Madonna with child

Correggio painted this small Virgin and Child around 1517, when he was shedding one master for another. The soft shadows and the melting sweetness he had learned from looking at Leonardo are still here, but the fuller, calmer forms show him turning toward Raphael, whose work he could feel arriving from Rome. It is an ordinary, human moment. Mary tilts her head and gathers the child as if about to nurse him, and their eyes hold each other. There is no throne, no saints, nothing official, just the closeness. The panel later hung in a chapel at Soliera Castle near Mantua, and a Modena collector, Giuseppe Campori, left it to the city's gallery in 1894, which is why it still carries his name.