Madonna and Child with Four Saints

The four saints in this altarpiece were chosen by another painter, more than a century earlier. Around 1530 Correggio painted a Virgin and Child for the confraternity of Saint Peter Martyr in Modena and surrounded them with Geminianus, the bishop who is Modena's patron saint, John the Baptist, Saint George, and Peter Martyr himself, the Dominican friar killed with a blade to the head. In 1649 Francesco the First d'Este, duke of Modena, took Correggio's picture into his own collection and ordered a replacement from Guercino, with the same four saints around the Virgin. Guercino seems to have finished it by 1651 or 1652, yet it was only set up in the church in 1668. In 1783 a later duke moved it into the ducal gallery, and in 1796 French commissioners carried it off to Paris. When many seized works went back to Italy in 1815, this one stayed in the Louvre. Correggio's original had long gone the other way, sold by the dukes to the elector of Saxony in 1746, and it hangs in Dresden.