Madonna and Child, "Zingarella"

The nickname came later, from the way Correggio dressed his Virgin. Instead of the usual blue mantle of a queen of heaven, she wears a scarf wound round her head, a plain white shirt and sandals, the clothes of a travelling gypsy woman, which is how the painting earned its Italian name, la Zingarella, the little gypsy. The subject is the rest on the flight into Egypt, the Holy Family pausing on the road, though Correggio leaves Joseph out entirely and gives us only the young mother and the sleeping child in a shady wood. He painted it around 1516, early in his career. By the time it was inventoried in the Farnese collection in 1587 it was already prized, and copyists across Europe would reproduce it for the next two centuries.