La Sainte Famille avec saint Jean-Baptiste

This small panel has spent centuries changing its name. On the back is the mark of Charles the First of England, so it once hung in a great royal collection. Later it passed to Louis the Fourteenth in France, whose cataloguers hedged and called it a work in the manner of Correggio, not quite willing to commit. Through the 19th century the doubt hardened, and it was written off as the work of some anonymous painter of the Lombard school. Then in 1921 the Italian scholar Roberto Longhi looked again and gave it firmly back to Correggio, dating it around 1518, just before the artist painted his famous ceiling in the convent room of San Paolo in Parma. Mother, child and the infant John the Baptist sit close in the soft modelling that convinced him.