Holy family with Saints John the Baptist and Elizabeth

For most of its life this small panel, barely a hand's width across, carried the wrong name. When the Pavia collector Luigi Malaspina left it to the city in 1833, his will listed it as the work of Francesco Francia, a painter from Bologna. Only in 1880 did the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, who read pictures the way others read handwriting, recognise the young Correggio in it. Correggio was barely 21 around 1510, working in the small town he took his name from, still absorbing what he had seen of Leonardo and Mantegna. That tenderness, the way Elizabeth steadies the infant John beside the Christ Child, is the soft manner he would later spread across whole church domes in Parma.