Die Anbetung des Christkindes

Correggio worked away from the great centres of Rome and Florence, mostly in and around Parma in northern Italy, and by the mid-1520s he was doing something new with a very old subject. In this Nativity, painted around 1526, the only real light source is the newborn child himself, glowing on the straw so that his mother's face and hands are lit from below by her own son. The idea came from a vision described by Saint Bridget of Sweden, a 14th-century pilgrim who wrote that the infant gave off a light brighter than the candle Joseph carried. Painters kept borrowing the effect for generations. Nearly a century on, the picture was still prized enough that a Gonzaga duke handed it to the Medici in Florence as a gift.