The Holy Night by Antonio da Correggio

The Holy Night by Antonio da Correggio

The child is the light

It is night, and the only illumination comes from the baby. Mary bends over him in the straw and her face is lit from below, glowing; a young woman bringing doves turns away and raises a hand against the glare; a shepherd stands up in astonishment. Correggio took the old idea that Christ is the light of the world and made it physically true in paint. Nothing else in the picture has a light source of its own.

How new this was

Painters had shown the Christ Child radiant before, but no one had organised an entire large altarpiece around the effect. The consequences ran for a century: much of what the Baroque did with night scenes and single sources of light — from the Carracci to Rembrandt — descends from this picture.

Reggio and Dresden

It was commissioned for the chapel of Alberto Pratonero in San Prospero, Reggio Emilia, and was known there simply as La Notte. The Duke of Modena took it in the seventeenth century, and in 1746 it was sold with the best of the ducal collection to Augustus III of Saxony.

Where it hangs

The panel is in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden and measures 256 by 188 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 4,332-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 28 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden · Wikidata Q1527541 · Wikimedia Commons