Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist

In the years before Leonardo’s followers spread their smoky sweetness through Lombardy, the young Antonio Allegri of Correggio fused the examples of Mantegna and Leonardo into the melting chiaroscuro his contemporaries admired as a liquidity of shadow. Here the Virgin turns toward the infant Baptist, who already plays his herald’s role clutching the slender reed cross, while the Christ child reaches out toward the witness the gospels promised. The panel, long counted among Correggio’s early mature works and dated about 1515, belongs to the tender devotional Madonnas by which the painter made himself the most Parma of High Renaissance masters. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.