Madonna col Bambino

When this small Madonna entered the National Gallery of Art in Washington, it was catalogued as a work by Andrea Mantegna, the great, hard-edged master of Mantua. Only later did scholars reassign it to the young Correggio, who was painting around 1508 in exactly that corner of northern Italy and clearly studied Mantegna closely. You can see the debt in the sculptural firmness of the figures. What is already his own is the tenderness, the soft handling of the child's flesh and the mother's downward gaze, the warmth and gentle light that would later make Correggio famous. For decades the two names sat side by side in the catalogues before his finally won out.