Not to waste time on conjectural works, we finish this list with a picture formerly in the house Barberini, now supposed to be in England: it is painted on panel, and represents from the narrative of S. Marc, the young man who followed our Saviour at the moment of his captivity, but fled on being laid hold of, and left his garment in the hands of the captors. Mengs describes a duplicate of this picture, painted on canvass, at his time in the hands of an Englishman at Rome, and though, in his opinion, only the study for the other, in the principal parts, especially the figure of the youth, highly finished: his expression, form and attitude, remind the critic so strongly of the same in the eldest son of the Laocoon, that he is persuaded they are an imitation, though in a style more consonant with Correggio's manner. The cause and circumstances of his death we are not acquainted with, since the idle tale has been discarded which Vasari tells, of his perishing in consequence of having carried home a load of sixty scudi in copper, which he had received in payment at Parma. He who considers what strength would be required to carry sixty crowns in quattrini, will find its confutation in the tale itself; let it be added that the extreme heat which is said to have aggravated the fatigue, and accelerated his death, is, even in Italy, not coincident with the season in which he must have taken the journey,[165] as he died on the fifth of March. The magnificence and number of his commissions; the deference paid to his powers in the face of rival artists, by the very patrons of those men, or societies, that might have saved expense by admitting concurrence; the handsome, though not quite metropolitan prices, which he received, and what Mengs has observed, the expensive goodness of his colours, of his panels, and canvasses--make it not only extremely improbable that he should have lived in the depressed circumstances, to which vulgar tradition has sunk him; but add an air of truth to the opinion of those who thought him, if not opulent, yet nearer allied to affluence than want. Correggio was a monument without a tomb; but it appears strange that a century and a half should have elapsed before the thought of erecting him one occurred to the Senate and citizens of his native place, and then was suffered to evaporate in ineffectual projects. The boastful intentions of Padre Resta proved equally nugatory: the tombstone set and inscribed by Girolamo Conti still remains a solitary offering to his genius: D. O. M. Antonio. Allegri. Civi. Vulgo. Il Correggio. Arte. Picturæ. Habitu. Probitatis. Eximio. Monum. Hoc. Posuit. Hier. Conti. Concivis. Siccine. Separas. Amara. Mors. Obiit. Anno. Ætatis. XL. Sal. MDXXXIV.