Nativity

Correggio was asked for this altarpiece in October 1522, for a family chapel in the church of San Prospero in Reggio Emilia, and he took most of the decade over it before it was installed around 1530. The reason people still single it out is the light. Nearly everyone before him lit a Nativity from outside, like an ordinary daylight scene. Correggio made the newborn Christ himself the source. The glow comes off the child and falls on Mary's face and on the shepherds crowding in from the left, so close that one woman raises a hand against the brightness. It is often called the first great night-piece in European painting. The picture is not in Reggio Emilia now. A duke of Modena took it in 1640, and in 1746 it was sold on to Dresden, where it still hangs, known there simply as La Notte, the Night.