Madonna del cesto

Correggio painted this small panel in Parma around 1524, in the same years he was covering the church domes there with dizzying illusions of figures floating up into the sky. Here he worked at the opposite scale. The Virgin holds a squirming infant Christ on her lap while she reaches, almost distracted, toward a basket of sewing beside her. Behind them, out in the open air, Joseph bends over his carpentry. The child twists and kicks the way a real baby does, unwilling to sit still, and Mary's soft look answers him. The whole thing is barely two feet high. It was already prized in the 17th century, and it became one of the earliest pictures to enter the National Gallery in London, where it has hung since the 1820s.