La Vierge à l'Enfant avec le petit saint Jean-Baptiste

Correggio painted this small devotional panel around 1515, early in his life, and you can almost watch him teaching himself from the masters around him. The pyramid of figures, Mary with the Christ child and the infant John the Baptist, comes from Raphael. The soft smoky outlines and the Virgin's half-smile come from Leonardo. And the wide landscape opening behind them shows he had been looking at paintings from the North as well. For a long time nobody realised it was his. When the panel was sold in Paris in 1825 it went under the name of a different painter, Bernardino Luini, for 4,000 francs. The Art Institute of Chicago acquired it, correctly attributed at last, in 1965.