Perhaps no question has been discussed with greater anxiety, and dismissed from investigation with less success, than that of Correggio's origin, circumstances, methods of study, and death. The date of his birth is uncertain, some place it in 1475, others in 1490; were we to follow a MS. gloss in the Library at Gottingen, mentioned by Fiorillo, which says he died at the age of forty in 1512, he must have been born in 1472; but the true date is, no doubt, that of the inscription set him at Correggio, viz. that he died in 1534, aged forty. The honour of his birth-place is allowed to Correggio, though not without dispute.[158] His father's name was Pellegrino Allegri, according to Orlandi, countenanced by Mengs. He was instructed in the elements of literature, philosophy, and mathematics; however doubtful this, there can be no doubt entertained on the very early period in which he must have applied to Painting. The brevity of his life, and the surprising number of his works, evince that he could not devote much time to literature, and, of mathematics, probably contented himself with what related to perspective and architecture. On the authority of Vedriani and of Scannelli, Mengs and his follower Ratti make Correggio in Modena the pupil of Franc. Bianchi Ferrari, and in Mantoua of Andr. Mantegna, without vouchers of sufficient authenticity for either: the passage quoted by Vedriani from the chronicle of Lancillotto, an historian contemporary with Correggio, is an interpolation; and Mantegna, who died in 1505, could not have been the master of a boy who at that time was scarcely in his twelfth year. Some supposed pictures of Correggio at Mantoua, in the manner of Mantegna, may have given rise to this opinion. An imitation of that style is visible in some whose originality has never been disputed: such as in the St. Cecilia of the Palace Borghese, and a piece in his first manner of the Gallery at Dresden. Father Maurizio Zapata, a friar of Casino, in a MS. quoted by Tiraboschi, affirms that the two uncles of Parmegianino, Michele and Pier Stario Mazzuoli, were the masters of Correggio,--a supposition without foundation; it is more probable, though not certain, that he gained the first elements from Lorenzo Allegri his uncle, and not, as the vulgar opinion states, his grandfather.