Adoration of the Magi, 1515 - 1518 circa

The work, which arrived in Brera with an attribution to Scarsellino, came from the collection that Cardinal Cesare Monti left to the Archbishopric of Milan in 1650.
It was assigned to Correggio by Bernard Berenson and is generally considered one of the artist’s early pictures, painted between 1515 and 1518: the complexity of the composition and the artificiality of the figures’ twisted poses reflect Correggio’s interest in the work of the so-called proto-Mannerists in Emilia, of which several examples can be seen in the Pinacoteca.