Nativity

Alessandro Tiarini grew up in Bologna just as the city was changing how Italians painted. Around 1600 the Carracci family had opened an academy there that pushed artists back toward studying life directly, away from the twisting elegance of the previous generation. Tiarini absorbed that lesson and built a reputation for direct, strongly felt religious pictures. This Nativity is one of them, the old night scene of shepherds drawn to a newborn child in a stable. He worked mainly for churches across Emilia, and paintings like this were meant to be read at a glance by ordinary worshippers, his figures kept close and human rather than remote. He went on painting into old age and died in Bologna in 1668, at 91.