Le Baptême du Christ

In 1519 a boy of sixteen in the northern city of Parma finished a panel of Saint John baptising Christ. That boy was Parmigianino, and it is the earliest painting by him that survives. Vasari, who liked to collect stories of young prodigies, wrote that people who saw it could scarcely believe a child had made something so assured. Parma was a modest place then, off to one side of the Italian art world. Yet within a few years this same young man would be called to Rome to paint for Pope Clement the Seventh, and this panel came to Berlin three centuries later with a single English collector's hoard, the Solly collection, in 1821.