When the snow lay round about ... Brueghel the Elder's Hunters in the Snow. Photograph: Corbis
Christmas is the one time of year when everyone looks at Old Master paintings - because the European art tradition offers an unrivalled variety of images that look good on greetings cards. It's a great example of the way modern Europeans can have it all, and future generations may well conclude that to live in Europe in the early 21st century was to experience the best of times and places - look at the way we can live our free, secular, modern lives and yet also enjoy the afterglow of religiosity in our winter festival. And look at the way we can savour the best of Christian art, on Christmas cards or for that matter by visiting galleries and churches, without having to live in a religious society with all its horridness.
Nor is it just Christian imagery that Old Europe bequeathed the Christmas card industry. Winter was harsher back in the 16th century - in fact the age through which the likes of Brueghel lived was actually a "mini ice age" - so however much our planet changes, we will always remember the images of "classic" winter in Old Master paintings. Anyway here are my top five all time Christmas card paintings:
1. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
A marvellous evocation of the beauty and harshness of winter, this is a painting you could keep as a souvenir of earth, like the astronauts who have it on their space station in Tarkovsky's film Solaris.
2. Leonardo da Vinci, The Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi, Florence)
One hundred percent Leonardo, in spite of any nonsense you may hear to the contrary, and the most magical of all evocations of the wonder of the Nativity.
3. JMW Turner, Frosty Morning (Tate Britain)
A crisp British winter's day, the air brittle and golden. An old man, a child, a lonely road. A wintry masterpiece.
4. Fra Filippo Lippi, Madonna with Child and Two Angels (Uffizi, Florence)
The most beautiful Madonna. This naughty artist-monk modelled her on his lover, runaway nun Lucrezia Buti
5. Caravaggio, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome)
The immense tenderness and unearthly light take you into a world in which angels are real.
