The authenticity of Correggio's celebrated "Anch' io son Pittore," is less affected by the improbability of his journey to Rome, than by its own legendary weakness: though not at Modena or Parma, for there were no pictures of Raphael in either place during Antonio's life, he might have seen the St. Cecilia at Bologna; and if the story be true, perhaps no large picture of that master that we are acquainted with could furnish him with equal matter of exultation. He was less made to sympathize with the celestial trance of the heroine, the intense meditation of the Apostles, and the sainted grace of the Magdalen, than to be disgusted by a parallelism of the whole which borders on primitive apposition, by the total neglect of what is called picturesque, the absence of chiaroscuro, the unharmonious colour, and dry severity of execution. The next point is to fix the dates of Correggio's works; the certain, the probable, the conjectural. The theatre of Correggio's first essays in art is supposed to have been his native place and the palace of its princes; but that palace perished with whatever it might contain. From a document in the parochial archive of Correggio, of 1514, it appears that in the same year he painted an altar-piece for one hundred zechini, a considerable price for a young man of twenty. This picture was in the church of the Minorites, where it remained till 1638, when a copy was unawares put into the place of the original. The citizens alarmed, in vain made representations to Annibale Molza, their governor; it even appears from a letter of his to the Court of Modena, in whose name he governed, that, many years before, two other pieces of Antonio had been removed from the same chapel by order of Don Siro, the last prince of the House of Correggio; those represented a St. John and a St. Bartholomew; the subject of the altar-piece was the Madonna with the child, Joseph and St. Francis. The fraternity of the Hospital della Misericordia possessed likewise an altar-piece of Antonio. The centre piece represented the Deity of the Father; the two wings, St. John and Bartholomew. According to a contract which still remains in the archives, it was estimated by a painter of Novellara, Jacopo Borboni, at three hundred ducats, bought for Don Siro in 1613, and a copy put in its place. The originals of all these pictures are lost.