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Good morning, all.
Happy Monday! The Christmas countdown is on.
If you’re looking for any last minute Christmas gifts for art lovers, you’re way too late to order anything from our gift guide (what have you been doing?) but there’s still time to give the gift of an artplace subscription & it’s 20% off until the end of the year.
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In today’s letter:
We look at a Caravaggio’s stolen nativity painting.
Plus, a new $50k arts award, Maris Balshaw will step down as Tate director, there are calls for the Louvre director to resign, and more art world headlines.
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When you think of the ultimate Christmas scene, what do you picture?
Santa’s grotto? Presents wrapped under a tree?
Now cast your mind back to the seventeenth century, when the visual centre of Christmas looked very different and the answer to that same question would have been shared across cities and households alike: the nativity scene.
For painters of the period, the nativity was not just devotional subject matter but a chance to show technical mastery, emotional range and theological clarity in a single image.
Few artists approached it with more force than Caravaggio.
He painted several nativity scenes during his lifetime, including the celebrated The Adoration of the Shepards, now in the collection of the Regional Museum of Messina, Italy, but his most talked about nativity painting is undeniably Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence (1609), the below work, not only for its high quality realism and dramatic use of light, but for the story that surrounds it.
Artwork of the week: Caravaggio, Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence (1609)
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The painting was installed in the Oratory of Saint Lawrence in Palermo, Sicily, hanging high above the altar in a quiet chapel. Caravaggio arrived in Sicily while on the run, having killed a man in Rome and fallen out of favour with the Knights of Malta.
Measuring over six square metres, it filled the forty-foot altar wall and remained there, largely undisturbed, for more than three and a half centuries.
How then did a painting so large go missing?...