The picture of Io embraced by Jupiter, inbosomed in clouds, by a silent water in which a stag quenches his thirst, was their companion: a work to which the most lavish fame has done no justice, and beyond which no fancy ever soared. The Io shared a still more barbarous fate. Not content with mangling her like the Leda, the bigot prince burnt her head; and, were it not for the beautiful duplicate which fortune preserved in the Gallery of Vienna,[164] we should be reduced to guess at Correggio in the fragments at Sans Souci, and the prints of Surregue and Bartolozzi. The Imperial Gallery possesses, likewise, the Rape of Ganymede, by Correggio, of the same size with the Io; a Mountain Scene; a full-grown Cupid, seen from behind, with his head turned to the spectator, shaping a bow, accompanied by a laughing and a weeping infant, in struggling attitudes, which was likewise sold by the heirs of Don Livio Odescalchi, has equally exercised opinion. Vasari, Tassoni, Du Bois, de St. Gelais, &c. ascribe it to Parmegiano; Mengs and Fiorillo, who judge from the duplicate at Vienna, with greater probability give it to Correggio. The contrast of the attitudes is produced more by naïveté than affectation, the lines have more simplicity than the style of Mazzuola admitted of, and the colour more breadth. The conception of the whole, whether the infants be the symbols of successful and unsuccessful love, or denote the dangers of love, or be simply children, though not beyond the fancy of Parmegiano, has more the air of a Correggiesque conceit. Numberless copies were made after it, some by Parmegiano himself, whose handling may be recognized in the picture at Paris. We are now arrived at those works of Correggio's which cannot be fixed to a certain period. Such are probably, in the Gallery of Dresden, those known under the names of S. Giorgio and S. Sebastiano, of both of which Mengs gives a circumstantial account. He is, however, mistaken when he imagines the last to have been voted by the City of Modena after a plague: the commission of it was given by the fraternity of St. Sebastian. The half-length portrait, formerly known at Modena as that of Correggio's Physician, belongs to the same doubtful period. Mengs, though he praises the colour and the impasto of it, is inclined to think it painted about the time of his first Cupola, when he had not yet sufficiently studied detail of forms and variety of tints. The style resembles that of Giorgione, but is less vivid, though of equal pasto, and somewhat more limpid.