Santos Pedro, Marta, Maria Madalena e Leonardo

Around 1515, Correggio was still a young painter in the small northern-Italian town he took his name from, and this altarpiece was made for a church right there, Santa Maria della Misericordia. The patron, a local man named Melchiore Fassi, picked the four saints himself. What's striking is how much Leonardo da Vinci is already in it, though the two never worked together. The soft light that seems to swallow the edges of the figures, the faint smile Correggio gives Mary Magdalen as she turns toward you, both come out of ideas Leonardo had set loose across Italy. The four saints stand before a dark grove, each lost in a different thought, one looking down, one up, one out at you.