing tail. For a long time people have linked it to Halley's Comet, which came by in 1301. Many years later, the European Space Agency sent a spacecraft to meet Halley's Comet, and it named the craft Giotto.

But in 2026 Mark Kidger questioned the Halley story in a British astronomy journal. He wrote that people on Earth got a poor view of Halley's Comet in 1301. Instead, he pointed to a comet from 1304 as Giotto's model. That comet was seen for just six days, and two of those days were Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 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)

This is the smallest picture on the list. Geertgen painted it in oil on a wooden panel. It was probably made for one person's private prayers, and today it belongs to the National Gallery in London.

Geertgen left out the cloth that newborn babies were wrapped in. Instead, he made the baby himself the source of light. Mary and the little angels catch that glow on their faces. An ox and a donkey peek out of the dark. Through a gap in the back wall, you can see shepherds by a fire on a hill. They look up at a shining angel, and one of them covers his eyes with his red cloak. So the picture has three separate lights: the baby, the fire and the angel.

The idea of a glowing baby came from Saint Bridget of Sweden, a holy woman of the 1300s who wrote about it. Time has also darkened the colors. Mary's dress and cloak were once two different blues, but today they look black.

03The Mystical Nativity, Sandro Botticelli (1500)

Sandro Botticelli signed The Mystical Nativity in 1500, and at the top he added a few lines in Greek. In them he links "the troubles of Italy" to the Book of Revelation. That is the part of the Bible that tells about the end of the world. The troubles were probably the French attacks on Naples and Milan, and the fighting inside Florence itself.

Every angel in the painting carries an olive branch, which is a sign of peace. Twelve of them dance in a ring under a golden dome in the sky. Three more kneel on the roof of the stable. At the bottom, three angels hug three men, while winged demons and little horned devils run into cracks in the rocks. Revelation says the devil will be buried when Christ comes back, and here the devils are 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 feeling also echoes a preacher named Girolamo Savonarola, who was put to death in 1498. Botticelli is thought to have been one of his followers. Today the painting belongs to the National Gallery in London.

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

In the Gospel of Luke, the Roman emperor Augustus orders a census, which is a count of all the people. That is what brings Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. Pieter Bruegel's The Census at Bethlehem moves the scene to a snowy village. It is in the Low Countries, the land around today's Belgium and the Netherlands. Villagers crowd around a house on the left to sign up and pay.

Joseph and Mary are easy to miss. Look for Joseph with his saw and Mary on a donkey, as they head for that crowd. She is wrapped in a big blue coat. Children skate and ride sleds on the ice, and a red sun sits low behind the bare trees. The buildings may carry a message too. The ruin on the right may stand for the old pagan religions, and the church across the ice for Christianity. You can zoom into the panel online, and today it belongs to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels.

A year earlier, Bruegel had painted snow in Hunters in the Snow, which has nothing to do with Christmas. Hunters and a tired pack of dogs walk home with just one fox. Below them, skaters glide across the ponds. It was one of the first winter landscapes in European painting, and it hangs in Vienna. 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 ›

In 1609 a group of religious brothers called the Capuchins asked Caravaggio for Adoration of the Shepherds. It was for their church in Messina, on the island of Sicily. It is more than three meters tall, so it is the biggest picture on this list. Today it belongs to the Regional Museum in Messina.

Caravaggio left out the glowing baby and the angels in the sky. Correggio, whose painting comes later on this page, had used those about eighty years before. Here Mary lies on the straw in a plain red dress, and she holds the baby against her cheek. In front, a basket with bread and a white cloth sits beside a few tools. A single hard light picks the people out of the dark. That is the key to Caravaggio's style of light and shadow.

He may not have painted it in Sicily at all. In 2025 Vincenzo Sorrentino, an expert at a museum in Naples, shared an old bank receipt. It shows that the Capuchins sent Caravaggio's payment to Naples. "I believe it was painted in Naples and sent to Messina, possibly by boat," he told The Art Newspaper.

More Christmas paintings worth finding

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Correggio's Holy Night was ordered in 1522 for a family chapel in Reggio, Italy. He painted most of it in the late 1520s. All of its light comes from the newborn baby, an idea that first spread in Flanders at the end of the 1400s. It was the first large night scene in Italian painting.

By the time Augustus III of Saxony bought it from the Duke of Modena, it was already famous. An inspector at the Dresden gallery wrote proudly about its fame. He said all of Europe called it Die berühmte Nacht, which is German for "the famous Night." It still belongs to the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden, Germany.

Three more Christmas paintings belong to the National Gallery in London. In Guido Reni's Adoration of the Shepherds, angels hold up a scroll that announces the birth. Jan Gossaert's Adoration of the Kings puts the three kings in a ruin. In Philippe de Champaigne's Dream of Saint Joseph, Joseph sleeps in an armchair next to his carpenter's tools.

Snow shows up in history paintings too. Paul Delaroche painted Napoleon Crossing the Alps in 1850. In it, a local guide leads Napoleon's mule over a high mountain pass in the snow. Delaroche meant it as a down-to-earth answer to the grand versions by Napoleon's own artists. The painting is in Liverpool, England, and 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. Two of them are by Bruegel: his snowy census and his hunters coming home. The other three are the Botticelli with its ring of angels, Caravaggio's shepherds in the dark and Correggio's glowing Nativity. If you want the painting to stay up after January, choose a Bruegel, because the snow lasts longer than 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