割礼

Parmigianino painted this around 1523, when he was barely 20 and still working in and around Parma, the northern Italian city that gave him his name. It shows the circumcision of the infant Christ, packed with figures pressing in under a warm, crowded light. For a long time the picture's own identity was in doubt. It surfaces in records only in the 1830s, in the Russian imperial collection, and for much of the next century scholars treated it as a copy of a lost original. That judgement was overturned in 1977, when the historian Sydney Freedberg argued it was the genuine Parmigianino, an attribution that became widely accepted by the early 1990s. It reached Detroit in 1936 as a gift.