Lot 1016 Dα

Inscribed on the verso: "Milano 14 Marzo 1973 / il dipinto a tergo / è stato da me trasportato / da tavola su tela / si tratta di sincera opera / di Antonio Allegri detto / il Correggio" (indistinctly signed).
The present painting was first published in 1975 on occasion of an Exhibition in the Kunsthalle Baden Baden, where it was lent together with Italian pictures from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Since then, the work disappeared from the market and from literature until today.
The work is thought to date to around 1512, and was possibly painted during Correggio´s stay in Mantua. At this point the artist´s output was still far from the results achieved after 1519 and his trip to Rome. It is a work dense with references to the masters of the previous generation, such as Mantegna and Leonardo, but is also influenced by contemporaries such as Dosso Dossi, Lorenzo Costa and Garofalo, from whose examples the present composition is derived. This small Adoration scene can be compared especially to the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (circa 1512, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kross Collection) and to the Nativity in the Pinacoteca di Brera (1512-13), which almost appears to be a further development of the present idea.
Correggio, who was remembered by his contemporaries as a shadowy, melancholic, and introverted character, was an enigmatic and eclectic artist. It is difficult to trace the early years of his apprenticeship and it is not always possible to identify stylistic links between his paintings. Nevertheless, his works later became some of the most influential for the development towards the Baroque, and the artist was still admired throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by artists and writers such as Anton Raphael Mengs, Stendhal, and Hegel.