Nativité avec sainte Élisabeth et saint Jean-Baptiste

Before Antonio da Correggio became the painter who dissolved Parma's cathedral ceiling into open sky, he was a young man learning his trade in Mantua. This small Nativity dates to around 1512, and Mantegna's stamp is all over it, in the crisp drawing, the classical ruins and the careful figures of the Virgin, the infant John the Baptist and his mother Elizabeth. The tenderness between the two babies is the one note that already feels like the later Correggio. Nobody knows who ordered the panel or where it first hung, though it was probably made for a private house rather than a church. It surfaced on the art market centuries later, and the Brera in Milan bought it at a Paris auction in 1913.