Nativity

Procaccini's undated Nativity, without a specified collection, depicts the birth of Christ — the foundational event of Christian history — in a format that had been refined over four centuries of Italian painting by the time he approached it. The Nativity gave Procaccini the opportunity to exploit his most celebrated technical achievement: nocturnal lighting in which the Christ child acts as his own light source, a device inherited from Correggio's Adoration of the Shepherds (La Notte) and continued by Caravaggio's own Nativity of 1609. In Procaccini's treatment, the warm amber that characterises his daylit scenes shifts to a concentrated radiance emanating from the infant's body, warming the faces of Mary, Joseph, and any attending angels in a circle of supernatural light.

The nocturnal nativity's technical challenge is consistent internal illumination: all shadows must fall away from the Christ child's position. Procaccini's warm ground, normally supporting ambient golden light, is here darkened and the child's body luminance becomes the composition's sole source. Faces are modelled specifically for this angle of bottom-up or frontal-from-centre illumination.