Head of a Cherub

In 1522 Correggio began painting the half-dome of the apse in San Giovanni Evangelista, the Benedictine church in Parma, the curved wall behind the high altar. He gave the monks a Coronation of the Virgin, Christ setting the crown on his mother's head among evangelists, doctors of the Church and a crowd of infant angels, and he took his final payment in January 1524. Some 60 years later the monks wanted a longer choir, and in 1587 the apse was pulled down. Only the central group of Christ and Mary and a few of the small heads were cut from the wall and kept. This is one of them, about 20 centimetres across. The design itself was not lost. Copies had been made before the demolition, and the painter Cesare Aretusi repainted Correggio's composition in the new apse, where it is still what visitors see. The central fragment is in Parma, and other heads are in the National Gallery in London. This one turns up again in the 19th century. A handwritten note once fixed to its back named an owner called Bignami, probably the abbot and collector Michele Bignami, who died in 1888. The Museum of Fine Arts bought it in 1956 from a dealer in Los Angeles, for 2,800 dollars.