Birth of the baroque
- December 21, 2009 21:04
Four hundred years ago, Caravaggio stopped off in Naples and an art movement took off. Jonathan Jones writes about how painterly excess and sentiment live on in the modern Christmas. Today's nativity scenes with a baby Jesus in a crib, the presepi, belong to the baroque art movement, born in Italy in about 1600, and the dominant style in European culture for around 150 years.