1528-30

Oil on canvas, 256,5 x 188 cm

Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

The painting was commissioned in October 1522 and completed at the end of the decade. It has been described as the first monumental nocturnal scene in European painting, and it is an ideal companion to the Madonna with St Jerome, also known as The Day, painted only a few years earlier for another private chapel.

The artist, following the trail blazed by a number of celebrated works by Titian, interprets a scene that is fully 'à la chandell' and produces an outstanding result. The light appears simultaneously to bathe and to emerge from the Child, who is lying on a rough pallet, only to soften on the face of the Virgin, tenderly rapt in a maternal embrace. They are surrounded by the fluid gestures of the shepherds and of St Joseph, who is holding back the donkey, and by the kicking legs of the angels transported by the cloud that spreads hazily through the picture[1].

In “The Mission of Jane” Mr. Lethbury compares his wife who is looking at Jane with this piece of art. Alice Lethbury, who wished a child for a long time, changed in the presence of little Jane; Mr. Lethbury leaned over the crib, “such ecstasy reflected in her face as strikes up, in Correggio´s Night-piece, from the child´s body to the mother´s countenance. It was a light that irradiated and dazzled her” (Wharton, “The Mission of Jane). In this moment, Mr. Lethbury realizes that he became invisible for his wife, like she was for him before.

Sources:

[1] Source

"The Mission of Jane"