The Redeemer in Glory

For most of its time in the Vatican this Christ was taken for a copy or a work of Correggio's school. The doubts ended with the restoration completed in 2011 by Claudio Rossi de Gasperis in the museums' own laboratory. He had noticed many pentimenti, changes a painter makes while working, which a copyist following finished outlines does not usually make. The analyses that followed bore him out, and the picture was confirmed as Correggio's.

Those corrections have a story of their own. Correggio painted the canvas around 1525 as the top of an altarpiece for the high altar of Santa Maria della Misericordia in his home town, a structure built to protect a much-venerated terracotta Madonna. According to the restorer, he made the changes only after the finished picture had been mounted about two and a half metres above the floor. Looking up at it, he saw errors of perspective and widened Christ's chest, arms and forearms, and the fingers of his right hand. The new paint went straight over the sky, which was already completely dry, and the two layers never blended.

In 1613 the confraternity sold the picture, and in 1666 it was one of the prizes in a public lottery in Venice. The papal government bought it in 1829, and it has been on show since 1832. For some months in 2024 it hung in the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo, before coming back to this room.